Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Sure. Still leaves me more likely to visit the US under a Trump administration than Biden, since the latter still came with extended periods of time where it's illegal for me to visit when I might want to. A lot of people, including me, want to visit a country at a specific date, for a specific thing, not just plan to do so at any time including years later. If I want to visit in 2022 but can't, the most likely outcome isn't that I'll delay it until June 2023, it's that this visit will just never happen.
Tophattingson
1d ago
No, you misunderstand. It's already been adjusted because the raw figures of how many people they surveyed aren't included.
The survey asked X black people, of which 0.41X said they viewed him favourably.
The survey asked Y white people, of which 0.15Y said they viewed him favourably.
When you adjust for population, by dividing by X and Y respectively, you get 41% and 15%, so minority youths are more pro-Andrew Tate.
Tophattingson
1d ago
Yeah, if I had a time machine I could use to send past me information about when Biden is going to randomly shut the borders to me, I could go in September 2021. But I don't have one.
Tophattingson
1d ago
Black and Asian people will be overrepresented regardless of the population distribution, because of those surveyed, a greater percent viewed him positively. As for whether there's still a white majority or plurality among those who view him positively, that's what I mean by I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell.
is does the US have a massive cultural divide with the UK over pornography, or is UK media completely unhinged and unrepresentative?
Both.
Like, in the US, it's currently a minor flashpoint that conservative state governments are requiring age verification for pornographic websites, and the websites are choosing to block access from those states instead of implementing age verification.
Mindgeek (i.e pornhub) doesn't oppose age verification for pornography. They just oppose that they've not been given a lucrative monopoly on age verification via a law perfectly designed to match the system they've already made for it. It happens to be strategically useful to blame this on Rethuglicans to rile up Democrats in opposition, but there's no political commitment here.
A lot of what I can only assume are left coded Narrative following shows produced or co-produced in the UK (Broadchurch, Inside Man, Black Mirror) have as their central conceit that pornography is the singular corrupting force behind evil patriarchy and violence against women. The consumption of pornography repeatedly leads to a chain of events where men rape and/or murder women.
The problem is, the cultural divide isn't genuinely over pornography. It's over censorship of the internet in general, because, rightly or wrongly, the current and prior British government, and their client media, view free expression online as a major threat to their continued rule. They are obsessed with introducing laws to ban it, and will reach for any tool available as a justification to do so. Porn is on the weapon rack, so it gets used. It would be trivial enough for governments to introduce legislation specifically banning porn. In practice, it only tangentially hits porn as part of laws that fire broadsides at online dissidents, who are the true target. Anti-porn activists get rolled out in situations where, before, they'd have been shut out as too religious and too conservative, because they are temporarily useful.
It would be illegal to operate this website in the UK post the Online Safety Act, for example, because it doesn't meet Ofcom's takedown requirements for content our government doesn't like.
Or is it just more of the same top down forceful lies that gets pushed in the US media, totally out of touch with the people who watch it?
The UK public simultaneously doesn't specifically oppose porn, but loves randomly banning everything. A significant percentage of people will support permanent bans on all kinds of activities for no discernible reason.
Tophattingson
1d ago
The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".
The pessimistic take is that the government likes redirecting anger at actual problems onto the faux-causes so it can justify the policies it actually wants. Since 2020, that mostly means censoring the internet so it can silence dissent. The most extreme example of this is the murder of David Amess, an MP, by an Islamist terrorist in 2021. This was subsequently used to justify laws around "social media abuse" and "online anonymity", despite neither playing any role in motivating the terrorist, or the murder itself. It just happens that the government wants people who dislike it kicked off the internet (hello, I am one of them).
Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American)
Andrew Tate is also mixed-race. While white British probably make up a plurality of his viewing demographic (I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell), they are underrepresented.
Tophattingson
1d ago
For most of us, the precise contents of a work of fiction tend to be secondary to the effects of those using a work of fiction as a basis for policy changes.
Tophattingson
1d ago
To add my anecdote to this, I am vastly more likely to come to the states under the Trump administration. This is because the Biden administration made it illegal for me to visit as a non-citizen non-immigrant from October 2021 to May 2023 via Presidential Proclamation 10294.
The reason this didn't negatively affect US international relations should be pretty obvious. Our home countries also wanted to discriminate against us, so why would they get upset at the US joining in on the hate?
Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.
I believe it was specifically the factory closures that did it, because Musk would have seen it as a potential death sentence for his businesses if it carried on. Before this, blue tribe tended to act in ways that were either neutral or positive for his business. That suddenly flipped to extremely negative.
But this is always going to be the elephant in the room for any Trump/Musk is doing a wrecking ball argument. Progressives just drove a wrecking ball that was at least an order of magnitude worse through society, which can justify a pretty big wrecking ball in response if that prevents it from happening again. Or halts it, even. The US avoided some of the worst of it but parts of Europe were still doing severe restrictions in late 2021, after the vaccine rollout, and thus long past any logical stopping point. Worst case scenario for the minimally Trumpy world that Hanania wants is that we're still doing them in 2025.
And to reiterate the below comment, the result is that I’m also okay with pretty much anything if it means driving out whatever political faction we should call this thing.
The mirror image of this article, alleging insane beliefs by key liberal figure, could easily be written by a social conservative. I am not one, but it's quite easy for me to imagine a version of this which swaps out Zelensky's approval rating for e.g. beliefs on trans people, which many social conservatives would regard as "incapable of separating truth [that men are men and women are women] from fiction". I don't, so I will let someone else write the actual mirror image article if they want to. Regardless, at a minimum I think most would agree that regardless of right or wrong, beliefs about trans people are more politically profound and important than incorrectly claiming low approval ratings for a specific figure. This is the entire problem with Hanania's current routine. From the perspective of conservatism, there's plenty of low human capital liberalism, they just have the added benefit of sometimes getting to smuggle it through academia.
Tophattingson
19d ago
theoretically nation-agnostic
I vaguely recall an ISDS case I can't put a name to where Canada banned some chemical ostensibly on environmental or health grounds, but in practice because this chemical was produced by and imported from the US, and the government wanted to favour domestic manufacturers who produced something similar but not identical which was not covered by the ban.
This obviously raises the question of why US tech companies don't just ISDS everything. And I suspect the answer is that since American-style free speech is a threat to the ruling parties of many countries, rather than just the bottom line of a few specific corrupt figures, that Canada would not permit itself to lose an ISDS case against e.g. facebook.
Tophattingson
19d ago
The steelman argument I've seen for these tariffs being retaliatory is that the regulatory schemes of many European countries (and, presumably, Canada), particularly for the big US export of digital services, act as de facto tariffs. This argument is described here by what I believe is a critic of Trump: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-tariffs-big-techs-new-tool-against-eu-regulation/
The weakness of this argument is that the retaliatory tariffs are too disproportionate and untargeted for this. And then the counter to that would be that since the countries involved lack anything like the US tech sector, the US can't retaliate with proportionate and targeted tariffs.
Tophattingson
19d ago
Killing a bunch of random people is not really a good way to achieve any goal, unless your goal is just that: to hurt and kill others. The reason to want to do that is typically anger and resentment.
While it is the case that terrorism is ineffective, the modal European government response of utilizing the threat of terrorism to create the appearance of acquiescing to political positions they wanted to take anyway on e.g. Blasphemy can easily create the wrong impression. Their terrorism is effective because they're on the right side, not because it's terrorism.
Tophattingson
21d ago
I didn't claim that Twitch Plays Pokemon actually beat the game with random inputs, just "very-close-to" random.
I think claude is also barred from #1 because I don't think the software interface ever gave the power to hold down A, B, Start and Select simultaneously (assuming that's the combination you mean). The description of how it works only refers to button sequences, not holding multiple buttons at once. As for #2, performance so far suggests that Claude will struggle at this in pretty much the way you'd expect the actually random input method to also struggle, because it's one of the few segments of the game that can't be cleared with button mashing.
Impressively, I don't think the original run of Twitch Plays Pokemon ran into any notable glitches, despite the game being so buggy that many of them are plausible occurrences during casual playthroughs.
At any rate, even sticking to chess, I used an elo calculator and the dumb chess AI would win 13.55% of games. I still think it would be rather impressive if a dog make valid moves, even if at random.
A dog (and humans) playing a digital chess game generally won't have the option to play an illegal move and lose by doing so. The pokemon-playing LLM has already been given a similar advantage by not getting disqualified for invalid moves like "remove batteries" or even "throw the gameboy across the room" because such commands will just get ignored by the software interface.
This reminds me of a very good joke:
A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "
The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."
Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.
A chess AI that plays the game by making random moves has an elo of 478 and will occasionally beat a novice, which usually have an elo around 800. A dice is not AGI.
We have had AI that can beat you in chess 20 out of 20 times since the 90s. Not only did this AI not become AGI, but it is also now very much recognised as a dead end of development even for chess AI.
Pokemon is such an easy game that it can conceivably be beaten with entirely random inputs, and provably beaten by very-close-to random inputs. It's the ideal case for a video game that a primitive general intelligence would be good at. It does not require reactions or timing, it has very limited controls and interactions, and being incredibly slow and persistent gradually makes the only challenge easier as you inevitably outlevel everything from blundering around in the tall grass for too long. Twitch Plays Pokemon was essentially built on this premise.
From OP's description it's not actually clear that Claude plays Pokemon at a level that's much above buttonmashing, and there's strategies that are both superior to buttonmashing and also not intelligent (to name one, a biased buttonmash).
Tophattingson
23d ago
Indeed, and all the sabre rattling and criticism of what it claims is right-wing extremism by the current government must be understood in the context that this is also a government that not only funds extremism in support of it's supposed enemies, but is legally obligated to do so by it's own institutions.
Much of this is, however, just two-tier. A hypothetical opponent perceived as right-wing, like Russia, probably wouldn't be protected in this manner by our courts. But good luck defending Taiwan from Communists, to name one example.
Tophattingson
23d ago
The attitude in the UK is similarly bizarre. The government, other blob parties, and supportive institutions have become foreign policy hardliners in a context where those same governments have, at every opportunity over the last 30 years, adopted policies that weaken the UK's ability to fight against a peer power. And I don't just mean in strict military budget terms here. They can increase the military budget right now and this won't improve the situation because the current circumstances make effective utilization of a larger military budget impossible. I mean policies like:
- Outsourcing. Relying on foreign, China-centric supply chains for industry is silly.
- Green energy. Tanks and jets don't run on batteries. Frack to Fuel Fighters.
- Legally empowered NIMBYism. How are you going to build the factories and bases for all this?
- Judicial power and rulings. Why build a munitions factory if you'll get sued over rare spiders? Why fight Russia if you'll get charged for shooting them?
- Weapon Bans. Legal access to firearms would both mean more experienced citizens and a potentially stronger occupation resistance. Instead the government is floating bans for kitchen knives with pointed ends.
- Nationalism. Nobody has found a way to make effective modern armies other than nationalism, and usually ethnic nationalism at that.
- Lockdowns. Shrinking the economy over a cold does not win wars.
- Immigration. This does not turn into military manpower. More British Muslims joined ISIS than are in the British Army.
- Two-tier laws. Dispossession of the demographics most likely to serve in the military is a terrible idea.
- Coffin dodgers subsidies. Why fund pensions or the NHS at the expense of the 20 and 30-somethings who are actually going to fight your war?
A UK that has a small military but is prepped and ready to re-arm and oppose Russia is a UK that looks very different from the UK we actually have. More importantly, it would be an image of the UK that our current government would despise. Cynically, the government isn't genuinely interested in defence, they just see sabre-rattling over this as a good way to go after domestic dissent.
Tophattingson
24d ago
The Korean War had about 1/10th the manpower deployment, 1/10th the expense, no rationing, extremely limited factory conversion, no conversion of civilian vehicle production to military, no massive naval buildup, and two fewer uses of nuclear weapons. Sure, when the US fought in Korea it was a no holds barred fight relative to what would come later, but they were still throwing punches pinky finger first rather than putting the entire industrial weight of the US behind it.
Vietnam has an obvious appeasement moment in the Paris Peace Accords followed by the accord-violating 1975 offensive, where the US pretty much deliberately allowed South Vietnam to fall to invasion. You don't even need to get into the rest of the war effort and whether the US didn't commit enough resources, the 1975 offensive is too obviously appeasement in the face of an ally being invaded.
Of course, this is not an argument for escalating the Korean or Vietnam War. There are plenty of good reasons not to, do not think of this as me saying the US should have turned the Chinese border into a belt of cobalt. But every argument against escalating the Vietnam or Korean war has a 38th parallel in not escalating the Ukraine War, but when you do it there, it's suddenly the Munich Conference.
As for nuclear weapons, Russia still has them. If appeasing a nuclear power is Munich in 2025 then it's also Munich in 1965.
Tophattingson
25d ago
Winding back a bit to option A, to put things into perspective, what we’re presently doing is pretty much what led to WW2. Chamberlain and the rest of the west were in a stance of appeasement. By not actually fighting evil, we let it grow. Just as appeasement emboldened Hitler to push further, letting Russia keep gains now might signal to Putin—and others—that aggression pays.
I always find it strange that appeasement is compared to the lead-up to WW2, and never to the repeated appeasement given to Communists throughout the Cold War. First in letting Stalin conquer Eastern Europe including betraying Poland, whose independence was the supposed purpose of WW2 in the first place! Then in the Berlin Blockade, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in China, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Angola, and in Finland. In fact, between the Greek Civil War of 1946-49 and the invasion of Grenada in 1983, at no point did the US dare to deploy a decisive amount of force against any Communist opponent, even though from a sheer balance of military force perspective the west could have steamrolled North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba etc in a total war situation.
The result of all this appeasement... Is that the USSR lost.
Tophattingson
27d ago
The thing about making hyperbolic, propagandistic statements (abortion is murder!) that are intended to be taken metaphorically
I think most firm opponents of abortion would reject the idea that their claim that abortion is murder is meant to be hyperbolic. You could argue that they don't truly believe it because if they did they'd also treat those seeking abortions as they would someone attempting a murder, but that's just arguing that they're insincere or inconsistent, not hyperbolic.
Radical feminists who proclaimed that "gender is a social construct" helped create the transgender movement that would later turn on them.
Radical Feminists believe that the transgender concept of 'changing gender' reinforces the socially constructed gender norms they seek to destroy. A trans woman, from a rad fem perspective, is a man putting on an overt, almost offensive stereotype of what society believes a woman to be. One does not follow from the other, they are actually incompatible ideas.
Tophattingson
28d ago
Using a book that was not written by Popper, or referring to anything written by Popper, to figure out what Popper thinks is a bad idea. Adorno is not Popper.
Tophattingson
28d ago
No, Popper's analysis is centred on critique of Plato and historicism, the idea that history is controlled by historical laws that can be used to predict the future. He links racialism to this as a theory of history that proposes that a certain race is destined to inherit the Earth, but it's not centred on this.
Not living in reality? Okay. How much are you willing to bet that you are living in reality, and I am not? Let's set the terms to whether 2025 will have less visitors to the US than an average of 2021-2023. If you disagree with those terms for not decoupling a chilling effect from broader trends, then explain how you intend to decouple both effects to measure them otherwise and, if I think the method is viable, we can bet on those instead.
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