popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
newly-arrived grandparents
It's insane to me that this is allowed. The justification for immigration is that these are net contributors and we need them to prop up the social safety net but instead actually we're letting in people who will never work again (or not for long) and will almost immediately start collecting benefits.
Mass immigration as a policy rests on a tripod of supporting interests: 1. disinterested economics and demographic realism (or academic dogma posing as such); 2. ethnic hate of/guilt by native populations combined with charity towards foreign populations; and 3. high-middle-low factionalism to gain votes/a client class for the current ruling elite.
In different parts of the online right, it's fashionable to speculate that one of these is the "true" reason, and the others merely a facade or pablum for useful idiots. In reality, the technocratic center-left is not a monolithic. Each leg is true reason for different parts of the governing coalition. The current policy is a negotiation between their interests, and its "illogic" is an illusion born of your assuming a primary motivation.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
I just don't find these sorts of "Ah, but what if [alternative explanation]!" type of arguments very interesting anymore. You caught me: I don't have some convenient within-sibling GWAS where they pinpoint the precise genetic markers that corresponds to "the ability to follow instructions". But considering that, whenever we've bothered to check, behavioral differences that aren't obviously cultural (e.g language spoken) always have some genetic component, I've stopped reflexively hedging when talking about these sorts of things.
However long the sojourn in rationalism, one ultimately returns to "yeah, I know what I know. It's common sense, screw you."
The hero's nerd's journey.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
Give a shot to Far Cry 3. Substracting all the Ubisoft open world nonsense, the core of the gameplay is infiltrating and clearing enemy strongholds. It's largely impossible to do so guns blazing, so you have to thin the guard numbers through stealth: luring patrols off to kill, creating distractions with animal attacks, etc.
Everything else about the game is infuriating, but those parts are very good.
How much repression a political regime commits is a function of its weakness rather than its ideological character or theoretical 'system'. Stalin's communist party committed mass political repression because it was the only way for the regime to survive. The US regime under Obama's presidency committed very little political repression because its headwinds were weak; the moment it ran into a slight uptick in resistance in the mid-2010s, this was revealed to be from lack of need rather than a principled tolerance built into its constitution.
Repression in the USA now seems comparable to the more muted level of the USSR between Khrushchev and Glasnost. Its methods are different. But, as an individual, it is impossible to question the ruling ideology of the US without reprisals that eject one from any decision-making or managerial role in any important organization. Groups, meanwhile, will be harassed with impunity by mobs and lawfared into submission or irrelevance, as you can see with VDARE.
One argument in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts is that the games embody a certain historical theory, and players are essentially forced to make the same choices as the nations did
CK2 teaches the incentives of patriarchy better than any other game I can think of.
CK2 teaches many things — why the protestant reformation was a big deal (everyone gets a CB on heretics), why national identity didn't play an important role in politics until the 18th century (elites branch-swinging across Europe for different titles), why primogeniture was an improvement over the equal inheritance of the Franks despite the bad son problem (it keeps the dynasty strong and its holdings united).
When I first played CK2, it made me realize how the Marshall Plan mindset clouds my thinking, and that past governments were not "just stupid" for not focusing on infrastructure/tech. My first CK2 game was on Tutorial Island (regular people call this place Ireland), and I immediately sent my spy master to study technology from Al Andalus while saving money to buy an irrigation building. Economy, research, then conquest: the 4X order of operations. Twenty years later, I managed to improve my tech to best in Ireland, and I constructed a fancy new well to double my feudal dues. My neighbor country, meanwhile, had used his spymaster to fabricate a title on my lands, and instead of building infrastructure, he bought mercenaries. He conquered my county. Game over.
Sadly, the sequel CK3 is just a map-painting game. It doesn't have as many embedded historical lessons.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
Social analysis of the bear-or-man meme is a waste of neurons. The initial poll showed very-online urban women did not know bears were at all dangerous. After that, all discourse has been a toxoplasma of gender war signaling — feminists get to signal how super-duper-extra they condemn men with a cherry on top, while anti-feminists get to grandstand about how stupid and man-hating women are.
There's nothing else to it.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
Well, it's more than a nothingburger. At minimum, public education will be forever changed by LLMs doing assignments for kids. At the same time, I disagree with the projections coming from the AI enthusiast/AI doomer camps. I don't expect to see anytime soon:
- an AI-generated serial hitting the Top 500 views on Royal Road
- an AI-generated humor Youtube channel cracking 50k subscribers
- an AI-generated Op-Ed or political essay trending on X
What I mean by these choices is that I don't expect AI to do even very low-brow creative work within a decade. (Except by technicality, wherein the popularity comes from "Look what an AI did", or a human has directed the creative process behind the scenes.) Let alone the sort of self-improving singularity bootstrap AI fans/blackpillers are expecting.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
I feel most people past 28 or so who still play complex games are going back to the well of The One they started a decade ago: Dota, WoW, Counterstrike, TF2, EU4, Football Manager. Pick your poison.
I don't think changing times factor in at all, because I vaguely perceive young people forming similar attachments to games with names like "PubG" or "Genshin Impact".
I tend to think Jesus believed 'works' were a lot more essential to salvation than most Protestants (even most Catholics) would like.
Grace leads to good works because grace remakes men morally. "Grace without good works" is incoherent; if you are not doing good works, you have not accepted grace. The dispute between protestants and catholics lies in the catholic church's offer of a bargain by which a favor from God could be purchased: that you could do a good work to "buy" grace.
They didn't. Jesus told them to go buy some swords earlier that same week, explicitly so that he could fulfill the prophecy
As told in Luke, they already had two on hand.
There's not a single place in the New Testament where violence against one's enemies is encouraged or even sanctioned.
There is no occurrence where violence would be appropriate, save for crucifixion, which was Christ's intention to suffer. A centurion approaches Jesus in Matthew and Jesus praises him and says that he will enter God's kingdom with no stipulation that he give up his army gig.
What is forbidden by Christ is retribution or vengeance. That a Christian cannot take up a sword in hatred or for his own personal ends is beyond question.
I would say the pacifism of the early Christians is inexplicable without the apparently ubiquitous belief that Jesus was going to come back very soon to establish the kingdom and destroy Rome and the nations; in other words, earthly Christians didn't need to do any killing because God was about to do it for them. When this didn't pan out naturally doctrine had to evolve.
It depends on what you mean. The actions of the apostles recorded in scripture are strong evidence for any Christian that believes in biblical inerrancy — which I believe is all of them. They certainly acted as if they could not use violence to defend their own persons against persecution. However, this does not track 1:1 with the question of whether a Christian can be a soldier, police officer, defend their family against a rapist, etc: that is, commit violence not on one's own behalf. The apostles did not address that question or find themselves in that situation.
(EDIT: I see Romans 13 gets cited a lot in defense of Christian police officers, despite the main focus being Christians obeying the police. Looks cut and dry on that one.)
As for the behavior of Christians in the 2nd century, one is perfectly entitled to think individuals from that time period might be wrong about doctrine, same as one might think for the 6th century, 11th century, 15th century, or (now) 21st century.
If that's the case, he wasted a lot of time delivering ethical teaching.
His ethical teaching falls into the camps "you think you're doing enough, but you're nowhere near adequate by God's standards" or "you're hewing to the letter of the law rather than reaching the spirit of the law, which is what you know is right". Both those points are to a purpose. He avoids giving straightforward list of instructions, and he teaches in questions and riddles, because being a moral person does not mean lawyering your way around a contract of clear-cut rules as the Jews had been trying for several hundred years.
This sort of interpretation tends to strip Jesus' preaching of anything particularly novel or interesting.
Absolutely. He did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them. The novelty of Jesus's teaching is entirely in the nature of Grace, not specific ethical teachings.
"Well when he said turn the other cheek he didn't mean you should let your enemies kill you, he just meant, you know, don't go off half-cocked, control your anger," "Well when he said 'it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye...' he didn't mean it's bad to be rich, he just meant don't love money too much." This is all stuff any Greek Pagan would have happily nodded along with. What was so hard or so shocking about the path Jesus offered?
I was of this opinion once, from most of my childhood as a protestant and most of my adulthood as an atheist, but I've changed my mind — the text of scripture does seem to have fruit beyond the autistic literal definition of the words. A lot of protestants (or atheists who were protestants) are lead astray by things like "Sheathe thy sword, for all who take the sword shall perish with the sword" and don't step back to think: Wait a second, why do twelve disciples have swords three years into Jesus's ministry if Jesus actually teaches unconditional pacifism like the literal words suggest?
This is somewhat supported by what is known of the early church, it's self-imposed poverty and the lack of any violent resistance to persecution. People being what they are, this didn't last long and pretty soon theologians and church fathers were spinning all sorts of justification for why you can actually
The steelman for your views is in the book of Acts, where the early Christians after Pentecost form what appears to be a commune. (There is also an incident right after this where a wealthy couple hold back some of their wealth, lie about it, and the Holy Spirit executes them on the spot.) I would encourage anyone to read these early chapters of Acts, because ostensibly the early Christians invested supernaturally with the Holy Spirit would be authorities on what Jesus actually meant. But again I would say there is a deeper meaning that goes beyond sanewashing cope.
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. From those who have much, much is expected (and the corollary, from those who have nothing, nothing is expected, explains Grant's Pass). Blessed are the poor. Etc. It's a slave morality.
You're passing a progressive or nietzschean interpretation of those elements as their true, indisputable meaning. Consider the possibility those teach self-discipline ("bearing the cross") rather than as statements bashing those high in status.
Blessed are the poor. [...] from those who have nothing, nothing is expected
The beatitudes describe various hardships as the blessings of God. "Blessed are the X" is not to say the status of poverty/mourning/persecution intrinsically grants righteous status — that is, "poor people are good" — but that poverty/mourning/persecution are blessings from heaven to mortify the evil in you. In this reading, being rich, happy, and safe carries the dangers of you becoming self-satisfied and thus not seeking God. To the contrary, in another context of Jesus's ministry, the poor person who receives only one talent is cast into hell for sitting on his laurels. The two richer servants are praised and the master grants them greater dominion in his service (AKA puts them above the lesser servants).
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven."
The lesson here is that the rich man does not value God higher than his own material status. When challenged on the point, he prefers money; his mouth says "I want God" but his mind says "I want earthly passions" — this lesson holds for the beggar with his bottle just as much as Scrooge McDuck with his gold swimming pool. At other parts of scripture, Jesus meets well-to-do people and does not demand they pauper themselves for God's kingdom.
To be clear, it's very questionable that Bezos can be saved, because he is chasing money and status above all else. But is not at all clear that Jesus categorically condemns money any more than he condemns enjoying marital sex, food, or earthly luxuries such as come to you in your service to God.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
I'm interested in reactions here since one of my own sons will be 16 in less than a year. The world was very different in many ways when I was that age, and now certain advice I'd give ("Spend more time with your dad asking him questions. Help him more working on the car.") I couldn't give my own son without sounding like an idiot.
Unfortunately, giving advice means nudging someone towards some Aristotelian golden mean. Be more social or more introspective, more self-disciplined or more self-forgiving, more cautious or more adventurous. They're mutually exclusive. Advice is not generalizable because people are different. We humans, being narcissists, spread the seeds of wisdom that worked in our alkaline soil to the acidic of others.
Perhaps the one universal good advice might be reverse any advice you hear.
That was an infuriating listen. The loop was (1) Ymeskhout or Tracing raises some point about the alt right or white nationalism, (2) Walt agrees there's some truth there, but nuance and background is needed, (3) Walt bolts down a tangent rabbit hole that has nothing to do with the substantive point, (4) Midway through, before he can wrap around to the prompt, Tracing gets mad about something in his tangent and challenges him on it. Return to (1).
The least fruitful bailey episode yet. Kudos for both sides being willing to sit down with each other, but man.
If a kind fairy made you absolute ruler of your country, what batshit crazy out of left field ideas would you implement?
Strict sumptuary laws. Outside of special occasions, everyone wears clothes that specifically indicate their job in rough categories.
A pet theory of mine is that "capitalism" in the informal sense came to exist when conspicuous consumption became the only means of status signaling. The first two estates (clergy and nobility) got gutted, so bourgeois success became the ruler of social distinction: everyone jumped on a hamster wheel of ever increasing productivity/entrepreneurship to buy the next stage of luxury good, not because they wanted the luxury, but to distinguish themselves from the lower classes. This created an economic boom. However, the excess wealth has increasingly been funneled into a meaningless hedonic treadmill, with humans throwing out all other social goods in favor of keeping up with the Joneses. The destructive dual income household, for example, results from it being the only way to maintain "middle status" in society.
The difference between flyovercountry crackheads/american fatties and the videographical apocalypse in that 4chan video is the lack of shit all over the place and rats. I am visually viscerally disgusted on a level unable to be put into words far more than the racist words spoken by the ai.
But the question is: how do we know said crackheads wouldn't do the same in Delhi? I don't know any cities where dirt poor whites live in Indian concentrations without welfare support. It could be that some ethnicities have more "ingrained cleanliness" than others, but american fatties benefit from abundant free bathrooms connected to a sewer system; poor Indians do not.
My priors are that if you artificially gave San Antonio third world infrastructure and wealth, the inhabitations would still clean their surroundings better than what you see in this film. But there's no test case to know for sure.
The core thrusts of this article strike me as "galaxy-brain takes", in the sense of throwing Occam's Razor to the curb and going with the most dramatic rather than the most plausible interpretation.
A wise sage on /r/themotte once said that @KulakRevolt is always wrong, but he's always wrong in a fascinating way that's rewarding to puzzle apart.
You read a lot into normies' discomfort and inability to watch the movie for any length of time, but the straightforward explanation there is that the unapologetic racism of the narration is extremely far outside the Overton window and this is just a standard human reaction to having well-internalized language taboos violated in front of them.
Yes, it was more dehumanizing narration than the sight of a man pooping on the beach that made me turn off the video before the title card.
"The Pajeet, breeds out of control like a plague of rats. Often defecating out in the open with no regard for its native habitat, the Pajeet spreads across the face of the earth like a cancerous tumor consuming all in its path while the world watches on in disgust and horror. With almost 1.4 billion Pajeets and rising our mother earth buckles under the terrible strain, whilst these creatures rapidly multiply in their own filth, with seemingly no end in sight.”
I've been thinking about Christianity lately. Christians (at least the modern ones) struggle with the question of subhumans. They prefer to thrust the question completely out of mind. "That couldn't happen. There could be no such thing!" is their comforting bromide and thought-killer. Understandably, Christians are afraid to put themselves in the position of judging whether a fellow person could be subhuman. But the unwillingness to entertain a hypothetical reflects a kind of cowardice: you are so afraid of being bad, you won't meditate on what makes the good.
Let me elide the question of whether Pajeets, or a subset of them, qualify. I don't know. This movie is selective. Nevertheless, it is certainly possible to imagine the breeding and education of an organism devoid of the divine spark. If you're not a Christian, it's even easier to imagine the creation of an organism without the virtues a materialist uses to define "human". Such a beast is, if C.S. Lewis is to be believed, what God casts into hell after the corruption of pride eats it completely. To materialists, it's some level of sophistication between "ape" and "moth".
If we are to preserve Christian morality, being Christian or no, we must come to terms with God's treatment of the Canaanites, the Hittites, Sodom, and Gomorrah. Subhumans in other words. He killed them. Ostensibly these people had fallen into extreme depravity of human sacrifice, mass rape, etc., and after many generations, these patterns of sin soaked into their very nature. God saved the righteous, but he commanded his people to kill the first two, and he personally rained fire on the others. I've heard protestants claim that this was "old morality" which the New Testament overturned, but this seems exceptionally weak reasoning to me. It endorses morality as something God arbitrarily decides, which Christians deny in every other context.
So there exists a threshold beneath which a "human" does fall below human dignity and should be treated as a beast. At least if you believe in sky daddy™. If you don't, it's an interesting parable to consider for whatever you consider the "source" of morality.
Another possible answer to the question of subhumans is stewardship. My bae Kevin Dolan did a long meditation on this idea, so I won't repeat it. This answer says: the subhumans have value in God's eyes, as we mere humans have value. But that value does not imply the necessity of equality, or the abolition of stewards and bondsmen. Hierarchical relations are perfectly in line with this Christian morality, unlike "modern" post-Christian morality which holds that the divine spark in everyone implies the abolition of rulers and ruled.
I don't have a conclusion, but these are things I've been thinking about.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
"Communism" in the sense of "enslave rural populations to produce grain at gunpoint, and then use that wealth to centrally plan heavy industrial development" does indeed work. For a while at least.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
One of my handful of 10/10s. Absolute aesthetic perfection. Kundera's other pretty-good book is Immortality, which also explores the self as an experience versus the self as others project values onto. But this is the novel he lived his life to write, so the rest of his work ends up disappointing.
What are great graphic novels I should read? I read some manga as a tween, but never got really into it
Berserk. Koe no Katachi if you feel like a good cry.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
I even have a toy example I like to use involving an ordinary claw hammer, and how they are four different ways of answering the question "why is this hammer here?"
Its the final cause (teleology) that really gets people upset with Aristotle here. He believed you could meaningfully talk about a dog having sharp front teeth because:
- Material - Enamel
- Formal - "Tooth"
- Efficient - Genetic expression
- Final - To sever meat to eat
Whereas modern scientists are iffy on #2 and hostile to #4.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
Good job predicting the motte. I really thought
It's a shame there wasn't a Knowledge option, otherwise we could re-create that scene from HPMOR.
Congratulations on being the only
Does anyone here actually "believe" Plato/Aristotle's theory of forms, material/formal/efficient/final causes, and hylemorphism? Or is at all basically nonsense, dreamed up for a want of robust physical science, with 'ball', 'sphere', 'man', 'dog' being just human oversimplifications for matter arrangements?
I bet most of The Motte will (correctly) see that the pleasure machine can provide every feeling the other options might. You could even program the pleasure machine to fool you into thinking you chose something else. And arguably, the existence of the pleasure machine solves any external suffering that Good Works or Power might fix; when others hook up to the grid, the moral dilemma of choosing Pleasure goes away.
The fertility problem continues to defy the desire to blame it on a political hobby horse. People try to draw correlation lines with feminism, secularism, diversity, urbanization, high cost of housing/education. To some extent, they succeed; those are all correlated with modernity. But look closely and you'll see outliers for your chosen culprit. Low fertility is hitting everyone regardless of regional particularities, just on a time lag of how deep they are in the boonies.
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