quiet_NaN
3d ago
The US has a long history of supplying arms to enemies-of-enemies to attempt to achieve its strategic aims, but that's not really a central example of terrorism. A central example of terrorism is when you murder lots of people for no reason at all except to sow terror among a civilian population.
The word which you are describing is terror. Terror is a weapon which can be wielded by the state, opposition groups down to a couple of crazies.
The US has certainly supported many perpetrators of terror in the cold war for geostrategic reasons. But they were generally states or rival groups to the people in control of the state. This is because supporting tiny groups of crazies is rarely conductive to their geostrategic aims.
Generally, these people supported by the US do not seem to seek shelter in the US, though. All the governments-in-exile based in the US listed on WP sounded somewhat tame.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
What I found really disgusting were the imgur posts openly celebrating the assassination.
Now, I am not someone who thinks that every human life is sacred. I will celebrate if Trump finally croaks from natural causes, and I would not take any inconveniences to save Trump's life. But if someone were to shoot him (whose death would matter per se, in a way in which shooting a random MAGA proponent I had never heard of before will not matter), that would be quite bad in a lot of different ways, from normalizing political violence to turning him into a martyr.
Trump will not be defeated by murdering his supporters, nor would the cost be worth that.
I was not very upset about the killing of the United Healthcare CEO because I did not consider it to be a step on the slippery slope any more than any non-political murder is. Running a company which sometimes makes decisions which people feel (rightly or wrongly) are ruining their lives comes with certain risks, and even if one health insurance executive was shot every month there seems to be little danger of it spiraling out of control.
By contrast, Kirk was a clear political murder. Any effect the guy may have had as a human will be overshadowed by orders of magnitude by the effects he will have as a murder victim and MAGA martyr. If such a killing happened once a month, things would spiral out of control.
And the idiots who claim that he now became a part of the gun violence he had previously called an acceptable price for the 2A are missing the point. That would be an excellent point to make if he had been randomly gunned down during a routine school shooting. But he was not, he was very deliberately targeted for his political activism. If he had argued that assassinations were a legitimate form of political debate, that would have been mentioned in every other imgur post, so I guess he did not. (Apparently, he called for people to bail out the Pelosi attacker, which seems cringeworthy poor taste to me, but is still different from calling for her to be murdered.)
quiet_NaN
3d ago
- Before the end of the year, will it be possible that the total number of cis people murdered by trans people in the US will exceed the converse? It seems an eminent possibility. Will we then be permitted to discuss openly the role that trans identification seems to play in political radicalisation?
Anything is possible. But you are starting from three cases and making up a concept of a reality of 350M.
Furthermore, even a significant correlation would not mean a causation. For example, I would expect that white anti-vaxers are more prone to violence than the general white population, simply because being an anti-vaxer is a more common belief among the poorer classes, and for reasons of either nature or nurture, these are statistically more prone to violence. Of course, some anti-vaxers may specifically commit violence motivated from these beliefs, but most of their violence will be for unrelated reasons.
Likewise, I think it is possible that a trans identity is more appealing to people who are generally less neurotypical, and that this includes some disorder groups (such as psychotic disorders) which are (possibly) correlated with higher likelihood of violence.
A straightforward "normal people become trans, and then become more prone to violence" seems less likely (except that FtM on T might probably catch up to cis men).
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I was fairly skeptical of that line of argumentation.
I think that not outing yourself in the profile is fine. But when you plan a date, you might also want to specify what your naughty bits are. Waiting for them to discover that once they take of your underpants seems impolite. And also dangerous, I think there have been some cases of MtF getting killed when their (Muslim culture) date realized that they were making out with a dick-having person.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Well, we're already in hell. Now what?
Anyone who claims that things can not possibly get worse on a societal level is having a terminal lack of imagination, just like the people who think that things will have to get worse before they can get better.
The US is doing fine. Ukraine is doing fine. Even fucking North Korea is doing okay, perhaps rating a 2 on the xkcd pain scale as adopted to societies.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Productive is relative to ones goal.
I would argue that the more evil you are, the more likely that violence will further your twisted goals.
Take the Hamas attacks. Under the assumption that they were meant to prevent further normalization between Israel and its Arab neighbors, they were a resounding success -- Israel did even bomb Qatar. Only if you take a broadly humanitarian view (e.g. are unwilling to sacrifice all of Gaza for a slight increase in the odds of getting to genocide all the Jews) do Hamas' actions become unreasonable.
Another type of violence depends on your favored type of decision theory, in that it is simply retaliation. In causal decision theory, you will not retaliate. If your enemy launches their nukes, nuking their cities will not have a beneficial troops saved to civilian death ratio.
In other decision theory systems, you will retaliate, not because it will improve the situation in your branch of reality but because being the kind of person who will punish defection will lead to a lower chance of finding yourself in that situation in the first place.
Personally, I think that thinks have to go very badly before punishing the other party should become your main goal, think Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or their-ICBMs-are-already-launched levels of bad. And I still think that obviously innocents (e.g. kids) should enjoy their deontological protection even then, so a retaliation which deliberately targets them would be evil. But nuking their cities would definitely be on the table.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
This is pretty much anti-liberal, though. People should have freedom of association.
Germany kind of did this for an infamous gang called NSDAP. Display their symbols in public, you get a fine. Of course, this also means that we constantly get told by Americans how horribly unfree we are.
And it does not stop the fascists from rallying if they simply pick a different symbol or color. In my opinion, the main benefit was always more symbolic -- victims of the previous iteration of fascism might have to endure similar ideas and rhetoric, but they at least get spared of seeing the swastika banners again.
For gangs, this will simply get you into a cat and mouse game. Gangs will adopt to using more deniable symbols. And what do you do about a Yakuza missing a finger? Tell them that they must wear gloves in public?
In the current political climate, this would also be extended to the opponents political groups the minute it is passed. Neither side will stop at just banning MS-13, either they will want to ban the confederate flag or the trans flag.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
quiet_NaN
7d ago
First off, there is no way that Trump is getting a Nobel without first invading Sweden and replacing their committee. They gave Obama the peace prize for not being GWB, Trump would basically bring liberal democracy to China before they would even consider him.
Secondly, your reasoning seems to be akin to "when the girl started to talk about her father sexually abusing her, she destroyed what had previously been a happy family".
The job of the media, even the fucking, thrice-damned NYT, is to report the news. A previously unreported US military operation in North Korea seems pretty clearly news to me -- unlike outing or doxxing people, which seems evil in itself.
Like most actors, news media often have an agenda. They put spins on things, they select what to report on and when to release their reports. That is all SOP. If they want to frustrate Trump's efforts at peace, that is perhaps not maximally nice, but well within their expected alignment constraints. FWIW, I do not think that a few dead fishermen will be a dealbreaker for Kim Jong Un.
Did the NYT stop anyone else from discovering the story and publishing it in 2021? No? Then your problem might just be that their competitors suck at investigative journalism.
Finally, I think that this is just more of Trump trying to collect all the achievements that Obama got. I do not think he is very coherent about it, more completionist than seriously role-playing. So he got out of the Iranian deal and bombed them instead because he wanted the "Bomber President" achievement, then he makes some token effort to get his "Peacemaker President" in Korea, is gunning for "Law and Order achiever" while also maxing out his corruption meter.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
The result was demographic replacement.
Oh no, what was presumably a sleepy town is now much less sleepy but also has a sizable ethnically Korean population. Dried seaweed in the newly constructed supermarkets. The horror.
And they don't even shy away from culturally appropriating honest White American names or religion. Who knows, within a decade, they might speak better English than the people who have been living there for generations. What is happening in Pooler, GA is basically White Genocide.
Seriously. Generally, there are a lot of NIMBY laws in the US, so I will presume that the locals did get some say whether they wanted an Korean-owned battery plant in their backyard or not. Industry always has advantages (e.g. all the perks that come with a higher population, like supermarkets, better selection of schools or healthcare) and disadvantages (new people coming to town, higher rents).
To claim a demographic replacement, you would have to show that the demographic group which was previously living there has been net emigrating from Pooler at significant rates: if I mix cookie dough and add 200g of flour to 100g of sugar, I can not describe the outcome as "the sugar has been replaced by the flour", that is just not what "replacement" means.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Does nobody have respect for the rule of law?
Based on priors, I am doubtful that they were meaningfully violating the law.
So far, Trump has been less of a Kantian paladin who enforces the laws of the land whatever the consequences may be, and more of a petty tyrant who uses "I am just enforcing the law" as an excuse to punish his enemies.
- You are in the US on a perfectly legal visa but ICE does not like your tattoos? Go to an El Salvador mega-prison without any due process.
- You are employing illegals on your farm or in your hotel? Don't worry, wise king Donald has decided that he is fine with that, nobody will arrest your workers. (Also, as illegals lack social security numbers, I am wondering how you can even pay them without breaking federal labor law.)
In some cases, Trump seems to be targeting cities for harsh ICE enforcement simply because they did not vote for him.
Is it possible that Hyundai was blatantly cheating with their visa? Certainly.
But my money is on them being targeted because CW-wise, electrical cars (except for Tesla) are a technology of Trump's opponents, or because South Korea has lately not spread their ass-cheeks to Trump's satisfaction.
The South Koreans now probably wish they had built their factory in a more reliable partner country like China instead.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Luckily for him, he does not even have to fight the federal government for that, because his dream country already exists. It is called Afghanistan.
Sure, he will have to make some compromises as there are no buildings high enough in rural Afghanistan to throw the gays to their death, but I wholeheartedly recommend he goes there and waits for the decadent Western civilization to collapse and being replaced by the Taliban regime.
failure to murder everyone who is insufficiently left is likely to also be 'extreme far radical right'"
This sentence has too many negations in it for my taste.
Let me try to dig out the core:
murder everyone who is insufficiently left
Virtually nobody is advocating for the cleansing of all the people who are not left. Not the GOP, not the Dems, not the woke mob. Even if you say that everyone except literal Nazis is sufficiently left, the position "let us just kill all the Nazis outright" is very fringe. Getting Nazis fired, cast out from society, forcibly re-educated, perhaps put into labor camps for life might all be popular fantasies on the fringe left, but simply gassing them and be done with it is unlikely to be the consensus even in Antifa.
His claim is that this would make Antifa 'extreme far radical right'.
--
More broadly, I think that fringe opinions should not influence our broad categorization of the political spectrum. I can probably find a crazy person who is arguing that we should take "eat the rich" literally and slaughter and barbecue the top 10% income bracket. I could then claim that simply taxing rich people out of their wealth but not eating them is a "moderate left" position, actually.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Brains/Consciousness being some kind of magical quantum system was always nonsense.
Agreed.
But it’s not quantum mechanics, which means in turn that most quantum cognition models allow no indeterminate
I thought that the quantum consciousness people were claiming that QM effects (superposition, entanglement, etc) play a role at the scale of brains. Indeed, Penrose claims superposition.
It's actually evidence that quantum mechanics is itself also just classical mechanics.
Hard disagree. A quantum system is not just a classical system of similar complexity where we do not have access to all the variables. An electron is not just a point-like particle whose position and momentum is not precisely knowable to us. Instead, it is its wave function, which is a much richer object than any classical point mass.
Crucially, quantum objects can become entangled. Where a register in a classical computer holds exactly one out of 2^N possible values, N qbits can hold a linear combination of all these 2^N. If you want to simulate that on a classical computer, you need not N bits but 2^N numbers. While building an interesting QC is hard, the physics fundamentals about the speedup you would get are solid.
Are there deterministic theories with non-local hidden variables? Sure. But they only save you from god throwing dice when you measure a spin, they do not get rid of the fact that in the real world, you have particle waves, and only in the boring limit where h is too small to matter do you get objects like cannon balls which can be described with just a few parameters.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
This still sounds like a vacuous concept to me.
Also, take a 4-bit adder, which is a very simple computation device.
In the first experiment, we connect it to two digital light sensors. One reads 3, the other reads 5. The adder circuit does its job and outputs 8, which we then bitshift to get the average of 4. By your description that means our circuit is experiencing a certain amount of light.
In the second experiment, we connect two temperature sensors. One reads 3, the other reads 5. Again the adder does its job and outputs 8, which results in an average value of 4. But this time it is supposed to experience temperature, and depending on the scale of our sensors, it might experience very different temperatures!
To the degree either an adder or a human neuron experience anything, what they experience is simply voltage levels of their inputs. Either system is describable perfectly well without using a word like experience.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
If you've ever felt a sensation of hot or cold, that's a qualia.
I do not think that this will get you anywhere. At most, you can convince me this way that I have qualia. But my temperature detection circuit is nothing special, an insect might have something rather similar. Does it have qualia? What if I replace it by electronics running an identical neural network and a temperature sensor? What about a rock which gets slightly larger when it is warm?
If qualia is a useful property systems of matter can have or not have, then you automatically run into p-Zombies.
At the end of the day, I want concepts which describe reality and pay their rent in anticipation of future events. The pH value of aqueous solutions is a good (if limited) concept. I can measure it, and it will give me good predictions about which reactions will tend to take place e.g. if I decide to take a swim in it.
Qualia is not such a concept. It does not make falsifiable predictions. There is no test to determine if a dog or a LLM has qualia.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
a crank manifesto in the same tradition as Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach
Personally, I liked GEB. I think that a lot of it was just a popularization of the Incompleteness theorem.
Normally I have a working BS detector which goes off at woo (e.g. "brains are macroscopic quantum systems"), and I do not remember it beeping.
While I probably did not fully grasp the incompleteness theorem, I also did not think that Hofstadter was trying to sell me any deepisms.
In short, I see GEB like HPMOR in that it packs claims which have been made before into a narrative. Some people like to read about Mr Crab or Harry P-E-V, some don't.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Historically, both over- and underestimations of the norms of civility and the strength of checks and balances have appeared.
The people who predict the rise of the fourth Reich whenever a right-of-center politician takes power are certainly wrong more often than a rock with the text "it's gonna be fine, checks and balances, baby."
But ever so rarely, that rock ends up being wrong, and when it is wrong, it will be so much more wrong than the wolf-criers.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
There are different kinds of purges. I am sure that when Obama got rid of don't ask, don't tell in 2011, there were some generals who decided that this would be their hill to die on which were subsequently retired.
But my understanding is that Obama did not retire all 4 star generals appointed by GWB when he took office. At the end of the day, both Bush and Obama wanted generals who would follow the lawful orders of their president, so they were fine with the same people (as long as they knew which way the wind was blowing and would use the right phrases, or at least shut up).
By contrast, Trump wants personal loyalty. If there was a constitutional crisis, would that guy support me unconditionally? This is what is meant by the kind of generals Hitler had. If it was just about firing anyone who could not stop mentioning DEI, that would be a much lesser issue.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
to the actual assassins at him
Come on. Do you really think that
(a) the deep state wanted to murder him
(b) that they would wait till election season to off him
(c) that they would decide that a sniper bullet would serve their goals better than, say, heart failure after an overdose of viagra?
(d) that they would be likely to miss?
Now you can add any amounts of epicycles to make all of that plausible. Perhaps the plan was that JD Vance would get elected Americans would vote for him simply because they dislike assassinations. Only Vance was really a democratic operative whose presidency would discredit the GOP for decades, allowing the reptiloids running the Dems to defeat the last Illuminati bastion in the US. But they did not know that the Illuminati had acquired precognition from alien artifacts from Area-51, so they knew precisely how much to adjust the shooter's scope for maximum dramatic effect.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Not in these words, directly. Apparently, he was spinning his usual lies about the election being stolen -- a process that would be finalized through the certification of the election -- and told them:
"If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore"
What do you think was he anticipating that would happen? Than MAGA would pray for a divine intervention, and get archangel Gabriel appear before Mike Pence and tell him how the Democrats had rigged the election and that he must certify Trump?
If a mafia don is telling his subordinates how an associate has become a thorn in his side and how good he would feel if that guy just dropped dead, and his goons took that as an order to kill himself, would you also claim that the mafia don is innocent of murder because he was never telling anyone to kill the victim in so many words?
quiet_NaN
11d ago
The funny thing is that Trump is very much elite, just not the DC political elite, which is good enough for his voters.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Presumably, their plan was to force Congress to certify Trump as the election winner at gunpoint.
All coup attempts seem silly until they succeed. Hitler marching on the Feldherrenhalle was far more silly than J6.
Take the vote for the Enabling Act. I would argue that the presence of the brownshirts during the vote was a clear factor in persuading Zentrum to vote for the act which turned Hitler into a dictator. If anything, the surprising thing was that the SPD showed balls of steel by voting against it.
Is it possible that Mike Pence would have stared down the barrel of a gun and certified Biden? Sure.
Is it possible that the SCOTUS would have overruled a certification for Trump under duress? Sure.
Is it possible that the military leadership would have arrested Trump on the spot? Sure.
So while Trump was unlikely to succeed, I would not claim that his coup attempt was totally absurd -- more like shooting with a handgun at someone 80m away than trying to shoot the Moon.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
I think the capitalist solution would be that you simply charge smut providers higher fees.
Also, I am not sure if this applies to steam accounts, especially if they have years of content on them. I imagine if I tried to cancel a CC purchase made to my steam account, the first thing steam would do would be to lock my account -- after all, I have just said that it was used by an unauthorized person.
Also, steam is kind of a big platform and unlikely to go bankrupt over some porn game chargebacks.
teenage boys using their dad's credit cards
This is puzzling to me. If daddy told the CC company "actually, that was my 15yo son paying for smut online", I would imagine the CC company to reply "no problem, here is your money back. Also, we have just reported your son to the police for wire fraud. Have a nice day!"
This would reduce such claims to a very small number, because most families would gladly forgo 100$ to avoid having a family member investigated for financial crimes.
Instead, they mostly react without the middle sentence. But my view of CC is that they are a laughably insecure system whose insecurity simply gets papered over by them absorbing losses through fraud.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Because, well, after Trump won in 2016 there was a scheme to have the Electoral College throw out the results, and there were riots trying to prevent the inauguration.
From that article, ten electors wanted to defect. Five ended up defecting from Clinton, two from Trump, who had a margin of 37.
Personally, I think that trying to defeat Trump through faithless electors would have been a terrible idea. Still, I think what Trump did was worse. The constitution at least mentions electors, and that attempt to steal an election would have been subject to the SCOTUS oversight. By contrast, the constitution is silent about armed goons breaking into the Capitol, and it seems unlikely that the SCOTUS would have been in a position to rule against them without the mob interfering.
I do not find your J20 thing convincing in the least. To my knowledge, Legba Carrefour was not a fixture of DC Democrats. Now, if you have evidence of Obama, Clinton, Pelosi or the like telling the disruptJ20 rioters something along the lines of "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore", then I would concede that this is equivalent to J6, but otherwise I do not blame the Democrats more for their fringes than I would blame Trump for the odd Qanan loon.
A short brainstorming session comes up with the following norms which will be actively prosecuted:
In short, "historically attested heterosexual norms" is the weakest possible defense short of "attested in the fiction of de Sade". If someone wants to legalize having sex slaves being raised in a brothel, (first catering to pedophiles, I would guess) before being bred to get more whores (with male infants being killed at birth), guess what, that is a "historically attested heterosexual norm".
And I do not think that the law has it in especially for the heterosexuals, either. There are plenty of attested homosexual norms around boy-fucking which are just as outlawed.
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