funzodonzo
8d ago
Ehhh.. there's a ton of sophistry on the internet, The Motte is no exception. Let's not pretend this is the Library of Alexandria or the old salons of Europe. There is an occasional interesting and well-thought out post, but those are mostly an exception. This is why I mostly lurk and now just skim top level posts for an interesting topic. It's probably best to view this site as a place where somewhat rightwing malcontents talk amongst themselves with an occasionally centrist or somewhat liberal poster chiming in.
Look, I used to be quite liberal, but back in the "age of woke" I got turned against progressive idiocy. I read SSC, Less Wrong, Steve Sailer, etc. and that helped me see the overreach and sometimes straight out wrongness of the mid 00-10's progressive and liberal ideologies. However, I never dug that deep beyond some rightwing/centrist thinkers. Now that a lot of the right is either in power or in the spotlight (see X), I see how stupid much of it is. Politicians talking about banning chemtrails, TACO Don who doesn't understand trade beyond a general love of tariffs and wants to continue scamming his supporters (e.g. formerly Trump University, now Trump Coin, Trump scent, etc.), and to quote SSC, the spineless toady JD Vance. It's just all so stupid! Well, stupid and malicious. It reminds me of an older meme about Pakistan; that they'd be 100% ok with the world blowing up as long as India was destroyed first.
There are strong arguments to be made about some right wing positions, e.g. reducing the deficit, decoupling from China, demanding NATO allies pay more, on-shoring, etc. but these clowns are just bad at this. The BBB adds to the deficit, tariff schizophrenia doesn't allow for a stable and long term industrial policy, etc.
The left might be wrong a lot of times, but that doesn't make the current right correct.
I too want there to be editing of humans for the betterment of mankind. Maybe I'll do an effort post to this end on what's been tried, what's possible, costs and the near future of gene therapy and editing. The latest I've seen from him involved working on DMD, but I don't see any recent papers by him in PubMed or Google Scholar.
Regardless, I'm not certain I want to throw behind a shit-posting scientist. Is it too much to ask our best and brightest minds and leaders not to shit-post and troll (Hsu, Trump, He)? Is it too much to ask leaders to have gravitas and not give in to spite just to own their enemies? I guess I'll just resign myself to wait for someone to develop a cure for ALS and announce it on twitter with something like, "Despite the FAGGOTRY of ESTABLISMENT midwits, my 10X team has developed a SAFE and EFFECTIVE treatment for twitchy fuckers w/ALS. You're welcome gaybros! See below for preprint 1/n"
funzodonzo
7mo ago
Making population projections more than 50 years into the future is foolish. https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
If you lived in 1900 or 1950 and looked at the data, what would your predictions be then?
This is especially true with AI and genetic engineering around the corner.
Regardless, North Korea still sucks. So your hinting around at it being better than South Korea is pretty stupid.
funzodonzo
1yr ago
How are you personally sacrificing Ukrainians?
funzodonzo
1yr ago
Do you honestly think there's going to be a huge war between China and the US in the near future?
Is there suppose to be a link here?
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