magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
No bio...
User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
6hr ago
· Edited 6hr ago
Worst case, nukes get exchanged (maybe half a dozen).
Half a dozen nukes is not the worst case or a likely case. If the USA detects Chinese launches, it will go full counterforce in an attempt to destroy as much as possible of their arsenal before it's airborne. That in turn means the PRC is in a "use it or lose it" scenario and will likely launch as much as it can (excepting, possibly, the sea leg).
Of course, then there's the issue of the peace terms. If PLA nukes have hit cities, the West's peace demand would be along the lines of "denuclearise/demilitarise China, free Tibet/Xinjiang, formally cede Taiwan" with little room to budge (particularly given the need to prevent the PRC trying again later). The PRC is aware that, as you note, this means no more Mandate of Heaven, so it plausibly refuses. Plausibly, Trump/Vance then order countervalue in order to force a capitulation (or state failure), because Rule 2 of war and they aren't the sorts to just back down. End result is that China is a basket-case again, like the early 20th century. Russia, if it stays out, does well in some ways (with the West significantly weakened), but doesn't become outright hegemon. Probably no more culture war, as SJ would suffer base existence failure to a fair extent and would be blamed for weakening the West and thus causing WWIII.
China winning a lightning strike? Honestly I view this as somewhat status quo, believe it or not.
No. The immediate problem is that the PLAN would have un-interdictable access to the Pacific proper via Taiwan's east coast, which means Japan and South Korea would have Beijing's hand around their throats via the threat of blockade (neither is even remotely close to being able to feed itself). They probably both withdraw from the NPT, Beijing in its overconfidence (and with popular support due to the long-standing cultural antipathy) plausibly attacks, and you're back to WWIII. There's a reason that Japanese PM Takaichi Sanae made those comments about a Taiwan invasion posing an existential threat to Japan and justifying the use of the Japanese military, and there's a reason (though not a good one) that one of China's diplomats to Japan publically threatened to cut off her head in response.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8hr ago
@EverythingIsFine may be referring to the idea of the Mandate of Heaven - that the Chinese tend to violently chuck out governments that are seen to have failed. If the CPC were forced to relinquish its claim to Taiwan as part of a peace deal, it would have a hard time holding on to power. This potentially means loose nukes.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
11hr ago
School shooters are spree killers; what Corvos is talking about would arguably be serial killing. Profiles are pretty different.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
And "let's free these oppressed people".
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
Geopolitical alliances crack when one party is seen as the partisan partner of one's own domestic political opponents.
TBF, this kinda goes both ways.
From the US point of view, the EU supports the Democrats against the Republicans (in a lot of ways), and thus the Republicans see the EU as backing their domestic enemies.
From the EU point of view, the US is supporting the European far-right (by providing communications that circumvent the various EU censorship laws), and thus the EU establishment see the US as backing their domestic enemies.
I happen to be extremely unsympathetic to the EU establishment's position, but that's because I see their suppression of the far-right as an oligarchical attempt to revoke democracy and thus not a legitimate state interest.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
To take an extreme example, if you receive a letter from your landlord telling you that you are going to be evicted then in a sense your choosing to leave peacefully rather than squat or lay makeshift pit traps under the welcome mat is a moral choice. But only in a sense.
I mean, you say this, but while the Zizians opening Door #3 there was pretty obviously doomed, I understand that people do get away with squatting in California.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
Wow, can't believe she crossed state lines.
I'm guessing she was trying to ensure that the fetish artist didn't hear about the case, given the high likelihood of him turning her in (I mean, come on, the political leanings of fetish artists are well-known even aside from the "most people want justice done" thing). "Don't expect the enemy to cooperate in the creation of your dream engagement" is still such an obvious flaw in the plan that it's not how I'd have done it (not to mention the time delay), but then again I'm not crazy enough to do something like that to myself.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3d ago
· Edited 1d ago
Europeans are effortposting on X right now, centering around a reported $140 million fine apparently for how X changed the blue checkmark and restricted API access to researchers. But this comes at a time when Europeans are bearing down on Musk for not curating feeds based on the opinions of paid 'misinformation experts', an industry effectively invented post-2016 election.
I would appreciate links here.
EDIT: Here's one. Can't source the second sentence.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3d ago
Because parent can cut off the access to the credit, while the child can never do the same.
My point is that while men as a whole could in theory do this, a man for the most part cannot actually do this because enslaving women is illegal. You are eliding a large co-ordination problem; for this to occur without massive bloodshed, all the men would have to agree on this and have common knowledge of their agreement, despite the various societal measures deployed in many nations to prevent that agreement and that common knowledge. Furthermore, they would then have to directly commit a lawless act by chucking out their women's rights laws (and in many cases women's rights constitutional provisions) outside the constitutionally-prescribed mechanisms, and yet still maintain enough regard for those constitutions and the rest of their laws to not immediately degenerate into civil war over what other laws should be chucked out (or dictatorship, as "the military is supposed to uphold popular sovereignty, not do whatever the guy in the big chair says" is also part of respect for constitutions).
Thought experiment: group A and group B live on an island together. Every member of group A has a big red button; no member of group B has such a button. If a day goes by with less than 10% of the buttons pushed, everyone who pushed a button has a heart attack. If a day goes by with between 10% and 95% of the buttons pushed, the island's volcano goes Krakatoa and everybody dies. If a day goes by with over 95% of the buttons pushed, group B are enslaved by group A. Does group A have any practical capability to use the buttons to enslave group B? No, not without some form of explicit co-ordination to make sure they all push the buttons on the same day. Even threats to push the button are empty without the ability to explicitly co-ordinate over 10% of group A.
Yes, if there were a civil war that boiled down to Men vs. Women, the men would win. But this does not mean that "men" can, in practice in a Western country that's not undergoing civil war, revoke women's rights. Orcus will stay on his throne, one bony hand clutching his terrible rod.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
No, it wasn't missing. Not everywhere. I checked the SpaceBattles thread and a decent chunk of the posts express this. And to be clear, SB got purged of right-wingers a few years back - even I faced a trilemma of [leave]/[stop talking about politics]/[get permabanned] and picked the first horn - so this is your milquetoast liberals (not the hardcore ideologue liberals, like me) and non-radical progressives.
Are there places where it's missing? Yes. Are there way, way too many people on that side howling for more conservative blood? Also yes (including in that thread, many of them whacked by the mods for it). Is every corner of the SJ-purged Internet composed entirely of such bloodthirsty maniacs? No.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
But what is actually happening is that the majority of trans individuals are mentally ill men,
This is out of date. It used to be the case that MtFs outnumbered FtMs 3:1, but these days FtMs outnumber MtFs. This is why 37% is the highest rate of being born with a penis out of the four groups in this study.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
They defined the classes by latent class analysis, i.e. "look at the data and see what groups pop out as natural". I'm not sure that the 95% non-regret of a class that's identified that way is actually meaningful; "doesn't regret the transition" and its consequences seem to have been a big chunk of how the class is actually defined.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
For obvious reasons, we don't let logged-out users, or logged-in users without the admin flag, shadowban people :)
Sure, but normal users aren't supposed to have a shadowban button available to push, so I wasn't sure whether the failsafe of "even if they somehow do, it doesn't do anything" was in place as well. I suppose that would help against hackers who send commands the interface doesn't offer, though.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
6d ago
I regard suicidal impulses as a mental illness, not an action which it is worth criticizing at the level of rational debate. It's a "stop hitting yourself!"-level error - suicidality is an altered state of consciousness, and suicide survivors coming out of it very often testify that they're immediately aghast at what they experienced.
Eh, sometimes. My most recent suicide attempt was pure* "bad intel"; I remained suicidal until sufficiently-convinced that I'd been wrong about the legal practicalities (for like a decade; it just hadn't become relevant until then), and then immediately stopped. One of the others was closer.
*Unless you count "high scrupulosity" as a mental illness, which I would object to on moral grounds.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
6d ago
I didn't mean "hopelessly doomed to starvation". I mean, the survival rule of threes goes "three minutes without air, three hours without heat, three days without water, three weeks without food, three months without love". That is, assuming you have solved all your physical needs, after months of zero social interaction you will usually develop severe depression and (without a "get me out of here" button like on reality TV shows) kill yourself. Bug in the firmware which evolution didn't patch out because it's barely ever relevant in the EEA (you're not going to make babies by yourself, so unless you're rescued your survival is evolutionarily meaningless). I don't have data to hand, but my understanding is that this is fairly-settled science (if very loose in timescale and, as noted, not inevitable). Related to why a bunch of humanitarian organisations consider long-term solitary confinement torture, although obviously prisons can usually prevent suicides if they want to.
I also didn't necessarily mean "commit suicide or you'll be executed". I also meant "commit suicide or you'll be considered a pariah". You're right regarding the potential for tautology, though.
we're talking about entirely different things.
I agree; I didn't claim otherwise.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7d ago
There are virtually no life events that consistently lead to suicide, in the sense that there are more people who have the same experience and don't kill themselves, from even the most traumatic events.
I mean, there are two big ones throughout most of history - "being marooned" and "being in a situation where suicide is considered the honourable course". Not 100% of people in those situations commit suicide, but my understanding is that it is in fact over 50%.
We're pretty low on those two in the modern West, although certain places are starting to re-invent the second one (Canada and MAID most notably).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7d ago
Was he treated poorly? No, he had a chance and blew it by being out-of-shape and awkward.
She grabbed the friend she was with, a guy named Albert. “Oh, my God, that’s him,” she whispered. “The guy from the movie theatre!” By then, Albert had heard a version of the story, though not quite the true one; nearly all her friends had. Albert stepped in front of her, shielding her from Robert’s view, as they rushed back to the table where their friends were. When Margot announced that Robert was there, everyone erupted in astonishment, and then they surrounded her and hustled her out of the bar as if she were the President and they were the Secret Service. It was all so over-the-top that she wondered if she was acting like a mean girl, but, at the same time, she truly did feel sick and scared.
If we draw the obvious inference from their behaviour as to the nature of the lies she told them, yes, Robert was treated poorly.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7d ago
Are memoirs ever ok? How many details does one need to change before one can write a novel? Is bitching about your wife on TheMotte ok because it's all under pseudonyms? What if she reads what a mottizen said about her and kills herself out of shame? What about twitter under a pseudonym? What about a blog under a real name? If Kulak writes a little tweetstorm about some "feminist bitch" he had to deal with, and she reads it and recognizes that it was her, is he in the wrong? What about the "blankfaces" that scott aaronson decried? Or is it the ideological agenda that makes the crime? What details is one obligated to change to conceal identity, and which are immoral to change because one is no longer telling the real story?
Telling real stories truthfully is definitely fine.
Telling fiction is definitely fine.
Telling falsehoods about people that hurt their reputation is considered the tort of defamation.
The problem here is that we've got a story that's based closely enough on real events to identify the villain as a real person, but the real person isn't that villainous (and hence the reputational hit he takes is undeserved). If the story claimed to be real, then yeah, this'd be #3, no question. Completely coincidental similarities still clearly fall under #2; there's no mens rea, even a negligent one, if you didn't know a real person existed who uncannily resembled your Darth Vader (nobody knows the exact traits of everybody in the world). Here, though, we're stuck in the middle; the story is claimed to be fiction, so it's not an outright lie, but there's potential real undeserved damage to reputation that's the result of real choices on the author's part.
The obvious case here is A Few Good Men, which was closely based on a real Guantanamo Bay incident (the fenceline shooting, the requested transfer, the rag stuffed down the throat, and the hazers calling the ambulance were all lifted from the real case, which Sorkin's sister defended and told him about) but changes two major details in ways that make Dawson and Downie look worse than the people they're based on (the real hazee didn't die and the real hazers who went to trial weren't dishonorably discharged). Sorkin and the movie's production company got sued by the real hazers for defamation; WP doesn't state how it went so there was probably a settlement of some sort. Which side was in the right? You can argue either way, but I don't think it's obvious.
All the examples you give except the novel are not in this limbo; truthful memoirs/bitching/tweetstorms are #1 and are definitely fine, while false ones (because they're outright lies, having been stated to be real) are #3 and are very much not fine.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7d ago
So clicking the "confirm" or whatever it was button wouldn't actually have shadowbanned anyone?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7d ago
The thing is that if men collectively, or even in majority minority refuse to participate anymore, the illusion dissolves within days. We saw it recently after Afghanistan withdrawal, when Taliban warriors just leisurely waltzed in and subjugated women without any fuss, literally laughing at the notion of women's political rights.
The key point there is the revolution. While law exists, social power controls physical power due to the police force. It does not especially matter if the ruling class has no physical power; they have social power, codified in laws, with which they can direct those with physical power to oppress on pain of that oppression turning upon them. This does, in fact, allow classes with social power to dominate classes with physical power nigh-indefinitely. Revolutions are the exception because revolution voids all laws - the pre-existing police force is literally defeated and can no longer enforce anything.
"Men are in charge, because the police force is essentially male" is an equivalent argument to "the proletariat was in charge in the 18th century, because the police force were essentially proles".
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
I mean, apparently what the king actually said was "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?", which is quite ambiguous. Even the version with "turbulent priest" started out as "who shall deliver me from this turbulent Priest?", and that could be satisfied a lot of ways other than Becket's death.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
My project to get in touch with the Motherland's food has achieved some success. For lunch today I had a mostly-full traditional English breakfast. I say "mostly" because I hate mushrooms and cooked tomatoes, so I didn't include those, but I had bacon, chipolatas, eggs, fried bread (I think I need to read up on how to do that; it came out okay but I don't think it was as intended)... and black pudding.
It... wasn't as unusual as I was expecting. Yeah, it's got a distinctive smell, and when cooked it looks almost exactly like "unidentifiable food that's been left on the stove and converted into carbon", but it has the taste and texture of a rich meat loaf (which... it basically is). I can see why people might shy away if offered it (from the looks; the smell's odd but not bad), but yeah, actually pretty normal. You don't forget what you're eating, though; the smell bursts out in your mouth when you chew it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
· Edited 9d ago
It's much easier to send a missile than to catch a boat. The missile all move faster than boats, for one.
Civ2 notwithstanding, I think a Super Stallion might be able to pick up one of those boats.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
I mean, yes (I expect to survive, at least unless I'm drafted, but it's a bit trickier in the USA than Australia for several reasons), but the topic did come up because of the "power in the future = power now, because threats" factor. Still, since it's really more about perceived power in the future than real power, as long as people aren't pricing in Interesting Times it is largely irrelevant to the present (still funny, though).
Possible, I suppose (though occupying China to that degree wouldn't be trivial). Largely ends in the same place, though, of "PRC refuses, China burns in countervalue strike".
More options
Context Copy link