Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
In the meantime may I ask your favour that, if you manage to connect some dots about me, you confine your guesses to DM?
I'm not going to guess; in your field I've probably only heard of the Siberian silver fox experiment, the NIMH rat utopia experiments, and...Jane Goodall?
The general problem with mutation load in small populations is very well and very widely understood, such that I'll be a bit surprised (but happy to help) if you'd just like to know more about it. But that's not the impression I'm getting. What would you like from me, specifically?
I'd rather just hear what you know, but fine. You're pushing a model whereby:
- Bad times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, etc. Isn't this your overarching thesis? You have a large number of relatively common variants in your population floating around, and as soon as you relax purifying selection on the weak alleles, your model organism/people are suddenly 50-65% less 'whatever' even in the F1 generation. I'm not a population geneticist, but I don't see how that can be possible? You're telling me that if you relax all selection and let everyone breed (and you're also telling me that all your captured animals have this trait!) a single generation is enough to wreck what you're looking at?
This is like saying you can take a population of people in the 90th percentile for height, remove any kind of selection such that they all breed, and your F1 generation averages the 60th percentile. Regression to the mean is a thing, but I don't believe it can happen that quickly.
Calhoun's mouse utopia bred like gangbusters from 8 mice to 2200 without any kind of purifying selection. Shouldn't they have crashed in a generation or two?
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Whatever behavior you're looking at (you're an animal psychologist, right?) has a significant environmental component, and living in captivity is deleterious. Plenty of animals fail to breed or exhibit other behaviors in captivity and this has nothing to do with 'catastrophic mutational load.'
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Consanguinity/founder effects - I assume you're trapping these in a smallish area, and your starting population might be significantly related? It seems unlikely to be able to account for the early effects, maybe some of the future generations.
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'Catastrophic mutational load.' The generational mutation rate is the same whether they're breeding in captivity or in the wild. In this context, you're almost certainly speaking about genetic variants rather than mutations which (at least in human genetics) have a stricter definition. It doesn't make much sense to say they have a 'catastrophic mutational load.' How do you define a wild type and a mutant when an allele is 70:30 in one area of the world, 30:70 in another, and there's no clear indication that it even has any kind of functional effect?
How do you think it works, genetically speaking? Concisely.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
It's actually pretty difficult to keep a captive population from sliding into catastrophic mutation load.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by 'sliding into catastrophic mutation load?' What, specifically, do you think is going on (genetically speaking) when you run this experiment?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
I read 99.5% of the comments that get posted to the motte using the firehose view,
Wild. I never imagined anyone would use that feature to read 2,000 comments a week.
I get the feeling you enjoy our exchanges less than I do
You're a good guy. So is Whiningcoil; I imagine we could easily meet at a party and have a few drinks without incident. But two things drive me crazy, insofar as I let anything on the internet drive me crazy: blackpills and political violence.
Even setting that aside, you're like the friend who's a huge sports fan and is either constantly bitching when his team is in the dumpster or gloating and rubbing it in your face when he's winning the division title. Your specific ideology (and I don't mean Red Tribe ideology here) means that you're either constantly winning or losing an existential struggle, with all the attendant emotions.
Life's a lot easier when you can just kick back and watch the game with a few beers.
Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing
I've already expressed my skepticism on this point.
we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.
On the contrary, your lack of a progress narrative makes your message ultimately soulless. People don't want to believe that it's iphones and laissez-faire capitalism and poverty until the heat death of the universe. And they certainly don't want a retvrn to housewives and the cultural norms of the early 20th century let alone whatever era twitter has decided is best this week. If anything, malaise is from a lack of progress relative to the norms of the last century, and it's clear your movement doesn't have a widely palatable solution to that problem beyond grievance politics.
Guns, taxes and global weather patterns don't hinge on peoples' mentality, and so are less amenable to the core Social Justice strategies. Even trans impinges far more on the physical world, and it is these impingements that have resulted in resistance and, seemingly, downfall.
What? The bad guys, narratively speaking, are white nationalists/white suburban teen boy school shooters, and wealthy old white men oppressing the lower classes for the latter two. The Social Justice narratives write themselves.
I question whether you won hearts and minds, or generated a preference cascade through a massive social pressure campaign backed by threat of legal force.
Did abolition occur through social pressure campaigns, legal and actual military force? Desegregation? Pick any social change in history - the rise of Christianity, American independence, whatever you like - which of these were legitimate? And what criteria did you use to decide?
But the people who such a campaign can't flip don't cease to exist, and their arguments were never defeated, only suppressed. Lincoln had it that you destroy your enemy when you make him into your friend, and that's not a victory the LGBT movement ever achieved.
It seems ironic that you would accuse the gays of strongarming you into accepting their movement, then quote someone who literally waged a war to force acceptance of his.
Regardless, large numbers of people opposed to the gays were converted. There are plenty of gay conservatives, and they don't seem to suffer any major consequences for it. After abolition, slaveowners didn't disappear, and yet we've still arrived at a future where genuine supporters of slavery are vanishingly rare. Give it a couple generations.
My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history
They are fortunate, indeed, to learn Actual History.
I think shoving Christianity into the closet was bad for society in strictly material terms, because it unleashed much harm that Christianity might have helped to mitigate or restrain.
It's funny that you should frame it that way, when I raised in a much more secular area and the stereotype is that Americans are obnoxiously in-your-face Guns & God religious. And there is some of that, to a degree you likely don't notice and can't comprehend because you've been swimming in these waters from birth.
I note that many people on all sides express considerable nostalgia for the 90s, and even the 2000s; the point where we lost and were cast out is also pretty close to the point where things started taking a very serious turn for the bad, and not by my assessment alone.
They're also the years where we had just won the cold war, were the sole hyperpower in the world, ran a budget surplus with bonkers economic/technological growth and it also just happens to be the time of our childhood/adolescence. It's bread and circuses with a side of martial victory, not normies longing to spend two hours of their Sunday doing bible study.
This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down?
Yes, and no. I agreed with whichever post you wrote in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting that this event certainly moves us towards the brink and I denounce it. But no, I do not think we are close in any meaningful way.
The culture war, defined as people self-assorting into tribal groups and flinging shit (verbal and otherwise) at each other is eternal. To dream otherwise is to dream of Progress and Trying Something Different, but I'm not holding my breath. I do think the temperature is lower than the early 2020s when I would literally routinely watch proud boys and antifa beat each other with sticks in the streets. Do you genuinely think that tensions today are as high as they were in 2020 and 2021? Or 2016? Or what I imagine the 70s were like?
Whether we're in a trough, a peak or just about to keep chugging along for a while - I don't know.
If we can restore something like accountability to power, and if we can generate common knowledge of where we are and how we got here, it seems to me that many of our problems are solvable.
I wish you luck. But I'm pretty sure 'restore accountability to power' means 'my political opponents don't have power anymore' and 'generate common knowledge' means 'teach Actual History to other people's kids.' Not to mention people have been mouthing 'restore accountability to power' since at least the 2000s on reddit, if not the ancient Greeks.
Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition.
It might amuse you to hear that I've considered going to church recently, largely to try and surround my family with a functional social circle. It's a tough trade-off when I have such limited time to teach my children already.
That said, you're living in a bubble, my man. But then again, I suppose I am too.
A wager then - weekly church attendance isn't going to significantly increase in the next couple years (say, an increase of 20% or more - so if 30% of Americans attend church weekly, a boost of 6%). Me, living in a large blue city, will be 100% unaffected by political violence in the next year. By this, I mean I will not witness any shootings/melee/violence between two large gangs of Red/Blue tribers/insert your definition here, nor will anyone I know. There will be some nonzero number of school shootings/political assassinations/assaults on ICE at maybe a rate of 1 every 1-3 months? Were real money on the line, I'd dig up the actual numbers to get a background level over the last decade but I can't imagine it's much more frequent than that.
Feel free to make your own wagers.
When truth is truly on your side, no political hardball is necessary, only contrasting outcomes and the ability for people to choose freely.
lol. This is funny on so many levels, but maybe in the interests of brevity: we'll see whether people freely choose conservativism and Christianity and the Hallmark channel or whether they want to smoke weed, watch netflix and have premarital sex. And I say that while holding a dim view of at least smoking weed and watching television! Your idea of freely choosing is fiercely teaching your children 'Actual History' because you're terrified they'll internalize values and ideology from mainstream culture instead.
I'm not even making a value judgment one way or the other, but to say that the people will freely choose your way is both breathtakingly hubristic and seemingly ignorant of the last century of history.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
I'm confused by the timing. 2015-2020 saw the Pittsburgh synagogue, Charleston church and El Paso walmart shootings despite conservatives being in power and the anti-Trump/nazi rhetoric being significantly more unhinged than it is today. 2020-2024, all I remember is the Tennessee trans school shooter despite the rhetoric against Fauci and plenty of other government officials being absolutely bonkers in right wing spaces (traitors, nooses, trials, you know the drill). 2025 has seen what, a half-dozen left wing events all at once? It doesn't seem to track with who's in power or how violent the rhetoric is.
I'd guess that during Trump I radicals of both stripes thought the majority of the country was on their side, whereas this time around, it certainly feels like the left is losing the normies. Shooting Kirk or ICE agents is retarded on both fronts, you're going to further alienate the normies and obviously not going to stop deportations.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5d ago
Are you beetlejuice? Or do you, gattsuru and germ have some kind of discord group? I don't see how else you could find a 6 day old comment in a two week old thread, short of trolling my comment history or someone else doing so and reporting everything I write.
And as @gattsuru often notes, it worked. You won. Those you did not persuade, you shamed and abused and harassed into silence. "Protected Class" law formalized this for employment, the media and the Academy handled it everywhere else. As several Blue Commenters have straightforwardly stated it over the years, we lost, so it's our turn in the closet for a couple decades.
It's foolish to ignore the actual issue being discussed and chalk it all up to what you view as a propaganda apparatus, both because you're ignoring a half dozen other issues (gun control? trans people? climate change? Taxation and social welfare?) that failed to achieve anywhere near the same level of unity and because you're going to fail when you try to spin up your own propaganda apparatus.
How fortunate that this sort of political hardball had zero negative consequences of any kind.
...political hardball? Winning the hearts and minds of a significant majority of the population is not political hardball. You're so blinded by your obsession with realpolitik, so deeply steeped in the culture war and obsessed with small-minded zero sum games that you can't see anything beyond conflict and winning or losing. You can't even reflect on whether the change was a net benefit to the country, you're just bitter that 'your side lost.'
Is a more perfect union simply one where your side wins, and blue tribe is eradicated? And what comes after that? You'd just fracture into normiecons and groypers, neolibs and church fundamentalists and repeat the cycle. Your path is just one of endless conflict.
Tell me, then, your model of ethically influencing the electorate without playing 'political hardball.' Or are you so far gone as to think it's impossible?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7d ago
Sure.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
12d ago
If this is how culture war is defined, it's too broad to be a useful phrase. By this standard how would you have separated civil rights from culture war? Or would you consider them together?
Probably parts of it were, given that it happened many years before I was alive and history is not my forte. Undoubtedly FC could give you a detailed list of anti-segregationist terrorists who went on to have illustrious careers at Harvard.
Gay marriage may be a better example. Writ large, I'd consider that an example of Mostly Peaceful and Well Intentioned propaganda and PR campaigns which successfully won supermajority support among the American people. And even among those who don't support gay marriage, probably a significant portion have no problem with gay people and just hold some views about the church and sanctity of marriage and whatnot.
But it was largely a campaign won by sympathetic figures you knew in your community, not shitposting on twitter about the hordes of illegal immigrants coming to take your jobs and rape your families. It wasn't won by darkly hinting about how many guns you have, or congressional shenanigans or gerrymandering.
Undoubtedly there are those who'd claim that the left's takeover of Hollywood, the media and institutions etc. are just culture war by a different name. Realpolitik applied to culture war. But realpolitik invariably seems to be an excuse for defection.
He was self-consciously a DEI pick because Harris or somebody advising her apparently thought she needed another generic old white guy for racist reasons, and they played it up too much.
Were those racist reasons them thinking that rustbelt/Pennsylvania/Georgian white working class Americans (aka where the election was won) were less likely to vote for a black/black or woman/woman ticket than woman/white man ticket? Because...yeah? Probably true? I'm sure they're not opposed to voting for either black or female candidates (Obama clearly won handily), but on the margin, I would 100% go with Walz or Shapiro or Newsom over Stacey Adams. Are you arguing that there were better-qualified non-white/non-cishet-male candidates that were passed over because Walz is white?
Either experts have consequences when they're wrong, or you're asking that the lowly public trust them, forever, no matter what, that trust can never be harmed by failures. That is not a reasonable request.
I can guarantee you that physicians in the 50s and 60s (your golden age!) believed much dumber things than they do now, and they nevertheless enjoyed much higher levels of trust. Thalidomide? Doctors selling out for smoking companies? Tuskegee syphilis experiments? Refrigerator mothers and autism, electroshock therapy, lobotomies? What, exactly, were the consequences for the profession for all that shit, and why was the public too stupid to know better? And I can guarantee you that whatever era of history people want to RETVRN to, the 'experts' believed even dumber shit than they do now.
Your argument should be that nobody ever should have trusted experts.
All our conversations and you think I'm on the EA side? It has been too long since we've chatted, hoss.
Don't overindex on the beliefs of the candidate, the point is that you're weird relative to the population norm. If you genuinely liked a politician that much, they're almost certainly unpalatable to the general population. I can't imagine you hold the combination of positions most electable in any given campaign year.
I remember once upon a time we had happier conversations. Can we get back to those? If you've got the time and interest, I've got two questions I've wondered your input on.
I've been here for 7 years, give or take. I'd estimate I've read >95% of the top-level posts in that time, although I rarely participate. Somewhere along the line I lost interest in people bashing Fauci and other causes I care about while nodding sympathetically, patting them on the back and censoring myself.
One, how can scientific institutions regain the public trust? Do you think there's anything they could do to meaningfully communicate some degree of awareness?
With the caveat as always that I don't really know what I'm talking about; they can't. They haven't lost the public trust, they've lost the trust of Republicans. Pandering to one would piss off the other. Probably best case scenario is that they fade into the background over the next 5-10 years and win bipartisan support in the senate (which is still holding, by the way).
In the meantime, people can stop vaccinating their kids and take supplements instead of chemo I guess. They're free to make their own choices.
Do you think the left (defined very loosely to include even sane liberals; the phrase used as a matter of convenience rather than strict party lines) will ever change regarding their at-best indifference and sometimes encouragement of anti-white racism, or is that just permanently baked in and people are supposed to take it on the chin?
I'm pretty far removed from anyone deep down those rabbit holes, but the chasm between the way you see things and the way they do is...significant.
I'm far from the first person to say this, but the left and, to a large extent, normies, support the underdog. So long as blacks and other minorities are the underdogs, there's going to be an urge to perpetrate what you call anti-white racism. I feel like this has been shifting for men vs. women given the way women outperform men in school and outnumber them in university. I wonder if the dam would have broken already were it not that 1) women still make less than men on average (debate the data/methodology of that all you will, it's a nice figure to quote to normies) and 2) women are much better organized and understand the game significantly better than most men.
I also think it's why I believe 2015-2020 were so damaging to the right (all the shootings and gun rhetoric and threats) and why the last few months have been so damaging to the left. If the right can position themselves as victims of leftist violence rather than threatening paramilitary men with all the guns, the mainstream will bail on the left pretty quickly. People don't like assassinations and domestic terrorism.
But what do I know, I've been largely wrong about every prediction I've made in my tenure here.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
13d ago
How did you manage to exclude the pittsburgh synagogue shooter, the el paso walmart shooter, and the Charleston church shooting?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
15d ago
Why not just let them come back? There's another person active in the thread today who's so blatantly a banned user that I'm shocked nobody else has said anything, but they haven't been banned yet. I remember an unofficial policy that if someone came back under a new pseudonym and changed their behavior sufficiently to plausibly avoid detection, that was a win too?
Not to mention if most people don't realize it's hlynka he can shed all the baggage of people who hated him for his mod decisions.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
15d ago
Possibly. I had thought there was more space between Floyd and the 2020 election.
I'm not expecting people to be specifically fired up about Charlie Kirk in 2026, but by the same token, 2026 is not shaping up to be 2018. From 2016-2018 we had massive protests and anger. From inauguration 'til now, it's been one thing after another taking the wind out of Dems sails and motivating voters on the right. Gun control, trans rights, racial equity are all 100% out the window until at least 2028 and even then I doubt the public will have much appetite for any of those issues, no? Isn't that forcing them to moderate and move away from the left?
But who knows, you're right that a couple years is a long time and I sure as hell wouldn't have had a good prediction record if you asked me in the fall of 2021/2017 what would happen that election cycle.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
16d ago
As always, disgusting. As always, it's going to backfire on whatever political positions the perpetrator holds. Dems are either going to have to moderate and cut off crazy fringe to avoid alienating the majority, or they'll just lose. Either way, whatever causes the shooter believed in are worse off for it. Abject stupidity and waste of life.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
Yes, the several million illegal immigrants was the original defection, and sending a couple dozen to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities that immediately shipped them back was the tiniest possible tat in reply.
The funniest thing is that most of the increase in the illegal population occurred during our mutually agreed upon golden age, and evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Although, I often forget that MAGA has retroactively decreed Bush to be a democrat, the same way that every politician elected between prior to 2016 (maybe with some exceptions carved out for Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jackson and Washington) was a democrat.
Even if you argue that there were an extra several million that came during Biden's presidency, this is more a return to a historical trend than 'an invading rapist horde' to paraphrase someone here.
Numbers of illegal immigrants almost seems to correlate with the relative prosperity of the USA to South American countries rather than ICE enforcement, which I'm told was a bipartisan issue in the 90s and early 2000s...
Well, absolutely! I'd give my left nut to crank the clock back to late 90s cultural détente, colorblindness, warts and all. Hell, I'd be tempted just for Utopian Scholastic and Frutiger Aero to make a comeback.
Have you considered that your main complaint with the contemporary US seems to be the culture war, yet your vitriolic hate for Fauci (and apparently Tim Walz?) is itself, culture warring? Even as you decry a lack of national unity, you're just as angry as everyone else.
As much as I found Tim Walz to be an odious little troll performing a racist minstrel act
...why?
Down ticket- well, did you catch the wackadoo that ran for governor where I am? I didn't vote a straight Dem ticket but it was closer than I would've predicted a few years ago.
No, I missed it. That's...an interesting choice.
I am angrier, because I have a kid and I want my kid to grow up in a better world, and neither of these idiot parties are going to deliver that.
I have two, and I'm confident they are growing up in a better world. They'll have significantly more opportunity than I ever had should they choose to pursue it.
I am angrier because I watched scientists and public health experts and journalists shit all over the reputation of everything, and for what? They ruined and debased themselves for nothing, but the public pays the price! Fauci got his pardon and nobody that signed that braindead open letter got stripped of credentials, and here we are with Trump, RFK, Florida cutting vaccine mandates.
You act like the people have no agency or responsibility for themselves. Fauci is still trusted by close to a majority of Americans; there's every possibility that regardless of what Fauci did, half the country would hate him. I worked at the same institute as Fauci and met him in passing, and I'm sure you've read enough of my writing in the past to know I think that the right's fixation on Fauci as a figurehead betrays a near-complete lack of understanding of his actual role/function and is largely a character assassination downstream of resentment about lockdowns.
Someday I hope to vote for a politician I actually like, that isn't a collection of horrible tradeoffs or ends up doing things that disgust me.
If you do, it will look like this. The politicians you would like are not the politicians that would win elections.
I'll admit, I kinda like the Harvard stuff. Resentment isn't the healthiest motivator but I have so much of it. Perhaps that's my most socialist trait. Ha!
Can you imagine the CCP cutting funding from Tsinghua or Peking university? The center of gravity around biotech and STEM are shifting towards China, and the only question (in biotech at least) is whether the equilibrium will be that of peers or whether we go the route of low/mid-value manufacturing, aka extinction. NIH is probably getting budget cuts next year too. Ten years from now neo-MAGA will be bitching about how they have to buy their new drugs from China because their elites sold them out, without realizing it was their own retarded policies that got them there.
You want justice? Justice would be the next democratic president coming in and cutting subsidies to farmers, trade schools and other red-coded industries who are trying to fuck over mine. Thankfully, I doubt that would ever happen contrary to what you and Iconochasm think about retaliation from the left.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
No, I think the only way to get close to parity given the biological realities is just allowing men the option to opt out of the legal responsibilities.
I'm fine with that in the abstract, although in terms of concrete details it seems like a system open to abuse. But I'm sorry you're in that situation, and I imagine you don't want to debate something so personal.
From the conservative perspective, that's basically what John McCain and Mitt Romney actually did, and that's why so many people picked Trump - because for all his flaws he's a fighter.
The bad thing about McCain and Romney is that they lost, and the good thing about Trump is that he won.
Not to mention it's easy to lionize men who never won the presidency and had to actually get their hands dirty.
OTOH, Mangione (who I think is an actual drug-addled nutjob, rather than any kind of ideologue) is openly lionized on the left.
You think Mangione doesn't have fans on the right? Are you telling me MAGA is a populist movement that loves CEOs of health insurance companies?
If a future Democrat administration invites in a hundred million foreigners on welfare, and all but openly tolerates them raping my children while viciously repressing the native population, then yeah.
For all the conservative memes mocking childless liberal women for their breathless, supposed erotic fixation on the Handmaid's Tale you have a shocking lack of awareness for similar fantasies on the right. There's this odd fetishism with home invaders and having to defend your family from the rapist hordes at the gates.
just keyboard rage until exhaustion
Isn't that the point of this place?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
Interesting question of where to set the clock and what counts as grace, given how atrocious the original decision was.
We should probably rewind to prehistory, when women risked infection to get back alley abortions with filthy stone age awls. we ought to retvrn to the old ways, where women would give birth and then drop the baby in the ocean or jungle.
where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds?
LOL. Moving on-
Is the joke that the 10 million refugees is the defection, or the angry letters in the newspaper and on tumblr?
70 years ago, yes: post-war optimism, being the main country that mattered and wasn't wrecked, fairly strong sense of national unity. 50 years ago it was already declining.
Just curious, what are you basing this on? Because I bet if I dug into the history books it wasn't as wonderful as you might imagine. The McCarthy trials and Korean war can't have been universally popular, the scars of Japanese internment, continuing racial segregation, miscegenation laws...even then, setting your norm as the high-water mark the decade after winning a world war and emerging as one of two superpowers does not seem like a solid foundation for a nation.
Besides, we won another global conflict within our lifetimes! The Berlin wall fell, the USSR dissolved and for my childhood the USA was the sole superpower. The budget was balanced and our biggest problem was that the president was getting BJs in the oval office. You really don't think the 90s were another high-water mark?
Had I the time, my thesis would be that the institutions of the 20th century were just as shitty as today. As you say, information control is simply much harder now.
Define "flawed." All models are imperfect; some are useful.
Uniting behind a flawed leader is usually better than no leader at all. Or at least that's what I tell my employees.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
You seem to be joking here but have you already forgotten those psychotic blanket pardons?
Referenced later on in the same post:
Hell, Biden did too in the heady last month of his presidency when the pardon printer went brrrrr and the ERA suddenly passed. If Democrats elected left-wing Trump, I guarantee that you would absolutely lose your shit.
The point stands. Even now, the typical angle of attack is 'senile admin run by the deep state' because that lands a lot closer to the mark for normies than radical leftist firebrand.
"It's difficult to predict when the Riot Party will riot" might not be as much of an update as you're looking for.
At a certain point, this level of cynicism and bitterness starts reflecting more on you than the people you hate. You, too, seem to be even angrier now that your star is ascendant.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
And a bit different: Down in the river to pray - Colorado All State Treble Choir (this goes semi-viral every few years since 2019 I think)
Love it! Thanks so much. My family has never been religious, but I've always been sucker for a good choir.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
20d ago
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
20d ago
What are your favorite versions of classic songs/folk tunes/jingoistic drivel/any song or piece that's been covered many times over the years? I find some versions of these songs nigh unlistenable, but one inevitably ends up being 'the' authoritative version. In particular, prompted by the fact that I hate the Sinatra version of Moon River, but I've been subjecting my family to the Melody Gadot version for weeks now.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic (although the version by Jon Batiste is also interesting).
Will the circle be unbroken (shoutout to the Bioshock version).
This version of La Marseillaise.
Hit me with anything you got that's even broadly related, I'm curious what I've been missing.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
26d ago
Hi, Chris! I hope life is going well for you.
It'd be better if Trump and China weren't busy spitroasting the biotech industry, but the home life makes up for it.
In fairness, a higher expectation for riots doesn't seem like an unreasonable prior just two years after the Summer of Love, even if it ended up being a false prediction.
And now you've updated your priors in the opposite direction, right? And false prediction is a fun euphemism for being wrong :)
Still, I don't think that's really a counter-example. The general response was still apoplectic rage, even if it didn't spill over into real violence, and kept itself to rhetoric and hostile personal encounters. My own mother blew up at me over it, even though she knows I'm personally pro-choice. Though that did give me an opportunity to gently explain that the reason she is a grandmother is because, as a man, I have literally no reproductive rights at all.
Somehow I doubted that you would. But you asked for instances where your tribe won without a corresponding escalation, or 'cheating' such that your side couldn't win. Your personal life notwithstanding, there was no supreme court stacking, there's been no widespread riots or criminal activity (Amusingly, there are more recorded instances of vandalism/violence against abortion clinics in the same timeframe than what you call low-grade domestic terrorism), conservatives took the W and moved on. In your words, 'it's been a fun year.' And yet, and yet, you still aren't happy.
As for your lack of reproductive rights, say you had those rights. Without knowing the specifics of your life, would you have grabbed your ex by the wrist and physically dragged her to the abortion clinic? Would you have held her down to dose her with abortifacients or undergo a surgical abortion? Or I guess just not have to pay child support? What does this world look like, where you have reproductive rights?
But in terms of the grace vs revenge scale, I don't think I've seen a single leftwinger say anything like "Look, the SC made their ruling and we have to accept that. Even Ruth said that Roe was on shaky legal ground. We should have expected this would happen, and better prepared for it. The issue has been sent back to the states, so let's focus on the state level and win as much as we can."
Coming back to your dichotomy of 'grace and forgiveness' versus 'punching back twice as hard,' I knew as soon gave any concrete example the goalposts would move from the latter to the former. If your expectation is 'my side wins and nobody on the other side says mean things' then you both have a long, unhappy life ahead of you and moreover, come nowhere close to living up to your own standard.
I think it's a bit early to call on most of this. But I don't see any tacit acceptance, or anyone saying "fair enough, we did try to bankrupt, jail and kill you, let's call it even". Instead most of the Democrats seem to be talking about how they've been playing nice up until now, and calling for the gloves to come off in a scorched earth war to the knife.
There has been tacit acceptance. Trump issued reams of EOs, gutted agencies, tariffs, pretty much whatever he wanted. There's no widespread unrest, no major congressional resistance (remember Schumer giving in on the budget because the alternative was worse?), no 'deep state' blocking his will.
And 'we' tried to kill Trump? Did 'you' shoot up that synagogue, or that church, or the wal-mart? Don't give me that nonsense. If you want to play that game, take responsibility for your own nutjobs first.
To be clear, I'm not saying the Republicans look particularly good under this light. A huge part of Trump's appeal is specifically that he's a Molotov cocktail thrown at norms and conventions that his supporters see as having been weaponized. He is the Devil turning round on you.
And democrats escalated, responding with their own molotov cocktail against norms and conventions, Joe Biden.
I sincerely don't think he was asking for what you think he was asking for. That line came at something like the 53rd minute of a conversation, and the whole prior discussion was Trump confidently insisting that an investigation would uncover large numbers of fraudulent votes. I don't think Trump is as dumb and blunt as many, but I do think it's more likely he was referring to that, as opposed to pivoting abruptly to overt requests for obvious crimes on a recorded line in front of multiple other people. If nothing else, that theory presumes that Trump believed that he truly lost Georgia and I don't think his ego would allow that.
I used to work for a guy who reminded me of Trump in some ways (insofar as I can know Trump from watching him on the television). He'd commit borderline research fraud, but do it in such a way that he kept his hands clean. Hey, I've got this great research idea! Go find the evidence for it. Oh, you've got 3 months worth of negative data? You must have fucked up the experiments! Go do them again and stop being so incompetent, I'm going to take you off the project and give it to a real scientist, etc etc etc. I know a lot of his old research is fraudulent, but when the chickens came home to roost he just said his postdoc fabricated the data.
If nothing else, Trump showed that the only check on a president's behavior is impeachment, and so long as the president is popular enough with their base, he can go shoot someone on fifth avenue and Republicans would say that guy had it coming and vote against it. Hell, Biden did too in the heady last month of his presidency when the pardon printer went brrrrr and the ERA suddenly passed. If Democrats elected left-wing Trump, I guarantee that you would absolutely lose your shit.
And really, it was for leaking classified documents, i.e. the exact same thing Trump had the DoJ kick down his door and riffle through his wife's underwear. Did that make you worry about the weaponization of the DoJ?
Frankly, and I'm surprised I've never seen this theory floated, I thought Trump intentionally broke a relatively benign rule that he knew would have to provoke a serious response from the feds. He'd keep himself in the news, get to complain about witch hunts for the next couple years and make it look like the feds were picking on him. It's probably what I would do were I playing the game.
Do you have any specific reason to think Bolton is being held to an unusual standard? My memory goes fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure a few generals or other high level political types have gone down for very similar behavior to what Bolton is alleged to have done over the last few administrations.
I don't, other than that it's suspicious when a government's legal system starts going after people the president is personally pissed off at. I'd give it a low probability of progressing, but it's not a great sign.
Let me take a step back for a moment, and share a bit about where I'm coming from. Iirc, you and I are around the same age. I graduated high school just in time for Iraq, and that colored the hell out of my view of politics. I cut my teeth writing heated diatribes about Christian fundamentalists and neocon warmongers. My tepid willingness to consider myself a Republican these days is mostly dependent on the fact that those factions lost, and the party was forcibly remade in a different image.
And we just had a long discussion about overturning Roe, the keystone project of Christian fundamentalists, that your party executed a plan over a decade or more. Tell me again how those factions have lost and millennial atheists are in the driver's seat? What fraction of voters in the Republican party today voted for Bush in 2000 and/or 2004?
The Democrats now find themselves at an even starker crossroads. Their approval ratings are at historic lows and they are hemorrhaging voters. It's time for reevaluation and repositioning. For moderation. There have been a few gestures in that direction, but overall it looks like they're worse than doubling down.
In 2008, Republicans got wrecked far worse than dems did in 2024. Word for word, what you just wrote applied to them 10x and was written about them as well. And then we all remember how they moderated, played nice with hispanics (muh demographic replacement) and that strategy paid off in 2016, right? Much as I'd like them to (and the Republicans as well!) it boggles my mind that you would look at the last ten years and say that moderation and saying nice things on camera wins you elections.
Sure, things don't look great for the dems today. But four years is a long time, and Trump's got plenty of opportunities to fuck it up. Either he's as successful as you think he'll be and I profit (at least if he stops fucking my industry), or he tanks babyface JD's chances for 2028 and dems win again.
But if I'm wrong, and their worse natures prevail, then yeah. I think that's potentially crossing the line where responses of a euphemistic variety go on the table. Same reason I think we should be arming moderate rebels in the UK.
Shooting people or waving guns around is the biggest own goal you can score, and will stay that way until the state has truly failed. And even if you win, what then? You're going to kick down every door with a pride flag on the lawn and shoot them, every registered democrat too, and then institute a police state to prevent wrongthink? These are all just childish fantasies. 150 million people disagree with you, and even if, as you like to say, 'we're the ones with the guns,' those people aren't just going to disappear. But by all means, talk more about euphemistic responses in public fora - I don't think it will help your cause.
Not to mention the juxtaposition of you ridiculing left-wingers for being scared of Republicans and a Trump administration while also 'darkly hinting' about 'euphemistic responses' is frankly hilarious.
The government, yes to an extent. In being less developed, it was less captured by people whose aim was power within the government over doing the government's job. I think there was more room for optimism then, regarding what could be accomplished by the hand of the state, and that a large portion of the lies we live under now came as a response to that optimism failing.
I'm skeptical that the government of 50 years ago was particularly honest or well-meaning (see: the Power Broker to start), and I wonder if it's more likely our environment changed. But I sure as hell don't have time to develop that idea in any meaningful way. /shrug
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Then by 2019 we're at "11,544 (65.9%) genes were associated with at least one trait (Supplementary Table 7). Of these, 81.2% were associated with more than one trait and 67.2% with traits from multiple domains".
This isn't my main area of expertise. Someone else could give a better answer than me, possibly even on this forum.
That said, did you read the paper? They have a list of 3,000 traits they pull from and any gene associated with more than one trait is called pleiotropic. The 81% figure is functionally meaningless because showing that a gene can predispose you to both lupus and arthritis, or depression and anxiety is not particularly meaningful. They try to get around this with the 67% figure (i.e. grouping traits by domain), but even that is fraught.
Take, for instance (from their paper):
Interferon gamma (IFNG): Going to assume you have no knowledge of immunology, but I can be more granular if you like. This gene is important for the immune response to many different infections, many of which occur in the gut. SNPs in IFNG are also linked to GI issues, but these are downstream to it's role in the immune system controlling the gut microbiome/infections. Is this 'pleiotropy' as you would understand it? There's plenty of examples like this I could give.
If you really want to dig deep, look at supplementary table 19 or figure from that paper. The fraction of genes linked to cognitive traits that also have significant associations with inter-domain traits is very low for body structure, skeletal, connective tissue traits.
I'm far from the authority on human genetics, but look at the complexity from a casual conversation and trying to distill academia's definition of pleiotropy to a practical understanding. And if OP is so confident in his assertion, shouldn't he have the references/arguments ready at hand?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
It doesn't seem like your hiatus has given you much optimism on the culture war front.
It's been asked repeatedly in this thread, but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?
The gap between 'grace and forgiveness' and 'punching back twice as hard' is wide enough to drive a semi through, but I'll try:
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After the conservative majority on the supreme court (viewed by many on the left as obtained through defection) struck down Roe v. Wade, many people here and elsewhere predicted riots and burnination in every major city in America. Ask Whiningcoil and FC about that one. Where, exactly, is the punchback from that one? Jane's revenge?
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Similar predictions of riots, defections, #resistance after Trump's inauguration in 2024. Even the protests were muted compared to 2016, Trump deleted USAID, laid off some largely indeterminate number of federal workers, is extorting Harvard and the other major colleges for hundreds of millions for 'antisemitism' (among other things). NIH and NSF have proposed budget cuts of ~40% each for 2026 - I suppose congress can appropriate the funds and Trump can just do to NIH/NSF what he did to USAID.
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Since you want to talk about immigration, where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds? People bitched about it, but it's not like Desantis/Abbott are being harassed by the feds or blue states are shipping red-county fentanyl addicts to Florida and Texas.
In the dim recesses of the past, I can recall John McCain telling one of his supporters to be less racist and cruel towards Obama. But I sincerely can't think of an instance from the other side more recent than Bill Clinton's Sister Soulja incident.
Your example for Republicans is what, 17 years old? And isn't even from a sitting president. Has Trump ever told his supporters to be nicer to Biden? There's no asymmetric defection here.
For God's sake, we just had four years of lockdowns,
You mean the lockdowns that started during Trump's administration, that he could have stopped at any time for months? Lockdowns that had overwhelming bipartisan support in the first 1-6 months of their institution? Lockdowns that, I'll remind you, many people here predicted would be permanent as they asserted the government would never voluntarily relinquish power that they had taken from the people and it would be 'lockdowns forever.'
total defections on having a border at all. They went Stalinist levels of low to throw Trump in jail and bankrupt him, and as many of his supporters as possible alongside him.
You're not concerned about Trump calling a governor and asking him to find votes after losing an election? I'm genuinely asking - do you think it was justified because democrats stole the election in Georgia, because this is normal behavior for presidents who lose elections, or you just don't think he should face consequences?
The totality on the left of people who gleefully cheered when Trump was arrested spent this weekend crashing out because war criminal John Bolton was arrested
Come on, this is your steelman for why people are worried that John Bolton was arrested? The guy publicly had a falling out with Trump, wrote a nasty book about him and now he's got the FBI kicking down his door. You're not worried at all about the weaponization of the DoJ?
If Democrats honestly think this is "0.9-tits-for-a-tat", then we should just start the civil war.
There's this funny phenomenon I've noticed during my time here. Regardless of what happens in the real world, regardless of the fortunes of Blue Tribe or Red Tribe, blackpilling only increases. Lockdowns/COVID end? Roe V. Wade overturned? Trump wins a trifecta in 2024? Doesn't matter, the response is only either gloating or increased pessimism.
I genuinely still don't know why this is. Are the moderates leaving the site and losing interest, and all that's left is the bitterest remnant? My perception is that this seems to be broader than TheMotte, though. And my recollection of you, at least, is that you were fairly restrained in your rhetoric and beliefs.
Secondly - much ado is made about the loss of faith in institutions over the last decade, but I have to admit the inverse is just as interesting to me. Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago? Do you really think the government or New York Times were that much more honest with the plebs in the 70s than they are in the 2020s? And if not, is faith in flawed institutions nevertheless adaptive for a society?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
It may help to remember that I'm describing a last common ancestor (LCA) which would map to something like 6-7 MYA, not modern humans.
If you're discussing human evolution, why not drop the Tidus framing and just call them humans? And write a sourced post instead?
And, having studied this fairly intensively, the situation I'm describing is pretty much the current best mainstream academic hypothesis as to how they behaved.
What is the cliffnotes version of the data supporting this hypothesis? Just what you describe below about inference from modern primates?
The apes arrange themselves up and down the slopes more or less as would be expected by anyone who is familiar with chapter two's shellfish. Higher genetic quality individuals at the top, dregs down below. But we have a few key differences here.
What is the evidence for this being a relevant description in human evolution, or is it referring to some other concept in evolutionary biology I'm not aware of?
In the case of propensity to aggression, rather than there being one specific allele that makes the difference, which one population has and the other doesn’t, aggression is a complex, polygenic trait. Basically no gene does only one thing and they all interact with each other in massively complex ways. A typical single-gene variant (allele) might, for example, make the tail 2% shorter, make the lizard 7% more aggressive, minutely impact its ability to process certain nutrients, give it a slight aversion to the smell of the ocean, etc. Another allele (on a different gene) might make the scales slightly glossier and more blue, instill a minor fear of heights, a preference for rounded basking-rocks over flat ones, make certain bugs taste a little better, and shift its perception of light (colour) a tad, and so on — But then when both are present, they interact with each other in unforeseen ways, amplifying or canceling out each other’s effects basically at random and also leading to whole new effects which neither causes in isolation.
You open with wanting to discuss polygenic traits, then what follows is largely a description of pleiotropy. Pleiotropy is far from universal (your 'no gene does only one thing' quote) with 10-20% of human genes estimated to be pleiotropic. Polygenic traits frequently have very significant environmental influences (Even in animals, and even in genetically identical animals) which you also do not discuss.
This sort of polygenic interaction is almost impossible to keep track of. Computers help a lot, since even with genetic sequencing no one could possibly track the myriad interactions with pen and paper
I don't know what you're referring to here, but this sort of polygenic interaction is impossible to keep track of with our current level of understanding. There's no way to construct a deterministic/mechanistic model of how genetic variation will translate to a given trait. If you're referring to polygenic scores, I wouldn't call that 'keeping track of polygenic interactions,' and furthermore, their explanatory power is in the single to low double-digit percentages of variance explained.
They also behave differently along other axes, and look different, and — this is the important part — experience the world differently. Sense data occurs to them differently. They feel differently about things.
What is the evidence for this? Is it a purely theoretical conclusion based on your argument around pleiotropy? Because:
And you know this about them at a glance if they look different, since many genes which code for behaviour or anything else also code for physical appearance. In other words, you couldn't genetically edit an embryo to change its adult appearance without also changing its behavioural proclivities.
This just isn't true. I can give you plenty of examples of genes I could manipulate that would result in an observable difference in physical appearance that aren't even expressed in the brain. I'd have an even easier time giving you genes that would mess with your immune system without affecting the brain. I suppose you would argue that I could never prove to your satisfaction that those mice experience the world differently, but that would just a be waste of everyone's time.
To be frank: I find is disquieting how many people reject psychology when it concludes that racial diversity improves team efficiency, stereotype threat or whatever other bullshit and then happily eat up evo psych slop that flatters their own biases. 'Current best mainstream academic hypothesis' is only as rigorous as the data behind it, and there's obviously differences in rigor between disciplines.
Were you HelmedHorror on the old site?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
There's a (likely just-so) hypothesis they teach you in undergrad biochemistry, or at least there was many years ago. The first enzyme in the catabolism of glucose, phosphofructokinase, is thought to be a key regulatory step in the pathway - as downstream products build up, flux through the glycolytic pathway is decreased. Fructose has a parallel catabolic pathway that bypasses this regulatory step and thus keeps churning and is more likely to stimulate de novo lipogenesis in the liver (aka getting fat).
I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in this, or how it interacts with CICO. But I think this hypothesis trickles down in an increasingly garbled form to the public and may be a large part of the hostility towards HFCS.
You're sanewashing what he's saying into 'multiple perspectives are good.' He's free to teach his children whatever he wants, but I'm going to mock him for having the arrogance to think that he's teaching them Actual History.
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