Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
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 not use 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo 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.
They actually aren’t, though.
For one, there’s the halo effect: i.e. it’s natural for humans of both genders to assume that a person successful in one field is also successful in another. So ‘success as a leader of men’ will prejudice women positively towards such a man on other axes, and ‘success as a c(h)ad’ will prejudice men positively towards such a man on other axes, symmetrically. I’ve been reading a history of Italy lately, and this is pretty much Berlusconi’s entire (winning) strategy both in politics and in Bunga Bunga.
But we don’t even require such a Fully General Argument as the halo effect to demonstrate the thesis - assessing it in detail also makes it seem like there’ll be general “popularity” skills rather than gender-audience specific ones. Being a good conversationalist, being extroverted, openness to new experiences, gregariousness - all traits which will improve one’s success both as a leader and as a lover.
I don’t dispute that some traits like “Autistic knowledge of Gundam anime” is male leadership material in specific (one might say contrived) situations, like choosing a team captain when entering a Gundam trivia quiz, but in the vast majority of cases, Chad gets both the girl and the crown because both genders want the same thing.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
I suppose what you meant to say was that no group of men accepts an incel as their leader?
If a man is sufficiently attractive / outgoing / interesting / popular enough to be a leader of men, he is also sufficiently attractive / outgoing / interesting / popular enough to be a fucker of women.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
Good analysis.
The ultimate irony is that if the Bonglander government was REALLY interested in bringing the hammer down on misogynists, it would be siding with Britain’s recent “””far-right””” anti-immigration rioters rather than against them. A Rwandan migrant knife-attacks a girl’s dance school and the party line is that people subsequently protesting against immigrants and mosques hate women? Clownworld.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
at that time UK was not bombing Russia
I don’t really see how assassinating Palestinians overseas becomes more palatable if you’re also gunning them down by the thousands with ground infantry.
Or is this a “One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic” thing?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
Out of curiosity, do you have any examples of a country where a leader rapidly and publicly executed tens of thousands of elites and things went well afterwards (e.g. the country did not descend into civil war and standard of living did not decline substantially)?
Most mainland European countries in 1946.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
Foolishly I got my news on the opening ceremony from the BBC, who make no mention of any problems or embarrassments at all, and just breathlessly report it as the greatest show on earth.
I would have expected the Anglos at least to be Francophobic enough to tell the truth, but apparently globohomo must not be embarrassed. The Party is always right!
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
I agree with you, but by corollary it’s hard to claim that an unsuccessful assassination attempt is a somethingburger.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
Since the debate he's spokento the press - and to his congressional and governor dem allies - surprisingly little.
After he’s just demonstrated an inability to speak coherently, why is it surprising that he won’t speak to the press?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
They all fit the same criteria: well connected, wealthy families, people who often knew lots of doctors personally and had the resources and support to try multiple
I think you’re trying to legislate based on edge cases here. Even if we accept the hypothetical that “I know better than Kid X’s parent, how Kid X should be raised/medicated” AND “The optimum number of trans people is zero”, then refusing to accept a policy until such time as you achieve zero is making the perfect the enemy of the good. Restricting trans surgeries to the well-connected and wealthy people who have lots of doctors in their country club is very restrictive; that it probably won’t stop LITERALLY EVERY trans surgery is not policy disqualifying.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
You have been misinformed. The movie's climax sees the one juror insistent on a guilty verdict 'proven' wrong by... all the other jurors ostracizing and refusing to talk to him?
Tell me your movie was written by women without telling me it was written by women.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
What does the word "leader" mean? He leads, they follow.
because if e.g. people living below the poverty line all suddenly stopped having kids child poverty would hit 0% very quickly.
I think your overall thesis is wrong because I don't think that preventing the lower strata from reproducing will actually improve the wellbeing of the next generation.
There has been much talk of "elite overproduction" previously: the proposition that much of the political malaise of the West lately (and, indeed, Ancient China before any of its periodic civil wars) comes from an oversupply of big-brain literati and an undersupply of prestige jobs to keep them from formenting revolution. Put another way: the economy needs Dalits; there must always be sewage janitors working on minimum wage. If the economy doesn't get it's Dalits through Dalit reproduction, it'll get 'em through cramming Brahmins into jobs that they feel are beneath them, which is WORSE for stability and prosperity than just letting the Dalits keep reproducing more Dalits.
We live in Omelas already. We need those miserable children. They cannot be excised from the makeup of society. Improving the objective quality of the lower strata will do nothing to improve their actual life-satisfaction and may even be counterproductive, because it'll not improve their relative economic condition but it WILL make them more resentful about it, and better at throwing pipe bombs at the higher strata.
If anything our best course of action is to Brave New World epsilon semi-moron them to be WORSE.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5mo ago
If we can not train an LLM to reliably avoid saying bad words, how can we expect it to reliably not vote for bad laws?
Adhering to anti-racist parlance is harder than making good law, because anti-racist parlance is a logically incoherent moving target of whatever Current Thing the progressive stack is mad about today, whereas "Thou Shalt Not Murder" is pretty consistent.
Seems strange to me that labeling foreign funding for NGOs would be controversial and bad.
It's likely a "Who? Whom?" thing. If you're a Slovakian leftist and you notice that all the orgs you like and non of the orgs you hate are being shut down under this law, you may (reasonably?) conclude that the law was generated through 'Schelling gerrymandering': motivated rightists first finding a distinction between their orgs and yours, then claiming that it's a material difference when it actually isn't, in order to hurt leftists with plausible deniability.
Can you give three examples of their fresh bold takes on policies which Dems usually tiptoe around?
How are they on the JQ?
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