4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
Working in academia, the predominant perspective is closer to saying that everything of value is produced by the blue tribe anyway, so they should have the right to choose how the surplus is redistributed as well.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
Who are the "takers"? Both tribes would contend that their own are valuable hard workers and the other side are parasites taking more value than they contribute.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
Brazil is not really embedded in the Western media sphere/memetic pond, though. I'd be more inclined to compare with Fico, where the media barely even mustered disapproval, and instead the reaction was all "he kind of had it coming" and "what if this makes more people support his pro-Putin agenda". The subsequent EU election did not really go in his favour, either
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
There is a model of anchor babies that would see them as comparable to a hostage situation: the parent essentially says "let me stay here (too), or else this innocent child suffers". Do you also believe in a general moral obligation to yield to hostage takers if the hostage can't be saved otherwise, the argument that this encourages more hostage-taking notwithstanding?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
The same "it's different when people without actual power do it, and they are just joking/venting anyway" argument is commonly fielded in defense of variants of "kill all (white) men".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
Sure, sorry if it was opaque. The first sentence has nothing much going on - it's just the observation that in China every subpopulations seems to only become less rebellious as modernity and affluence spreads to them, and largely the wealthier people now seem to be happy to work and consume while the remaining sparks of rebellion all came from still-impoverished marginal populations as well as groups that dropped on the totem pole of wealth (HK).
The second one is a reference to "the devil makes work for idle hands", a phrase often quoted in Western contexts as part of an argument against allowing the masses significant leisure - the intended image being that only 16-hour workdays stop the plebeian masses from organising at some beer hall to stage an uprising against their betters or else falling into antisocial debauchery. I found the idea that more wealth would create more motivation to use that wealth in a way that threatens government control quite similar, but in reality, any leisure time modern Chinese people get seems to be sunk into modern entertainment - TV dramas and perhaps most conspicuously games that get players hooked using supremely gamified literal make-work activities, the "daily quests" or "dailies". This typically looks like performing some randomised chores (talk to NPC X, defeat five slimes, craft three potions) to get a daily reward of in-game currency that can be used for obtaining randomised lootboxes/gacha. At best, people go to organise in some online beer hall to stage an uprising against a rival subfandom of one of those games.
Paraphrasing a common zinger, what if it turns out communists can stay innovative longer than you can stay ahead?
More substantially, though, I don't see much of a persuasive argument here. You are generalising from very little data (a roughly 200 year old system that identifies as "capitalist" vs. the second major ~60 year old system that identifies as "communist") and theoretising about the "communist" system from first principles that there is very limited evidence it actually adheres to, and on top of that reaching a conclusion which is flattering to your obviously preferred system, which should give you pause. Is this different from a Russian arguing in 1904 that a heathen state will never prevail over a Christian one, with an argument based on the recent historical primacy of the former and imagining that the expected naval tactics of Russia and Japan can be derived from the tenets of Orthodox Christianity and State Shinto?
So far the PRC story seems to me to make a compelling case that you can suddenly and massively crank up the wealth of great numbers of people while making them less inclined to pursue freedoms outside of your prescribed window. The main line of work the devil is making for idle hands there appears to consist of mobile game daily quests.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
I can't find a good way to respond to your objection because it is not clear to me what part of the comparison you think fails. Just to be clear, you do understand that I think that LoTT's normal conduct of nutpicking the outgroup is the bad thing, rather than just the circumstance that LoTT reposted a hoax, right? I doubt any of our right-wing members think that the left-wing version of that behaviour (which is basically sneerclub and rationalwiki) is good; to assert that it's good when your tribe does it is just the same sort of trite who/whom that otherwise takes the form of "black people shoplifting is just".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
The shoplifting in the metaphor is not posting hoaxes, but doing what LoTT does normally - "nutpicking" and sneering at the outgroup based on the most outrageous examples of its members. This is entrapment in the sense that those porch thief bait packages people like posting about on YouTube are - the reason the porch thieves are bad is not that they took the bait, but that they took non-bait packages before. The bait package is just a tool to catch them.
This viewpoint is basically your version of the social-justice activist's "police is racist for arresting a Black shoplifter", is it not? It doesn't matter that the arrested person was a shoplifter and police's core function includes arresting shoplifters, but only that they were black; it doesn't matter that the hoaxed person was a purveyor of bad epistemics and a rationalist blogger's core function includes obstructing purveyors of bad epistemics, but only that she was conservative.
There is a view that it is proper to enact violence upon and confine criminals and doing so doesn't make you qualitatively the same as those who would do so against any political opponent. It's not too much of a stretch to draw the same distinction regarding sneer celebrities and similar antisocial elements of the epistemic domain, and say that they ought to be humiliated, alienated and discredited regardless of political colour.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
Wasn't this person already renowned for having some gorillion followers and profiled on major news media by the time Trace's hoax happened? If you don't have the capability to assess the accuracy of what you put before hundreds of thousands of people, then maybe you should recuse yourself from putting things before hundreds of thousands of people. Do you seriously think, hand on heart, that you would have accepted an "I am just a poor normie, you can't expect me to fact check" defense for a sneer celebrity with this much of a platform from the other camp?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
Yeah, I corrected myself after making the initial post. Conflating sex and orientation is also something that's easy to do as a -by-default, though.
As I understand it, a sexual orientation that amounts to "I'm sex A, and sex not-A is the one that I'm physically built to mate with, so I guess I'm looking for a not-A partner".a "gender identity" that amounts to "I have sex-A parts, and in our society sex-A people are expected to dress/communicate like this and have interests like that, so I guess that's what I'll be doing". The test case are hypotheticals like anime transmigration/body swaps: assuming you are male, if you woke up stuck in a female body tomorrow (and your preexisting social web were conveniently erased), would you be looking for male or female partners going forward? would you (1) have a strong preference to refer to yourself or be referred to as male, (2) -"- as female, or (3) a weak preference to be referred to as female because anything else would now seem factually wrong? Answer (3) is the "cis-by-default" one.
I think I'm in the set of people the label is supposed to describe, and I really understand it as the natural outcome of not having whatever sense generates the "I'm gender not-A" qualium in dysphorics but still being socialised in a society with distinct gender roles.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
The unaddressed elephant in the room still is that right-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless is in it voluntarily because homelessness has become a comfy and appealing lifestyle of antisocial sloth, while left-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless would gladly move into and maintain housing if only they could.
I don't understand why, instead of trying to persuade each other, these discussions are always based in seeming denial that the other premise exists (an endless loop of "You're wrong, providing the homeless with housing is not actually that hard!" - "You're wrong, punishing the homeless is not actually that hard!", apparently heard by the respective other side as "You're wrong, there is no realistic way to punish the homeless" and "you're wrong, we can't just magic up housing for them all").
Picking random big-but-not-too-overhyped cities, in Chongqing a studio (up to expat standards?) apparently costs about $250/month, to a median salary of about $21k/year. Knowing China, there are plenty of options that are much cheaper but wouldn't be considered by a website called "expatistan". In comparison, in Chicago a studio is about $1500/month, to a median yearly income of $65k (and my impression from when I lived in the US is that even putting up with inhumane levels of slumlording won't lower your rent by much). I don't understand why you would expect homeless people to be able to buy, or any bank to give them the massive collateralised loan that is a mortgage.
(I briefly looked up the situation in Taipei and it seems that there the income/rent ratio is in between, at sth like $30k/year to $450 for a studio.)
The "not happening and it's good that it is" bingo board entry has that perfect toxoplasmic nature where it takes a very common combination of opinions that is just human nature and skews it just a little bit in order to produce a great net effect of making the outgroup look nastier. Most of the time, what they actually believe amounts to "this would be good if it happened, but there is no way it is happening because things are going terribly for me and my tribe" - delusional and paranoid maybe, but not the gloating and gaslighting that the other side wants to see in it. It makes little sense for people to strut around like Optimate master-morality winners when their whole worldview and moral self-esteem depends on them being virtuous slave-morality losers.
As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that there is any level of intelligence (that has been attained by humans) at which the ability to delude oneself disappears. It is facile to bring up the famous historical examples like Newton or Pascal, as to begin with it's hard to answer the question to what extent they would even resemble our modern understanding of a "genius" , but even in modern times there is no shortage of examples such as the cavalcade of Physics nobel prize winners (Pauling, Josephson...) who went off the deep end, or even cases like Mochizuki where the cancerous growth of delusion happened near the center of their actual domain of expertise. By any account, these people are the sort of geniuses you describe: their competitive advantage was taking leaps of correct intuition over gaps others could only bridge with lots of meticulous work.
Moving in a slice of academia where it seems that we're good enough to be the "thousand-year-old vampires" (TW: Yudkowsky being himself) to a distinct stratum of people below but also have a distinct layer of people above us who appear the same to us, I've had a friend and colleague in academia who is probably quite similar to the case of Mar(k/y) that you describe. His->her transition did come as a bit of a shock to me, but as I thought about it more the signs had been all there. Since I first met him there was always a class of topics that made him act squirmy and avoidant, mostly to do with his own romantic relationships as well as even seemingly non-romantic ones with some people around him that one would casually describe as "queer", but also whenever other people's romantic relationships came up, as well as anything to do with his own seemingly quite religious upbringing. This was not the avoidance of someone calmly deciding to not talk about a topic, but the avoidance of someone with a fear of heights suddenly pushed onto a suspension bridge, and it seemed quite likely that he would be struck by the same sense of vertigo if his train of thought hit upon these topics on its own. I can only imagine that she came to be either somewhere in the depths of the avoided area, or as a mechanism to cope with the inevitability of having to engage it - but how would I know? I don't have the social wisdom to know how to keep engaging with someone who broadcast a choice to discard the social identity I was acquainted with, and academic contingencies made us go different ways at the time either way. The thing is though that if I accept this cluster of anxious avoidance as being a "pre-delusion", there is no shortage of people on "the level above mine" that I have seen it from.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
Subtropical, surely; I'd climatically put the heartland at least in the same general class as Louisiana or the Mediterranean (east coast N hemisphere patterns suggest the former). If you go far enough back, every Japanese food of note is continental, but if you are willing to consider miso, soy sauce and fermented fish sufficiently native, those hardly make for bland fare. Generally, pickling and fermentation feature more in the older and lower-class dishes; "purity and fresh ingredients that stand on their own" sounds like copy for indulgences afforded by a modern society that has refrigeration and wants to flex it, not a tradition.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
So are you in fact intending to talk about the Ukraine war, or is there a cleaner question you would like to ask hidden in there? In the former case, I think your analogies are all over the place, and to begin with the invocation of the "defensive alliance" line is more than a little inflammatory to us rare anti-NATO readers (as we tend to see it as pure "dare to contradict me if you think you can get away with it" trolling in the vein of workplace neopronouns since the invasion of Serbia at the latest).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
I think I have sampled just about every relevant contender in these domains and come to the belief that Germany has the best savoury baked goods (including in particular bread) and Sweden has the best sweet ones.
There's plenty of greatness in the Mediterranean space but maybe we're excluding it. I concur with appreciating English breakfast; there are also some soups in my native cuisine (Russian) that I would be unhappy to do without. In the US, Cajun cuisine is the only regional one that I found worthwhile, and it's hard to count it as non-Mediterranean Western given how it's largely a fusion of French and Afro-Caribbean. Maybe KFC (which nowadays is good everywhere except for the Anglo countries), or Popeye's for a still-okay-in-the-US substitute, would count?
In general it does seem to be true that northern foods are generally less interesting - even the ones that people praise seem to be more in the "lots of high-quality protein, prepared in a way that doesn't ruin the taste" (steaks, good burgers) class than anything that registers as cuisine. This extends to extreme latitudes elsewhere (Mongolian food is legendarily terrible, and I would consider the outer reaches of commoner Northern Chinese food to be bland in the same way cabbage-and-potatoes Eastern European food is. What I've tried of Chilean food gave me similar vibes). It might be tempting to blame this on a lack of aromatic plants (plants don't have the same need to evolve repellent chemicals in areas where insect activity is low?), but many of the flavourful tropical cuisines (Japanese, Indonesian...) rely heavily on fermented products over spices.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
As far as I can tell, the more fashy folks believe that Jewish perfusion in society is the main obstacle to establishing the ethnostate of their ambitions. This might at least be true in a boring sense, in that a society that gets on board with purging the Jews almost certainly must already have been converted to a strict strain of ethnonationalism; but there's a more dubious bailey along the lines of "if all Jews were spirited away without any particular attendant shift in attitudes preceding it, in due time the society left behind would come around to our views".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
What does "evil" mean to you here, even? It's hard to see it as anything other than an "opposed to my values", paired with a certain claim to license to transgress normal boundaries in order to bring the evil person or action in line with what your values are. The former is okay, but the latter surely is out of place in this forum, being somewhere in the space between "shaming" and recruiting for a cause (even if that cause is just to stand by and do nothing to interfere as you proceed to smite evil). At least I don't think you can argue that calling something evil is merely the former - I expect that if I started calling your preferred views on sexuality evil, it would rain downvotes and possibly reports if I am obstinate enough about it, which surely would make no sense if I were just communicating my values.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
Good point about the speed at which it would happen - I didn't consider that it could only amount to a "debris threshold passed now leads to inescapable exponential growth that will reach the point that no sats survive for long in 10 years" scenario.
I do however doubt that either of Russia and China would be particularly concerned about the damage loss of international space capabilities would do to their remaining allies (Google Maps? Degradation of weather forecasts? Loss of landsat-type commercial imagery?) if they are in an existential-ish struggle against the US. All of those sound to me like they would be minor relative to the effects of disturbances to the financial system and supply chains such a war would impose on everyone either way.
It being more relevant than another measure (why?) is not an argument that it is relevant in absolute terms, and the rest of your post seems to be another assertion that China's GDP is low. I find the continuous mention of GDP in these discussions about hypothetical military clashes very frustrating, because nobody ever explains why a measure that counts the number of tokens of socially constructed value exchanged for goods and services that mostly have nothing to do with military capability has anything with military capability.
At the extreme, a country that abolished money and markets completely, stopped exporting and importing and just press-ganged its people into producing sustenance and ordnance like an ant colony would seemingly have a GDP of zero, but clearly nonzero military power...? For a real example, Afghanistan's GDP appears to hover at around $20b per year. Total US expenditures on the war are given as around $2000b over 20 years, so why did the US lose? If you think Afghanistan was somehow exceptional and the US didn't fight for real but just wasted money on nation-building or something instead, a similar calculation holds for Vietnam where it's hard to find an argument that the US didn't throw everything that they could muster short of nukes at the North.
Coming from people who are ideologically committed to the token exchange system, the whole thing really winds up sounding like "the Albigensians stand no chance against our crusaders, since their Gross Devotional Prayer index as measured by our clerics has been way behind ours for decades", "Google stock is bound to prevail over Apple because their workforce is more diverse" or any other invocation of a metric that is about goodness as measured in terms of the speaker's value system, with the gap to the question at hand being implicitly bridged by the just world hypothesis (the arc of history must surely bend towards those with superior key market indicators/Christian devotion/wokeness).
The rape element is as shocking in a modern polite society context as the Satan element is in a Christian one.
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