magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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21hr ago
Some of column A, some of column B, some of column C (they're also IMO-overly worried about global warming, which is unrelated to nuclear war and only somewhat related to Donald Trump). There's a reason I said "if we're using Reliable Sources", and a reason I capitalised the phrase (the reference is to this, and to a certain episode of DS9).
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
As part of my work, I ended up meeting a man in his 70's who was hardcore MAGA, and he told me that he thought Elon Musk had done more for free speech than anyone alive today.
And don't get me wrong. I'm genuinely happy Elon Musk bought Twitter/X, because I do think it had a positive effect on the quality of societal debate, but I think it is silly to suggest that he did anything to free speech one way or the other.
Far too often, the signal of genuinely worrying encroachments on free speech like the Biden government sending messages to large social media sites asking them to take certain posts down during COVID,
Biden retaliated against Elon Musk (via capricious investigations of his other companies, fraudulent revocations of subsidies, etc.) for allowing the deplorables back onto Twitter. Musk lost ~$50 billion in net worth from that. If the COVID issue implicated free speech, I think this (the threat, implicit or explicit, of which we have to assume was behind a lot of the deplatforming by other social media and by pre-Musk Twitter) clearly does too. Of course, I'll also note that given the massive vibe shift from uncensoring Twitter, SJ's consensus-astroturfing operation does seem to have been quite successful until then; even had the US government not been involved, that does really seem like an instance of the problem free speech attempts to fix.
Also, missed this when writing my other reply:
I'd be far more likely to support laws forcing credit card companies to be common carriers for anything that's not actually illegal, as I have witnessed Visa and Mastercard absolutely demolish free speech online over the last few years, because they're too prudish around niche fetish erotica.
Do note that some (though not all) of that niche fetish erotica is illegal in at least some non-US Western jurisdictions. Those laws are bad, I break them, and I want them repealed, but it does somewhat complicate the matter.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
I don't think it is inevitable, although avoiding it may get a lot of Taiwanese (and others) killed.
If it goes nuclear, the USA has a lot more nukes; China would have to surrender. Of course, Taipei and Tainan would assuredly be nuked in the process.
(Also, I think the term "Anschluss" is misleading here; Austrians generally welcomed the actual Anschluss, while Taiwanese support for unification is lizardman since Xi pulled a Darth Vader on Hong Kong.)
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
The barges aren't ferries. The barges are mobile docks for ferries, with long ramps to overcome the various countermeasures Taiwan has at its beaches. That's why there aren't very many of them.
The ferries are ferries. The PRC is big on the idea of "civil-military fusion"; rather than commission a fleet of dedicated military transports, they told all their shipbuilders that all their roll-on-roll-off ferries (for moving cars over water) had to be tank-compatible.
He's never said anything to Taiwan at all.
Um.
If they're not worried, I'm not either.
They are, which is a very-large chunk of why I am.
(Also, if we're using Reliable Sources, I'll note that the actual, official Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than it ever was in the Cold War. The experts are very concerned. What's different to the Cold War is the vibe among laymen.)
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Starlink is VLEO, as I understand it partially for that reason (it would be destroyed by an LEO Kessler event, but won't cause one). LEO goes up to 2,000 km.
Oh, don't get me wrong, Kessler syndrome in LEO's not the end of the world or anything; it will eventually self-clean and it doesn't pose much of a hazard to things going further. What I'm saying is that people spending on LEO infrastructure now (and yes, Starlink's part of that) are implicitly assuming no WWIII.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
These are peaceful times.
These are times in which the citizenry assumes peace. There is a difference. The EMH does not apply to military spending or popular sentiment.
Or to put it another way: when Xi Jinping told the PLA to prepare the capability to invade Taiwan in 2027 (he said this multiple years ago), do you think that he wasn't being serious?
I'm not saying we're definitely going to have a nuclear war next year. He might call no-go. The West might eat Beijing's cock. Or we might have a conventional war that doesn't go nuclear (this last one is very unlikely, though). But it's a live option. And, obviously, "decent chance of WWIII" is pretty serious. But we are not serious people.
Nobody takes great-power war into account, 'tis true. Nobody does cybersecurity as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (we mandate smart cars, because we're too used to the only hacker threat being organised crime who have nothing to gain by killing 50,000 people in rush hour). Nobody does reliance on space as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (the moment there's a great-power war, lol ASAT and LEO is destroyed by Kessler syndrome). Nobody does urban planning as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (YIMBY). I don't think that this is because WWIII's impossible. I think that this is because it's been 73 years since a great-power war and 81 years since a total war, most of the Western population is less than 78 years old, and the various other pressures on Western attention and business practices have had their way - after all, the IQ 100 way of learning to take something seriously is generally to get burned by it.
(There was a whole pile of commercial integration between the great powers in 1914, too. WWI happened anyway.)
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
I can sort of understand the idea of wanting large social media sites to be common carriers, but I kind of fail to understand why it should be necessary. Did the Founding Fathers feel like every printing press in existence needed to be a common carrier that would print anything that wasn't illegal, or did they understand that if there were enough competing print shops, then Shop A might refuse to print something for Cause X, but Shop B would probably be happy to print it?
The argument's based around network effects/natural monopolies and correlated incentives.
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Social media is a natural monopoly, or at least an oligopoly based around different products, because people want large reach which means they tend to prefer sites that are already large (a network effect). This means that Moloch doesn't bite at full force on failure to obey the market incentive of "serve everyone who wants to be served". Note how most of Web 2.0 - the enormous profusion of specialised fora that took off in the early oughties - withered on the vine when the major social media sites started sucking up all the people; I can think of one site I visit that's grown massively in the late tens and twenties (Questionable Questing), but it is worth noting that QQ's niche is primarily that for the most part no titan site wants to host QQ's type of content due to the immense reputational and legal issues (most of its content is fanfic, which is in a legal grey area; much of it is erotic stories and cartoons of characters under 18 which is legally CP in the non-US Anglosphere (and AIUI decent chunks of the EU) and sends even most US advertisers running away screaming).
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Relying on the various social media companies to pursue different non-commercial agendas doesn't always work, because the non-market incentives on them are not independent; they're highly correlated. All the major social media companies implemented the same SJ-based censorship from ~2014-22, because they were all being pressured (by cancellation, by jawboning, by being convinced, etc) by the same pressure group. Elon Musk broke that lockout, yes, but he did so in explicit defiance of his incentives (he lost about $50 billion from Joe Biden's retaliation over the next couple of years); true believers that committed and that rich are rare, and it's questionable whether someone else could/would have done it in his place (IIRC Zvi Mowshowitz had it as a pie-in-sky idea, but couldn't figure out where to get the money); certainly, if you look at theMotte back then, many of us weren't exactly hopeful.
It's not quite as strong as the argument for regulation of e.g. water/power companies, but it gets pretty close.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
The only place I can think of at the top of my head
I'd add criminal harassment campaigns, i.e. "I go to your house, smash in all the windows with thrown rocks, graffiti it with horrible insults, and repeat this every time you fix it", which are likewise not something you can just choose to walk away from (they will likely follow). I don't think many people argue that people should have the right to do that, though, aside from the same utterly-mindkilled people who claim that [TARGET GROUP] are an exception to normal rules of civilisation and should be murdered in the streets, and it doesn't bear on the free speech issue (beyond the "people don't generally have the right to graffiti other people's property" exception which even libertines like me generally accept).
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
AOC has African blood as well, or at least she claims to and it seems likely from looking at her. (So do a decent chunk of Hispanics.)
Native Americans are definitely far more closely related to whites and Asians than any of those are to Africans, Austronesians or Australian aboriginals (they're of North Asian descent), and I agree it can be hard to tell apart a white+NA Hispanic from a pure white.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
Is there some argument against the "some are, some aren't; depends on ancestry" position other than the "race doesn't exist" SJ-adjacent one?
AOC is obviously not supermajority-white-and-Asian, so it's not surprising that someone only attracted to whites/Asians has reduced attraction to her.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
Reasonable points.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
No, it'd be in trouble because half its adherents would become, to borrow your phrase, charcoal briquettes.
If law and order disintegrated, lots of the survivors would then get shot.
The relevance of impeachment (in scenarios in which the USA doesn't fail, which are quite likely) is that if unlocked (which it likely would be due to the aforementioned charcoal briquettes being unable to vote) it allows a total purge of the judiciary and major purge of the civil service, because of how hilariously open-ended it is (Congress doesn't have to spend weeks on each case; 900 cases in a day is totally legal!). That turns a major defeat into a total rout.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
The next Dem president can easily ruin him.
I will note that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. already did declare Fair Game on Elon Musk and Musk was the one who wound up getting Biden fired.
I'm not saying that there aren't ways that USG could dispose of Elon Musk, but it wouldn't be trivial or cost-free.
IMO we have won a few battles, but the fundamentals look weak to actually win against woke.
The fundamental of "does not live in a nuclear target" is a fairly-important one with the Doomsday Clock where it is. Do note that SJ would likely not be able to concede ground quickly enough in the aftermath of that to prevent the Serious Business tools from being handed over to its enemies - in the USA, Constitutional amendment and impeachment.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
I will note that "trans still exists" could be read not only as "transsexuals still exist", but also as "trans ideology still exists", and even "substantial official deference to trans ideology still exists".
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
Now imagine a counterfactual world wherein Nazism went into retreat, without being so aggressively stigmatised. After the war, the Nazi party was no longer in power, but politicians elected as party members during its peak make no especial effort to distance themselves from their electoral pasts: indeed, many politicians proudly self-identify as Nazis, and openly announce their intent to seek election under a Nazi platform. Academics with cushy university jobs hang swastika flags in their offices, and no one so much as raps them on the knuckles. While most Germans have gotten back into the habit of greeting each other with "Guten tag", a handful still use "Heil Hitler", and this is treated essentially as an amusing anachronistic idiosyncrasy, like someone who persists in referring to the internet as the "world wide web". Whenever Nazi atrocities are brought up in public, the reaction among those responsible is not solemn contrition but flippant dismissal: "ha ha, we sure did get a bit carried away, didn't we?" And whenever Jews complain that open expressions of support for this ideology make them uncomfortable, people roll their eyes and tell them to stop moaning. We had the Nuremberg trials, the party is no longer in power – what more do you want? Let the baby have its bottle.
Isn't this basically just a description of Japan? Like, seriously, read the WP article on Nippon Kaigi; most of the things you've stated have an exact parallel mentioned in that one article.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
opposing "it's okay to be white", which they are wholly justified in doing.
The Left does not believe that whites should be ashamed "for the color of their skin", but for the innumerable crimes they have committed against non-whites* in the 500 years since they set out from Europe to gain their globally advantageous position.
I think that the latter reduces to the former, in addition to baking in another problem and thus being even more objectionable.
Specifically, to get to "being white implies responsibility for all the crimes whites have committed" requires two premises:
- People can be held responsible for the actions of other people
- The relevant criterion to use for assessing such guilt is skin colour.
#2 must be skin colour (or other "racial" traits, but asking people to feel guilty for having e.g. thin lips or blond hair raises 100% of the same issues), not closeness of blood relation, as for any given white criminal (e.g. a slaveowner) there usually are some "non-white" people more closely related to him (e.g. the descendants of the bastards he sired by raping his slaves) than some white people.
And #1 is a whole other can of worms which most modern Westerners find barbaric.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
“Jet fuel can't melt steal beams”
“If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”
Both of these are solid observations, there's just nuance they're missing. Specifically, "but it can soften them" and "only some of the monkeys evolved into us" respectively.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
They recognize a loaded question, or outrage bait, and try not to walk into the minefield. Sometimes this works out. Sometimes it looks cringey and gives the baiters what they wanted. Regardless, it doesn’t require lunacy or cowardice or even cognitive dissonance.
I'm pretty sure "refusing to charge into a minefield" does technically qualify as cowardice.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
Including the circumflex? What does that signify?
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
I downvote uncivil posts, and your initial post seemed to say that downvoting for any reason was senseless, so I felt the need to object.
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
TBF, "genocide" - etymologically "the killing of genes" - is indeed accomplished by mass sterilisation, although not by mental trauma.
"Massacre" and "extermination" seem like words you might want to use.
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
I will note that there is the option of declaring tabula rasa - where history is not abandoned as a project, but the current crop of historians do not have the ability to select their replacements and thus there is no continuity. The extreme version of this would be throwing out all the members of history departments, and then creating new history departments ex nihilo in 5 years to figure out what's true from scratch (according current historian qualifications zero weight when re-initialising).
I'm not saying that this is clearly optimal - it does still have costs - but it's an option that needs to be considered when you're thinking about best-alternative-to-reform.
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
It's overused, but I don't really see the problem with downvoting uncivil posts.
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
There is also the trans issue. Going as hardline as you did on it in that post - literally using it as an example of obvious absurdity - gets more upvotes than downvotes here, but it does get some downvotes.
(I'm not one of the people who downvoted that post.)
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