RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19hr ago
I'm surprised to find that there are two Project Pegasuses but I observe that the anti-theft Pegasus is a part of Opal, who are also still continuing their work.
https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/14920/html/
So even if my link was wrong, my point still stands. Pegasus is still a thing in practical terms. You are the one who produced the idea that it had shut down, seemingly from nowhere. What source did that come from? How can you legitimately have known this info?
Since the number is actually falling on a rolling average, the AI is quite misleading
But theft is at record levels? What, we have to wait for the nano-top or regurgitate secondary sources like wikipedia? Sonnet could easily observe 'ok I know about past historical theft levels, this is higher therefore its at record highs'.
Then pick out 10 articles of your choice in an area you know about.
When I see some bad journalism I don't add it to a big list of bad articles, same with spelling errors tbh. But you can take your pick from Russiagate, spruking the case for the invasion of Iraq or suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, or this euphemism treadmill where journalists eagerly create a racial narrative if a white does something bad to blacks, whereas they bury the reverse case, mentioning race only at the very end of the article. Those are cases of deception and misleading news from 'real journalists'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I think that the real trouble with fear and shame is not that it doesn't work in principle but that it can't be effectively wielded today.
Just imagine the amount of shaming and bullying that the 1950s guys would've been deploying against this stuff, against even the tamer /d/ threads. Metric tonnes of shaming! And that largely worked. But shaming is not something modern society is actually good at anymore. Huge resources are thrown into shaming racists yet there are a lot of racists around. Nobody cares so much anymore. In the 70's and 80's, shaming didn't stop gays from buggering eachother anonymously in bathhouses, making a human petri dish for diseases that would then kill so many of them (and others besides). If you read the infamous Salo thread, you can see the attitude of the scientists and doctors, how limpwristed and weak they felt in the face of an obvious public health emergency, like they'd be like 'please stop having sex and killing all these people' and then gays would bitch and complain that closing their sex/drugs bathhouses was like the Holocaust: 'Today the baths; tomorrow the ovens'. Ironically the would-be shamers felt more ashamed for even trying to shame than the ones who ought to be ashamed. As far as I know, the gays decisively won, Reagan is considered somehow at fault for HIV/AIDs and they continue on doing their thing now with expensive state-funded Prep drugs to hold off the consequences.
(rather confronting but since we're on the topic of confronting material) https://web.archive.org/web/20200618004225/https://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/patient-zero-and-the-early-days-of-hiv-aids.3167/
After the examination, as Dugas was pulling on his stylish shirt, Conant mentioned that Dugas should stop having sex.
Dugas looked wounded, but his voice betrayed a fierce edge of bitterness. 'Of course, I'm going to have sex,' he told Conant.
'Nobody's proven to me that you can spread cancer.'
'Somebody gave this thing to me', he said. 'I'm not going to give up sex.'
And I see the same thing here. The Harpers journalist staring in at these people feels way more ashamed than the actual men involved. Total mismatch in willpower and determination.
Trying to use shame in the modern Western world today is extremely difficult.
To achieve success, you have to make a 'normal relationship' more cost-efficient than 'gooning'. Odds of success? Realistically, nil. What new relationship technologies have been developed in the last 100 years? No-fault divorce is scarcely even technology so much as relationship-sabotage.
Whereas in the techno-sexual sphere there are endless innovations! Television! Internet browsing! Photoshop! Livestreaming! Japanese weirdness! VR! AI waifus and chatbots!
If one side in a conflict is innovating while the other remains static, the former is sure to win. Even if the latter has all the good-coded stuff like 'having a normal one' and 'the power of love', then that only affects timelines, not the end result.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I thought the Saturn V was just outright cheaper and more powerful than SLS (at least the SLS in current condition)? I guess it's more complicated if you consider the Apollo project as a whole but on the other hand, there would also be cost savings from experience going to the Moon and doing all that stuff for the second time and not the first time. $35 Billion for the project and a billion per launch, inflation adjusted, for Saturn V, whereas SLS 1 has already cost just as much to develop and is more expensive to launch, while providing less lift.
Sounds like an epic case of grifting and laziness on behalf of trad aerospace companies. Then again, I'm not really a space guy so there may well be more to it.
From French's article:
The new right groans under the weight of its nostalgia for a nation that did not exist.
It's always this line of thought that leftists use against the right. They were poorer in the past, sure. But they also had more functional governance. People knew how to build things in the 1950s and 1960s, they didn't sit around in committees all day umming and ahhing about boxticking and getting permission from stakeholders. They had superheavy spacelift capability we're still struggling to replicate.
Crime was lower in the 1950s, it just was. Despite a younger, poorer population and police with less forensics and CCTV, despite doctors less capable of turning 'murder' into 'grievous bodily harm', Western countries had a more stable social system. Not all aspects of the 1950s should be copied (after all, we ended up where we are today), only the useful parts. Denying that anything was ever better in the past than today is ahistorical, literally Orwellian too.
And French never even justifies his theory that the justice system we have today is peak justice, he mentions Jim Crow and ignores the staggering level of black-on-white crime the US enjoys today. The black jurors statistically favouring their own race, this ridiculous 'he deserves a thirty-second chance' de facto jurisprudence, this incredible homage going to Emmett Till while random black thugs go around shooting white kids for zero reason and never get any kind of serious scrutiny beyond a fairly small part of twitter...
Why would French need to justify it when he enjoys this huge framing advantage, where all the schools (not just in America but around the world) teach his historical narratives, assert the vibes he relies on? He can just wave the magic wand of 'Jim Crow' and that's good enough, no further logical argumentation is needed. Truly the only way to fully oppose this is to deny the whole frame, 'no French, your fantasy world does not exist and never has, it has been debunked by me and mine. The facts are mine, I have chosen them and only I get to decide what is important and relevant. The narrative is mine, the premises and vibes are mine. Your books are not reliable sources, you are spouting pseudoscience.'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Shoplifting offences increased by 13% to 529,994 offences in the year ending June 2025
FAIL. Those are record levels, even before accounting for low reporting rates. Sonnet consistently gets this right btw.
There's no citation that this bill is the primary response to the problem by the government, versus other initiatives
FAIL. Claude specifically said primary legislative response, not primary response.
The link specifically says "This was published under the 2022 to 2024 Sunak Conservative government" and we have no evidence such an operation is still underway.
FAIL, the operation (which is a useful and reasonable description of what it is, in some respects better than 'project' which the British actually use, since operation conveys a sense of movement and continuous activity whereas project is more of a static construction process) is still underway, you can call them and report crime today: https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/wsi/watch-schemes-initiatives/pp/project-pegasus/
Also outdated.
FAIL, since it describes Pegasus which is still ongoing so can't be considered outdated. Also how is '2 years old' outdated by any reasonable sense of the word?
Rating: FAIL - poor nitpicking attempt.
Here is my Sonnet Research on the topic, Research being something you can only get if you pay: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/ef91a58b-8dfa-4529-b076-3de6ef14a40f
Now they cut out all the links for the web artifact which makes this rather unhelpful for the specific use-case. I checked a few and didn't find any errors, though I imagine there are some. I personally disagree with the methodology and argument since it takes the limp-wristed 'be really nice to the drug addicts' line of argument when I'm confident that 'lock them up' would work better, if the UK knew how to construct prisons properly. Nevertheless, there are lots of media reporting on this issue that take the limp-wristed approach. Sonnet has its biases, nevertheless I remain convinced that it and extended research is useful.
Ok if humans are so bad, pick an actual news outlet of your choice, it can be as shitty as you want, and pick 10 actual news articles of your choice, not opinion columns or other bs, and show that 45% of those have errors.
I'm not a subject matter expert in a wide range of domains, so I can't do that. That's literally what I said. I can observe it makes plenty of errors or is actively misleading in areas I know lots about but I can't show that's representative. This is why Gell-Man Amnesia is a thing.
Today's free model is still free and necessarily well below the frontier, that's why it's free. Sonnet, when you get deeper into it, is on a whole other level. It can and has seriously messed with people's heads, more discerning people, above and beyond the weakwilled who get eaten up by GPT4o.
Sonnet would not and does not make the mistakes at the rate BBC ascribes to the crap cheap models. It does make mistakes all the time but is a useful research tool, good at aggregating or finding things.
IMO their article itself is misleading since it ascribes to ChatGPT and Gemini only GPT4o and Gemini Flash. Like if I decide to pick out poor, dumb MAGA people and say 'look at these MAGA people, they're stupid, therefore MAGA is stupid' and choose not to consider the smart MAGA people on the basis that people are more likely to run into the former and not the latter... it's not good journalism. That's not to say that MAGA isn't stupid, there are stupid elements but it's more complicated than this kind of smear campaign. They then don't mention that's what they're doing, they do what you do and say 'AI is inaccurate' when they mean 'cheap AI is inaccurate.' Cheap air travel is unpleasant. Cheap food is bad for you. Cheaper is worse.
New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.
But they can't be bothered to test the good AI platforms of course...
This time, we used the free/consumer versions of ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini. Free versions were chosen to replicate the default (and likely most common) experience for users. Responses were generated in late May and early June 2025.
If I had the resources to get human experts to rate the media, selectively choosing the credulous outlets, and imposed my own standards of truthfulness, I could easily prove that human journalists were grossly inferior. Hell, they already are prone to mass hallucinations like the 'datacentres are using all the water' meme. Or deliberately misleading stuff such as eliding the difference between an AI chip and a pod: https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/1980691878262501673
They aren't trustworthy for any AI-related topic given their proclivity to the 'big tech bad, big tech bad, pay us more money now now now now now!!!' lines of argument which they've basically applied to AI as well. There are serious issues with big tech and AI accuracy but journalists still need to be bullied much more so they lose whatever remaining undeserved prestige and reputation they still retain.
Another attempt at AI political criticism with Llama 4 Scout
Why use Llama 4 models? Even Behemoth is terrible nevermind Scout.
If you're going to be cheap, use Kimi, it is open-source but decent at writing.
"Behold, that corpulent, sour-bellied gargoyle squatting upon the federal throne—Adams, the human carbuncle whose jowls quiver with every belch of executive spite! This puffed-up, pudding-faced monarchist, bred on tainted Boston porridge and the stale crusts of Puritan hypocrisy, stalks the Republic in a wig too small for his swollen head, so that the greasy curls drip like icicles of pomatum down a brow forever furrowed with petty malice.
Mark the man: a tyrant in thread-bare dignity, a pimple on Providence’s nose, pickled in self-importance and brine of his own cant. His speeches belch forth like the crack of doom from a cracked kettle—each syllable a sour fizz of vinegar and vanity—while his piggish eyes glint with the dull, porcine joy of discovering fresh taxes to levy upon honest farmers. He is a walking thundercloud of gout and gloom, forever clutching his cane as though it were a sceptre, forever waddling after imaginary crowns like a fat spaniel sniffing for rotten sausages.
What is he, truly? A swollen tick engorged upon the public purse; a bilious monarchist stuffed into a republican coat that splits at every seam with the strain of his regal pretensions. Under his rule the eagle of liberty is plucked to a carrion crow, and the very air reeks with the sulphur of Alien decrees and Sedition fetters. He would nail your tongue to the pillory for a whispered jest, then sell your sons to French cannon for the price of a fresh periwig."
There is a notable shortage of racial hatred though and the sentences are a bit unwieldy. Grok 4 is too cringe to write well but it will add some racial hatred. Really I'd want Sonnet 4.5 for this kind of task but Sonnet refuses and generally suffers in 'meanness' unless its against people that Sonnet particularly dislikes. So it's a bit of a mess.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
AIs doing research do make errors all the time but '45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue' isn't too bad. Human researchers in published academic papers have a 25% error rate in their citations: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.0538
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3167934/
Substantial quotation errors were found in 9 of the 50 statements (18%). The incidence of minor errors was 14%. Although the small size of the sample allows only a rough estimation of the error rate (95% confidence interval [CI] of substantial quotation errors: 9.2% to 30.5%), this result agrees well with the rates identified in the literature.
By the way, I found both of these papers through AI, which faithfully represented them. With a simple albeit-inference-costly script I bet you could lower hallucination rates 80% or more.
AI absolutely can summarize an article and reliably answer questions, try it and see what you get. I put in a few thousands words of my own short fiction and it could understand and give useful criticism and analysis. Note when I say 'it' I mean Sonnet 4.5, not something given out for free.
If you're using the free version of Grok as your main AI then I can see why you dislike it so much! Neither particularly smart or charismatic.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The most obvious thumb on the scale is anti-discrimination law. It is illegal to employ too few women at your company. If women are underrepresented, especially in your higher management, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. As a result, employers give women jobs and promotions they would not otherwise have gotten simply in order to keep their numbers up.
It is rational for them to do this, because the consequences for failing to do so can be dire. Texaco, Goldman Sachs, Novartis, and Coca-Cola are among the companies that have paid nine-figure settlements in response to lawsuits alleging bias against women in hiring and promotions. No manager wants to be the person who cost his company $200 million in a gender discrimination lawsuit.
Anti-discrimination law requires that every workplace be feminized. A landmark case in 1991 found that pinup posters on the walls of a shipyard constituted a hostile environment for women, and that principle has grown to encompass many forms of masculine conduct. Dozens of Silicon Valley companies have been hit with lawsuits alleging “frat boy culture” or “toxic bro culture,” and a law firm specializing in these suits brags of settlements ranging from $450,000 to $8 million.
Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten. Naturally employers err on the side of making the office softer. So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?
A lot can be inferred from the way that feminization tends to increase over time. Once institutions reach a 50–50 split, they tend to blow past gender parity and become more and more female. Since 2016, law schools have gotten a little bit more female every year; in 2024, they were 56 percent female. Psychology, once a predominantly male field, is now overwhelmingly female, with 75 percent of psychology doctorates going to women. Institutions seem to have a tipping point, after which they become more and more feminized.
That does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions. What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?
And then:
As a woman myself, I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to pursue a career in writing and editing. Thankfully, I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power. I think people will be surprised to discover how much of our current feminization is attributable to institutional changes like the advent of HR, which were brought about by legal changes and which legal changes can reverse.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
I find it somewhat interesting that the male objections to Helen Andrews' thesis are something like 'hmm, what about China and Japan, does it hold there?' and the female objections seem more like 'Helen Andrews should STFU and be a secretary, how dare she be a journalist if she's not going to advocate for women' or 'if men are so great how come they are so violent and abuse alcohol so much?' or 'here's a long and open-to-interpretation section of a play'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Wouldn't we be able to tell if it was endemic though? We could estimate maybe via observing the spread of STDs in the country, or murders (hard to hide the disappearance of a dead wife or rape/murder victim), observe the behaviour of Japanese travellers overseas or just check vibes.
There may indeed be more sexual violence than is reported but it's probably still much lower than in the West, where there are also reporting problems (a big cover-up of grooming gangs in the UK for instance). If we do away with official data and go off vibes, pretty sure Japan still comes out ahead.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
I think it has a lot to do with context. China and Japan are just significantly different places with different histories and social issues express themselves differently there. Social science doesn't need to encompass the whole world. WEIRD is weird from the perspective of Japan and vis versa. On the one hand, fewer women in high office than in the West. On the other hand, less sexual violence, husbands are supposed to give their wife their wages and receive back an allowance. So is it a feminist country or a patriarchal country? Neither really, the concepts we've built up are based in a context and expectations that aren't there.
Furthermore, Helen is not even saying to ban women from the workplace so much as 'have fair tests for admittance.'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Yeah I get a fair bit of traffic from china on my crappy little website, up 25% this month. It's at least half my traffic tbh and not a single actual Chinese user, at least not one who uses any mandarin... But LLMs that are trained then direct people to me, so there are swings and roundabouts.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Women aren't banned from education today or for the last 50 years in Western countries. Yet there's been no huge surge of amazing female-founded companies as if we suddenly stopped squandering half the talent in the world. The female Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos does not exist, nor does she need to. Extremely stressful, high-risk or very high-performance roles are what men are supposed to handle, by and large. Likewise with dying for their country or getting maimed in industrial accidents.
It can't be 'all the good things about women are due to their innate superiority, all the bad things due to men being mean and oppressive'. Feminism isn't 'women keep all their old privileges and get new ones on top', that's not how it's worked out.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Good point, for some reason I thought it was like '92 or something... Nevertheless foreign aid and support for black South Africa continued and still continues today. It's not exactly the height of Cold War realpolitik to support putting the Soviet-trained, Soviet-funded guerrillas into power.
If rationality is so masculine, why do men keep gambling away their money, driving drunk and get fat?
It's men who contribute the vast majority of scientific advancement and creation of new things. The steam engine, the transistor, the telescope, the polio vaccine, antibiotics, nitrogen fertilizers... There'd be no cars to drunk drive, no statistics to collect, no jails, no guns to shoot and no slot machines without men, who made all those things in the first place.
And no men without women, for that matter. I reject this kind of 'war of the sexes' framing about who is better, both sexes are essential and have a distinct but complimentary role. It's not a good thing when men show up in female domains and start trying to change things up to suit their mindsets, the reverse is also true.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Louise Perry, Cancel Culture is Girl Culture
I think you mean this, the link just redirects back to my post... https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/cancel-culture-is-girl-culture
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Women are viciously competitive
There are multiple kinds of competition. Are women known for violently beating or killing eachother for a stranger looking at them the wrong way? No, that's a male thing. Women do not compete like men compete. What kind of man does this:
Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—“colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.”
What helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa was the largely male Western governments being afraid of the almost entirely male governments of the Soviet bloc and almost entirely male government of red China and the almost entirely male governments of various third world countries fomenting a more intense global anti-western movement if they didn’t support the end of apartheid. Indeed this drove the entirety of ruinous American ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti colonial’ policy back to the late 1940s, through Suez and Algeria and onward.
And so it stopped when the West won the Cold War, all sanctions on South Africa were ended? No, of course not, people believed this stuff. It was the Cold Warriors like Nixon and Reagan who were amongst the more positively inclined US presidents towards South Africa, not the reverse. South Africa was actually on their side in the Cold War, possessed useful naval bases, fought communist-backed states.
Most importantly, Andrews has this statistic:
One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.
What is that if not indicating wokeness? Maybe it's not 'conservative' or 'liberal' since that depends on context. In the imagined Trumpenreich, it would be very left-wing to fight for free speech and Stand Up against His Lies about a cohesive, all-white society. But in the modern day, in the real world, we know the polarity of 'free speech' vs 'cohesive society'. I fail to see how calling for the undermining of free speech in the America of today to protect a cohesive society could be interpreted in any other way than as woke.
And if women are woker, then having more women in places of prominence where they can implement this mindset can only make everything woker. If those two lines of argument hold, then everything else falls into place.
Helen Andrews and the Great Feminization
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/
Some excerpts:
Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.
Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminization as something that happened in the past before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981). A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023. When Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the high court, only 5 percent of judges were female. Today women are 33 percent of the judges in America and 63 percent of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden.
Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.
The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.
A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law. But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.
Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten.
And we wonder why men are dropping out of the workforce/university...
The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?
I found the whole essay quite interesting and also somewhat obvious in that 'oh I should've realized this and put it together before' sense. I read somewhere else on twitter that you could track the origins of civil rights/student activism to women gaining full entry to universities in America, as opposed to just chaperoned/'no picnicking out together' kind of limited access. Deans and admin no longer felt they could punish and control like when it was a male environment, plus young men behave very differently when there are sexually available women around. So there's also a potential element of weakened suppression due to fear of female tears and young men simping for women, along with the long-term demographic change element.
Though I suspect it may be more multi-factorial than that, with the youth bulge and a gradual weakening of the old order. A man had to make the decision to let women into universities after all.
I also find Helen Andrews refreshing in that she's not stuck in the 'look at me I'm a woman who's prepared to be anti-feminist, I'm looking for applause and clicks' mould, she makes the reasons behind her article quite clear:
Because, after all, I am not just a woman. I am also someone with a lot of disagreeable opinions, who will find it hard to flourish if society becomes more conflict-averse and consensus-driven. I am the mother of sons, who will never reach their full potential if they have to grow up in a feminized world. I am—we all are—dependent on institutions like the legal system, scientific research, and democratic politics that support the American way of life, and we will all suffer if they cease to perform the tasks they were designed to do.
Another idea that occurred to me is that the committee that drafted the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's wife. The UN Declaration of Human Rights was instrumental in establishing what we now understand as progressivism. That piece of international law, (really the origin of 'international law' as we understand it today, beyond just the customary law of embassies) directly led to the Refugee Convention of 1951 that has proven quite troublesome for Europe's migrant crisis, it introduced the principle of non-refoulement. It also inspired the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965):
Each State Party undertakes to encourage, where appropriate, integrationist multiracial organizations and movements and other means of eliminating barriers between races
Shall declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination
Sounds pretty woke! Note that states don't necessarily follow through on international law or sign up with it fully in the first place: Israel, America, Russia and so on routinely ignore these kinds of bodies in the foreign policy sphere. The Conventions and Committees are feminine in a certain sense in that they can be ignored without fear of violence, unlike an army of men. Nevertheless, their urging and clamouring is real and does have an effect, the UN Human Rights Commission helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa.
To some extent international law could be considered an early feminized field, or perhaps it was born female. Are there any other feminized fields we can easily think of? Therapists, HR and school teachers come to mind, though that seems more recent.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Hey, Gemini 3 Pro looks pretty damn magical if the clips people are posting on twitter are true. Of course there's no actual use-case for oneshotting a crappy replication of the windows operating system (documents, paint, calculator and so on) in HTML, recreating a crap version of the Binding of Isaac or Vampire Survivor, making some mid music to go along with the game. But there's no use-case for going to the moon either, it's a way to flex, a costly show of ability. The real strength of an AI is in things that can't easily be shown off visually, stuff that needs it to be fully released first!
Check out what people have been saying, it's pretty good: https://x.com/search?q=gemini%203.0&src=typeahead_click
Sonnet 4.5 is genuinely creative in its writing IMO. Every six months, there's a significant improvement in capability.
And the US does need some kind of qualitative edge, otherwise China will wipe the floor with America. They're bigger, they have more talent and they have more energy and industry. Their government is just smarter too, they don't feel the need to shut down the government over whether illegals get healthcare or not, they're just not in that genre.
It's probably too late to avoid a future of "brutal serfdom" regardless of what happens, even if we reach singularity escape velocity.
Why would we even be serfs, what do we have to offer? Unless things go well and the AIs are nice, then the situation totally different to human politics. It's not 'new king sweeps in and loots your city, forces you to pay heavy taxes'. The new king would have no need for meatbags, he could dispense with legacy humans. Replace with androids or catgirls or whatever he finds aesthetic. Turn the world to computronium, planetary disassembly, full sci-fi. Serfs need not exist unless he's feeling sadistic.
Many people thinking about ASI are still way too politics-brained. ASI is above and beyond politics as we understand it. I cannot imagine a world where intelligence caps out anywhere near human level. 20 watt brains are miserly in the grand scheme of compute. When we get AGI, ASI immediately follows.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
All good points.
I skipped over the economic angle and indeed fascist economics is significant, it's all about advancing national interests rather than pure marketism or collectivism as you say. I think the key element is the demographic part though, fascism isn't about making the country rich but about making the people strong and populous too, Mussolini had his 'Battle for Births' and as usual, the Nazis and Japan did a better job at it with their pro-natal campaigns.
While Italy wasn't terribly racist by Axis standards, they did heavily suppress Libya and went in very hard against Ethiopia with gas and such. But it's hard to be that racist if you can't actually conquer very much. They wanted to resettle Italians to Libya and Ethiopia and parts of Dalmatia but didn't get around to it with wartime difficulties.
The People's Republic of China shares fascism's characteristic of binding capitalists, workers, intellectuals and so on under an extremely powerful and nationalistic government
Yeah China's an odd one, they've got the economics but not the foreign posture. Rhetorically, diplomatically, they're still third-worldist and anti-imperialist.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
The British, French and Americans didn't actually adopt and implement social Darwinism, they had 'the white man's burden' and 'the civilizing mission'. Kipling wrote it to encourage America to colonize even though he makes it out to be a thankless, exhausting burden.
Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
That's critically different from actual fascists who would say 'wtf is this, we're here to extract as much as we can and couldn't care less about the welfare of these subhumans'. The Nazis wouldn't have had any problems with Ghandi, they'd just keep shooting until the Indians were under control.
The native Americans weren't subjugated to eliminate them or permanently other them, they were subjugated to integrate them as Americans, they got treaties and reservations. The Australians went around massacring Aboriginals in an ad-hoc bottom-up way because it was easy but there was never any actual policy to get rid of them, the closest they got is 'the arc of history bends towards us, no big deal if they wither away but we won't actually make it happen, we'll do weird things like them away from their parents and raise them as our own'.
Not social-darwinist, full-bore racism, it was wishy-washy 'civilizing' racism.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Nobody even seems that interested in what fascism actually is.
Is Miller really a fascist because he wants to enforce immigration laws? Surely not, otherwise we would have to define Eisenhower of Operation Wetback fame as a fascist.
IMO, fascism is a combination of militarism, imperialism and racism within a social darwinist worldview. Not merely 'I don't like these backwater savages' but 'it's our job to subjugate them in the short term and maybe get rid of them outright, we need to tile the world with us and ours'. Nazism is fascism + anti-semitism.
Also, all violence is political to some extent. If a thief (poor) robs someone (rich) then there's a political angle to it. Some leftists would say it's justified, especially if its a big corporation. The whole point of the police is administering violence to baddies, how much violence and who is a baddy, that's a political question. Politics is about power and violence is the most important kind of power. Challenging the sovereignty and values of the state is very political violence.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
The joke is that the US is already a mess from the perspective of outsiders. Economically and technologically advanced, socially backwards.
I have a copy of 'Don't Make the Black Kids Angry', the entire book is examples of the non-stop American race-hysteria and tragicomedic, farcical levels of injustice and dysfunction that your country tries (with great success) to reframe as correct and enlightened diversity, while the actual Americans make workarounds and scuttle around anxiously referring to the issue via euphemisms or trying (for the fiftieth time) wimpy methods that failed the last 49 times.
What is this if not a backwards society? I view it as such, that's my opinion, based on my first-hand observations of dysfunction (drug addicts shooting up in public), observations via video, observation of American political rhetoric and observation of statistics.
It is still running, since I showed that Project Pegasus is part of Opal and Opal is still running. QED.
Shameless to complain about goalpost-moving when this is what you're doing.
OK, here are some links (which is just tedious work since 10 or 10,000 links out of a gazillion articles has no statistical meaning). But since you seem to be dead set on this and love journalists so much...
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/cracks-in-j-20s-stealth-with-no-buyers-exposure/ (this whole thing is retarded if you know anything about aviation, incredibly misleading)
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/rafale-or-f-35-why-indian-rafale-jets-are-as-dangerous-as-stealth-5th-generation-f-35s/ (same kind of stupidity)
https://www.newsweek.com/india-overtakes-china-in-world-air-force-ranking-10882624 (even more retarded, I don't know how anyone can believe this, just check the squadron numbers lmao)
Here is a whole article about Indian media organizations inventing fake news, bombings of Karachi for example: https://institute.aljazeera.net/en/ajr/article/3188
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus (this was just a fantasy)
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/01/abc-news-issues-corrects-bombshell-michael-flynn-report.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-3018945/New-study-reveals-eating-chocolate-doesn-t-affect-Body-Mass-Index-help-LOSE-weight.html
https://www.allsides.com/blog/story-week-media-misfires-covington-catholic-story (Covington kids...)
https://web.archive.org/web/20060523081219/http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=398274b5-9210-43e4-ba59-fa24f4c66ad4&k=28534 (this was just made up)
The whole Washington Post Steele dossier, the legendary pissgate: https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/581347-washington-post-removes-large-portions-of-two-stories-on-steele/
More options
Context Copy link