Sunshine
8mo ago
As far as I can tell this is exactly what Israel is trying to do with the whole "We're going to flatten northern Gaze, so everyone who lives there should grab whatever they can carry and walk south" strategy.
Gaza is dense and Israel is small. I don't think there's physically enough room to sequester the Gazans in isolated reservations. That strategy worked for the Americans with the Indians, but America is huge and full of open space. The most effective tool of separation is a hundred miles of empty land, populated by nothing but rodents and without so much as a shed to hide behind.
If Israel had their own equivalent of Utah in which to banish their problematic religious nuts, they wouldn't have this problem.
Sunshine
8mo ago
I agree with your premise but I disagree with your conclusion. I think it's too far of a jump to say this:
what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society
The fundamental flaw with any line of reasoning that puts agency into "educational and social institutions" is that it assumes way too much competence from those "educational and social institutions." The administrators in charge of school boards and government departments do not comb the web to identify thought-patterns that might move society in a dangerous dangerous direction so they can neutralize them with insidious social engineering campaigns. The administrators in charge of school boards and government departments read their Facebook feeds and uncritically absorb whatever their (overwhelmingly left-wing) social circles are talking about.
Accept this premise: Andrew Tate is a Bad Influence on Young Men.
Put five 30-60 year old out of touch midwits in a room and tell them to brainstorm a solution. By 'solution,' what you actually mean is some vaguely pro-social program you can announce to make it seem like you're doing something - the question of whether the problem can be solved never comes up. Also unmentioned are the question of whether the framing of the problem is useful, or even whether the problem exists in the first place. The metric of success is the amount of positive attention generated divided by the cost of the program - or likes/dollar, if you prefer.
What you'll get is something like, "Let's make our own influencer to be a positive influence and counter out the negative influence."
A lot of people are saying that Google's engineers must be pretty stupid not to have noticed this before release.
What if they aren't? What if they did this on purpose?
I propose a Straussian reading of this whole affair. Google engineers who have a problem with wokeness can't speak out against it. The only acceptable criticism is the 50-Stalins criticism, that we haven't gone far enough, that we need more wokeness. So I think this is a 50-Stalins-style protest. I think it's a deliberate act of accelerationism to highlight the absurdity of trying to apply this style of heavy handed censorship to AI.
I think Google's engineers are protesting their leadership by giving them exactly what they asked for, and everything that comes with it.
Sunshine
9mo ago
Fans can switch to a better show if they don't like the one they're watching, but PR executives and social media managers have to find some way to defend whatever show they work for.
Accusing your critics of being some form of -ist is just another part of the standard playbook now. No sane company would shy away from using this highly effective tactic just because the show they're defending is actually bad.
Idpol can defend a bad position just as well as it can defend a good position. Is it any wonder that so many people with indefensible positions resort to idpol?
Sunshine
9mo ago
Slavery was abolished in England in the 12th century, replaced by serfdom, and then Elizabeth I freed the serfs in 1574. Some English people practiced slavery outside of England but on the island itself there was no institution of slavery. It's clearly not a purely technological issue.
Slave plantations are less efficient than small farmers. Slavery is just a way of giving the rich a larger share of the wealth at the cost of stifling economic growth.
Sunshine
10mo ago
I don't think the ancestral homeland part actually matters. What matters is just whether someone is willing to take them in.
If Israel had existed at the time, the worst of the Holocaust probably could have been averted, because it is true that the countries of the world refused to accept the Jews. But the flipside of that is that if there had been any country willing to take them the worst of the Holocaust could have been avoided. It didn't have to be Israel.
And if any country had taken them, that country would probably be more powerful in the present day as a result. Let's say all the Ashkenazis who would have settled in Israel all immigrated to Canada (historically some tried this and were turned away). Today Israel has a population of only 9 million, and many of them aren't descended from Holocaust survivors. You could pretty comfortably put all of Israel inside Canada without bothering anyone. Israel and the Canadian province of Quebec have about the same population, but Quebec is 70 times the size of Israel. Canada's population would be about 10-20% higher today.
This feels like an argument for having open borders, but it's not. Is it even a good thing to live in a country with a higher population? Actually, my main point is just that it doesn't have to be your ancestral homeland. What matters is that any country is willing to take the refugees in.
Sunshine
1yr ago
No. Again, hate is bad. Hate does not help you make good decisions, and hatred-based law enforcement mechanisms are not known for their efficiency. The appropriate angle to approach social engineering problems like "How do we stop people from committing fraud and/or murder in the manner that gets us the best value for our tax dollars," is heartless rationality, not hatred.
Hatred is for suckers. It makes you easy to manipulate and prone to error.
Sunshine
1yr ago
I have no dog in this fight, but I don't think we should keep anything "highly hated." Hate is a bad thing. I think that there is probably an optimal level of social scorn we should direct towards pedophiles in order to minimize the amount of pedophilia in the world, and I think we should calculate that amount rather than just go nuts and hope for the best.
My best guess is that the target should be just enough scorn to dissuade them from committing crimes, but not so much scorn that we dissuade them from seeking professional help. I'm reasonably confident we've overshot the mark. It's quite possible that a modest reduction in hatred directed at pedophiles would actually result in fewer children being molested.
I think this is a false equivalence. Crime stats are about broad groups, not individuals (e.g. "Black men in America"). Even if you are a black man in America with a lived experience, it is impossible to have the lived experience of all black men in America as a collective whole. Thus, you can use lived experience to say "I have been victimized by a police officer," and most reasonable people would accept that, but you cannot use lived experience to say "all black men are victimized by all police officers."
But inflation is about the experience of individuals, not groups. No one is out there saying that inflation disproportionately affects Muslims because the CPI is racist (OK I'm sure someone somewhere is saying that, but I don't care.) A single individual can experience the effects of inflation on their personal food budget without needing to make any claims about the experiences of others. An individual saying "food costs more than it used to" is exactly what inflation is, and exactly what inflation statistics are supposed to measure. If the statistics don't match the experience, then the statistics are wrong.
Moreover, the same government agencies that purport to measure inflation have a pretty big incentive to say that inflation isn't a problem, since inflation reflects badly on the government that signs their paychecks. Not only would we expect them to downplay inflation, we've watched them do it in real time with claims about inflation* being low where inflation* is calculated to exclude food, rent, and education.
Sunshine
1yr ago
I can't reply to the deleted post, so I'll reply to this instead: What is the deal with the recent trend of top-level posts being posted and then immediately deleted?
Sunshine
1yr ago
He can't walk off and set up his own alternate, traditional diocese.
Why not? There have been multiple competing Popes at the same time before.
Antipope 2023.
Sunshine
1yr ago
I take 'NPC' to mean
I don't really agree with your assessment of the minimum deal for women. The minimum deal cannot be "get married" in a world where so many women are single mothers.
Let's leave aside the world of profoundly bad luck outside the scope of what might happen to someone posting on this site, like being drafted into war or dying of leukemia at age 10. I'm just going to look at fairly common Anglosphere life-paths.
A whole bunch of the women who I went to high school with are now single mothers working menial jobs. They work hard all day, then they come home to their kids and work some more. That sounds like a really bad deal to me. Now, you could argue that this could just as easily happen to a man who has kids young and gets roped into paying child support for 18 years. True enough. I could quibble that men are more likely to skip out, or that childcare is harder than child support, or that getting someone else pregnant is a lot harder than getting pregnant so you have a lot more time to reconsider your life choices, but fair enough.
A whole bunch more went into dumb low-paying fields. Their mentors encouraged them to do what they love, hormones told them that what they love is teaching or early childhood education, and now they're precariously employed substitute teachers making barely more than minimum wage. There was a girl who I went to highschool with who was neck-and-neck with me for grades, competing with me for awards and the like. All of her talents are now going to waste in a dead-end job. I am a software engineer. The fact that my teachers and peers were less encouraging to me than her is probably a contributing factor to the fact that I didn't sleepwalk myself into a bad decision like she did. I would not trade places with her today.
You could say that both of these are freely made decisions and therefore don't count. Maybe. But there's a weird interplay here. Yes, if women and men were both perfectly rational robots, being a woman would be an advantage. But humans are not perfectly rational robots. Women, especially young women, seem much more inclined to fall for misguided orthodoxy, like going into debt for a Gender Studies degree and hoping it all works out in the end (a lot of people point out that women go to college more, few mention that this is often not to their benefit).
Honestly, I would not want much of the "help" that women get from the various orthodox authorities. They do not have their patients' best interests at heart.
For men, the roads to Heaven and Hell are both overgrown with thistles and guarded by lions. For women, the road to Heaven might be slightly easier than for men, but the road to Hell is paved, icy, and all downhill. The absolute bottom may be lower for men, but women can literally screw themselves out of a fulfilling life at age 18 in under an hour. At least army recruiters can't have you sign the contract while you're drunk.
Caesar was a popular general who'd spent the last decade plundering Western Europe and enslaving Gauls by the thousand. He was the richest man in all of Rome, but that doesn't even do it justice because he was rich beyond modern comprehension. As the general who'd conquered all of what is now France, about 20% of the spoils of the Gallic wars went straight into his pocket. His army was loyal to him above the Republic because he had made them all rich, too. Some of the armies the Republic sent against him defected to his side because they were jealous of how rich Caesar's legions were. He once bribed a legion by promising to give each man his own Gallic slave. When the Senate turned on him he was in the process of serving as the governor of three provinces for a whopping ten-year term, which he was 7-8 years into. To put that in perspective, those three provinces that Caesar was ruling over were: all of modern France, a big chunk of what is now northern Italy, and a big chunk of the Balkans.
Trump doesn't even have an army, let alone an army comparable to the one that answers to the President. He isn't in a position of any political or military power, unlike Caesar who was a proconsul and therefore both a governor and general. He isn't even particularly rich. The comparison just isn't there. What's he going to do, defeat the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a set piece battle? Him and what army?
Sunshine
1yr ago
The whole idea of there being groups is smuggling in so many assumptions, though.
Consider this toy example: The US population is 10% black descended from slaves captured from central Africa and 3% first-generation-immigrant black descended from the coastal warlords who enslaved the previous group (fake numbers I just made up). I, the official making the statistics, invent the concept of "black people" and decide that both the slave-descendents and the warlord-descendents are "black people." Since 13% of the population are "black people," I make sure that Harvard consists of 13% warlord-descended immigrant elites and 0% slave-descended locals. The slave-descended black people now have "representation," but the people representing them are the descendents of the people who enslaved their ancestors. This is supposed to help make up for the fact that their ancestors were enslaved.
Consider this other toy example: Atlantis contains many immigrants from countries around the Atlantic. 20% of the population of Atlantis are "British" Immigrants - 5% Irish, 5% Scottish, 5% Welsh, and 5% English. For the board of directors of my hedge fund, which has 10 members, I decide that 20% should be "British" so that there will be "representation." I choose the English son of the CEO of Lloyd's of London and the English daughter of famous football player David Beckham and famous musician Posh Spice. Are the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish "represented" by these "British" members of the board of directors? Are the English even represented by these two millionaires descended from other millionaires?
I say no. There is no such thing as British people. There is no such thing as black people. There is no such thing as white people. I would argue that there is such a thing as Jews, and in order to get that kind of reality into any of these other groups you need to slice them at least as finely as you slice the Jews. At this zoom level you'll find many groups that are just as overrepresented as Jews are. You'll discover that 1% of highly-connected families have almost all the power, and only some of those 1% of families are Jewish. The rest are "white" (or "Chinese") and smuggle their power in by unfairly grouping themselves with millions of random shmucks with whom they have nothing in common except skin colour.
Sunshine
1yr ago
Well Jewish people tend to concentrate into a few cities, such as New York and Washington DC, so you would want to compare Washington DC to one of the other cities that contain large numbers of Jewish people. I expect that an AP math class in Beijing won't have very many Jews, for example. Cities that you could compare it to include Philadelphia, LA, Boston, and Chicago, all of which I'm sure have the expected demographics in their AP math classes.
Sunshine
1yr ago
The idea that any given demographic should have the same number of slots in any given position of power based on their representation in the overall population is dumb, whether you're talking about Jews or blacks.
Jews aren't overrepresented, they're just represented. White people may make up a majority of the USA population, but a big chunk of those are useless or stupid and so don't count. If you look at an AP math class in New York and compare that to the makeup of White House staffers, you'll see a more realistic comparison of Jews to whites.
White people and Jews are not the same kind of race. They're wholly different zoom levels, different layers on the cladistic tree of humanity. If white people are a kingdom then Jews are a genus. Jews have way more in common with the average Jew than whites have with the average whites. Whites include people from all corners of Europe in the same category for some stupid reason, Jews only count a single insular subgroup. If Jews are a race, then Anglo-Americans descended from people who lived in Ulster but aren't descended from Irish stock should also be a race. And if those Anglo-Hibernian Americans are counted as their own race, you will see a truly shocking overrepresentation among US Presidents (shocking if you assume that every European ethnicity should be equally likely to be President, which is a weird assumption).
Groups are different. White House staffers are not recruited by lottery. It is normal for their racial makeup to be biased one way or another by the makeup of the sorts of people who would apply for those positions. Also "white people" are a fever dream invented by racist nutjobs and everyone needs to stop pretending that "white people" exist. They don't.
Sunshine
1yr ago
I think the concept of government is, like, melting. It used to be oriented around war, but wars are getting rarer and governments are getting disoriented now that they've lost their original reason to exist. Now they're just power for power's sake, unmoored from anything, floundering for a purpose and settling on something between welfare state and propaganda state.
They're not going to evolve into anything concrete because evolution relies on evolutionary pressure, of which there is none. Modern governments don't die they just change hands to whoever is crazy enough to accept unlimited responsibility in exchange for very little power. They'll just flail around forever, accomplishing nothing, sustained by the free energy in the political environment.
I'd like to point out that in a lawless world of all-against-all OP would probably win a fight against any insane pauper, no matter how burly or experienced with violence. All he would need to do is buy a gun and shoot anyone who tries to get close to him. The homeless man probably can't afford a gun and ammunition.
The advantage of people who are good at one-on-one violence is artificial. It's created by a society that punishes people who win fights by inflicting deadly injury, but doesn't punish people who harass with low-level violence and intimidation.
In every previous era of our species, the military state of the art favored social deadly force over antisocial harassment. Two hundred years ago that dancer would have been sent to a prison or workhouse to die a miserable death. Five hundred years ago he would have been hanged. Two thousand years ago he would have been enslaved by the state and worked to death in a silver mine. Ten thousand years ago a gang of 4-10 men would have encountered him, perceived him as a threat, and thrown rocks at him until he died.
This man's ability to have any power at all in a public setting has nothing to do with his strength and everything to do with our mercy.
Sunshine
1yr ago
As a rule of thumb, prices don't go down. Inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply. In this case it's caused by the fact that a number of major governments decided to spend several years printing money like there was no tomorrow, and then tomorrow came. The only way to undo that would be to round up all the money they printed and destroy it. They would never do that, so it won't happen.
If inflation stabilizes, wages might eventually rise to match prices.
Marrying a Roman consul to their queen and putting Mark Antony's children on the thrones of all the neighbouring kingdoms would have solidified Roman rule over Egypt. If Egypt had become the lynchpin of Roman rule over the East as Antony intended, that would have meant that Rome would have controlled the East by controlling Egypt - note the part where Egypt gets to be controlled by Rome, not rise to become a co-equal partner. I don't think cementing your overlord's control over your kingdom is normally characterized as "[becoming] the eastern dominant kingdom." The dominant power was Rome. There are no points for being best-in-your-category.
Cleopatra's brother Ptolemy ('s scheming advisors) tried to pull away from Rome and exercise more independence - or at least more obstinance. Cleopatra smuggled herself into the palace and presented herself to Caesar as a more pliable alternative ruler, if he would just put her on the throne. Caesar had Ptolemy put to death and installed Cleopatra as queen. After Caesar died she picked up where she left off with Mark Antony, but that ended in disaster and she was deposed and committed suicide, after which Rome not only annexed Egypt but took it as the personal possession of the Emperor.
Every step she took led to less power for Egypt and more for Rome. Her path ended in the annexation of her kingdom and the end of her dynasty. Again, not seeing it.
Sunshine
1yr ago
The idea that Cleopatra had Mark Antony wrapped around her little finger was literally a lie that Augustus made up to justify starting yet another civil war. It was important to frame it as a war against that foreign seductress, Cleopatra, rather than what it actually was, a civil war between the two most powerful men in Rome for control of the whole empire (again).
The plan to put Cleopatra's children on the thrones of the East (the "donations of Alexandria") was an administrative strategy that Antony came up with to stabilize the eastern empire by centralizing power in Egypt. It wasn't some wicked scheme of Cleopatra's to usurp Rome.
Sunshine
1yr ago
It was Lydia who ran off with Mr. Wickham, not Kitty. Lydia married Mr. Wickham, Kitty married a clergyman, Mary married a law clerk at her uncle's firm, Elizabeth married Mr. Darcy, and Jane married Mr. Bingley.
The USA is not a hive mind, and it is possible to question election results without descending into anarchy. Who is 'we' in this "Should we"? Who is the final judge as to whether an election has "cleared the threshold to being authentic"?
These are not nitpicks. In ancient Rome, the person who decided whether elections were legitimate were the outgoing consuls for that year (consuls are like co-presidents who serve for one year terms, Rome had two). Pompey and Crassus were the consuls overseeing the elections for 55 BCE. When it looked like one of Pompey's enemies would win his election, Pompey would suddenly discover bad omens and cancel the vote. Then his men would go around the voting pens having 'discussions' with people, and when the vote resumed the outcome would be the way Pompey wanted it to be. This wasn't technically illegal. Consuls did have the right to cancel public events when the omens were bad. A partisan in ancient Rome could argue that there was nothing fraudulent about the outcomes of those elections.
A few years later, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched an army into Rome.
Not long after that, Pompey was beheaded in Egypt.
Not long after that, Julius Caesar was assassinated on the floor of the Senate.
Not long after that, a special election was called. A centurion stood at the gate of Rome and said, "If the Senate will not make Octavian* a consul, this will," resting a hand on the hilt of his sword.**
A few years after that Octavian became Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome. So it goes.
Octavian wasn't legally old enough to run for consul, but that didn't mean anything anymore. The laws that were supposed to guarantee fair elections had been destroyed in spirit. Elections weren't fair. Given that, who can blame the centurion for demanding his own brand of fairness? Julius Caesar was, to the thousands of men who served him, their man in Rome. He was the only person they could trust to stand up for their interests. The Senate tried to put him on trial for treason, rewrote laws to stop him from running for office, and ultimately assassinated him. Who can blame the centurion for doing with the sword what the Senate had already been doing for years with paper-thin legal justifications, and ignoring Republican tradition to put his picked man into office?
Thus the Roman Republic was destroyed and the Roman Empire created in its place.
*By this point Gaius Octavius had legally changed his name to Gaius Julius Caesar, but we call him Octavian to avoid confusing him with his more famous uncle. We could just as easily call him Caesar II, though. It does highlight the fact that, after the Senate assassinated Caesar, Caesar's army returned to Rome with another Caesar to replace him.
**This exchange probably didn't actually happen. Ancient historians tended to make up speeches and conversations to highlight important events.
I don't agree with the Feral Aryan Blonde hypothesis, but I think you're missing a few key points.
Because the side that broke first would be ridden down and slaughtered, the survivors sold into slavery. In ancient warfare the vast majority of casualties were suffered in the rout, not in the battle. If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.
But not women. When the men are all wiped out and the women are hauled back to be second wives to the victors, they still reproduce. If anything, women are selected for being more cowardly. The most effective action for a woman in war is to calculate the best moment to flee or surrender to maximize her own chance of survival. The only time physical courage will increase a woman's reproductive fitness is if she has to protect her baby from a mountain lion, and that didn't happen very often after we wiped out the megafauna.
Courage among mammals is an essentially male phenomenon to increase reproductive fitness at the cost of safety. From an evolutionary standpoint that's an easy trade. Of course, in modern times that trend will naturally reverse. In a post-Malthusian world, courage is now anti-correlated with reproductive success. Modern wars are won by artillery from hundreds of miles away.
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