Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
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User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
7d ago
I am not an expert on the US classification system, but I do know that producing an unclassified summary of classified information (including, for example, the classified information you worked on in the last week) is difficult work that only a few people in each department are qualified to do. The rule in corporate finance departments at banks (where almost all staff have access to market-moving non-public information such as upcoming mergers) and it is "Do not discuss live deals with anyone outside the department, even in general terms." For a corporate financier, sending a meaningful response to that e-mail would be a firing offence.
But this isn’t, like, a fact of the universe caused by the legitimate praxis of those jobs. Rather, this is itself administrative bloat designed to give bullshit jobs to the summarisers or inflate the self-importance of managers who want to pretend that their work is super serious. Everything you said constitutes organisational-calcification red tape that SHOULD be dismissively cut through, not “omg the freak-out-ers are right”.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
8d ago
Came here to post this. Rescinding PhD offers is throwing-toys-out-of-the-pram tier malicious compliance: and their decisions of who to cut will likely be based on which student they think can most convincingly cry in a CNN interview about how Trump crushed their family’s dreams of escaping poverty through studying hard.
It’ll damage the university in the long run and it would be much easier for them to cut administrators, but there’s a Principal-Agent-Problem here where the it’s the Admin department who decides what cuts to make and they’re sure as hell not going to be making them in the Admin department.
I feel like your model of the situation can’t explain why Daniel’s discord mods resigned en masse even after the truth came out (so there was no way they still did believe the allegations). What is your explanation for their behaviour, if you think the parties in this situation were choosing sides based on what they believed to be true (rather than what they believed to be expeditious)?
Obviously having to admit they were wrong and plugged the PayPal information of a known fraud is hugely embarrassing for them and so they wouldn't have done so if they didn't completely believe King's accounts.
I disagree. These people made the right move (to preserve their livelihoods as subculture-embedded personalities) even if they could see through Naomi’s crocodile tears as clearly as you could. As you noted, any hesitation in coming out totally on her side results in getting mobbed for ‘fencesitting’ and failing to ‘believe all women’. The attitude in play is “I’d rather be occasionally wrong than be a chud”. Any egg-on-face embarrassment they suffer will be massively outweighed by the advantage of having burnished their credentials as a reliable ally. That there are some bad actors in that alliance does not make the perception of unshaken loyalty to the ideology any less valuable.
The fact that all but one of Daniel’s mods quit despite being proven wrong is a succinct demonstration of this. The important thing is not to be right - the important thing is to be reliably on the side of the Believe All Women narrative. Indeed, doing so in defiance of all evidence gains you MORE subcultural cred, not less. That Daniel proved that his version of events was right doesn’t exonerate him - if anything, it condemns him more, as now he is an enemy of Believe All Women by showing it to be a falliable heuristic. His mods and associates corrrctly recognise that they must disassociate lest they be (accurately) accused of consorting with the enemy.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
There’s a big difference between dating a single mom who’s single because her husband died, and dating a single mom who’s single because she had a kid out of wedlock or went through a divorce.
Granted, but the number of dating age single mother widows is to within an epsilon of zero compared to the number of dating age single mother high-time-preference-poor-planning-out-of-wedlock-dumpster-fires.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
I don’t think this term will catch on because it’s too anti-white
I don’t think this term will catch on because it’s too pro-white, insofar as fifty years of argument-by-connotation has given us the meme of “Minorities good, majorities bad”, and therefore calling nonwhites the majority and whites the minority is not a linguistic change that the Cathedral is going to condone.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
My own personal preference is a complete meritocracy. If that results in a 55% Asian, 40% white, 5% other split, so be it. Nothing else seems fair to me.
How is it “fair” that 1950s Chinese communists who despised America, get to send their grandchildren to occupy (and profit from) the top 0.1% of prestige occupations in America, which is the patrimony of the very 1950s Americans they despised?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
Reminds me of the Bolsheviks being so scared of “Napoleonisation” (i.e. that a strong and charismatic party leader would upstage everyone else) that they hamstrung their most popular and effective guy, Trotsky, and were much the worse for it.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
My first advice to democrats is find a vision of a future you want to build that people would actually want to live in. And not only start talking about it, but start trying to actually build it.
Adam Curtis’ documentary Hypernormalisation is my recommendation to you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k?si=zvQm4rUCploqAEtw
TL;DR: no such positive vision can exist any more, because there is simply nothing aspirational left inside democratic Western political philosophy that hasn’t already been tried and failed.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
Russia is not winning the war because it is taking and may keep territory in the Donbas, it is losing the war because Russia itself framed the war not as a conflict between itself and Ukraine
Ok, question: did Shogunate Japan lose the First Imjin War? They occupied Korea, but by your logic they lost because Hideyoshi had once told his retainers that his ambition unironically included “world conquest”?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
The only reason 4B ‘works’ in Korea (or at least doesn’t instantly collapse as farcical) is precisely because Korean society is actually great for women. In Africa if you try to withhold sex from men in general, or especially your husband, you’ll just get raped, and everyone will call you an idiot because OBVIOUSLY that’s what would happen.
Say what you will about sexual violence’s moral deficiencies, but it does keep women in line, as the fertility rates in Africa demonstrate.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
Playing that anecdote as an Uno Reverse card won’t work, as a sufficiently motivated counterparty will just respond with “He wasn’t fired, he was still in the academy and drawing a salary, therefore he wasn’t suffering discrimination”.
As a practicing academic myself I wish I’d be able to spend more time on my research by getting banned from my teaching workload, teaching fucking sucks.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
It's not true, I'm South Asian. It's extremely common for South Asian women to begrudgingly marry a guy of the same ethnicity whilst being in a fairly serious relationship with a white guy.
Just because it’s extremely common for SEA doesn’t mean it’s not extremely extremely common for EA.
You and SerialState may both be right.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
Can you give three examples of their fresh bold takes on policies which Dems usually tiptoe around?
How are they on the JQ?
In addition to prognostications, I'd like to voice my disdain for these postmortems… Obviously not an ideal outcome, but far from cause to hit the panic button and start realigning your policies.
I think you’re correct, and the reason we get a flood of prognostications is that the prognosticators are not arguing in good faith. They’re arguing because they want jobs. In the same way that (I contend) lawyers and bureaucrats make law and bureaucracy unnecessarily complicated in order to invent jobs for themselves assisting normies trying to navigate their regulations, so too do policy analysts try to make every event constitute a “We need a serious policy reevaluation” moment. They hope the “…therefore, hire me” is inferred by think-tank funders.
It’s hustlers all the way down.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
If they manage to grapple the booster consistently, then we can talk about “inaugurating a new era of space”. But one lucky catch does not an industry renaissance create. And tbh I’m not even convinced that catching the booster is actually that reusable. Sure, it LOOKS more reusable than a smouldering crater on the landing pad or a rusting wreck on the seabed, but is it really? Given how anal the FAA is about testing each sprocket and screw a trillion times, I’m dubious as to whether the inevitable damage caused by just the Working As Designed rocketry stuff of having 15 tonnes of liquid methane lit on fire inside it will allow (physically or legally) a booster to consistently fly for a second time.
I really want my consumer moon vacations, but I’ve been burned so many times before by spess hype that I’m kind of a doomer at this point.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
Can you imagine Ben Franklin telling politicians they don't have to accept the result of a vote because the Pennsylvania Gazette wrote absurd lies about the candidates?
No, but I can imagine 2017 Democrats yelling “not my President” ad infinitum, and trying to impeach on tendentious grounds for an entire term.
Vance gave the right answer here. He should have refused to certify the election - not because he had just cause, but because he who does not fight fire with fire, specious lawfare with specious lawfare, is a sucker.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas. …However, these were not the actual arguments made by Trump and allies, nor were they the arguments voiced on January 6.
This seems like some sort of reverse-motte-and-Bailey on your part. Some crazies yell extreme theories, therefore the moderate theories are not worth considering?
At some point you're just too far away from the candidate himself or his campaign.
It also seems like an effort of sophistry to avoid the question of “how to get Republicans to accept the election results” by playing around with definitions until the people with legitimate reasons to distrust the election don’t count as Republicans any more, ergo dusts hands job done.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5mo ago
Israel is at war. Am I missing something or shouldn't this be hot-take level shocking?
Israel is winning a war (insofar as shooting fish in a barrel and tampering with Taiwanese pager shipments constitutes a war); what surprise is it that hot-blooded youngsters rejoice in seeing their enemies driven before them, and hearing the lamentations of their women?
I’m not saying that no parents are short-termist psychopaths, I’m saying that no childfree people aren’t short-termist psychopaths.
Outsourcing the necessary work of (both literal and figurative) species reproduction to god-knows-who (and in all likelihood it’s to 7-kids-per-woman educationless Third Worlders) is a rather spectacular indicator that you Just Don’t Give A Shit, no matter what prosocial rhetoric might come out of your mouth.
And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
I reject your hypothesis. Many human beings are net negatives to society regardless of how much compelled labour you can get out of them for the rest of their lives. You think that sentencing this guy to hard labour would be more efficient - I highly doubt it. The infrastructure (both physical, in terms of jails, and human, in terms of chain-gang guards salaries) required to confine such a person to hard labour is going to be more costly than the value of hard labour they produce.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Whatever you think of the Katyn Massacre: frogmarching people into the woods, having them dig their own graves, and then one-taping them in the back of the head - you cannot complain that it wasn’t a CHEAP way of dealing with undesirables.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5mo ago
By not inviting the channels’ major shareholders to the cool cocktail parties if they took a heterodox editorial position.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5mo ago
Just as “watermelon” has come to refer to politics which wears a green skin to smuggle in red outcomes, I want a word for politics which wears a nonpartisan skin to smuggle in Dem hackery. What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside? Something something haemocyanin.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
6mo ago
A country notorious for faking its math test scores, macroeconomic indicators, astroturfed ‘5c army’ political engagement, and COVID case numbers, is having unexpectedly great entertainment metrics?
I don’t think we need to do any sort of self-reflective cultural soul-searching here. The reflexive 4chan screech of “BOTS” is both sufficient and necessary in this case.
Can you elaborate? Because I think it unironically would be perfectly fine.
Better that everyone know USG’s secrets than I have to pay taxes to keep them under wraps.
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