disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
No bio...
User ID: 426
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1mo ago
Do you think there is only one bad guy in WWII? I’ve never said “true villain”, nor “race traitors” for what it’s worth. I’m saying Churchill sucks, not that Hitler or the Nazis are the good guys.
Given that Germany was already at war with Britain why would you expect anyone in the British leadership to want to make life easier for the German high command rather than harder?
Given that the Nazi regime thought it was at war with the Jewish cabal that controlled Europe, why should the Nazis want to make life easier on the Jews rather than harder? The answer is that killing civilians is wrong and doesn’t advance your war aims, but everybody but the US missed that memo. The same can be said for the treatment of POWs.
I can’t speak at all for DeGaulle, although the French colonies certainly aren’t where the war was won or lost.
I think the crux here is that you want the winning side to be treated as the good guys, and I want all players to be held to the same standards. War is bad! The Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets were super evil! The British were their usual level of evil, with Churchill channeling their worst tendencies. The Americans were slightly more evil than WWI but still basically the most moral players in the war.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2mo ago
Untargeted night bombing raids were effectively hitting only civilians, but the whole period has so much stuff going on that I don’t think we’ll change each others mind here.
I would consider the fact that Churchill's side won pretty much every every war he was involved in to be evidence to the contrary.
This seems very silly? Stuff Churchill actually was responsible for, like Operation Wilfred or the Gallipoli campaign all seemed to end disastrously. Britain barely came out ahead in WWI, and in WWII the British contribution to the European theater was essentially their naval blockade, while the actual war was won by Russian soldiers and American industry.
Madagascar
Germany had beaten France and claimed their colonies. They were offering the transport of civilians out of a war zone, but that wouldn’t help British war aims, so it was denied. If you inhabit the frame of winning at any cost, then sure, Britain was playing to win, but so were the Germans, and what they did sure does seem evil. If Britain was losing the war, would you be surprised if they started killing the Germans they had put in concentration camps?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2mo ago
The British sent bombers targeting Germany for IIRC 9 months before the Germans retaliated. I can’t speak to Germans bombing civilians in Poland, tho I would believe it.
On Churchill: yes. This is why Churchill sucks. He was a warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do. He was still responsible for pushing the RAF to terrorize the German civilian populous in the hopes that the Germans would retaliate in a way that would pull America into the war. Additional beef: Hitler’s offer to turn Madagascar into a Jewish-German colony was denied by Churchill because he wanted to maximize the number of mouths Germany had to feed on the continent. Decent odds Madagascar would have been turned into a charnel house anyway, but we won’t know thanks to Churchill.
Agree with Germany being dumb, but I think it was more that the Nazis thought that their struggles were due to a Jewish conspiracy that ran Europe, rather than perfidious Albion being perfidious. German theory-of-mind takes the L once again.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2mo ago
Culpability shouldn’t be a binary thing, where if you throw the first punch I get to burn your family alive and that’s on you. Britain make a last-second alliance with Poland which failed to deter German expansionism, and after Germany beat France the capacity of Britain to win a direct conflict against Germany dropped to zero. The whole of Churchill’s maneuverings were to provoke Germany into committing an atrocity that would bring the US into the war, which he did by targeting civilian German populations. Germany was culpable for starting the conflict, absolutely, but Britain was responsible for escalating the conflict to a total war.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2mo ago
Culpability isn’t a very useful metric when this stuff seems pretty overdetermined. Germany and France will try to unify Europe under their control, UK will try to stop said unification, Russia will try to expand the empire, Americans will sell stuff. The stuff I’d like to argue about is whether to treat a particular player as behaving in a respectable way or not. WWI, with all its slaughter, had its deaths concentrated among men explicitly waging the war, with some exceptions for starvation in Germany near the end. We don’t revile Germany for its behavior in that war today, because their conduct was within the relatively wide bounds of honorable conduct for that conflict. WWII on the other hand has widespread and unrelenting barbarity by nearly all players, excepting the US and France. The Germans are rightly reviled not because of their blitzkreig through Belgium but because they liked to kill civilian Jews for bad reasons. We too should revile the British approach of sending planes to scatter bombs indiscriminately amongst civilian German populations for different but still bad reasons.
Very few people care about the alliance between Poland and the UK because the alliance was explicitly built as a last-second deterrent for German expansion, not because the Polish and British governments had a long and close relationship of mutual protection. Local players had their own reasons for disliking said expansion, but from the American perspective there really wasn’t any reason why we should care.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2mo ago
How does the development of tools for mass murder in the world wars fit into the paradigm of ‘following the rules’? After the fact, the indiscriminate killings of civilian populations via bombings or starvation by the UK, US, USSR, and to a large degree Nazi Germany are treated ambivalently by contemporary recountings, while the discriminate killings were immortalized by the Nuremberg trials and have been written into the foundation of contemporary morality. ‘Don’t kill civilians’ is perhaps an unworkably high standard, but I’d much prefer if that was held to a bit more strongly than tripwire alliances designed to further geopolitical goals. The US was actually pretty good about not doing evil shit aside from a handful of bombings later into the war, and I’d like that to be that standard, which the indiscriminate and pointless night bombings of the British very much fall short of.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
2mo ago
Back in the periods of major European immigration to the USA a large number would return back to their home country, usually because they failed to make their fortune and America was rough if you were poor.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
3mo ago
I recently took STEP2, the immense medical school exam that dictates my likelihood to match. 8 hours, ~310+ q’s, the sum output of 6ish months of my free time. I’d project I ended up somewhere in the 230s, below average but still within the reach of my desired residency, although I’ve got a bit before I actually get the results. I still have a handful of minor hurdles, but most of the stress has now officially passed.
My next project will be getting back into climbing. I was able to clear v5 and 5.11s with some consistency but I’ve grown old and fat. With some afternoons free I’m hoping to at least clear the local v4s in the next month or so.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
3mo ago
How did you meet? How have your expectations for a partner changed over the years and across relationships? Do you have any regrets that you learned from or might be generalizable?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
4mo ago
Don’t conflate wicked with impotent. That’s a long list of political accomplishments, even if you think they’re malevolent!
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
6mo ago
I’d prefer if good workers were hired over bad workers, and failing that quotas could grant the system of racial spoils some transparency. The status quo of neither drives inflationary compliance costs where every company has to shell out for the next hot seminar about racial equity or run the risk of deviating from standard practice and thus become liable for a lawsuit.
But that wasn’t my point. What we get is overdetermined; underperforming minorities are going to underperform, and it’s mean to be mean about that, but they on average are worse than the average worker, so we get a stupid compromise that solves nothing with immense costs but sounds nice and fair so we’re going to be stuck with it forever.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
7mo ago
The counterfactual isn’t dumb regulations about tests, it’s racial quotas or laissez faire freedom of association. The politics of quotas have been unpalatable to voters forever so instead we get opaque jurisprudence trying to square the circle of stopping racism without noticing minority underperformance. There’s a ton of path dependence that got us here, and while the bureaucracy might be metastatic at this point good concrete legislation in the 1960s might have built a different, more functional world.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
7mo ago
The Jumpstart 2020 and 2022 sets are great for beginners. Each booster pack has cards from a single color and theme, and you can shuffle 2 packs together to make something that plays out like strong limited or draft decks. You can get a booster box of 24 packs for ~$100 and treat it like a cube. Highly recommend.
Card Kingdom sometimes puts out ‘Battle decks’, which are a cheap way to get playable 60 card decks that feel strong enough. Nothing too crazy, but good for kitchen table games.
Draft or limited are super fun but very very challenging and not for beginners.
Commander can actually be fun but it very much depends on the play group. If all 4 players are chill and playing decks of similar power then the format can be fun, but it’s often pretty complex and politics plays a big role. It’s definitely the most popular format and the easiest to find IRL games for, and it isn’t too hard to build a budget deck for $50-100 that plays perfectly well in low power pods. All that said, the format allows huge variation, and the experience of playing against a high-powered deck with a budget deck can be torture. If your kid wants to play with others this is eventually where you’ll probably end up but I wouldn't rush there.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
8mo ago
At the point where human modification is so good that you can casually get functional new gametes with no risk of deleterious mutation, you’ve basically moved past the point where traditional reproductive processes are going on. The AI double-checking the process is choosing the shape of the next generation, not the messy historically contingent mating process of H. sapiens. At that point x and y are just spandrels.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
9mo ago
I consistently finish all broth given to me with ramen and pho, and would be disappointed if there was less fwiw
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
I’d quibble with the ‘we’ part, and add the risk of a secular demographic collapse before going interstellar but probably agree with you on most of the details.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
The above passage is IMO a very clever way of framing Jews and Jewish racial traits as foundational to not only sexual liberalism and communist worldviews but to those of the trad-cons and the alt-right itself. It’s as pro-Semitic as a race-realist speaking to an audience of Hitlerite memers could probably get without getting cancelled.
The offensiveness arguably serves to stop the process of dilution and appropriation as depicted in Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths. You can’t take the homophobic slurs into the mainstream, so arguably you get to keep your ghetto free of grifters and maintain the spirit of contrarianism necessary for original thought.
Does Nietzsche have any specific policy platform? This is a distinct culture separate from neoliberal wonkery and it doesn’t express itself in that language, in the same way utils don’t make sense outside of a consequentialist framework. Their political goal is a new regime, with the specifics TBD, because their framework boils down to good leaders with real power -> good country. Again, naive IMO, but I appreciate that they are trying to build something.
There’s a subtle variant of racism 0HP advocates for that I’m coming to agree with but doubt I can communicate clearly. Too much of an inferential gap. I can give it a shot if you’re curious, but if you don’t agree with basic race-realist stuff it probably won’t get us anywhere.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
It’s easier to find a good critique than a good solution, and to his credit, 0HP has at least one pointed in the vague direction of a real solution in the form of his Christo-Nietzchean synthesis. The Neo-Nietzchean fake-and-gay critiques I suspect are correct, though the crassness is not quite my cup of tea. My most substantial disagreement is with his hope in high-drama politics to guide reform; I think the next election cycle or three is doomed, and the more technocratic arguments of Hanania will have to win out.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
The problem with this is that it assumes that problems have solutions. Easy mistake! But the strongest possible incentives have failed to stop aging, or find a way to increase IQ. No set of incentives will find a way to generate negative net entropy, or move faster than the speed of light. People can successfully build a bridge or fight a war, sure, but contemporary politics have solved most of these tractable problems.
It’s a pretty good prior tho, no? With an N= all British people 1600-2020 you could rank order each person per generation by Clarks’ variables, derive a temporal weight for each, then see who is at the top and bottom, and the rank of their relatives. As is, Clark has to do a lot of estimations, tho he does try to justify them. The alternative hypothesis would have to find a reservoir for status outside of money, occupation, or education, which seems plausible but I’m personally drawing a blank for possibilities.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Not necessarily, because house value is a proxy for social status that depends on its contextual weight. If London is burnt to the ground, or becomes much more expensive, the relationship between social status and house value changes, but the underlying heritability of social status remains the same. If everyone had cheap houses, it doesn’t mean that the society has more social mobility, just that that variable doesn’t capture status any more. Note figure 3, where wealth has much weaker maternal heritability compared to occupational status and education.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
Since I Left You by the Avalanches should be a perfect fit.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
All the ink spilled hyping up the conflict between human vs. AI seems, well, fucking retarded to me. AI is going to kill a ton of people, and help a ton of people, just like the human-horse alliance did. It will definitely suck to suck. The question is, what polities will be able to use this new ally in a way congruent with their culture, and who will be destroyed by it? I’m worried that AI will play nice with censors and busybodies, and hope that it will help scientist and technologists build better humans and explore the stars. There is no way to get what I want without the risk of mean AI, and every day of delay means another day of growth for the rent-seekers. So pedal to the metal acceleration is a-OK with me, as the alternative of a decaying Pax Americanus w/nukes seems a loosing proposition.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
1yr ago
But the political demand for this is hugely negative. The ones with current cultural power are either too old to have more children or are plugged into low-fertility norms, so it’s like pulling teeth to modestly expand parent tax credits. Your tax on careerist single women, you know, the ones with nothing better to do with their time than engage with luxury brands and girlboss feminism, would force them to do way more of the latter. What real stakeholders would back this plan for more than a few seconds?
The problem is, we don’t have cures. We have drugs that at particular doses have positive risk/benefit ratios for a particular condition for most patients. If every bottle of Tylenol is priced to cover the liability for liver damage I’m not sure pharmacies continue to exist.
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