SwordOfOccam
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User ID: 2777
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who does not benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit
You lumping together those three categories and then saying they all are detrimental towards individual merit remains baffling given the arguments made by people in this very forum using HBD to defend individual merit against idpol and intersectionality.
Do you agree affirmative action hurts individual merit?
Do you agree HBD awareness hurts affirmative action?
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
See also: Reality Winner, Private Manning.
The two biggest leaks in the last few decades were both ideologically motivated, as were many if not most during the Cold War.
basically nothing happened after he blew the whistle.
Well that’s because he (and Manning) were emotionally unstable idiots who thought they had found some major malfeasance and then leaked massive amounts of data not actually showing that.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
I don't know precisely how you could balance out the interest of "we are a clandestine organization that needs to operate with minimal exposure to the public and maximal discretion to act without immediate accountability" and "there needs to be someone NOT beholden to the organization keeping an eye on us to jerk the reins when we misbehave."
The US IC falls under the Executive Branch. There are various layers of internal overseers, but ultimately it is congressional and judicial oversight that checks the IC or any other Executive Branch entity. The agencies have consistent incentives to keep the president happy because he’s the boss, congress happy because they pass the budgets, the courts happy because they sign off on warrants, and the US public happy because they elect and influence the first two branches directly.
The post you link to focuses on elected officials, which is a very different kettle of fish from career civil servants, the uniformed services, and contractor worker bees.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Having a perfect record on stopping terrorism is not realistic, though in the years since 9/11 the track record is a lot better than most people would have predicted.
While the IC is not blameless for the invasion of Iraq, the vast majority of the blame is on the Bush admin for cherry picking and massaging reporting to support their preconceived notions soon after the intelligence failures of 9/11. Nobody had definitive evidence Saddam didn’t have a WMD program and the general prior was that he did have something because he sure did have one previously.
In contrast, the US demonstrating publicly it had evidence of the Russian invasion and insight into Putin’s inner circle is a basically unprecedented move because of the risk it posed to sources and methods.
Of course, as you point out, successful intelligence by definition being covert does not leave any footprint, whereas intelligence failures are public owing to the consequences of said failure.
It’s funny you say this when upthread someone makes the point that the IC can cover up its failures. The reality is that either can be the case, though on average I think successes are less likely to be disclosed in near-real time.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
I don't know how US counterintel is dealing with this problem. Presumably, they could choose to simply deny clearances to folks who have too much family that they are too close with back in China. Alternatively, they could still grant those clearances, yet try to flag those relationships as being of sufficient concern for some sort of extra monitoring.
That sums it up yeah. It’s not a secret. You can google getting a clearance with foreign associations and learn the basics.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
For B, compared to whom?
Feels like saying “the US military isn’t very good at the moment” or “the US economy isn’t very good at the moment.”
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
but that's really more of a legal matter than a religious matter anyway.
That’s a modern and secular sentiment that has no place in sharia, er, Christian Nationalism.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Quibbling about what “air” is and whether it exists in the same way as phlogiston, and then bringing up Kant and positivism, is almost a parody of trying to avoid the obvious point that if we suck all the air out of your lungs or put you in a room without oxygen you will die, 100% of the time. By “metaphysical” you seem to mean “made up and you can’t disprove it with your wimpy naturalism.”
In contrast, divine power resists all attempts to study it in the same way Bigfoot eludes capture and Santa avoids showing up on radar. People do try though.
It’s very brave to bring up falsifiability as a standard when religious claims almost always avoid it. Religious faith and reason cannot be reconciled because the former is explicitly based on believing things without sufficient evidence as a virtue. “We don’t have demonstrable evidence and that’s a feature, not a bug.”
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Yeah, but this is better explained by “traditionalism” getting some key things right that we’ve moved too far away from in modern society. The religious can say “we told you so” on some current societal ill, but that’s picking winners and ignoring losers on the track record of religion overall on any given issue.
Also you have to consider that the progressivism most of us here strongly dislike is highly compatible with certain strains of religion, and indeed its worse aspects are directly comparable to those of a religion (so to with Marxism and other ideologies that seek power beyond the level of their epistemology).
Religion being so kooky while it tries to defend traditionalism is arguably making it harder for secular traditionalism to appeal to the youths. See also: the Republican Party.
The supposed pragmatic benefits of religion (typically cherry-picked to hell) are not very relevant to the epistemic status.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Having read your linked thread, it seems you are a Mormon.
Tl;dr: Proper epistemology can save you 10% of your lifetime earnings (and more!) if you let it.
BLUF: Independently researching and leaving Mormonism was the hardest intellectual/emotional thing I’ve ever done. Trapped priors, anchor beliefs, upbringing and social pressure all make it very challenging, because you have been emotionally conditioned to perform confirmation bias to develop a testimony since before you could talk, and to avoid “antimormon” sources and evidence (the very opposite of an isolated demand for rigor). Try pretending you were born a Muslim or a Buddhist and consider how this version of you would be, religiously. Would you end up leaving your childhood faith and somehow finding Mormonism?
I gotta say, even by Mormon standards, those “answered prayer” stories are weak sauce.
“I was dealing with a problem, I prayed real hard for help, and so the omnipotent creator of the universe stretched forth his finger to help me find my keys” is a classic in the genre, but brings up the issue of why the power of prayer is seemingly so limited to things like not getting lost in the woods, healing from an illness, or encountering your ex, instead of solving larger-scale problems. God is so powerful, but his preference to work in mysterious ways really gets in the way of effectiveness.
“You are the easiest person to fool” and so “Bayesian” “analysis” of your prayer outcomes is just so remarkably divorced from a worldview based on keeping beliefs proportional to evidence (the antithesis of “faith”). Try running an experiment at scale on say prayer/faith healing at hospitals and then we can talk about Bayesian analysis. Or provide concrete evidence of a soul/The Spirit.
My favorite thing is that Joseph Smith claimed he possessed gold plates and other ancient artifacts, like a sword from the old world, and couldn’t just produce them as evidence. He had them, just take his word for it. He even had “witnesses” make formal claims they saw them (with their “spiritual eyes” as it turns out), and yet he wouldn’t let say outside experts examine them.
Strange way to go about establishing credibility. “I’ll let you see the relics but only if you already believe me.” It’s a level of credulity most children won’t demonstrate—Santa at least does provide presents.
Mormonism has no way to reconcile evolution, the archeology and genetics of the Americas, and the conspicuous lack of evidence of living prophetic power with its claims and doctrine—to a unique or stronger degree than trad Christianity, due to literal claims made by the Book of Mormon and early prophets. The apologists try to fit various camels through needles here, but it usually means contradicting claims and doctrine set forth by older prophets, which isn’t exactly good for establishing credibility. Early Mormon sausage making is just too well-documented for most moderns to accept, and Mormonism’s plunging conversion rate shows it.
Of course, the modem LDS church can’t settle the issue and make me look foolish because the plates and certain other artifacts were turned over to an angel. Tellingly, the one sacred relic the church does possess is a regular old seer stone, which was mostly ignored until recent times and is a point of controversy regarding exactly how it was the “translation” was done by Smith (it mostly did not involve looking at the plates, though most pictures depict it that way).
It’s a preposterous situation that would not survive scrutiny today (at any real scale), but people today—many of them very intelligent—can pretend it was a reasonable thing for a prophet of god to do in 1830 or so because they were raised believing it.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
You have upset the hive mind and will be downvoted accordingly.
When Trace split off I kinda thought he was being a pansy. But now I kind of get it. I’m pretty right-wing these days on a lot of issues, and get upvoted when I express such sentiments. But defending the left at all from unfair accusations or criticizing the right at all tends to bring a lot of downvotes.
I think we are a bit right of a sweet spot to avoid a groupthink spiral.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
If you don’t have a clearance the scenarios previously discussed wouldn’t apply to you.
Worrying about a progressive surveillance state unbanking and imprisoning you is worrisome if present trends continue (and Europe already does this at times for speech), but the Jan 6 mostly peaceful insurrectionists did about the dumbest thing possible in putting a giant red target on their backs for the feds to go after.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
There are an abnormal amount of rich people in government and intelligence that were not rich when they started.
Are there? How do you know? Are you including elected officials in this group?
The rate of hard corruption (e.g. outright bribery) in the US is not zero, but it’s pretty low.
One reason it’s low is that we have real competition between two major parties who share and switch off power, and always have an incentive to nail the opposing side for violations.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
There are over one million people with clearances.
Chinese robbers and all that.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
You strike me as incapable of passing an ITT for the Motters here you argue with because you consistently fail to engage the points being made and instead make outlandish allegations.
Which part do you disagree with here?
(Note that these are descriptive statements. The normative implications are a distinct issue.)
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IQ is real and measurable.
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IQ correlates positively with a wide range of life outcomes, such as income and job performance.
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IQ is significantly heritable, as e.g. height is.
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Similar to height, genes set potential, and environment can prevent reaching it via e.g. malnutrition or head trauma or being raised by wolves.
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There is a longstanding achievement gap on IQ between populations. A common ordering in a US context is Ashkenazi Jews > East Asians > Whites > Hispanics > Blacks.
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Evidence exists that the differences in 5 cannot solely be explained by environment, and so, as with height, there seems to be a genetic difference between certain populations, on average.
Blank statists deny most or all of these. White supremacists tend to dislike the order represented in 5. Smart people trying to stay out of trouble definitely stay well clear of 6 and even 5 is dangerous to acknowledge (despite the issue being the whole point of affirmative action).
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Yeah I think you’re right about the micromanagement of truckers (and other areas with ubiquitous monitoring. We already have cheap cameras/trackers/recorders and now AI can make analyzing the data cheap too. Privacy will be so very dead in most areas of life/work soon.)
The deregulation in the 70s was more about competition between firms.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
On average, yes.
But major counter examples exist. Trucking, airlines, and beer all got significantly deregulated. We are coming up on a century past the New Deal, and a lot of big gov overreach peaked in the 60s and then Carter started the neoliberal turn.
Housing is perhaps reaching a turning point as Blue cities/states face reality that zoning is bad/racist. Not sure if building infra is going to improve in that left-on-left fight over green energy/rail vs. environmentalism.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
You’re conflating “having beliefs that appear the same” with “the same people.”
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
DoJ is traditionally quite independent of the presidential administration. Biden doesn’t make prosecutorial decisions.
Any federal prosecution of J6 peaceful protesters and Trump was going to happen under any Dem, because federal prosecutors have independence, and so it’s not evidence against Biden being moderate relative to his peers.
Also Biden is also a moderate relative to his peers on the border.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
I’m not a progressive so you don’t need to convince me.
As you can see from looking around, putting a thumb on the scale in their favour just leads them to believe their own hype and demand more and more. They are ironically too stupid to understand that they didn't get where they are through merit at all.
Keep in mind the real demand signal frequently comes from well-off do gooders, who on average are quite intelligent, in the US at least. The underclass doesn’t have political power.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Well the progressive worldview is exactly the opposite.
We should help the most needy the most. (Marxists and Christians of the world, unite!)
The low value proposition is the high value morality.
(For the record, people can and do hold these views without being a blank statist. Freddie deBoer, for example.)
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Why are you failing to understand that the race-blind meritocracy we have tried ends with predictable racial disparities, which leads to DEI to combat “systemic racism”?
Most of the posters I see here support race-blind individualism and recognize that the hereditarian reality will have to be acknowledged such that “systemic racism” won’t move elites and institutions to jettison the meritocracy.
Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, most of us here want individual assessments of merit, not race-based discrimination.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
The self-reports from the polling I linked to above shows people changed their minds most from exposure to the gays, not science lies.
You’re still not presenting a theory for why, consistently, a small percentage of the population shows a predisposition for homosexuality, even when it conflicts with their religious beliefs and/or risked major repercussions.
When we look at people who engage in high-cost/risk activity, we don't say, "They must have been born that way."
Kind of funny thing to say on a forum that takes biodeterminism so seriously.
Also, I didn’t say the science was completely irrelevant. If you read what I actually wrote I think it had some effect, but, it was mostly a lagging indicator.
My whole point is that the cultural power preceded the scientific lies, which is why the latter is not so incredibly relevant as you seem to believe. The main relevant factors were things like changing views on sexuality and marriage, alongside increased awareness and direct exposure to gay people.
Why would I bring “here’s some science” to an argument where I think the science is basically irrelevant? It’s not just my opinion, it’s a lot of “lived experience” of myself and others whom I trust. I certainly don’t trust the NYT or institutional science much these days, but I do trust the reported experience of the gay people I am familiar with, many who would have chosen in a heartbeat not to be gay if they could have.
Overall, you place way to much faith in how influential science lies propagated from on high are, relative to people having their own personal evidence. (This is generally true for the limits of propaganda.)
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
The funny thing here is you’re blatantly wrong about the present dynamic among progressives/youngins.
Go read about age gap discourse and get back to me.
Also, progressives already don’t live by a strict consent-based moral framework. They frequently believe the right of consent should be taken away (organ donation for money, and anything else they perceive as involving a potential power imbalance that could involve “exploitation” of the oppressed).
This is not remotely true. He’s largely associated with expanding the Vietnam War, which did not go well, and Taylorism, which has long been out of fashion.
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