crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
1yr ago
The world is moving closer and closer to a monoculture, of which societal differences are obliterated from the twin forces of capitalism and social media. What justice would such a society have? It would be permanent and immutable, and if you dislike it even in the smallest part it will be imposed upon you.
The relativist stance is descriptive of a reality that is fast disappearing. Current academics feel no shame of imposing their morality on the distant past. It is post-modernist babble that is completely unhelpful to the vital question of what is right and good.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
In my opinion - as a writer myself - is that right now, AI is approximately at the level of your average competently-written fanfiction, which is a big problem for Hollywood because they write below that level.
As we've seen in recent years, so-called professional scriptwriters have been putting out utter shit on the big screen and prestige TV that fans of the work would often (and do!) write superior takes for free, on the internet. The only thing that separates the two are gatekeeping and connections in the notoriously nepotistic and corrupt Hollywood system.
SAG and SAW fundamentally rely on the studio system for their collective bargaining to make any sense. As soon as photorealistic 3D generative animation gets off the ground, there will be no corporate giants for them to leech off. They see a future where automated scabs run them out of business, and I can't blame them. The mediocre products they produce can in no way compete.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Mainstream media is picking it up: CNN, Telegraph, Washington Post. Even Russia Today has an article!
Oh baby, it's on!
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I actually do make things: I'm a writer, but the content I make is perhaps too spicy for here, being 4chan-adjacent. :P
crushedoranges
1yr ago
The comparison is in scope, not in kind. The reason there isn't a conservative Battletech is the same reason why there isn't a conservative credit-card. If the left is going to turn every conceivable facet of human existence into culture-war, things as diverse as crochet, miniature-painting, hiking, whatever - it is a total war.
Innocence (or a complete lack of relevance to politics) is no defense: they're going to come for your little comfy niche hobby eventually and cover it with rainbow paint. And unless you're willing to fight as hard as the Kiwis you'll be shoved out and marginalized and kicked out of your own communities. You can't flee. You can't abandon the high ground to the woke. You have to fight.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
This is an unfair argument.
Take Kiwi Farms, for example. You could extend your argument you make, smugly saying: 'make your own payment processor, make your own DNS, make your own web-host.' The left extends controls over previously neutral institutions and you say 'why not make your own?' Why not make your own laws, your own bank, your own country? Your own autonomous sovereignty, right-wingers?
Imagine my face: it is a chiseled, manly expression, saying YES.
All culture war issues are essentially coup-complete ones now because of the left's influence over the government and the media. If you want to keep the globohomo out of your Battletech: you must first overthrow the US government.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
The woke live in the paradoxical confluence of complete confidence in the state's power to bring about their wishes while living in constant culture struggle against its enforcers. It's like being a sovereign citizen, but sometimes saying the right gibberish does make things happen. Just because in the West authority has become completely abstracted from force doesn't mean that the authority's power no longer requires it. The demos has great power that yet sleeps, yet.
If laws are passed that make people criminal, perhaps more people should be criminals: if you're the kind of person who wants to possess a gun you're already an enemy of the state: the bureaucracy just hasn't caught up with you yet.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
It is, in a vacuum, but grudger strategies seem to be replicated in societies across the world while forgiveness ones tend to be the product of highly advanced societies with high social trust. Hothouse flowers, in other words.
It probably says something about the decay of social institutions when grudging feels better than forgiving.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
The presentation of heritage gives a false impression, like it's fifths of a pizza pie, but it's more likely that she's ENGLISH and irish and homeopathic amounts of the rest.
In other words, a Dolezal. She looks a bit brown in her photographs, but much like other fakers like Shaun King there's a ton of things you can do to look mulatto. If Trump claimed to be Namekian because of his spray tan I wouldn't put too much credence on it either.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Union leadership has been captured by socialist activists and politicians as to be completely alienated from their working-class roots. There's a reason why unions are marginal parts of the leftist coalitions now - outside of regime-adjacent bodies like teachers and civil servants, blue color labor has little real power. If they did, you think that NAFTA would have ever flown?
crushedoranges
1yr ago
If there is anyone in the world that has the right to complain about Jewish women, it is Jewish men. For most of the world's masculines they are a folk tale told to scare impressionable youths but they (the Jews) have to live with and marry them. The closest thing in our reality to an actual monstergirl.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I would argue that it would be nice if we could live in walkable cities: but I'd rather be in the multi-ton steel behemoth than not, if the world is dangerous as you say.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
A car is not just a means of transport: it is a private space in the public space, so to speak. You can store a great deal of things without watching them, you will always have a chair, a radio, a air conditioner. You can eat and even sleep in your car! These are not qualities that are commonly associated with public transit.
I went on a trip recently and I have never felt the desire to have a car to get around places, not just for travelling, but for its restful quality and comfort.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
There's a psychic cost that urbanists miss: namely, that public transit replaces the labor of driving with a lack of agency. Aside from the obvious downside of longer trips: whether you get there or not is out of your control. The wariness of being in a public space, of watching your possessions, of keeping your eye out for the urban lumpenproletariat - it's stressful in its own way.
Once again we return to the revealed preference of most people: when given the choice between the public commons and paying money and labor for a private space, they elect for the latter.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Sagan
All arguments in this vein are fallacious, insomuch that every problem can be obfuscated into higher-order abstractions. It's a favorite argument of progressive liberals because it dovetails nicely into an intersectional viewpoint of the world. This is how every conceivable problem is the fault of the current structure of society and why a revolution is necessary before a single iota of progress can be done. Yes, we're hard at work at the revolution. We can't solve the murder problem until Every. Last. White. Male. is brought to account. But until then you'll have to deal with the scent of urine in the cities and the free-range drug addicts.
...but to be more serious, I don't believe anyone who says this. I don't believe that people who can't solve the murder problem to be capable of solving the societal inequity problem. Anyone who tells you that society needs to do better before the incredibly basic functions of a state can be resolved thinks you are a credulous moron to be exorted of social capital. They are the same people who will tell you, with the same logic, that you can't solve the lunch problem until you solve world hunger.
No thank you, I will go to the fast food court and buy a meal while the great minds slowly starve to death: perhaps when all of the social reformers have passed away we can solve our own problems.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
California is a petri dish as to why progressive policy is incredibly stupid and counter-intuitive. In short, there is an entire class of activist rent-seekers whose job is to extract concessions from any new development, no matter how ruinous or stupid it may be. It is a kafkaesque gong show which even the schlerotic Soviet bureaucracy would compare well to. Imagine that in order to improve or change anything in California, you have a librum veto of which anyone can cancel the whole project. But instead of a congress of corrupt noblemen, you have a collection of junkies, homeless people, and rich white liberals - all of which despise each other but unified in hatred of you, who has the audacity to attempt to turn a decrepit coin laundry into an apartment block.
It is a miracle, frankly, that anything in California is built at all.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
It is my impression that in the vague direction of the general left people are not in favor of things like climate change, and the driving of cars that encourages such processes. If people don't feel safe taking public transit because of addicts and dealers, is that not a problem? Is it not an injury to the public to have one's public spaces smelling of urine and strewn with stray needles?
The new urbanist movement is attempting to shame people into using public transit, at the same time it refuses to make it usable and safe. Revealed preferences shows that it is a bipartisan consensus that one should not expose one's children to schizophrenic lunatics and drug dealers, and women prefer not to go home late at night around the urban lumpenproles.
And somehow they cling to the notion that it's a 'car-centric culture', when it is so clearly a output of clear material incentive. How could so many smart people be so stupid?
Authoritarianism is not 'whenever the state uses force'. If the government is not going to solve these social cancers with its monopoly on force it is weak and ineffectual and the people are not bootlickers or Hitlerites for wanting it fixed. Imprisoning addicts and killing the dealers is preferable to the status quo of letting them do whatever they want, and as populists in other countries have proven: if liberal governments don't solve the problem and just waffle in useless progressive policy a strongman will eventually come along and do it for them.
The frustration is reaching a boiling point: it is a warning to people of progressive, libertarian ideals: you are running out of time to implement policy, and you do not have infinite time or public resources to waste. Sadly, I doubt anyone in power will heed it.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
So as far as I can tell, Russia is losing this war, as it is almost a year later and they have failed to complete their objectives in forcing Ukraine back into their sphere of influence or secured territorial integrity. All observers assumed Russia would swiftly win this war, but their armies and industry are in such a shambles that they are unable to defeat the Ukrainians in the field and are reduced to terror bombing with artillery and missiles.
Against an inferior foe which they (according to Serge) have destroyed multiple times over. How could you not have great gains against a numerically and qualitatively inferior foe?
Does this sound like the strength of a great power to you?
The 'attritional strategy', so as far as I know, is a cope. There was no grand plan to grind the Ukranian resolve to fight through manpower and material because that would be planning for defeat, and even worse, planning for defeat against an inferior power. Now Russia is isolated and scraping the bottom of the barrel for allies while the entirety of the Western military-industrial complex is pumping every available resource into the country.
The Soviets, with their empire, couldn't match the American spend on military, much less all of NATO. How can the Russian Federation - a faded, declining power in comparison - hope to match a richer, larger version of the alliance? So as long as the Ukrainians want to fight, they will have the latest and greatest in NATO arms. The only hope for the Russians was to win early and decisively. If Serge's narrative is for a long war then there really is no hope of victory left - one that is worth throwing away the last of the Russian youth and prosperity.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekism
Hereditary ideological enforcer.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
But the entire point is that there is no argument being made (because even having a debate would be a concession of the nature of the topic as up for questioning.) The overall cultural milleu of the present day means that many leftists try and bludgeon their political opponents through authority, not argumentation. If a evangelical Christian showed up to a university and cited the King James Bible as an authoritative we'd all laugh at him but that happens all the time in spaces like these.
When left-wingers make grandiose claims of moral and cultural authority, they get greatly offended when I tell them that I don't accept their expertise. They don't want to get down in the weeds and fight it out because that would give the right a platform and validity, as if our positions were equal to theirs. Their counterparts on the right have to fight for every inch of ground to even be heard and they don't even want to step out of their ivory-tower citadels to engage with opinions they don't aesthetically like!
So I don't care what they think, to be perfectly honest. They can wring their hands and whinge behind my back on how mean we are all they'd like. Chekists deserve only contempt.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
Not that I have any true objection to what you just said, but the USD-market has its share of bad actors, then crypto is crawling with them. It would be charitable to say that most of the space is full of scams preying on dumb money.
Just because a system is bad doesn't make its alternative automatically better! Crypto enthusiasts are baffled at the lack of uptake of their ecosystem - it is because for the vast majority of users, they lose their entire investment or come away losing money. An unregulated, legally opaque market is the perfect environment for naive investors to lose their shirt.
(And being a 'grudger', in the defect/cooperative axis, is a suboptimal strategy.)
crushedoranges
2yr ago
On Reddit I made a doomerpost when Trudeau declared his state of emergency. I pulled cash out of my credit union and waited. I'm certainly not uninformed of the problem. I even went to a convoy political meet-up quite recently.
And even in this self-selected audience of people who this is immediately relevant, I heard nothing about crypto. Crypto did not stop the chilling effect of the government declaring martial law. These are relatively affluent blue and white collars and they're keeping their money in relatively traditional investments (gold, real estate, small business) and not crypto. They still bank at Scotia, BMO, etc, for Christ's sake.
And it is because the benefits vastly outweigh the negatives. You can talk all day about things you value but revealed preference shows that most people do not hold the same interest in the technology or in the concept of decentralization. People want to know if it's convenient, cheap, and safe in the real world. If you are a normie with no idea of what crypto is you would have been better off trusting the system because political and free speech rights are secondary to, you know, making sure you don't lose everything to a rugpull.
People who prefer trustless systems are, on the whole, one part tech-libertarian and nine witches.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
This is, bluntly, underpants gnomes logic.
I know you're an enthusiast, but liking (and seeing) those things as worthy of pursuit in of themselves does not make it true. There are a lot of X and Y things we can introduce into systems that exist, but would we want to? Is there a tangible, economic benefit? Is it cheaper? Is it better? Or, lacking in those two essential traits: is it the right thing to do regardless?
Forgoing the efficiencies and economies of scale of the current system is a cost. Trusting centralized institutions is extraordinarily cheap on scale. And sure, there may be a market of legitimate use - buying grey-market goods, sending funds to dissidents, etc. But that economic activity is a sliver of a sliver. That's not what advocates are pumping. They're envisioning a mass adoption across the whole economy - of which crypto's limitations and decentralization's costs would become rapidly apparent.
Crypto without exchanges is a currency without liquidity, a nightmare of passphrases and uncertainty of payment. If everyone self-custodies and that is the result, what value is the technology? How are you going to buy a pizza with your cold storage wallet?
At least underpants physically exist as a tangible good.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
But the land that was in dispute (and correct me if I am wrong) can be described to be 'cold as balls'. Finns were not moving en masse into the north, so the relative population densities were low enough for coexistence to be a possibility.
The Amerindians were OK with Europeans for a while until they realized they wouldn't stop coming. Grumbling about those damn farmers encircling another bit of prime pasture is one thing, but massacring and scalping is another.
Although doing a bit of research into the overall situation, it does look like they did go through the whole residential school and discrimination of language phase - but Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about Finnish policies to such effect: only Norway and Sweden. Since you're our resident Finnposter, could you look into it? Were there any particular programs to intentionally displace them in the 18th and 19th centuries?
No.
Or rather, it doesn't matter if your baseline is of low intelligence so as long as you have a talented tenth that actually runs things. Sure, you wouldn't be able to get the results of higher SD nations, but you can get something like modern-day Rwanda or Ethiopia going. Not great, but certainly above the (admittedly low) norm.
What is far more impactful is the threat of pernicious ideomemes like communism. You can throw as much high-iq Asians and Slavic technocrats at it to no avail. Even the most degenerate of African states are paradises to say, Pol Pot's Cambodia. Communism, in terms of HBD, is equalivant to a primal reversion to humanity's primate ancestors, an intellect-shredding machine. Even if one must accept the premises of HBD, it gives one hope that the right ideomeme can produce results out of porportion of one's intellectual talents, but we haven't discovered the right solution yet.
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