campfireSmoresEaten
No bio...
User ID: 2560
campfireSmoresEaten
7mo ago
It's not the economy that makes owning a house unaffordable, it's the regulatory environment.
campfireSmoresEaten
7mo ago
Pretty weird to talk about an entire political party as if it was one agent in the context of a bill like this. Is that how it works outside the US? In the US it's common for at least a few congresspeople to break party lines. Or at least I think it is.
campfireSmoresEaten
7mo ago
This isn't really a small-scale question but where can I go for a relatively complete and balanced perspective on France in Africa and the recent coups? Something nuanced. I'd rather read than watch a video essay. But not too long, hopefully. Or if it is long, at least it should be in digestible chapters.
campfireSmoresEaten
8mo ago
It is comforting to read your post, I feel similarly.
Well I don't know if you know this already, but in dath ilan it's implied that "someone wanting to live as if they were a woman and society treats them thusly because that's kinder or more libertarian" and "being a woman" are not the same thing. And it's implied that there are no ftm people (or very few) in that alternate timeline, only mtf. I don't remember where in the dath ilan writings it says those things, and my memory may be unreliable, but there you go. Progressive but subtly Kolmogorov or whatever. But from what I gather subtle things like that are not enough to satisfy you, which I sympathize with. In this week's roundup in response to another comment @Goodguy says that infant circumcision is probably a worse problem in our society than any concerns on this issue, but that people can care about both. And that's how I feel as well.
campfireSmoresEaten
8mo ago
The whale and the unicorn come to mind.
campfireSmoresEaten
8mo ago
This sort of extremely sarcastic and antagonistic writing style is against the rules of this forum.
campfireSmoresEaten
8mo ago
"Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)"
That is not exactly a fair presentation of of the philosophical basis of meritocracy.
campfireSmoresEaten
8mo ago
"In some ways, perhaps because we’ve been primed by Buddhist monk seminal example, that remains an ultimate attention-getter of Western modernity"
Not really! People have lit themselves on fire in protest many times since then without much public notice. This is a conspicuous exception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_self-immolations
Thank you for sharing your story.
campfireSmoresEaten
8mo ago
I will say that the details of October 7th seem like they were clearly designed to make it as hard as possible to respond with restraint.
campfireSmoresEaten
8mo ago
Good point. That's not really a bilateral monopoly, but part of the essay is about exploring how the dynamics of bilateral monopolies are similar to some extent to less monopolistic exchanges.
Do you think concerns for the welfare of detrans people are unfounded?
Edit: actually, the above isn't a good response. Here's what I should have written:
The topic of "trans issues" contains many questions. The question of whether or not hormones are good at replicating secondary sex characteristics is just one of those questions. Is it one of the more important questions of the topic? I wouldn't have thought so. I don't really think the more intellectual people of any stance would consider it to be, either. Would you feel vastly different about trans people if they weren't? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TGux5Fhcd7GmTfNGC/is-that-your-true-rejection
So I ask you, what does it mean to say "the debate is well settled"? There is not one debate, it's a vast number of smaller questions. I don't think it's intellectually rigorous to pretend like it's all one big question. Even if you think that every one of those unlisted questions has been settled in favor of trans people, even the ones where it's not obvious which answer would necessarily be the one that favors trans people the most, I think it's sleight of hand to act like it's all one big question which has been answered. And then I can't help but feel that it's also sleight of hand to reference one small and not necessarily consequential aspect of the debate before saying that the larger debate has been settled, as if one small question decides answers all the other questions too.
campfireSmoresEaten
9mo ago
The corporate AI Safety teams may or may not be mostly this, but my neighbors working on AI safety are the real thing.
campfireSmoresEaten
9mo ago
Subjectively, that response seems post-hoc to me. Or special pleading might be a better term for it.
campfireSmoresEaten
9mo ago
"They do because their lives are purposeless, hopeless, and devoid of meaning."
Y'know, most people would say that people kill themselves because they feel their lives are purposeless, hopeless, and devoid of meaning.
campfireSmoresEaten
9mo ago
"However, the common elements with these schemes is that they all involved either a small number of conspirators, or had victims that no one really gave a shit about. None of this is reflected in Flight 800, its 230 dead, and the multiple entities implicated."
The United States government performed unethical human experimentations on many, many people. It wasn't all black people, or foreigners, or people in mental hospitals or whatever. Random people from ordinary hospitals were selected to be irradiated. The victims were selected on the basis of convenience. If "a large number of random Americans belonging to no particular group" counts as "victims that no one really gave a shit about", why shouldn't the 230 people on Flight 800?
campfireSmoresEaten
9mo ago
Being pro freedom in a dictatorship without much of a broader platform is fine with me. It's the most pressing issue, so it's the one to focus on.
To use a somewhat goofy example, if there's an asteroid heading for earth, and some politicians are in favor of the asteroid, it's fine to just be anti-asteroid and nothing else. Anything else would just be a distraction until the asteroid is done with.
campfireSmoresEaten
9mo ago
Rootclaim has a few analyses that diverge from what the official narrative. The Syria chemical attack, for one.
campfireSmoresEaten
9mo ago
Those are not actually the only two options.
campfireSmoresEaten
9mo ago
Most real terrorist attacks don't have a very reasonable motive, but they still happen. A lot of the time the perpetrators rationalize that they are trying to provoke an overreaction, but that rarely works out. Although recent events in Israel may be a partial exception.
Anger makes violence seem more pragmatic than it is, famously.
campfireSmoresEaten
9mo ago
I remember reading about a case where the soviets did send a guy in over the Canadian border. The advantage is that he's harder to track than a known foreign national. He might have been East German, but same thing.
The guy ended up falling in love with an American woman. The soviets wanted to retract him or something but he quit his spy job for love by telling his handlers he had AIDs and would be dead soon. (This worked)
campfireSmoresEaten
9mo ago
"But nobody forced that (probably very media savvy) professor to go on the air and talk about how humane execution is stupid because murderers should suffer. That "bloodthirsty cruelty is the point." was literally his point."
His words may have been taken out of context, as often happens in documentaries and interviews and interviews that are part of documentaries. It happens to people who one would think are media savvy.
What do feminism and air conditioning have to do with each other? Is it a reference to how women purportedly like different temperatures in the office than men, or something else?
campfireSmoresEaten
10mo ago
Are the non-green parts written by a human? How does that work?
On this website we do not besmirch the name of Klara Hitler!
But seriously, I've never heard anything to suggest that she was a bad mother. And I read about Stalin's mother and she didn't seem bad either.
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