magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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18hr ago
TBH, I only really said it because the accusation of deliberate obfuscation was thrown and I felt that that was even less charitable. Probably would have kept my suspicions to myself otherwise.
magic9mushroom
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18hr ago
Yeah, maybe I should have prefaced my comment with "Nitpick:".
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Chaos theory is maths, not physics.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Yeah, the software mangled the URL and @FtttG supplied an unmangled version. Have submitted a bug report.
I'm all for noting that his use of chaos theory is specious and unhelpful, because it is. My point is strictly that "he actually believes that his invocation of chaos theory is super-deep and meaningful" is pretty plausible, where it wouldn't be for a normal person - "drawing wildly-different things into a nonsense Grand Theory" is a textbook psychotic delusion - and hence your apparent conclusion that he's deliberately blowing smoke there was suspect.
There are certainly people blowing smoke. I'm not even saying that Freddie never does it. But this particular thing doesn't smell like it to me.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
Bug report:
In this post, I input the following URL:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new? utm_source=publication-search
I can see this upon opening the post up to edit; I correctly entered it. However, the post renders with the link pointing to this URL:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new-search
As you can see, part of the URL has been stripped out, breaking the link. Hence, y'know, the bug report.
EDIT: I've had to add code tags around the first URL, as it "autocorrected" when I made this post. So it applies to bare URLs as well, not just [] () links. Note that this doesn't affect the preview, which is why I've had to edit rather than noticing it then.
EDIT2: Code tags weren't enough; added a space to the first URL to break it. URL I entered doesn't have the space. Seriously, this "some bugs don't affect the preview" thing gets annoying.
EDIT3: Putting a space before the ?, rather than after as it now is, results in the behaviour still occurring despite the deleted section no longer even being part of a hyperlink. Result:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new -search
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
His previous attempt does seem barely comprehensible and borderline schizophrenic to me (besides vaguely raising my AIslop hackles), so this one is definitely more coherent and puts his thesis better.
All the parallels with physical phenomena taking up over half the post certainly don't help the impression that Freddie goes to great lengths to quietly bury the "switch" under heaps of barely-related Le Science and authoritative-sounding parallels.
I'm not 100% sure if it's schizophrenia specifically, but Freddie de Boer actually is psychotic. Hence, I'm inclined to read the specious chaos theory as "his meds aren't working as well as we'd like" rather than "he's lying".
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Taiwan hasn't been invaded (yet). The PRC hasn't threatened to blockade South Korea or Japan (both of which need international shipping to eat) in order to extort extreme concessions (e.g. the Ryukyu Islands). Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
Persecuting people doesn't help you unless you're removing their ability to fight back by doing so. Getting people fired doesn't remove their ability to fight back unless they're in key positions (e.g. HR); their job didn't give them power and they can still vote.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
I was, indeed, talking about Thomas Crooks, the guy who shot Trump at a rally a year ago. We have a report of him being an outspoken conservative, and he registered as Republican in 2022, but a few months before that he'd donated a small amount to ActBlue, and he did, y'know, shoot Donald Trump, and AFAIK he didn't make any political posts on the 'Web to clear up what the hell's going on there, so I stick him in the "unknown" column rather than the "left-wing" or "right-wing" columns.
I think the Charlie Kirk murder screams Antifa, to the point that the only way it could be not Antifa would be if it were an outright false-flag trying to frame them - and even then, that's quite unlikely. But that wasn't the topic of discussion.
Are we good?
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
You say there are only twelve incidents of left-wing violence left after your filter; you could just list them at this point?
I think you may be mistaking me for @MonkeyWithAMachinegun for some reason, because I didn't say that.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Proof? No. Enough evidence, when combined with his membership of the Republicans, to make the "most Westerners who want to shoot Donald Trump are SJWs" heuristic dubious? Yes.
As noted above, I wouldn't count Crooks toward either "side"'s tally. Just too many question marks. As also noted above, there are plenty of others whom I would count as "SJers trying to kill Trump".
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
As mystery continues surrounding the possible motivations of the 20-year-old Pennsylvania man accused of trying to kill Donald Trump at a campaign rally, a former classmate of his came forward to describe him as “definitely conservative” when they were in school together.
“It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate,” Max R Smith told the Philadelphia Inquirer of the accused shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks.
[...]
Smith said he and Crooks took a sophomore US history course together at Bethel Park high school, located in a middle-class suburb eight miles (13km) south of Pittsburgh.
Smith told the Inquirer about a mock debate in which the history professor asked students to signal their support or opposition for government policy proposals.
“The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
From a Guardian article.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Well, yes, the US military, including but not limited to its nuclear arsenal (on par with Russia's and far more than any other state), is a very-large chunk of what's keeping the PRC (and others) in check.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Crooks was a registered Republican and some people who knew him said he was an outspoken conservative, although he did also donate $15 to ActBlue before that. You're right about the presumption (and I applied it to many of my inclusions), but the above suffices for me to declare it at least partially rebutted in Crooks' case. The obvious possibility raised by that info is "thought conservatism in the 'States would do better without Donald Trump leading it". Again, though, I wouldn't count it as "right-wing political violence" either; it's just not clear what the fuck he was thinking.
Allen and Crooks are the arguable ones, though.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
I think that setting up to snipe a presidential candidate at a political rally is in and of itself prima facie an act of political violence
Yes, it counts as "political violence". But I wouldn't count it as "left-wing political violence".
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
I think I'd count Sanford, Ferrier, Routh, and Monper as left-wing assassination plots on Trump. I wouldn't count Allen (apparently just nuts, claimed to have also sent ricin to Elizabeth II), Crooks (ideology unclear), Casap (neo-Nazi attempting to start a race war), or the various Iranian government operatives - indeed, I'd count Casap, though not any of the others, as right-wing.
Technically, Ferrier's assassination attempt wasn't violent (she mailed him ricin), and technically Routh and Monper didn't get around to taking actual violent actions. Sanford absolutely counts, though, and if you count all attempted murders as "violent" (as many statistics do) then Ferrier/Routh would as well (Monper didn't get around to anything I'd label an "attempt", because he was dumb enough to post on social media that he was going to commit a mass shooting).
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
US can't do anything about PRC and no county save Russia has enough nukes to engage it,
I'm going to assume there's an unstated "in this scenario" there, because obviously outside of this scenario the USA also has enough nukes to send China back to being a basket-case.
so what are you talking about
There'd be a combination of 1) various US military assets, likely including nukes to at least some extent, being "adopted" by allied countries, 2) a large number of First World countries (most obviously South Korea and Japan) denouncing the NPT and making a mad sprint to build their own nukes.
The time pressure and uncertainty created by all of that could well end in a nuclear exchange.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
I wonder which way that witch will jump. On the one hand, if she reveals her identity she'll probably get quite a few more customers (and/or be able to raise her rates quite a lot). On the other hand, she would also get quite a few more people looking to burn her as a witch.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
I know we're all ostensibly against violent remedies
I'm not. I'm not inherently opposed to violent means. Hell, they come to mind distressingly easily. The thing is, I like to think of myself as reasonably rational, and I can't come up with a way that personal violent means would actually serve my purposes.
I support civil liberties. The main opponent of civil liberties is hysterical fear. I don't think there's a way to reduce hysterical fears via terrorism. It's right there in the name: terror.
I want us to not all die from AI. There's definitely a place for state violence toward that goal; I don't think it can be accomplished without such. But the level of violence that must at least be credibly threatened in order to shut down the neural net field worldwide is far, far in excess of what I could bring to bear as a terrorist; you need a nuclear triad. And random murders aren't going to help me, or the general Yuddist movement, win over the people who can actually bring a nuclear triad to bear.
I want my country (which is Australia) to not turn into Mad Max. Going out and shooting a bunch of people seems like the kind of fraying of the social contract that might wind up resulting in Mad Max... which brings us back to the point at issue.
Civil war is bad. Civil war is really, really bad. As in, if the USA went into a full civil war, I'd expect at least 7-digit deaths, more likely 8-digit, and possibly as high as 9-digit; combat deaths aside, you're talking about a war between the farmers and the people making fertilisers, which puts the food supply in severe jeopardy. If you're very, very lucky, maybe 80% of those corpses will be of those playing for the other team. And that's just the ones in the actual USA; the USA is load-bearing in the world order, so there'd be plenty of blood spilled elsewhere as the rest of us try to figure out what the fuck to do about the PRC. Nuclear war's a serious possibility in that chaos.
I support at least a fair degree of co-ordinated violence in this matter. Most obviously, I think the police are entirely justified in using violence to arrest the lunatic who did this. You can assuredly come up with all sorts of laws that might help, which would of course be backed by the threat of police violence. But un-co-ordinated violence has far less capacity to deter and far more capacity to provoke. It's not very useful at removing your enemies in the current political context, it has a potentially-much-larger PR effect of pissing off the neutrals and making them into new enemies, and most importantly it adds straws to a very-overloaded camel and risks pushing your country into a different political context - that of civil war, which is worse in at least the short- and medium-term than your enemies outright winning.
Let the cops do their job. Let Donald Trump do his job. Do your job by keeping your noses clean.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
I mean, technically Reddit didn't axe /r/themotte, only siteban some of the witches and threaten to axe the subreddit if Zorba didn't start cracking down on witchcraft. But that's splitting hairs.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
If it was something like a personal grudge, wouldn't you rather shoot someone in a quiet place, such as at night?
Somebody like you or me? Yeah, sure. Rich people who get death threats all the time tend to live in places with better security. Yeah, Boelter pulled it off, but it took some frankly-masterful subterfuge on his part to get through that security.
Don't get me wrong, this murder was almost certainly politically-motivated; there are far more people who'd want him dead for political reasons than personal. But this particular thing isn't really corroborating evidence.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
I'll cop to not having read this when I posted (it was behind the paywall), but now it's loading without the paywall for some reason, so...
Today, Mr. Trump’s critics fear that he will use the death of Ms. Zarutska to justify sending federal troops into American cities, as he has already done in Washington, despite statistics showing a downturn in violent crime nationwide.
“Trump’s MAGA allies are trying to use the tragic murder of a service worker in Charlotte, North Carolina, to justify its illegal occupation of U.S. cities,” the Rev. Dr. William Barber, the state’s most prominent African American civil rights leader, wrote in a text message.
[...]
In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.
As I said to @ControlsFreak, I wasn't trying to steelman, but fleshman - i.e. model what they were actually thinking. It would seem that my model had some predictive power, although they did say other stuff too.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
I was never trying to steelman. I was trying to fleshman - to give my best guess at what they were thinking. I won't deny that Republicans Pounce has been a thing for a while, but I do actually suspect that a chunk of the NYT are in full-blown "the sky is falling" mode. See e.g. Ezra Klein's piece in the NYT a few days ago, although I'm also drawing from my more general experience with SJers in the past few years.
Mmm, yes, but selection effects going both ways. Yes, people who don't care about politics don't tend to show up at rallies. But social justice warriors also don't tend to show up at religious-right rallies unless they're explicitly planning to attack or disrupt them in some way. Not sure which is the stronger effect.
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