I think those remarks have low potential upside for Trump's campaign and high potential downside. I doubt that the number of people who would decide to go out and vote for Trump because a comedian at his event said Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage is as large as the number of people who would decide to come out and vote against Trump because of it. So it was careless for Trump's campaign to allow it to happen. It's another unforced error, following on the heels of when Tucker Carlson, a few days ago in a public speech, made a long political metaphor involving spanking one's daughter. These are the kinds of things that make me wonder, did Trump's campaign people start smoking meth the last few days or something? It's just stupid, stupid shit that might endanger an election that might well be decided by a few tens of thousands of votes, especially given that the Democrats have spent the last week putting a lot of media energy into trying to make the Madison Square Garden rally seem like a Nazi rally. Like come on, Trump campaign people, just shut up and go do more McDonalds type photo ops and talk about crime and immigration and shit. There's a time and a place for crude, controversial jokes. A week before the election and at a highly publicized rally at a major venue where most of your main people appear is probably not the right time and place.
I turned it off after about 20 minutes. Just couldn't stand Trump rambling and repeating himself. Oddly, I find those traits of his to be kind of endearing in his big public speeches, but in the context of a 1-on-1 conversation I found them to be very grating.
I don't think the interview will hurt Trump, but I also doubt it will help him. He looked and sounded like an old tired grandpa, his makeup looked weird under the lighting conditions, and he didn't say anything particularly interesting to me, at least not in those first 20 minutes. He didn't seem like the bellicose, charming, unpredictable Trump that made him famous as a politician, he seemed really tired and out of it. Maybe he should have gotten more sleep before the interview or something.
Overall, I'd say that the interview is a disappointment compared to all the hype. Basically a nothingburger. You'll probably like it if you can imagine that it would be fun to hang out 1-on-1 with a tired Trump while he freely associates about random things. Otherwise you'll likely think that it's boring.
From what I saw, Joe Rogan did fine though.
I think the interview slightly helps Trump in that it does make him seem human, not like some kind of uber-Hitler. Unfortunately for Trump, it also hurts him by making him seem really really old and unfocused. One almost wants to put him to bed and give him some nice warm tea to soothe him to sleep when one watches it. I didn't see any signs of the fiery, snarky Trump who makes people think he'll do big things if elected.
I know very little about prediction markets, so can someone explain to me how likely it is that Trump's surge on for example Polymarket is the result more of speculative behavior than of people rationally trying to predict the winner of the election? I don't really see any reason to currently view the race as being anything other than pretty close to 50-50. People might say well, if I believe that then why not try to make some money on it? And maybe that's fair. But that does not necessarily mean that the betting odds on Polymarket are actually an accurate guide to the likely election outcome.
I think that in reality if elected Trump would probably just spend all day tweeting and failing to implement his promises. However, to many Democrats it is almost as if Trump is a Lovecraftian god the mere mention of whom leads to insanity. Such Democrats view him as some sort of annihilating force the very presence of which in the universe warps and endangers the sane, wholesome building blocks of existence itself. Meanwhile I just see a fat old huckster sociopath who talks a lot of shit but is effectively restrained by checks and balances. Not a savory person, maybe even a rapist, pretty certainly a bad guy, but not some sort of fundamental essential threat to the entire being of American democracy or to sanity.
It is not that I do not believe in evil. But I do find it odd when liberals perceive demonic evil in Trump, yet make excuses for vicious violent criminals (at least, as a class if not always individually) who are enabled by Democrats' soft-on-crime policies.
Would Trump do many harmful things in office? I am sure. Harris would as well. Which one would do more, who knows? I do not see a clear-cut answer to that question. He certainly would be no angel, I am sure of that. But it also seems to me that often, vehement anti-Trump sentiment has little to do with a clear-eyed assessment of the possible harms that he would cause.
What explains the particular mind-shattering power that Trump somehow inflicts on so many of his political opponents? Interestingly, it largely do not seem to be his actual political counterparts among the Democrat elite who view him as an eldritch destroyer of worlds... the Democrat elite may hate him, may despise him, may say that he is a threat to democracy, but I don't think I can remember any time that any of them acted as if he was a threat to one's very psychological foundation. Maybe their power and their close understanding of American politics generally inoculates them against such a reaction.
Lest someone think that I come only to shit on the Democrats, unfortunately no. Would that I actually supported either of the two main parties... my political life would be easier. But the Republicans, too, deserve some questioning on this topic. Republicans' reaction to Bill and Hillary Clinton, at one point, was a sort of precursor to the mental shattering caused by the concept of Trump. Interestingly, despite often being accused of being racist, from what I recall Republicans did not actually react to Obama quite as hysterically as they reacted to the Clintons. Sure, there was a lot of vitriol against Obama, such as Birtherism, but it was probably half as vehement as what was thrown at the Clintons.
Yet even though Republicans were in many ways mind-melted by the Clintons, including to the point that Republican forums back in the day teemed with theories about the Clintons literally being a murderous and pedophilic crime family, I still do not think it quite matches up to the new standards of psychological devastation that Trump has wreaked. That might sound weird, given the murderous pedophile thing, but to me supporters of those theories generally just seem like they are stupid and prone to weird fantasies and LARPs but have always been that way, whereas people who are existentially shattered by Trump seem like they might have been different at one point, but then suddenly Trump appeared in the corner of their reality and traumatically inverted it into some new configuration of dimensions.
Why does Trump have this effect? Is it just that there is a large number of people in this country who fail to agree with me that Trump's chances of becoming a dictator are extremely small, that a man who has most key institutions against him, has the top military brass against him, and lives in a country where the military rank and file are probably not about to try to overthrow civilian authority, has very little chance of ending American democracy?
I am not sure. The idea of Trump being the curtain call on American democracy is certainly one of the main things behind his psychological impact on people, but I have seen plenty of people who seem existentially horrified by him for completely different reasons. Some people seem to be driven out of their wits' ends just by the very fact that Trump is crude and vulgar rather than sounding like an intellectual.
The political war over Hurricane Helene is heating up. Elon Musk is accusing FEMA of blocking his attempts to deliver Starlinks to areas affected by the disaster. Right-wing Twitter/X is full of talk about various incidents in which purportedly people coming to the area to try to help and/or deliver supplies are being turned away by FEMA. Also full of talk about FEMA using money to support illegal immigrants. Some people are pushing theories that FEMA is deliberately withholding help.
How credible is any of this?
My guess is that FEMA is a typical semi-competent government agency that makes many blunders. It might be bad at coordinating with random people who want to help but are not government employees and it might thus institutionally prefer to just block off the area and try to handle everything without random people's assistance. This policy then causes the various incidents that are being talked about.
I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.
What do you make of it?
Granted, I've never been a father, but I don't see why it's supposed to be automatically humiliating or horrible in some other way for a father to know that his daughter is having sex with dozens of guys. Seems strange to me. As a father, as long as she's safe while doing it, why should I care? I like promiscuous girls, they're usually more interesting to talk to than non-promiscuous girls, and it's easier to get laid with them. I don't look down on them compared to non-promiscuous girls. It would be hypocritical for me to judge my daughter's promiscuity based on different standards than I use with women whom I want to fuck.
It's voluntary, but when it comes to the Delta Gamma of this email (assuming that the email is real), that's probably about all the good that one can say about it. That person who wrote that email is not psychologically healthy, or probably even close to it. The way it describes the sorority makes it seem much like a cult. There is no good reason for a sorority house to be run like a stereotypical finance boiler room from a 1980s movie.
I am not a member of any organized religion, but I think that your post nails something very important.
And is pragmatic intelligence really anything other than an ability to objectively survey the field, especially when that means being able to see past the local maximum to a higher one?
But though I agree with you at least in that there is a similarity between the religious notion of a demon and the possible darkness of AI, I am not convinced that the argument makes sense unless I accept your metaphysical perspectives. From a secular perspective, why would AI be more drawn to chaos than humans are?
I suppose the non-secular, more optimistic argument would hold that humans have some kind of extra sauce, something that naturally makes them less demonic, maybe more altruistic, than an AI following pure gradient descent on matrix math would have. But what is the evidence that this is true?
And I say this as someone who thinks that consciousness might be beyond the ability of humans to ever understand. But when it comes to ordered/demonic, I'm not sure why the AI would tend to be more demonic, unless I buy into some kind of metaphysics that I see no reason to buy into so far at least.
Governments that have put a lot of effort into trying to increase the population, such as modern Russia's government, have not seen much success, so I doubt that the low modern fertility rates have much to do with governments trying to lower fertility rates. I think that fertility rates are just something that governments, even relatively authoritarian governments, do not have much control over. For a government to significantly influence fertility rates it would have to either make sweeping economic and cultural changes somehow, and/or go totalitarian beyond the degree to which even the current Chinese government is totalitarian.
My understanding of physicalism is that its main point is very much not that intelligence can come from mechanical causation - I think that most modern self-identified non-physicalists would agree that intelligence can come from mechanical causation. Physicalism claims that consciousness comes from mechanical causation, which is a claim that is orthogonal to the claim that intelligence can come from mechanical causation.
In reading your post and contemplating it, I realized that a very likely response that humans would have to a significantly super-humanly intelligent AI is to worship it as a god. I suppose this is old hat. There must be hundreds of old sci-fi stories with this premise. But I used to find this premise hokey, whereas now it actually seems pretty plausible. And it is especially plausible if the AI is super-humanly charming as well as being super-humanly intelligent in a scientific way. And why wouldn't it be super-humanly charming? This AI would combine in one being an intelligence that is beyond any of humanity's geniuses and the charisma of a pop megacelebrity like Elvis or Michael Jackson, or a politician like Hitler, but on steroids. The likely human reaction to such a being is not just fawning support, such as Obama gets from Democrats or Trump from Republicans, it would probably be something more like religious awe.
Some might object that humans would not feel such an awe because they would be aware that the machine intelligence was a human creation. But I am not convinced by that. Humans are capable of worshipping Jesus even though Jesus was born from a human woman. It would be easy for future humans to imagine that the super-humanly intelligent AI was actually some sort of being from beyond the metal, some kind of essence that the universe suddenly decided to activate in that metal like Jesus becoming incarnate in a human body.
Granted, the AI wouldn't have a human body, unlike say Michael Jackson, who could get worshipped as a demi-god off the power of his accomplishments and raw charisma by standing still and turning his head occasionally, and who still has the largest online defense force of any modern celebrity, one that includes thousands of people who worship him and constantly argue online against the idea that he was a pedophile. But it would have so many other advantages that I'm not sure the lack of a human body would matter. For all I know, it might even help. Humans have never yet in their history, unless you credit stories about gods or aliens, been exposed to an intelligence that is genuinely significantly super-human.
As long as I'm talking about Michael Jackson, I might as well mention that he was so beloved and worshiped that he could release a music video that is basically fascist propaganda and get away with it. Check it out, the HIStory Teaser is both hilarious and epic. Even if it was meant to be satirical, it is still probably the best fascist music video that has been made in the West since Leni Riefenstahl, or maybe parts of the Pink Floyd The Wall movie.
I think the problem is that the meme of calling things "cultural Marxism", while useful in persuading some people, is also a bit of a self-own by right-wingers because it can turn off people who care about a higher level of intellectual rigor than calling their opponents names. The term is historically imprecise. Leftism, feminism, the struggle for racial equality, blank slatism, and so on all pre-date Marx and would exist even if Marx had never existed, and I see no reason to think that without Marx, they would not eventually have developed militant dogmatic offshoots that are similar to today's SJW ideology. You can already see a large fraction of the modern leftist ideology in the French Revolution, thirty years before Marx was born. Marxism is a specific type of leftism. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people who use the term "cultural Marxism" have never read a page of Marx. So why use this term? Why not come up with an equally potent one, but one that is also more accurate, so that it does not seem weird to people who know a lot about history?
Now it is true that much of the modern left in the West, in its specific form, derives from the New Left of the 1960s, which was in many ways a reaction by actual American Marxists to the traumatic realization that Stalin's USSR was a horrific society that practiced atrocities on a mass scale, and was also maybe in some ways a reaction to the realization that economic leftism had little chance of succeeding in America's prosperous society - hence, as a consequence, the left shifted to emphasizing the struggle of the Third World against imperialism, of black people against oppression in the US, of women against oppression by men, and so on. But this shift happened almost 70 years ago. I am not sure that today's SJWs can really be described as Marxist in any other than a tangential way. There are still genuine Marxists around... there are entire subreddits full of them... but they make up a pretty small fraction of modern Western leftists.
I am a white man, so I can imagine it, since white men have been dehumanized for years now by various people.
Last night I talked to a pretty intelligent female friend of mine about various things, and the subject of how men commit the vast majority of violence came up. She was eager to admit that yes, men do. I pointed out that a subset of men commit the majority of all this violence, and that the men in that subset tend to target men as well as women. She was less eager to admit this, but she went along with it. I then made an analogy to the fact that blacks on average commit more violence than whites do, but it is a subset of blacks who commit the majority of all that violence. She started to question me, wondering whether my evidence such as the FBI crime statistics is trustworthy or not. She's not some naive college student, either. She is over 50 and has been living in the US all her life. But she still has a hard time realizing the to me pretty obvious fact that blacks are on average more violent than whites.
THAT is the power of leftist propaganda.
I think that this is a bit of an exaggeration. I live in a city that overwhelmingly votes for the Democratic Party, and I know almost no-one who is actually Red tribe, yet I know many people, including a few coworkers, who don't agree that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman or that non-whites should be privileged. Of course part of that is that I am more likely to become friends with people who are not turbo-woke than with people who are, but my point is that I regularly see this woke dogma challenged outside of a deep Red social context.
That said, I do think that there is one sense in which you are right that wokism has "become law" - confrontation against the woke. I know very few people, even unwoke ones, who would deny a transgender person's self-identification face-to-face offline, or who would strongly push back against a black's person's demand to be privileged face-to-face offline, unless they happened to know that transgender person or that black person pretty closely. With relative strangers, there is a fear of confrontation and perhaps even violence in doing so. I am probably relatively brave compared to most unwoke people I know offlline in this department, but even I know not to pick intellectual fights against either dogmatic religious zealots and/or people who are too stupid to understand my arguments, especially given that I have a sense that authority figures and in general, people who do not know me, are likely to assume that I am the guilty party if they become aware of the confrontation.
So in a sense, we are living in a mild Soviet-style thought regime. It is not quite Havel's greengrocer, but it has shades of it. In most Blue areas, one can freely go around questioning woke dogma in most civilized well-mannered contexts outside of some woke jobs and probably university campuses as well, and generally speaking nothing bad will happen. But at the same time, one cannot go around pushing back against woke dogma face-to-face too hard against woke people whom one does not know closely, even if the woke person is the one who brings up the issue, unless one is willing to risk the other person exploding in anger and causing a scene, a situation that carries some risk of drawing other people in, who are likely to immediately assume that you are the guilty party.
And of course, there is also the matter of anarchotyranny. Democratic policies are hampering the operation of law enforcement and are aiding violent criminals. We are used to it that there are some parts of cities where one just knows not to go, some people one just knows not to interact with, and so on. And this has in a sense "become law" in that while technically being a violent scumbag is illegal, civil authority is letting such things continue even though the state could easily crack down on all the scumbags and thugs and destroy them in a matter of months if it really had the will.
Now of course, violent crime is down compared to the early 90s, and there have always been places one knows not to go, and people one knows not to interact with - I mean, probably half of Westerns are based on that kind of concept. But with modern technology and social organization, we are now at the point where violent crime could be down much more if the left stopped thinking of violent criminals as pets or children who need to be hugged and gently treated. We have the state capacity, this is not the Wild West or 1920s Chicago, but some people are preventing us from using it.
Until very recently, someone who felt that they had been sexually assaulted by a prominent person could not just go online and instantly broadcast it to millions of people. And it is very hard to definitively prove that such a sexual assault has happened, given that bosses who commit sexual assaults are usually smart enough to do it when no-one else is around. Before modern social media that has made it relatively easy for anyone to do one-to-many broadcasting, and before the modern political culture in which it is pretty easy to find people who sympathize with your claim of sexual assault, I think it was probably a very different story. It was less likely that a boss who got accused of sexual assault, but without there being any concrete proof of it, would get forced out of his position by the force of public opinion and bad PR. In some ways, maybe Monica Lewinsky / Bill Clinton was the first major sign of the shifting attitudes about such things, and ironically the Republicans were the ones supporting a sort of MeToo in that case. Or maybe that's just the first one that I remember, I am not sure.
No disagreement there my good man. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes the dick is actually wiser than the rest of you.
Nobody, other than degenerate sexual deviants who think with their dick, would stake their career or social reputation just to get lucky
As a proud "degenerate sexual deviant", I feel seen.
But on a more serious note, you never know what sublime things your dick might lead you to. Many a loving, intimate relationship started with a couple of people who were originally thinking with their sexual beings but then found something deeper in common.
No, there is a big difference between various kinds of laws. A blanket principle of "always obey every law, simply because it is the law" makes no sense, since many laws are stupid and/or immoral, and that is even more the case in authoritarian countries than in the US. The law, in and of itself, has no moral authority. So one must pick which laws to obey. The law against, say, raping people makes sense to obey because clearly, raping people is immoral because it seriously harms others. Using marijuana, on the other hand, does not harm others, so the law against doing it is stupid and immoral.
Making laws against things that do not harm anyone except the person who does them is a quick path to raising generations of people who feel contempt for lawmakers and the legal system. And then you get more leftism, because some of those people who feel contempt eventually go down the rabbit hole of starting to believe that the entire system, rather than just part of it, is fundamentally wrong, and that it must be overthrown and so on.
When you say that sodomy is a sin, why do you say that? Because the Bible says so? Or because you have some logical arguments? I think that "the Bible says so" is worthless as a moral argument.
Unlike murder, using weed is not an activity that is inherently harmful to others. The argument that it is good to not fine/jail people for using weed does not generalize to murder, it only generalizes to activities that are not inherently harmful to others. Thus, your counterargument does not make sense.
I agree about marijuana, especially the point about cops. I think the fact that for so many years, cops would harass or even arrest people for making a personal choice to put a substance in their own bodies, helped to lead to the current widespread distrust of cops and the overall rise of extreme leftism. When you're an impressionable 18 year old, the idea of some cop arresting you for using weed naturally makes you distrust the entire system, and especially law enforcement. I think that many young people have been drawn to leftism by this over the years, to our detriment. The drug war helped to create several generations of people who had a natural and substantial reason to distrust and oppose civil order, law enforcement, and the legal system.
I disagree about women/attractiveness in some ways. In my experience, aging by itself takes a very long time to degrade a woman's looks substantially. 90% of the problem is simply obesity. The overwhelming majority of women who are hot in their 20s are still going to be very attractive in their 40s, as long as they do not get fat. They will probably have some subtle wrinkles and lines in the face, but they will still be attractive. If they take really good care of themselves, they will still be attractive even in their 50s. Maybe your standards are higher than mine or something, but in any case, this is how it seems to me. The key purely physical aspects of a woman's attractiveness - facial beauty, breasts, butt, legs, etc. - do not really change shape much with age until quite an advanced age, assuming that the woman does not get fat, although the skin does get less smooth. Out of those characteristics the face starts changing the quickest, probably. But even then, a woman who had a pretty face at 20 is still probably going to have a decent face at 45 as long as she does not get fat.
Uncompromising activism, to the point of bombing abortion clinics, has been tried in the US and it failed. There just isn't a large enough number of people in the US who feel deeply enough that abortion is wrong to go do anything about it other than vote. And in this context, the only thing one can do as a pro-lifer is to use convincing arguments and electoral politics. If a strong anti-abortion position prevents one from winning in electoral politics, it stands to reason that one should a adopt a less strong anti-abortion position, since it is better to win an election and then do at least something against abortion than it is to lose an election and merely imagine what strong measures one would have taken if one had won it.
Maybe, maybe not. But that is tangential to my argument. Whether that is true or not, it does not matter, because the 19th Amendment is not going to be repealed. If you want to win elections in the United States, you need to try to get women to vote for you.
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I don't know about VCs, but I think that the shift of tech executives toward Trump has another major cause besides just that he looks like he might win. The idea that it's driven by some sort of awareness that Trump is a heavy favorite to win doesn't make sense to me because to me it's pretty clear that, prediction market weirdness aside, the race is still a toss-up. There is no actual good evidence in favor of the theory that Trump is running away with it.
So what is the other cause for the shift? I think it's pretty simple actually. Most tech executives come from the kind of blue tribe middle/upper-middle class family and cultural backgrounds where either voting Democrat is just what one does, because "it is the right thing to do" (I don't believe that, but people in those cultures do)... or, at least, the idea of voting for a Trump seems beyond the pale. One might vote for a Romney, but not a Trump. Being in the middle/upper-middle class does not grant people any sort of special degree of interest in or understanding of politics. Indeed, most such people are politically pretty apathetic. They feel that they are doing the right thing for the world by voting for the Democrats or for moderate Republicans once every couple of years and they don't think much about politics otherwise except maybe to occasionally grumble about some particular blatant excess like the WMDs-in-Iraq clusterfuck. They are the kinds of people who think that the New York Times and the Washington Post are paragons of journalism and trust that writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond have given them a good understanding of anthropology. They are repelled by the Republican political umbrella's religious conservatism, its talk about Judeo-Christian values, its adulation of traditional family structures, its reflexive worship of the military, and many other things. As, to some extent, am I for that matter... and I myself would never vote for a Republican, if it was not for my belief that somehow, the Democrats have become even worse.
They are not stupid people, indeed many of them are brilliant, but a person's intelligence is usually not evenly distributed among different areas of understanding. It is at least as common for someone to be brilliant in one field and mediocre or even actually unperceptive in others as it is for a person to be smart all across the board. Take tech, for example. I have met many good coders who have very little interest in politics, have not thought very deeply about it, and do not have anything particularly interesting to say about it. The typical white collar professional knows very little about history and is not particularly interested in it. When he is done at work for the day, he does not spend hours thinking and reading about politics, he goes home and puts on Netflix.
Understandably, if one grows up in a background like this, spends most of one's time in college and business around other people who came from such a background, and spends most of one's energy focusing on business decisions and technology instead of on politics, it might take one a long time to come to the conclusion that maybe the Democrats are actually not on the right side of history any more than the Republicans are. Even when they begin to pressure you to use your company to censor their political opponents. Even when you realize that a large fraction of their rank-and-file voters automatically despise you simply because you have made a lot of money. Even when their policies make the cities where you live dirty and poorly policed. And it might especially take one a long time when the only alternative to those Democrats isn't a safe Romney type of figure, but is instead Trump and his whole gang of rabble-rousers.
I think it is notable that two of the most prominent anti-Democrat tech businessmen, Musk and Thiel, both spent time in South Africa. I do not know to what extent that experience shaped their political attitudes, but I doubt it is a coincidence that they share in common some experience having grown up not just in nice blue tribe suburbs in the West, but also in a country that has experienced a lot of devastation from racial animosity, crime, and corrupt political patronage systems.
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