jake
2mo ago
Low regional pricing (currency, Steam regional prices are set by currency,) discounts/e-rebates for store credit, free keys. Valve isn't freewheeling in China, Steam China operates through Perfect World.
But I just saw I was wrong about Cyberpunk's peak, SteamDB has it at 1.05 million. The difference isn't so stark now, and like I said above, the game is clearly very good, and I'm sure I'll play it eventually.
It can also be true that something other than the even very high quality of the game as responsible for its popularity. 2 million concurrent is incredible but I want to know is this a single player experience truly worthy of those numbers, or is it something else. I think we'd be seeing those numbers soaring among western gamers if it were paradigm-defining. It might be, in a month we might see over 3 million, with a million playing in the west. Maybe not, but even if it just playing to market, that's absolutely valid. MiHoYo of Genshin Impact, Honkai, Zenless Zone Zero, play to the western market in having attractive women and no hamfisted politics in their games. China could do nothing but publish AAA knockoffs with fanservice and no politics and devour the market, and they'd be valid to do it, but that wouldn't make the games amazing themselves, and that's what I'm interested in.
The concurrent player record could be inflated. It's a new IP by a foreign studio and while covered by culture war circles before its release, it was only after release and the record-breaking numbers that I saw it brought up among normies. A good comparison is Cyberpunk 2077, its peak was 250K just over 1 million, from a somewhat-established IP, the at-the-time preeminent studio, Keanu Reeves, and years of hype.
That said, if it were bad, Steam would show it, and the negative reviews I see are mostly "Game too hard", with a complement of "My computer can't run this." Some have better criticisms, "Invisible walls everywhere," "Buggy AI", "Repetitive", "Poor world design" and "Not enough variety in attacks." So probably a mix: something was done to inflate the numbers, but for a very good though not paradigm-defining game.
jake
3mo ago
I've finished with suggested edits in the doc. It kept signing me out, that may be why it looks like several people were making suggestions.
I've done a lot of anon editing in /lit/ /wg/ threads, most of what I've read there is the kind of bad writing that editing can't fix. Yours is good, and you can see that in my edits being almost all words and parts of sentences you could omit. Using a few too many words is an easy fix. I liked it, I'll be reading more as long you keep us updated.
I meant to put these in my previous comment -- "That" can often be omitted, and there are some rules on writing numbers. The article says and I'll summarize, it's just narrative consistency, always writing them as numerals or always writing them as words. That is narrative, so in narration you'd write them all as numerals, and as dialogue you'd write them as the full words (though there are specific exceptions to this, the one I can name is street addresses, which are always written as eg "123 Main").
If you want, make a copy and DM me an anonymized/open commenter link and I'll suggest edits on the entire story.
Your writing is quite good, there are disruptions in flow from you doubling and sometimes tripling up on adjectives. Most instances you could omit one or all, two examples:
In the station, an ever-present soundscape practically smothers us, heavy and ominous and oppressive
Soundscape implies atmosphere and ubiquity, I think there's probably a better word choice. Heavy/Ominous/Oppressive aren't exact synonyms but here they're redundant because of "smothers."
"The ocean smothers us with sound" conveys it in fewer words.
I hear Whitlock faintly stirring* in the bunk underneath me. The bed creaks as he slowly, gingerly* sits up and begins to vomit into a bucket, choking and heaving and gasping* as the contents of his stomach unceremoniously escape his body. Once* the retching is over, there’s laboured breathing and a soft, low thud;* the low sound of a head being rested against a bunk pole.
"Stirring" implies a quietness, you could go with "I hear Whitlock's weak stirs."
"Slowly, gingerly" gingerly implies slowness.
"Choking and heaving and gasping" like the above, your omission of commas is meant to emphasize the unpleasantness but just "choking" captures it, and we already know he's having a bad time from the context, before and after.
"Once" is a word for temporal specificity, "when" is a word for temporal generality. When also reads better, "When the retching is finished there's laboured breathing"
"soft, low" redundant
I might omit to "there's laboured breathing and the low sound of a head being rested against a bunk pole"
Last notes: the rules for italicizing apply to titles of works, words not in English (though this would be often, not strictly always), and scientific terms. In prose you can style how you want so you can use italics for names like "Proteus" and "Mazu" but there are times it hurts the flow, especially back-to-back with "Caelus, Qianliyan."
Spirulina is proper when referring to the organism, for a food product it's just "spirulina cakes."
jake
3mo ago
I'm surprised China in particular isn't making better use of the internal division in the West
Were Harris to win in November, the probability of China taking Taiwan would increase. But they don't need to rush to exploiting the division when their plans mean benefitting long-term. Yeah, I've heard "The Chinese economy is about to crash" for at least 10 years, but the tiger stands. It might be paper, but the eagle might be a puff of smoke. If Europe and the US keep declining, then on the timeframe China works at, soon nobody will be able to stop them when they make open moves to devour Africa's resources. That's their actual goal, and if Western decline reaches that point, who gives a shit about chip backdoors?
That said, China is helping sow the division. The whining about Russia for 8 years involved a mountain of stuff Russia was not doing, but China was doing, and at a far greater scale and efficacy. Russia wasn't on Reddit while China has been prolific at shaping narrative on the site. China had orders-of-magnitude more impact on Twitter, and yet decades more potent an impact still with TikTok. The Chinese hand on the scale has massively inflated the apparent size of the online left while also increasing its actual numbers. Whether they controlled trends directly or quickly passed it off to non-ideologically-aligned-as-such American subordinates, the result is the same. This "backfired" in congress forcing divestiture, but what makes TikTok beneficial to the Chinese will largely remain.
In this particular hypothetical, they would get the kid as the patsy while their sniper gave them the video and the pink mist screencaps for the rank-and-file lefties to spam on every platform everywhere, which is objectively what would have happened. There is a clear morale reason for them to go for something messy. In the continuation of this hypothetical, now they might go for something quiet. It also won't work. A gust of wind and a head-turn saved him, call it luck, I call it providence.
jake
3mo ago
The audio is clear, it's a clip from a single phone, I'm familiar with firearms but I don't think a special familiarity is necessary to recognize the three distinct reports. I don't need analysis to confirm what I can hear plainly, but that it comes from CNN should be enough.
It is significant. Certainly there's time still for one of the local law enforcement offices to put out their official report and it could be the report says one of their officers engaged Crooks. But we don't have it right now, and that is a chasm in the chain of events. A person was discharging their firearm in the same brief window of time another person was trying to kill President Trump. Who was it? Where were they? What or who were they aiming at? What or who did they hit? Why don't we know?
There could be a reasonable explanation, I won't dispute that at all, but it seems like your assumption that there is, is being applied to consider its current absence as unimportant. It's not, it's extremely important. Because there is an unknown gun firing, there is a possibility the bullet that pierced Trump's ear was not fired by Crooks, that's what's on the table, and until it is answered, it is the most important question about July 13.
jake
3mo ago
So ask. You're here, you're more thoughtful than most, I'm happy to explain. I'll explain now, I hate power. Look at history, it's always the same story. Titans of men raise great nations and their people enjoy golden ages. But those men die, their power must be passed on, and inevitably, every single time, someone reigns who is wholly unfit to rule. Often they kill nations outright, at best they sow ruin for their children or great-great-great-grandchildren to suffer through or else die by. Some intrinsic inadequacy in our specific personage births tyrants, petty and brutal, and the more the population grows, the more tyrants appear and for the last century they have grown enough to infest the American government at all levels. I am cynical of them to a man, I know their crimes, certain ones I'd give you as "conspiracies" for the sake of magnanimity in this discourse, but there is a laundry list of abominable deeds perpetrated by the American government that there is absolutely no debate happened. Iraq at the top of the list. We started a war and maybe a million people died over a fucking lie. The perpetrators are still around, they weren't elected to begin with and they weren't fired, they weren't jailed. They're still working, or enjoying comfy retirements. Same as the generation before them, same as the generation before them. The machine never changed. The Company never changed.
The disposition isn't specific, it's broad. There are powerful career individuals in the United States government and I do not believe there is a single action they consider unacceptable to their morals because the evidence cries thunderous, they have no morals.
Last November Vivek Ramaswamy was giving speeches to tiny crowds where he was saying there's no chance Biden is on the ballot for 2024. A month ago this was still a "right-wing conspiracy", before the debate, Biden's obvious lack of fitness for office was a "right-wing conspiracy." Now we know for sure how the people running the executive were not elected, and they were enabled in their deceit and their necessary tyranny by an effective state-media establishment.
Now, the party who brands themselves as the "protectors of democracy" are by all appearances going to run a candidate for President who nobody wanted, and if truly democratic primaries had been held this year, a candidate who indeed no one would have voted for. The party, the media, the state, have justified extraordinary measures targeting President Trump under justification of him being a "threat to democracy", they fight tooth and nail against anything and everything they perceive as a move to disenfranchise voters, yet their most recent major move was to disenfranchise their entire constituency. This is a fact, I describe reality.
I also describe reality when I say if there was no conspiracy at work in the attempt on Trump's life it was neither for lack of motive nor opportunity.
jake
3mo ago
I think this would be fair if I were citing arguments and analysis of the biased. Like if I were quoting the guy from the second link in #2, where he argues the origin and target of the shots, that'd be fair. Or if I were quoting the research being done by the Heritage Foundation. I'm not, I give them no current stock. Everything above other than the link in #2 is either an unbiased (or counter-biased) reporter, or where it's a biased reporter I only linked it because it contains Cheatle's testimony or raw footage/audio. The guy speculating on USSS protocol is biased, but he's also providing a counterargument: it could be protocol they don't keep recordings, or reasonably-selectively keep recordings, and the rally didn't qualify for entirely justifiable reasons.
My willingness to relatively quickly take the adverse inference is probably a result of my disposition, but I can say on 7/13 I wasn't thinking it was a hit, and by my own logs I wasn't looking hard at it until 7/16. I didn't write on some of the questions raised until 7/18, and even on 7/19 I would say I was only on the verge. The audio analysis is what pushed me over and that's because there's no argument against it. Three weapons were fired, Crooks fired some of the shots, the USSS counter-sniper fired the last shot, and there is a burst that is unaccounted for. Short of federal law enforcement and the domestic intelligence apparatus being in the midst of a clandestine nationwide manhunt for the second shooter and they don't want to give anything away, there is no other good explanation. But hell, it could be that, and if it is and they catch the guy, great.
We're in a black swan sprint. Attempted assassination of the previous President, the incumbent President announcing (or "announcing") he's not running for a second term and now a growing din that he's dead or all but. My grandmother experienced a cluster of transient ischemic attacks. She was sharp, in her mid-80s and about to make a long drive to Texas for her annual checkup, to the next day being unable to ever drive again and maybe ever think again. Her body lived a few more years, it's a bad way to go.
I started with no conclusion about the attempt on Trump's life but for transparency's sake I am the type to assume it was a hit. I think neutrally reported evidence now shows it was a hit.
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Cheatle testified the USSS was alerted between 2 and 5 times to Crooks
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CNN on forensic analysis showing reports from 3 weapons; and I don't know this guy, I'm not endorsing any of his analysis or quoting it here, but at around 18:40 is a clip where 3 distinct reports can be heard.
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CBS news on the USSS saying their counter-snipers fired a single shot.
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I can't find anything from the other law enforcement at the event saying one or more of their guys discharged their firearms, I think we'd know by now if one of the cops took shots.
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Cheatle testified the USSS has no recordings of radio comms from the event. Recording everything could be a policy that only applies to the details protecting the sitting President, but given everything else we know I take the adverse inference.
I think the adverse inference is justified because of the chasmic hole of "third gun." A third person was firing a weapon at that event, we don't know who they are (or were), we don't know where they were when they took those shots, and most importantly, we don't know why we don't know. If they were killed in whatever building, that's a corpse that got disappeared in the middle of a crime scene where somebody tried to kill a former President. If they got away, they got away. That doesn't happen without help. Conclusively: at least one person at that rally charged with protecting Trump tried or helped someone try to kill him. The necessary next question is how high does it go?
jake
4mo ago
Elsewhere in the thread someone quoted ABC news, in turn quoting the Butler county sheriff, who confirmed the story of Crooks being confronted by an officer just before firing.
To have that confrontation, the "sense" to ignore the cop and make those shots at 150 yards with iron sights--no adrenaline pumping, no jitters? Crooks must have been a crack shot with frozen veins. I guess I assume a second shooter wouldn't miss (+ all the other questions that raises), because otherwise that explanation would make far more sense than "random schizo is as coolheaded as scout sniper."
jake
4mo ago
Austin Private Wealth is the group in question, they're a fee-only fiduciary with just over $1B in assets managed. Their filing on Friday 7/12 listed 12,000 puts on $DJT. They put out a statement saying a third-party vendor caused all of their options positions to be multiplied by 10,000, and so the actual position was 12 puts. I don't know enough about the workings of actual investing groups to speak here with any definitiveness, but it seems unusual to me that they would buy 12 puts--assuming a $1 premium, that's $1200. That's nothing compared to their total holdings. Maybe there's a diversified spread and they had like $50,000 or $100,000 of puts, and I'm sure that'll come out if they did. Or maybe it was a hedging move if they have 1200 shares of $DJT, but I think they'd have probably included in their statement if they had such stock. "We didn't have this large short, in fact we hold $DJT." Simple.
But that also ignores a worse question, from my cursory research their holdings would be reported under SEC Form 13F. Maybe this is wrong, if it is the following can be crossed out, but if that's true: multiple people from APW should have, and possibly would have needed to sign off on it prior to its approval, so did they all fail obscenely in their fiduciary duty? Or did they fail it by only one person being charged with verifying and then approving. If the financial guy doesn't notice a position worth $1200 has been marked as $1.2 million, should he keep managing your money? Now multiply that by as many options positions as they had. It's insane. They should absolutely be investigated if for no other reason than the claimed lapse in duty, unless it's a regular thing for investment groups to give astronomically wrong filings to the SEC. But there is presumably a lengthy paper trail here, so if they're lying and they did have a 1.2 million share short, I assume it's a matter of time before someone with the proper finance bona fides uncovers what happened.
All this meaning: if APW did in fact have a 12,000 put position, then that combined with their statement now denying it and their attempted obfuscation, is clear evidence of conspiracy.
As for #3, sure, all plausible. #4 yeah remains to be seen. I don't think I emphasized enough, but that is the question above all other questions. When did they know? If people go to prison over this, it will be on that question. The CBS report says at 5:51 they had a suspicious person with a rangefinder, that's enough for me to say someone had a failure in duty worthy of prison. But that's criminal negligence, for failure to protect the President and the people around him, the death of Compertore. Whether it was malicious aforethought is the deeper question, and one that, again, remains to be seen.
Before now I thought it would take so many people to be in the loop that someone would turn, but as I wrote downthread it now seems entirely plausible that it would only take 1 person on-site to open the door, or prop up the ladder.
My major questions are these:
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Short activity, some of the information in the tweets is wrong but the short interest was shooting up, there are plenty of reasonable explanations for that but not this one, last Friday was there in fact a major put acquisition with a fast expiry? If so, that's investigation-level suspicious
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Sniper ROE, my assumption would be they have very broad rules for engagement, so if the rules changed, how long ago was it changed, and is there documentation? If that's wrong and they do have broad ROE, 2a, why didn't they shoot? 2b, why didn't they talk to the detail? Or radio to command? Or hell, if nothing else, why not just shout? Did they radio it in and it was ignored? If so, I would immediately assume conspiracy, and that someone's going to turn
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I see people elsewhere saying there was an atypical amount of media presence at the rally, is this true, and if so, why?
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Most significantly, allowing Trump to go on the stage. I've seen clips before of USSS being highly proactive about pulling the President. If this guy had been initially identified an hour before, then someone with the USSS confirmed "suspicious guy on roof" at 5:52, what is the minute-by-minute explanation for that information failing to reach his detail?
jake
4mo ago
The question of conspirators is how many at the rally would need to be in the loop. My assumption would be as the number goes up, the probability of a defector quickly approaches 100%. If 50, I'd assume someone has already turned. If 25, is it halved, or is 25 still in the >99% territory? What's the necessary minimum? I think it might be a far fewer than 50, even 25.
It could be just 1. Whoever's in charge on-site. Call them SC, site chief.
The cops defer to USSS in these events, so they follow SC's orders and they're neutralized. SC decides to keep USSS away from that building, says the cops will cover, then gives the cops the go-ahead to be inside if it's too hot. If SC's controls all comms, as could make sense to prevent crosstalk, then they can ignore the cop reports and not pass the intel along to the President's personal detail. I'm skeptical of what's been said of USSS sniper ROE, but if they do have such strict rules, then they wouldn't need to be in the loop. They would do their job exactly as expected: wait for the guy to shoot, shoot him back. Loose end is killed, easy.
Had they achieved such a crime, then they use the chaos, bounce around the blame ball, give a few token heads, maybe even big ones, but who cares because they've won. They assassinated an opponent so they'll certainly rig an election, then re/consolidate power.
jake
4mo ago
I thought that, but the header text says
The editors of The Modern Library were privileged to have the assistance of a distinguished Board made up of celebrated authors, historians, critics, and publishing luminaries. In 1998 and 1999, members of the Modern Library Board participated in the “100 Best” project, voting on the 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Non-fiction works, respectively.
Maybe whoever wrote the header forgot that bit, as I'd assume it'd have an obligatory mention.
jake
4mo ago
It's not a bad list, and it being 1998-1999 there's nothing to be made of certain omissions, but wow to miss Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian. Midnight's Children at least made it, but at #90, lol. Then for the lesser misses, Gravity's Rainbow, and even less so, one of Dick's works, probably Ubik--though remarkable for prescience rather than prose. But it's not like people don't know those books, and also they all made one of Time's lists. Ignoring Neuromancer is probably a miss too, but I say that looking back from 2024.
Speaking of Gibson, and the only point I could say of this, thinking of him reminded me of his short story Burning Chrome. If you (anyone reading this) are familiar with Cyberpunk 2077 but not Gibson's work, read it. A quite short story, published in 1982, and Gibson's the rare science fiction author with real chops for prose.
I think there's some measure of trolling in spirit here, but maybe some real insight too, just hiding. I see the argument, history not changing, no matter how fine the margin, is still history not changing. Trump got a pic that's getting him 100 million votes (re. my now-Over @ 105), but how's that +15MM votes and ~+3 states won (I'd take the over on 42.5) going to change his presidency vs one where he wins by a lesser margin? If a conspirator comes forward and says the attempt was orchestrated through USSS, Trump would have historic mandate, but that's a discussively comical magnitude of "if", and ifs aren't happenings.
It also makes me think of the other, other "great historic" picture of Trump: on the DMZ with Un.
In a different timeline this might have been a picture historically comparable to those of Nixon with Mao, and with Deng. But as good as the pic is, Trump left office, Nork's back to belligerent insularity, nothing happened. I wonder if I caught some psychic headwinds, I've been playing Dishonored (no kill total ghost ofc) the last couple days, and as I was walking yesterday around noon I fell down a Wiki hole reading about Korea's tumultuous more-than-20th century. Assassinations, coups and cults. Korea marched on, it's a tech, cultural and athletic powerhouse. One of their recent presidents was impeached, tried, sentenced to prison in 2018 and pardoned and released in 2021. Is that a happening? I don't know, how much did Korea change? The first woman in East Asia to be popularly elected as head of state, ending in scandal and prison, and how many people outside of Korea know? Not many, doesn't seem like Korea even felt the bump. So was it really a non-happening?
I'm not being coy. If "happenings" require a moment where a country is on the fulcrum and a decisive action forces the lever, maybe they are rare. (I'll use "moment" from here forward because "happening" is too slangy.) Was JFK's assassination such a moment? If it was federal actors, could you really say their moment was killing a President? They had to get to that point. So was it the conspiracy? But that doesn't come ex nihilo, they had to know they could conspire, so was the moment when the federal government changed so actors within could foment ideas of killing an adversarial Executive? Well when did those conditions arise? FDR? Where did that tyranny originate? Was he a communist? For the sake of this point and this point alone assume he was. So when was the moment? His swearing-in? Or was it being shown it could work, so the October Revolution? But was that a moment, or was it the long consequence of the Communist Manifesto and Marx? Well what was the moment in Marx's life? And what precipitated that moment?
"Nothing ever happens" is interesting to me, but even not reduced as I've done, so saying yes, JFK's assassination was a moment, the October Revolution was a moment, it's interesting to me because it's still necessarily a very holistic reading of history. In that there is a sensibility; holistically, Obama's election wasn't a moment, so many moments preceded and produced the America of 2008 and he was in the right place at the right time. Trump likewise, so many decisions were made and moments happened before he ever ran, before he was the nominee and the victor. Holistically these are really the long outcomes of the thoughts and actions resultant from the psychic ebbs and flows of the masses and any particular moment, even a very loud one, might be nothing, and it's not until much later that we know. Yeah, right now we don't know. We can't know. I like the zen of "Nothing happens until it does." There might be wisdom in it, "Don't rush to history."
Tom Crooks rushed to history. He grazed Trump, killed a supporter, died after catching a bullet or several to the head, and nothing happened. Maybe.
jake
4mo ago
Talking of its inevitability would squeak in at a solid 1% of all comments, with 69% being "feds" and the last 30% being "that retard tried to kill a corpse."
If I were speculating here, I'd wonder about the increase in probability of an assassination attempt on any D politician other than Biden. It's gone up, but maybe not much--had 7/13 been a historically bad day, I would think it inevitable.
jake
4mo ago
If January 6, 2021 was the day Trump's second term was confirmed and had leftists behaved identically to the red hats, people here wouldn't even bring it up, because they'd have no reason to bring it up, because there's nothing unusual about leftists interrupting political processes.
Statements like this reinforce the grand hoax. There was nothing unusual about the day, its only unique quality was the right engaging in a particularly visible protest. It wasn't transgressive, the left behaves far worse far more often; it wasn't a threat, they would have brought guns.
Last week the country and world saw Joseph Biden is the de jure but not de facto President of the United States. The party that has branded itself on "democracy" shows no felt obligation to clarify to their base the man they voted for is not the actual Executive. It goes without saying they will lie about anything and the significance of 1/6/2021 is one such lie. Sadly it's not their worst.
jake
4mo ago
Enthusiasm for Trump isn't what it was, but he's been in the sphere for close to 10 years, lessened excitement is to be expected. There was the euphoria among Obama supporters in 2008 that felt entirely gone by 2012. Disillusionment is some of it, but a rounding error is people flipping, a lot of it is going to be people who have become apathetic about politics or who have more immediate concerns in their life, but most in the right are the people who became disillusioned with the government. They hoped Trump was redress, everything got worse, now they want an open radical. A Tucker with Vivek's platform amped to 11: Garrote by XO the major alphabet agencies, fire everyone employed at the pleasure of the Executive including most of the military officership and start over. A tidier candidate with Trump's charisma--so easy--with that platform would do extremely well, especially in 2028.
That platform is the key, it's why I say Trump will win in a landslide. It's not him drawing a second wind in voter enthusiasm but the Michael Moore factor, the "Molotov at the establishment." A million if not millions will vote in November for Trump even as they dislike him or even hate him because they hate the establishment more. Trump's a lot of things, but for politics, the thing that matters more than all else is that he embodies being the anti-establishment, and it doesn't even have to be anything he's done, it's everybody who's against him. His haters are the cred.
On real issues, the price of milk and eggs should have the DNC in an endless waking panic, nothing should matter more. I'm a conscientious shopper with a damn near eidetic memory for grocery prices, I cook a lot, and I'm good with my money, but that's me. The people making less, worse with their money, less interested and capable in cooking, who now have to spend another $50 every trip, every week or every other week, what are they not buying? What are they delaying that they need or not paying off? There's a torrent of negative effects from decreased purchasing power and nothing causes regime change like economic instability. A lot of people experience this most viscerally in the checkout line gut punch, then they look at what the left is championing. I know there might be a million women who vote this fall for the sole reason of keeping abortion lines open, that's a "valid" insofar as it's an effective political platform, it's also grotesque. They can say it's not that, it is, its presence at all necessarily means it is, but also they should, because couching it? Yeah, in what? Doomsday climate change while opposing nuclear power? Increasing welfare? Not prosecuting violent criminals? Keeping the borders wide open? Classroom proselytizing of the queer religion? These people get the same say as me, I say keep it to abortion. Better insouciant than imbecilic.
But for all this, for an election scenario the DNC should be existentially incapable of winning because of the nature of the average voter's day-to-day experience with buying anything, the discussion here is the presidential prospects of the governor of the state most representative of the failures of establishment doctrine. Newsom is actually incapable of winning a national election unless he breaks his ankles pivoting so hard from the reasoning and politics of the decisions that ruined California, and that's 2028. Trump would slaughter him on the topic of the state, the state would become the topic of the election, and I bet Trump would, he certainly could do it while praising everything the state once was. It's wonderful even still, I'd love to live in California if I had a way to dodge the Big One, but it's so far from its past glory because of people who are selectively blind about what is and tragically govern on what ought to be.
jake
5mo ago
I should have couched it more: I consider a weakness of BC's argument to be its reductiveness. If 1999 was the peak of human civilization, consider how "poorer" in possessions and quality of life people were in '89; '79; '69; etc. Also consider how families shrunk from each preceding decade. It doesn't take long before you find dozen-kid families in destitute households. Civilization marched on, it got better. We're not looking at the thing itself. Those modern households at question: generally single mothers, generally non-white, or if white, black children, 3/4+ kids--we're seeing social questions in divorces, children out of wedlock, and especially children from multiple fathers, and we're seeing governmental issues in their voting, where to leftist politicians, are described most congruently with reality when called "bought." We're looking at the consequence, or asset or vassal of the thing, when this is the framing. It is reductive, so I presented an opponent's hypothetical reductive response. Yes, as fitness has been labeled by eminently foolish leftist mouthpieces as at best "right-wing" and at worst (to them, they know not what they say) "fascist", physical fitness and "traditional", insofar as it's genetic, beauty standards are being conditioned into the masses as rightist. The right embraces this for obvious reasons, they're being freely given the easiest image W. The Soviets were very interested in fitness so I expect it will be remembered by history as quite the mistake when the American left decided on tolerating and more encouraging fatness as an angle for political power. Short of pathology or actual brain-hacking, there is not enough time or words in the world to make the average guy think of "placeholder excessively overweight woman celebrity" as more attractive than say, Sydney Sweeney.
I'm glad you brought up the question of "leftist" governance. One of the most insidious rhetorical tricks communists pulled (and there are many, as they are typified by such) was the invention of the concept of the "Lib-Left." Leftism is an inherently authoritarian ethos and this is evidenced by a simple looking at history. Since Marx, there has been no leftist political movement anywhere in the world that achieved majority power on the promise and subsequent delivery of a reduction in size of government. Leftism in all circumstances, again when in majority power, invariably strengthens itself. A state that seizes a child to trans them has identical spiritual power to the Soviets seizing Kulak land. In creating "Lib-Left" the trick was cemented with the two-axis political spectrum, thereby allowing leftists to deny any governance as left unless it were economically left, ie avowedly communist. Thus, all governments that failed to achieve communist utopia could be labeled "Auth-Left" and/or "not real communism", or even "Auth-Right", as everyday leftists were free to continue beating their drums in support of the most evil ideology ever conceived by man. We're swiftly approaching the final dissolution of political rhetoric into purely friend/enemy distinction, and I hope just as much that we are swiftly approaching the end of rightist political discourse entertaining the two-axis premise. Or at least until a new two-axis spectrum is likely conceived, but this one without the communist framing. To repeat just to be clear: I reject leftist framing as leftism requiring communist economic policy; leftism is about a powerful state, and the American state is very powerful indeed.
Do you want children, or already have them? If so, do you want them to be more successful than you or less? If there is a particular group you consider a net burden on society, then knowing BC's sterilization isn't going to happen, would you prefer their children eventually rise to be net gains for society or remain a burden?
Among the online right are people who attach a moral value to intelligence, in so doing they necessarily attach moral value to distance from animal urge. It's animal urge that says kill the other, it's the most base desire that pushes sterilization and eradication and it's not one whit different in heart than warring chimpanzees. Virtue makes neighbor of the other, and just as I want my great-grandchildren to be wildly smarter than me, I want the great-grandchildren of all my neighbors to be wildly smarter than me. And yours, and BC's, and everyone here.
Though neither is it virtuous to tolerate criminal and reprobate behavior. Caring for your neighbor can mean knowing what's best for them even when they don't, and that means punishing those who deserve punishment and withdrawing aid beyond bare necessity for those who waste in it. There must be a new inspiration of healthy respect for the just governor and fear of his righteous retribution. There must also be the pursuit of the virtuous solution to these antisocial populations: by changing their children. Not by the chimp's desire to murder them all, not the mythical and well-disproved social policy of uplift by schoolmarm, but in the technological promise of genetic modification.
There's the moral question of the practice, but it's a very low bar: a person who doesn't want their children to have a better life than their own may be disregarded. There's the practical question of whether it would actually work, fair, and of bad actors claiming uplifting therapies as a façade as they in fact modify to make slaves, also fair. If I were not convinced of its safety, I would vehemently oppose it. But in the moral abstract, if we have the ability to make our children healthier and smarter, we absolutely must.
Luxury beliefs. Status signaling. Peacocking. This is a well understood phenomenon.
This is what I target with the paragraph beginning "Of course the behavior of such people is very easy to explain . . . " Though I was unfair in it, I should have included "and people who are personally invested in acting in accordance with what they believe is best for all people" though I think that's the minority.
jake
5mo ago
100 years ago people in most countries, especially the west, were significantly poorer than today. In 1900, 20% of American households had 7 or more children, as of 2020 it's .1%. Those people were far more ignorant and compared to today unbelievably destitute but they marched on and raised civilization to new heights. What would you say changed? If it's the kind of people having so many children, then is poverty the real issue?
The online right talks a lot about genetics as destiny. Putting aside their moral failure to understand if the thing they say is true, and I think it probably is mostly true, it is damnable and must be fixed. I wonder how they square their purview with the most successful, the most attractive, and the most effective people being so uniformly leftist. Alan Ritchson sneeding about Trump stung his Reacher fans for many reasons and I'd think a not trivial one is because 6'3 Aryan chad is attacking them.
Of course the behavior of such people is very easy to explain: going with the flow, kompromat, general evil, apathy, idiocy, but when a discussion starts in such highly reductive territory as "Poor people are clearly the problem, sterilize them" you invite opponents to bring the proportionate reductiveness of something like /r/beholdthemasterrace. It's not a productive discourse. I think there is something to be argued about the impacts of specific policies, one such negative impact of welfare is that certain people dependent on welfare in turn create more people dependent on welfare, and as a great deal of political power is effectively bought from these people, the incentive structure is perverse. But do we blame the impoverished or the exploiting politicians? "Genetics as destiny" wouldn't find blame in sheep, they're sheep.
I think this is also the mistake I see time and again in the political off-by-1 error: if your desired governance has the power to mass sterilize the "genetically undesirable," well surely you've already made abortion and all birth control illegal; abolished welfare and no-fault divorce and so practically ended alimony and child support; revoked the CRA and all of its subsequents; ended the universal franchise; made it generally impossible for women to be educated after high school unless they're becoming nurses; and, I don't know, banned most social media. If casual sex risks pregnancy and there is nothing to stop it and if for many women it would be financially ruinous to have a child if they don't have the father tied down, shouldn't wanton reproduction fall off a cliff?
All that aside, I've written here before how I think hard population control is an inevitability, but I think between us it's for every reason different. It's not healthy to live around more people than names and faces you can remember, the evidence for that piles by the year. Yeah we'll be able to provide for their physical needs, in that Malthus will be forever wrong, but we can't provide for their social needs and a failure to address that will end in total civilizational collapse. Not because of laziness, not some economic issue, just the opposite. Boredom. If tens of millions of young men find no purpose in virtual lives, if they have no real work and not even a prospect for productive labor because AGI is doing all the work the top 10% can't handle, if all they have to do is nothing, they'll get bored, and bored young men have quite the knack for finding a reason to burn everything down.
The Byzantines were dealing in solidi, easy to collect gold in fines and then use it for paying mercenaries. A hiring-mercenaries-level-conflict in the States would mean the dollar and economy collapsed. There'd be dealing again in precious metals, and bartering. Weapons, food, medicine, and those soldiers could well be offered another certain kind of good: women. If a faction pays in women, those women have no power.
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