Goodguy
1mo ago
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.
Goodguy
1mo ago
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.
Goodguy
1mo ago
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.
Goodguy
1mo ago
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.
Goodguy
2mo ago
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.
Goodguy
2mo ago
No disagreement there my good man. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes the dick is actually wiser than the rest of you.
Goodguy
2mo ago
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.
Goodguy
2mo ago
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.
Goodguy
2mo ago
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.
Goodguy
2mo ago
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.
Goodguy
2mo ago
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.
Goodguy
2mo ago
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.
Goodguy
2mo ago
The problem is that he overdoes it. This strategy might work well if he toned it down just a bit, both in content and in how he talks about it. When he gets heated and raises his voice and starts talking in word salad while randomly inserting these kinds of things into the conversation, like he did in the debate last night against Harris, it just makes him look like a crazy homeless man ranting on a street corner. Personally, it does not bother me, but I do not think that it is the best way to reach swing state voters.
At this point I am tired of right-wingers bringing up abortion. My attitude is, they should stop talking about it so much and they should do it now. Even if you legitimately view it as murder, the fact is, if you bring it up so often that it makes you lose elections, you're not going to be in a position to stop it anyway. I mean, what are you going to do? Blow up abortion clinics? That has been tried, and it did not even put a dent in how many abortions are performed.
The right-wing fixation with talking about abortion is politically suicidal. If some right-winger personally thinks that abortion is evil, then by all means, fight against it. But constantly talking about it on the national stage does not help. It is just virtue signalling. What would help is to win some fucking elections. Trump did more for anti-abortion activists by winning in 2016 and nominating those Supreme Court judges than almost anyone else, and one thing he did was, he didn't talk about abortion all the time.
The right needs female voters. The 19th Amendment is not going to be repealed magically. You need female voters, so you need to talk about issues where there is not such a gigantic disparity between the average man and the average woman's views.*
I say this as someone who is agnostic on the whole question of whether abortion is or is not murder. I do not think there is any actually rational answer to that question, it is a matter of perspective. I am not so unempathic that I am incapable of feeling bad for aborted fetuses, but at the same time, I also have to think about actually winning against the left. I know it seems obvious, but it does not seem obvious to some people for whatever reason. If you really care about the well-being of fetuses, losing elections by talking about abortion the way the right currently all too often does is not going to help them.
*Edit: I just looked at the statistics, and the gap between men and women's attitudes on abortion is actually smaller than I thought it was.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I have little doubt about that brotha, it probably is bad for me. On the other hand, it may have stimulated some interesting discussion.
Goodguy
2mo ago
If there is a stage 5, then what is a description of all the stages? Your notion of reality seems subtle enough to maybe shed more light on what it really is than the typical ideologies do, Please explain further, if you feel like it,.
I wish to do a follow up. Ignore the following if you do not wish to read a bit of venting.
I am angry. I am actually fucking enraged. It's irrational, but I hope people don't hold it against me. This is the fucking best that the anti-left coalition can do politically when running a Presidential candidate? Really? This fucking idiot whose idea of a good debate performance is acting like a fucking 15 year old who makes really basic mistakes and failed to prepare? If so, we might be fucked and we might need to get the fuck out of these leftist cities before things get worse, well those of us who still live in them, I mean. Not that I ever expected Trump to do much about local leftist politics, but I am worried that a Harris win might energize the left and make things worse.
The current right is kind of fucking useless unless you care about abortion, or about minor wins in things besides abortion.
Curtis Yarvin, for all his faults, such as some of his misunderstandings of history or his overestimation of what his preferred political systems would manage to accomplish, keeps seeming to be proven right in some core ways. The left is structurally stronger, the so-called right focuses on the wrong things. Like when they were overjoyed when Trump won in 2016, but that ended up not necessarily being a bigger win for the anti-left than when Musk bought Twitter, cause when Trump became President he mostly sat around Tweeting and getting blocked in his policy suggestions, whereas when Musk bought Twitter he ripped some new ideas right into the heart of what was largely before a leftist-dominated idea-shaping space.
Trump might win in November, though I do not evaluate his chances as good, but even if he does, what of it? Will he do anything more than he did last time he was President? I want actual wins, not symbolic wins, and I'm not sure I'll even get a symbolic win for the current anti-leftist coalition any time soon. To be fair, it's not like I've been doing much to help other than posting online. But in any case, fuck. From the perspective of my preferred political outcomes, I think there must be a major re-evaluation of strategy - what is going on now does not seem to be working.
Not that I ever liked this anti-left coalition much to begin with. I just want to live in a city that isn't full of insane violent people, and I want to not be censored online. I don't care much about abortion, I'm not religious in the least bit, and I am not a white nationalist, even though I am a race realist.
To get from where we are now to the kinds of policies I want will take some effort and maybe even a bit of higher-dimensional magic, higher-dimensional in the sense meaning that it goes outside the lines of what we typically imagine now as politics and taps into some deeper currents of existence and reality and life.
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?
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