desolation

desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 16hr ago

The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.

Just looked it up, I've been on a Scotch kick lately and I'm not eager about more price increases- there's a 25% tariff Trump instated his first term, but was suspended for five years in 2021. Supposedly the industry lost 600 million pounds during the time they were in effect.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 19hr ago

did he just pull out the phone to put Hendrix on blast?

While I haven't likely accounted for all reasons this would be a bad idea, I'd be pretty well in support of a strong self-defense statue that includes reacting against, and destroying the phone of, anyone that does this kind of thing.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 1d ago

especially fanfiction spaces.

Oof, how could I forget! I would think slash fiction is much bigger in the West.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 1d ago

Fujoshi is an example but I rather doubt that it applies to Western hardcore stuff. The manga usually isn't (very) explicit; it's more about observing the emotional reactions you would want between two people you also find attractive, rather than self-inserting as the female in the fiction.

My understanding is that (until quite recently, maybe?) most straight women find bi guys a turnoff, so I wouldn't think they'd want to watch gay men either.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 2d ago

It seems lately that within the rationalist / post-rationalist diaspora on twitter and elsewhere, polyamory is starting to come into the crosshairs

Always has been, this happens every few years. Was Kat's post the origin post for this round, or was she prompted by something else? It's been over a year since poly did the New Yorker/NPR/etc circuit.

issues arose that reminded people why these ideas were fringe in the first place.

There's a few issues around it. One of which is the typical-minding by the WEIRDest people around, and outside of a small, hyper-selected group influenced by the Berkeley egregore, such experimentation has a much higher failure rate. There's also the "what is the rationalist community for" question that was asked and left largely-unresolved several years ago, by Sarah Constantin and Zvi part one, Zvi part two that explicitly says polyamory is bad. Zvi's post always struck me as so idealistic it crosses well into arrogance, but I get that was also the atmosphere at the time- changing the world in wild ways and encouraging adoption of poorly-tested social technologies that may not generalize is something to be incredibly careful with, and broadly, they're not.

For those not steeped in rationalist lore, there have been many 'cult-like' groups that have hurt people arising in the rationalist and especially EA space.

Didn't Sam Altman suggest that in Yudkowsky's efforts to inoculate against paperclipping AI he basically hyperstitioned the field into existence? The anti-human branches of AI researchers are almost certainly a rationalist-descended cult-like phenomenon.

It's never really been clear the degree to which rationalist/EA spaces are prone to certain kinds of sex pest, or just unusually public at writing blog posts about them rather than quietly jettisoning them.

Looking at the people on the conservative side, the loudest champions of a traditional moral order seem to be grifters, or at least hypocrites where they say one thing, and do another in their personal lives.

Exceedingly few "true conservatives" are able to win in the attention economy. This says something important about communication of conservative ideologies, though I'm not entirely sure what, and perhaps says even more about the terribleness of ideologies that are able to win within the attention economy.

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Quality Contributions Report for April 2025

desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 6d ago

at least in major cities, is no that the public finds public transport “inconvenient”.

Define "major." Living in the NC Triangle, I wouldn't be hanging around the main bus depots for safety/annoyance reasons, but primarily the bus system is kinda useless if you're not going on fairly limited routes or have hours to waste.

When I first moved here from a city with much better transit (SLC, also vastly more bikeable), I tried mapping it out- I could almost walk my commute as fast as the bus system was going to take.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 6d ago

Our educated and wealthy people are only human, and in my experience almost all of them can have their substantive thinking overwhelmed, at least on occasion and maybe more than that, by the need for social signalling. That is a different problem than being morons.

It's been proposed that there is a comforting impulse behind conspiratorial thinking, to think that even if the mysterious Powers That Be are evil, at least they're competent! I propose a parallel here, that thinking of the EHC as morons is more comforting than thinking of their particular brand of disastrous signaling as only human. Perhaps it is that I do not want to think so poorly of humanity in the abstract, and so I want to disconnect the concept of humanity from the cause of their issues.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 8d ago

Looking forward to someone trying to analyze in the future how much of the dropoff was due to Trump intimidation versus USAID cutting the NGO racket.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 8d ago

the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.

Major mens rea issue divining the difference between they incompetently wanted to undo anything Trump did versus they competently wanted (approximately) open borders but backtracked after the last minute once they finally realized it was it was such an electoral albatross.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 8d ago

I mean, my interpretation of your comment is that DEI is everything indefensible (from your perspective), and everything that's defensible is not DEI.

Wouldn't it make more sense and be more charitable to distinguish that the ADA predates DEI as an acronym by 20 years?

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 8d ago

Would a White researcher come off as unbiased in race research in your opinion?

In the social climate of the past 30 or so years? Quite possibly, though if the researcher themselves capitalized white that would be a signal that increases the prediction of bias. That's part of how we ended up with Biden.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 8d ago

The term is overused but it's useful to have a shorthand for the particular effect Trump has on some people. It's worth distinguishing criticism of Trump from TDS. "Tariffs are mostly bad, or at least have been applied poorly" is a reasonable take, not TDS. Handmaid's Tale posters are TDS, always have been always will be, though useful to identify people who can be wholesale ignored.

Similarly someone should've coined ODS to distinguish "Obama is a good candidate" from the messianic wackadoo stuff.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 13d ago

Pride is a fun social event (while certainly a sort of political propaganda) doesn't transgress it except in the minds of folks who throw sex acts and the existence of LGBT people in the same mental bucket

Pride is a motte and bailey of events that was originally specifically to transgress. It is completely disingenuous to act like throwing Pride and sex acts together is some absurdity; that's what pride was for its first 40+ years, and that's still what it is in many areas.

Surely, surely some fraction of the LGBT community can act like normal gosh-darn people and admit that a line can be drawn between And Tango Makes Three or whatever the equivalent with human characters is versus Pride Puppy or Grandpa's Pride (Noticing a theme here). AND YET! This absurd books that are practically beyond parody keep getting pulled up in schools.

Gay people are normal, yeah. While it's been toned down since Raytheon started sponsoring, a significant fraction of Pride is not.

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desolation You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart 13d ago

The Harvard letter was claimed to be sent before the final version was approved

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