BANNED USER: waging culture war repeatedly after multiple bans and warnings
Lepidus
No bio...
User ID: 1547
Banned by: @Amadan
Hlynka is a true believer - East German Christian Democrat. He thinks the Socialist Unity Party has corrupted the pure communism found in the writing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Martin Luther King), and that if they only stopped being so corrupt, exaggerating the capitalist threat to mask it's own corruption, and shooting people; we would suddenly live in a happy classless society. That violent repression, and permanent revolutionary rhetoric is necessary to avoid the collapse of the inherently dysfunctional communist (colour-blind) regime, escapes him. He will go to his grave claiming that the rare capitalists he stumbles accross are actually Stasi.
Lepidus
1yr ago
Well not exactly, one is the immediate result of nature and the exact realization of your political values. The other is the (highly plausible) result of my not having full control over other players, most of them my sworn enemies, in a likely slippery slope scenario (*).
Nonetheless, I will bite the bullet and say that yes, I'd prefer a world where the horror stories you mention are normal than one where the current state remains. One involves 1) a willing victim I probably won't ever meet, the other an 2) unwilling one that I'm likely if not guaranteed to know and love. I see choosing 2 over 1 is basically the definition of completely inverted moral instincts.
As for your "lives unworthy of life" comment, I love it how ostensible righties just can't help accusing lefties of being nazis, when leftism in it's current stage is most accurately described as the worship of the weak, the ugly and the stupid.
Of course I suspect our gap is even greater because opposition to euthanasia tends to be a terminal value in and of itself for fundamentalist types; with the horror stories being merely how you lobby people who do not share these. This is of course entirely fair, I just feel it should be mentioned.
(*) I use this phrasing ("slippery slope") reluctantly because I know well that there are agents actively working for the worst case version of euthanasia. A decent person must be willing to face the likely consequences of their actions, and not hide behind platitudes.
I actually agree with you entirely on the implausibility of success via conservative boycotts; I was addressing the implied discrepancy in degrees of concern. 1st, there's the domestic and personal versus foreign angle, then there is a secondary discrepancy in what success looks like. Were boycotts to succeed on the politics front, I think the world would be improved (this almost certainly won't happen). Given the state of much of Africa, I'm not sure boycotts would deliver the goal of improving life quality for the affected people, even if they worked. Those children in the mines, might be better off than in the alternative. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
Lepidus
1yr ago
Genocide is barbaric even in a time of war. Killing enemy soldiers is normal in war but a crime in peace, while an agreement is in place. You wish to apply the rules of peace and tell me I shouldn’t target enemy soldiers because that would make me just as bad as them. And of course if there was an agreement in place it would be an atrocity. But this agreement having been shredded by the enemy, we are in a state of war.
Yes, I anticipate your objection that that is what both sides would accuse the other side of. The thing about being an adult is you have to weigh the evidence and make a choice. At the very least if you abstain from making it, you should take the Scott Alexander route and admit you are doing it for your own good (TheMotte statement, Kolgomorov) instead of dressing it up as superior morality above the petty squabbles between left and right.
Who ended federalism (violation 1) and then overrode the legislature of the national population (violation 2)? Who unleashed violent actors to terrorise it’s enemies and cleanse them from urban life?
These are not at all hard questions.
Lepidus
1yr ago
So "95 year old grandma screaming in pain" became "persons who are not in danger of death" and then had to be rowed back to "but if you're only suffering from something like depression, we'll put a hold on that for a year or two" probably due to public pushback.
And I'm supposed to favour the alleged interests* of a infintesimal percentage of unproductive disordered strangers to have their decisions overriden over my own interest, and that of everyone I know and love to not end our lives in agony because???
How well do you think opiates control the pain of having fluid building up in your lungs so that you can't breath? What exactly do you think a "natural" death looks like?
Oh, he died in his sleep, you might say. But did he? Did the pain ripping through his chest shake him out of his final dream while he stared into the dark or did his brain merely confabulate a drowning, or burning within it?
Of course I don't expect these issues to matter much to you, just like a woke person's fetish for sacred diversity is entirely unaltered by the mass rape of girls in Rotterham. Both easily disgust the average person, and yet it seems we've been condemned to be ruled by zealots whose vision of morality is entirely unconnected to the reality of the human experience. In either case the Publics preferences are destined to loose most of the time.
I'll add Scott Alexander's poem, inspired by his own experience working in hospitals below:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the gurney that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sack of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene with cancer, bitter with the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues
My friend, you would not so pontificate
To reasoners beset by moral strife
The old lie: we must try to cultivate
A culture of life.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
Lepidus
1yr ago
Since Orwell is totally not overused, I'll submit the following quote.
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”
Even in the rare world of college educated young right wing women that this might attract; you are more likely to run into a Q-Anon Trumpist or a "How dare you suggest my 95 year old crippled gramma who spends every day screaming in pain should have the option of euthanasia" fundamentalist type. Women have always relied exclusively on their alliance with the social consensus to extract the resources and protection offered by others. This means that by definition there are not enough matches to go around for the loosing side. Now maybe men have overcompensated in their coyness about their political beliefs; leaving an avenue to be exploited, but most non-crazy right wing men are by definition going to loose.
That's the thing though, it's not a given you disagree any more man, that sentence is couched in an entire paragraph of agreeing.** Do we have to become them to beat them?** Is there really no path to the future which leverages the flourishing of human thought instead of its suppression? If that's the only choice we get - whose jackboot is crushing whose throat? - then fuck the whole enterprise.
The defense of beauty and truth is in and of itself superior to the defense of depravity. Your ?enemies? want a world in which the normalized castration of children is celebrated as the highest virtue. They are not even content with waiting for 'trans' children to reveal themselves to a doctor, but actively work to fill every medium with messages telling subsceptible girls that they might actually be boys. You could crucify every single one of them above an iq cutoff of 115; and it would still not be morally comparable.
I really don't get how people seemingly on the other side can find themselves uncertain about these things. I'm left to conclude that they must be missing some seemingly basic human experiences, like color blind people vs the rest of us*, except for beauty. I look at red and green and see this infinite chasm; you look at it and see slightly different shades of gray (or whatever), while the woke say they are the same or invert them. You are honest so you can point out the tiny difference between shades and I imagine you must be like me; but we might as well be of different species.
- I suppose the colour blind analogy might be off, in that I might be the outlier here, sure seems like it. Anyway, we all might aswell act in our natures and could never have done anything else. The one thing I can say for my side to a person like you is that, while both the woke and I are committed to mutual annihilation, i'm the only one who intends not to come after you when (or before) I'm done with them.
Lepidus
1yr ago
Not op, but children mining cobalt are not an existential threat to the west. Concern for them is purely charitable, and while I’d have no objections to a plan to re-colonise Africa, sterilise a good chunk of the adult population and take the kids out of the mines and put them in glorious well fed summer camps; in the current world boycotting mining companies… is pointless.
You’ve got to admit, out of the thousand versions of the post one might have predicted, one containing a segway into celebrating polish redneckism is genuinely unexpected. I for one enjoyed the counterpoint to dead internet theory.
Lepidus
1yr ago
A few moments ago, while looking for a quote by James Baldwin*, I turned to Chat GPT for help. I used the prompt, "...It describes his anger towards the white man and his interest in white women.""
It gave me the following quote:
"No black man has ever been able to seriously consider the white woman without having to grapple with the ancient myth of the wide-eyed, agile and demanding Eve, who offers him the poisoned apple of forbidden sexuality, the apple of his own destruction." - James Baldwin.
As far as I can tell this quote was fabricated wholesale. A God of words is being birthed, and conscious or not Ze will change the world entirely.
- This is the quote I was looking for:
"And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as that dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled..."
Lepidus
1yr ago
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I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do.
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(Obviously this is not to say that I want those people removed -- that sets a dangerous precedent because who decides?)
In any society containing modern progressives (ie. postwar ones), you don't exactly get a choice on the matter. These people represent enemy civilians at best and enemy soldiers at worst, in a zero sum war against your basic rights and interests - to stop half way at indifference is to declare the bizzare position of neutrality towards yourself.
I mean if I tell you, hey that pitbull is charging for your child - there's a gun in the car, I technically haven't made any policy prescriptions. Nonetheless, it's pretty obvious what basic widely shared moral intuitions demand that you do with those facts. This is why I bring up the emperor. In the real world, your emperor being deluded enough to fall for invisible clothes implies that him and/or his advisors need to be removed from power and there's no way around it.
The general atmosphere of seemingly paranoid fear among the blue tribe is totally legitimate. In this country, the kulaks never lost their guns and blue tribe subjected millions of their children and it's own (Columbia students ride the subway too) to disgusting conditions... for nothing. What is mind-boggling for me, having recently realized what this is in fact what we were doing and defected to the other side is finding that the dog-whistles we were worried about weren't dog whistles at all, and that there are only marginal elements in the red world interested in doing anything about it's subjection.
Committed leftists tend to use a reasoning process which finds the at very least plausible, logical extrapolation of a particular position and see if it violates any well established sacred values. They then declare it illegitimate if it does, and by extension declare illegitimate anyone who might raise it. Ex: If X is claiming blacks are unequal, and he's not claiming that this is the result of white actions --> there must be something fundamentally flawed with black people. People claiming there are fundamental flaws with black people, and by extension that race is a useful proxy for eliminating flawed traits must be racists. There are obvious discrepancies in outcomes. QED: Conservatives are racists. QED: Conservatives are evil and not legitimate critics, they are racists.
It's the Emperor's new clothes, if no one was allowed to mention the nakedness of the emperor and some people had convinced themselves they weren't alluding to it even when they obviously were. Apologies for the spelling errors, I'm drunk.
Lepidus
1yr ago
"...fresh new wave of Twitter excitementspew". Don't worry it's only trivial figures like VAN JONES, at insignificant news outlets like CNN running this narrative.
Self-deleted original response which expressed the view that cartoonish red tribe's mockery of blue tribe intelligence is seriously challenged by the reality of blue tribe's basically unchallenged rule over red tribe. I apologize for it's boo ?ingroup but not really ingroup...? nature.
Ever wonder how the world's bluest person starts engaging with reactionary thought and HBD honestly? It's the power of (strike)rationality(strike) volunteering in Haiti and seeing every western institution replicated in cargo cult form.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150407223525/http://squid314.livejournal.com/297579.html
Excerpt:
"It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable."
The Indigenous populations of the Americans came primarily from Asian populations around 18K years ago who underwent one hell of a trek. Funnily enough, 2 day old Navajo and Japanese babies show similar responses on the cloth over nose cognitive test (near complete docility) which would be extremely abnormal in caucasians. The separation between Africans and every other group is over 50K years. Given the standard theory that we all came out of Africa, it makes intuitive sense for the least cognitively capable members of our species to be the ones that didn't make it elsewhere. The Saharan desert is not exactly tolerant of the unintelligent.
Evidence for the horribly run nature of African societies, or malnutritution and parasite load doesn't exactly counter the validity of the genetic hypothesis. All of these are highly indiscriminate, killing the smart at similar rates to the stupid. You need particular conditions for selection pressures to favour intelligence over the simpler traits they might favour (speed, muscle, and high testosterone for example). Note that these are all areas where Africans excel, with African infants showing greater muscle control at birth than caucasians or asians (but not aboriginals).
Lepidus
1yr ago
It's actually pretty simple. The early liberal position was that blacks could and would reach equality with whites after the removal of discrimination and imposition of temporary positive discrimination. While some screwups were made early on - In the 90s, the Clintons and Joe Biden joined black leaders in pushing mandatory minimums and heavy law enforcement in black neighbourhoods, under the theory that neglect, tolerance of criminality, and retrograde welfare policies were the form of the racism that was keeping blacks down. And yet, inequality while reduced, wasn't fixed.
Blacks born to families making 200K were getting SAT scores equal to whites in families making 20K. The children of rich blacks were still going to jail at rates comparable to poor whites. At this point liberals could either:
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Choose to tolerate a world in which the vast majority of blacks, being judged by their actual abilities, would be found unequal to whites.
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Upgrade positive discrimination into pure anti-white racial hatred, crushing the white kulaks, taking their resources and representation in elite institutions away and giving these to blacks. Meanwhile, tar every positive white trait and figure as inherently evil (objectivity is white supremacy), while praising their black counterparts.
I don't need to mention which one they chose.
Qualifier: While Blacks are near the top of the totem pole, they are often outcompeted by other members of the Democratic coalition, which it needs to guarantee it's permanent power. Nonetheless, the fractures aren't as severe as anticipated. Latinos don't exactly like blacks, but they can deal with them through extra-political means while allying with them to continue squeezing whites.
"...their primary loyalty (if one can call it that) is to politics."
If it was, they'd take up a Bill Clinton style Law and Order campaign and pare it with at least making noises about immigration while pursuing extreme wealth redistribution and of course taking their cut at every step of the way. But more intuitively, do you think Dems are pushing trans kids because they think it polls well?
How, as our resident Christian, is it so hard for you to understand that people might be genuinely and unselfishly committed to an evil vision, for it's own sake.
Lepidus
1yr ago
Well, I can only say that my personal experiences with American (as opposed to immigrant) blacks have been pretty universally hostile and this was before I had any racist tendences, but I guess personal experiences or tolerance must vary. Thank you for your anecdote.
''' Black criminals are not an existential threat to you or your family. Mostly they are a threat to each other, and to a lesser extent other blacks and the blues who live around them. If you live in a bad neighborhood, move."'
- More whites are victimized by blacks than blacks are. Note that given the rates of residential segregation, which are maintained by whites spending something like a third of their income in bidding wars to price out blacks, this often involves them leaving their neighbourhoods to get us. True most lethal victims of black violence tend to be black, but do you really think this is the only justifiable concern when it comes to walking the streets safely? Source: NCVS 2021 - https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf.
Yes, most whites in proximity to black violence tend to be blues, but that's because most people who haven't fled the big cities already are blues. Should I not have the right to live in the (severely declining) centers of our civilization if I want to be safe?
Lepidus
1yr ago
That's entirely fair of you. I was mildly hesitant to post them, but if there were going to be passionate undiplomatic condemnations I figured the pro-Bostrom camp could use the psychological reinforcement of knowing that there were people there who passionately hated woke entryists.
Lepidus
1yr ago
''' And some clear defenses of Bostrom are downvoted to hell – including your ones. '''
Yeah, for a brief moment I was shocked to see that I had actually reached +7 and +10 on what were hardly diplomatic comments but I guess the Bostrom people were temporarily out in full force. I'm now DEEPLY in the negatives as I had previously expected.
Nonetheless, I 'd be shocked to find a single community with any contingent of Lefties outside of Less Wrong with a stronger pro-Bostrom faction. I haven't given up hope entirely yet. I'll consider this a win if Bostrom doesn't grovel (at least not again) and appears in any major community events within the next year.
And yes, women's tears are once again conquering the marketplace of ideas.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-marketplace
See this prior exchange.
https://www.themotte.org/post/328/smallscale-question-sunday-for-january-22/56816?context=8#context
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