aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
4d ago
Not totally sure why we should take ziz seriously. This reads exactly like the kind of thing you'd come up with if you took the poisoned dualist interpretation of why trans people are the way they are and then tried desperately to attach it back to materialism. The whole premise reads more like a fantasy writer's first attempt to build a magic system than anything grounded.
aqouta
6d ago
Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.
Not totally related to the thrust of your point but this isn't even true. Skin packs already exist. Very little of the games cost is actually making a few extra models. There really could be a woke and non-woke addition of any AAA game. Hell, this is already done in practice for some international copies that remove LGBT flags or less radioactively the chinese version of WoW that gave a bone dragon flesh because of Chinese sensibilities around exposed skeletons.
aqouta
7d ago
If I were arguing for using the popular vote instead of the electoral college you might have a point but that's not my position. Neither is it my position that Chicago should be allowed to impose its culture and rules on wider Illinoisans. The capital of Illinois isn't even Chicago as a concession to this idea that the wider state ought not be totally dominated. What voting rule specifically do you even advocate here? That the ~20% of Illinoisans who don't live in Chicago but own a great deal of much cheaper land outside of the metropolitan area should dominate? It's going to be a hard sell to say that farmers are treated poorly by the federal government given how large farm subsidies are.
aqouta
7d ago
I do not believe I am any more kind or empathetic than my brothers, my father, my boyfriend, his friends, my male coworkers, my cousins, my uncles and my grandfather because of how I was born.
Wait, does this only apply across gender lines? Do you agree that some people are more empathetic or kind than others on an individual level? If no then that's wild, please expand. If yes then why would you expect these variable traits to be equally distributed between groups that have wildly different hormonal profiles which cause behavioral differences in a very straightforward manner?
aqouta
7d ago
If it's purely self charging then why are there retribution tariffs? Obviously when you raise the price of a good when produced by foreigners such that you give your internal market an advantage it is bad for those foreigners. They need to pass the cost to the consumer but that would make them uncompetitive. The winner of tariffs is special local interests, the loser are general internal interests and foreign competitors. The only interests influential in foreign states are the foreign competitors thus foreign states oppose it.
aqouta
7d ago
Yes, by land area the US is more red, but deciding that land area is what matters is even more ridiculous than the people who think the popular vote is all that should matter. Chicago dominates Illinois because the population of Illinois is under 13 million people and the population of chicago and its suburbs is almost 10 million people.
aqouta
15d ago
My view basically is that the left and right need each other, although a mature society should be able to recognize this dynamic and avoid these procedural outcome manipulation type shenanigans. We have both a defective left and a defective right.
aqouta
15d ago
This is the natural outcome of weaponizing moralism. The pictures of crying refugees being turned away to shame anyone who would deny a sympathetic person entrance leaves the person who demands a border of any kind to either harden their hearts or concede. Because concessions would dissolve the nation hearts have been hardened, it could never have been any other way. I think this is the bedrock of Cthulhu swimming left, there is no actual solid ground between hard hearted conservatism and ruin but every step towards ruin is rose scented, every resistance to it mired in cruelty. Left leaning people will say that of course we can still have a border and laws but they can't believe it because every argument they make to move one step left has no limiting principle, it will take us all the way to borderlessness and lawlessness. They rely on the pull back from conservatives to keep them from the abyss and resent the pullback at the same time.
aqouta
19d ago
It's at least usually tempered by human unwillingness to spend time writing it out. This really was more egregiously so than nearly any human comment on this forum in my opinion.
aqouta
19d ago
I think it's fine to use llms in the writing process but you really really need to take on the role of an editor. This is the same like 3 points repeated a half dozen times and should have be edited down substantially. I do think that the credit system as it exists now is suboptimal but at the same time we do need some system for determining credit worthiness. Part of the problem is how very regulated financial markets are and credit scores are a hack for lenders to use to discriminate without fear of capricious state sanction.
aqouta
19d ago
Do you think the Palestinians or surrounding Arab nations would accept this if it was actually offered?
As I said, if they raise up the machine god, or I guess this is just getting us past the need for physical labor, then they've won. But it's this generation in the next decade and not a generational project.
aqouta
22d ago
As the bulge of population retires that elderly care problem becomes more difficult, the ratio of working aged people to dependents becomes much worse. That's before even factoring in burning the other end of the candle by trying to increase birthrates to something sustainable at the same time. If not solved you have a population that at best halves every generation and I suspect would actually spiral even further downwards.
aqouta
22d ago
as the marginal people who stay in China help to build the kind of economy that persuades an ever-wider margin of young people to stay in China.
What young people? China has a TFR of around 1.2 if you trust the Chinese data, which you maybe shouldn't. If China is able to use the last gasp of their civilization to birth the machine god then perhaps they'll be on top but this is not a generational project.
aqouta
23d ago
I think something more descriptive such as "social justice warriors", "DEI proponents" or "applied intersectionality" would be much more apt. It also is more likely to be used by those people to describe themselves.
I guess I have some problems with these as alternatives. Of them only really SJW selects the whole of the blob and I think it'd have the same problem of being rejected as a label by many that it fits if for no other reason that it's a kind of silly formulation. I don't know how long you've been aware of this particular naming dispute but there was a move to call them social justice activists which I'm happy to use but never really got wide adoption. I suspect because it's a mouthful.
The problem, I think, is that this blob intentionally wants to resist being named because it wants to assert its contentious beliefs as normal, the null hypothesis of ideologies. This is a very privileged and powerful position to be in. It lets them stake out radical positions and if those positions prove disastrous it doesn't taint the rest of the ideology. They don't want the failure of things like "defund the police", a sentiment widely shared by adherents of this blob, to color people's perception on the other ideas they propose.
I guess my question for you is do you deny the existence of this blob entirely? As in do you deny that there is a large contingent of people on the left that are bought into nearly every radical left leaning position including but not limited to:
- anti-racism( as expressed by Kendi and including race concious policy)
- climate doomerism
- anti-western and anti-US in particular geopolitical positions (broadly can be expected to take whichever side of any conflict that is lest aligned with the west)
- intersectional and privileged based understandings of race and gender,
- anti-capitalism economics ( this is a big one and expresses itself and many ways)
- acab or at least substantially anti-police beliefs
- suspicious of free speech
- LGBTQ activism
If you point to a person with this perspective on any one of these issues I would bet they have something like a 95% chance to believe in every other. That's really seems like a group that I should be able to easily point to.
aqouta
24d ago
I don't really get this critique. You're seriously looking at the 922 page long wish list of a major republican thinktank, noticing that a lot of elements of that wish list are being implemented by a republican president and deciding that the parsimonious explanation is that Trump is just following the checklist? It can't be that a Republican president has a lot in common with a Republican think tank?
The reason that people tried to say that project 2025 was the Trump plan was because, in addition to the stuff that is popular enough for Trump to want to run with, it includes stuff not popular enough for Trump to run with. It's like if Kamala won and implemented some passport support for trans people that also happened to be on NAMBLA's "let trans-aged people attend highschool and sleep with children" 2025 agenda and thus it was right to tar her with every policy on the document this whole time.
aqouta
25d ago
Hmm. Can you remind me of the point being made here? You're trying to differentiate neoliberal as an exonym from woke because people accept the label neoliberal but not woke? If that's the case then suppose nothing at all changes about the population, you still have people who believe and espouse every bit of this cluster's beliefs but refuse to accept any label. These neoliberals were highly related, constantly quoting each other and repeating each other's arguments. When you met someone who was in favor of one of these policies you knew with a 95% chance they'd support all the other policies but they just insisted there was no legitimate way to refer to their memeplex. What would you do then? Until we can square that circle I'm not sure what the point of the comparison is or even what your point is. If woke isn't meaningful then what can I call the highly correlated cluster of beliefs?
On the level of criticism of your definition of neoliberal I think you have some sneer phrases baked in. Few like to be associated with the phrase "trickle down" preferring something like supply side policies. "Too big to fail" also has some negative connotations. A neoliberal would say it was a policy failure to let banks become too big to fail but bailouts were still the prudent option given the circumstances, truncating it to that is ignoring important parts of their understanding of the events and their real concern for moral hazard. Neoliberal tends to approximately map to neoclassical economics, basically Adam Smith but with modern economic modeling.
aqouta
28d ago
Yeah, sometimes I still think it'd be fun. I have a couple frameworks installed on the computer but suffer from a lack of motivation. Not super interested in coding after a long day of coding. Moving across the country also doesn't make collaboration easy. I've gotten to the little dudes moving around on a screen stage a few times and just can't sustain interest. Maybe I'll take another swing more aided by LLMs soon.
aqouta
28d ago
If you wanted to you could have multiple timelines that different characters could be involved in but that'd depend a lot on how your story is handling the shared space and if multiverse/time travel can fit into the story well. If they're building persistent structures then yeah, that's kind of iffy. If you really wanted to I think you could find a way to write in multiple concurrent timelines.
aqouta
28d ago
Could even have some incentive to go different narrative paths by having group level rewards gated behind certain paths if you wanted although that a pretty big gameplay decision.
aqouta
28d ago
If you split multiple characters with shared progression where each character gets their own version of the story you could accomplish this. You'd have a team level and your team could consist of several characters. The team could level up rather than individual characters making switching between them less costly and allowing for gear drops to be shared where most useful, maybe your ranger finds a sword and you decide to play your knight for a few levels. Think Path of Exile SSF mode but with shared character levels. Lot of narrative ways to fit it in, maybe split universes shared souls or something.
aqouta
29d ago
Woke is just the omni-cause. Woke people are people who were informed of how at least one part of the standard patriotic narrative of liberalism is wrong and then devote themselves to cynically opposing every other aspect of the standard liberal narrative. If the standard liberal narrative is that America is a great place where any plucky upstarts can make a name for themselves through hard work and grit they believe the inverse must be true. America is a place where entrenched powers make it impossible for an under class of minorities - be they racial, sexual or religious - to succeed through violent suppression. They believe the west is rotten to the core and reflectively believe any criticism of it. The null hypothesis for every question is that the liberalism is a failed lie and anyone who opposes it must have a good reason.
Racial Justice activists are woke because they believe America has committed original sin against minorities and the stain of slavery and racism pervades every aspect of American institutions. They don't really even believe in progress, acknowledging past progress would be a concession to the patriotic liberal narrative so they insist that things are as bad now as they were under Jim Crow. If given a free hand to adopt any policy they want they'd find anything they built equally poisoned.
Anti-Rich rhetoric is woke because it is against the liberal idea that free enterprise is positive sum. Woke people believe every billionaire is a policy failure because they genuinely believe that to get that right you must be stealing from others.
Degrowthers are woke because they believe the liberalism must be destroying the planet. They don't want to use liberal solutions like carbon tax or deregulating nuclear because that would be allowing liberalism to try to solve the problem. Instead they oppose these liberal solutions and advocate for unworkable policies. They're more interested in using climate change as a bludgeon against liberalism than working on actual solutions.
These things are all joined by a disillusionment with the liberal order and reliably each of these and many other woke beliefs are found in the same people not as some kind of coincidence but because all those people have the same burning intuition that they were betrayed by the liberal promises they grew up hearing.
Maybe to people who live fully immersed in these illiberal mindsets it's like water to a fish but to people outside of the milieu it is very very obvious within a few seconds of talking to a woke person exactly which side they will take on any new subject that pits western liberalism against literally anything else. That a memetic clusters exists here is beyond doubt, what you call it is fairly irrelevant.
"Me and this other very unusual guy who sleeps with people who have all the qualities of poisonous tree frog have this preference therefore everyone probably does" is not a compelling argument. There's like three layers of selection going on here. I don't think you're really steel manning the opposing view here which is more complex than "I wouldn't even want to have consequence free sex with beautiful women that my wife actively approved of and made our bound closer", which is a very spherical cow way to look at human relationships. I don't think that kind of relationship actually exists, or if it does it would either require a wife that I wouldn't want as a partner or for me to not care about hurting my wife.
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