Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
20d ago
My first advice to democrats is find a vision of a future you want to build that people would actually want to live in. And not only start talking about it, but start trying to actually build it.
Adam Curtis’ documentary Hypernormalisation is my recommendation to you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k?si=zvQm4rUCploqAEtw
TL;DR: no such positive vision can exist any more, because there is simply nothing aspirational left inside democratic Western political philosophy that hasn’t already been tried and failed.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
Russia is not winning the war because it is taking and may keep territory in the Donbas, it is losing the war because Russia itself framed the war not as a conflict between itself and Ukraine
Ok, question: did Shogunate Japan lose the First Imjin War? They occupied Korea, but by your logic they lost because Hideyoshi had once told his retainers that his ambition unironically included “world conquest”?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
The only reason 4B ‘works’ in Korea (or at least doesn’t instantly collapse as farcical) is precisely because Korean society is actually great for women. In Africa if you try to withhold sex from men in general, or especially your husband, you’ll just get raped, and everyone will call you an idiot because OBVIOUSLY that’s what would happen.
Say what you will about sexual violence’s moral deficiencies, but it does keep women in line, as the fertility rates in Africa demonstrate.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
Playing that anecdote as an Uno Reverse card won’t work, as a sufficiently motivated counterparty will just respond with “He wasn’t fired, he was still in the academy and drawing a salary, therefore he wasn’t suffering discrimination”.
As a practicing academic myself I wish I’d be able to spend more time on my research by getting banned from my teaching workload, teaching fucking sucks.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
It's not true, I'm South Asian. It's extremely common for South Asian women to begrudgingly marry a guy of the same ethnicity whilst being in a fairly serious relationship with a white guy.
Just because it’s extremely common for SEA doesn’t mean it’s not extremely extremely common for EA.
You and SerialState may both be right.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
Can you give three examples of their fresh bold takes on policies which Dems usually tiptoe around?
How are they on the JQ?
In addition to prognostications, I'd like to voice my disdain for these postmortems… Obviously not an ideal outcome, but far from cause to hit the panic button and start realigning your policies.
I think you’re correct, and the reason we get a flood of prognostications is that the prognosticators are not arguing in good faith. They’re arguing because they want jobs. In the same way that (I contend) lawyers and bureaucrats make law and bureaucracy unnecessarily complicated in order to invent jobs for themselves assisting normies trying to navigate their regulations, so too do policy analysts try to make every event constitute a “We need a serious policy reevaluation” moment. They hope the “…therefore, hire me” is inferred by think-tank funders.
It’s hustlers all the way down.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
If they manage to grapple the booster consistently, then we can talk about “inaugurating a new era of space”. But one lucky catch does not an industry renaissance create. And tbh I’m not even convinced that catching the booster is actually that reusable. Sure, it LOOKS more reusable than a smouldering crater on the landing pad or a rusting wreck on the seabed, but is it really? Given how anal the FAA is about testing each sprocket and screw a trillion times, I’m dubious as to whether the inevitable damage caused by just the Working As Designed rocketry stuff of having 15 tonnes of liquid methane lit on fire inside it will allow (physically or legally) a booster to consistently fly for a second time.
I really want my consumer moon vacations, but I’ve been burned so many times before by spess hype that I’m kind of a doomer at this point.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
Can you imagine Ben Franklin telling politicians they don't have to accept the result of a vote because the Pennsylvania Gazette wrote absurd lies about the candidates?
No, but I can imagine 2017 Democrats yelling “not my President” ad infinitum, and trying to impeach on tendentious grounds for an entire term.
Vance gave the right answer here. He should have refused to certify the election - not because he had just cause, but because he who does not fight fire with fire, specious lawfare with specious lawfare, is a sucker.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas. …However, these were not the actual arguments made by Trump and allies, nor were they the arguments voiced on January 6.
This seems like some sort of reverse-motte-and-Bailey on your part. Some crazies yell extreme theories, therefore the moderate theories are not worth considering?
At some point you're just too far away from the candidate himself or his campaign.
It also seems like an effort of sophistry to avoid the question of “how to get Republicans to accept the election results” by playing around with definitions until the people with legitimate reasons to distrust the election don’t count as Republicans any more, ergo dusts hands job done.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
Israel is at war. Am I missing something or shouldn't this be hot-take level shocking?
Israel is winning a war (insofar as shooting fish in a barrel and tampering with Taiwanese pager shipments constitutes a war); what surprise is it that hot-blooded youngsters rejoice in seeing their enemies driven before them, and hearing the lamentations of their women?
I’m not saying that no parents are short-termist psychopaths, I’m saying that no childfree people aren’t short-termist psychopaths.
Outsourcing the necessary work of (both literal and figurative) species reproduction to god-knows-who (and in all likelihood it’s to 7-kids-per-woman educationless Third Worlders) is a rather spectacular indicator that you Just Don’t Give A Shit, no matter what prosocial rhetoric might come out of your mouth.
And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
I reject your hypothesis. Many human beings are net negatives to society regardless of how much compelled labour you can get out of them for the rest of their lives. You think that sentencing this guy to hard labour would be more efficient - I highly doubt it. The infrastructure (both physical, in terms of jails, and human, in terms of chain-gang guards salaries) required to confine such a person to hard labour is going to be more costly than the value of hard labour they produce.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Whatever you think of the Katyn Massacre: frogmarching people into the woods, having them dig their own graves, and then one-taping them in the back of the head - you cannot complain that it wasn’t a CHEAP way of dealing with undesirables.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
By not inviting the channels’ major shareholders to the cool cocktail parties if they took a heterodox editorial position.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
Just as “watermelon” has come to refer to politics which wears a green skin to smuggle in red outcomes, I want a word for politics which wears a nonpartisan skin to smuggle in Dem hackery. What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside? Something something haemocyanin.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
3mo ago
A country notorious for faking its math test scores, macroeconomic indicators, astroturfed ‘5c army’ political engagement, and COVID case numbers, is having unexpectedly great entertainment metrics?
I don’t think we need to do any sort of self-reflective cultural soul-searching here. The reflexive 4chan screech of “BOTS” is both sufficient and necessary in this case.
They actually aren’t, though.
For one, there’s the halo effect: i.e. it’s natural for humans of both genders to assume that a person successful in one field is also successful in another. So ‘success as a leader of men’ will prejudice women positively towards such a man on other axes, and ‘success as a c(h)ad’ will prejudice men positively towards such a man on other axes, symmetrically. I’ve been reading a history of Italy lately, and this is pretty much Berlusconi’s entire (winning) strategy both in politics and in Bunga Bunga.
But we don’t even require such a Fully General Argument as the halo effect to demonstrate the thesis - assessing it in detail also makes it seem like there’ll be general “popularity” skills rather than gender-audience specific ones. Being a good conversationalist, being extroverted, openness to new experiences, gregariousness - all traits which will improve one’s success both as a leader and as a lover.
I don’t dispute that some traits like “Autistic knowledge of Gundam anime” is male leadership material in specific (one might say contrived) situations, like choosing a team captain when entering a Gundam trivia quiz, but in the vast majority of cases, Chad gets both the girl and the crown because both genders want the same thing.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
I suppose what you meant to say was that no group of men accepts an incel as their leader?
If a man is sufficiently attractive / outgoing / interesting / popular enough to be a leader of men, he is also sufficiently attractive / outgoing / interesting / popular enough to be a fucker of women.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
Good analysis.
The ultimate irony is that if the Bonglander government was REALLY interested in bringing the hammer down on misogynists, it would be siding with Britain’s recent “””far-right””” anti-immigration rioters rather than against them. A Rwandan migrant knife-attacks a girl’s dance school and the party line is that people subsequently protesting against immigrants and mosques hate women? Clownworld.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
at that time UK was not bombing Russia
I don’t really see how assassinating Palestinians overseas becomes more palatable if you’re also gunning them down by the thousands with ground infantry.
Or is this a “One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic” thing?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
Out of curiosity, do you have any examples of a country where a leader rapidly and publicly executed tens of thousands of elites and things went well afterwards (e.g. the country did not descend into civil war and standard of living did not decline substantially)?
Most mainland European countries in 1946.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
4mo ago
Foolishly I got my news on the opening ceremony from the BBC, who make no mention of any problems or embarrassments at all, and just breathlessly report it as the greatest show on earth.
I would have expected the Anglos at least to be Francophobic enough to tell the truth, but apparently globohomo must not be embarrassed. The Party is always right!
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
5mo ago
I agree with you, but by corollary it’s hard to claim that an unsuccessful assassination attempt is a somethingburger.
Reminds me of the Bolsheviks being so scared of “Napoleonisation” (i.e. that a strong and charismatic party leader would upstage everyone else) that they hamstrung their most popular and effective guy, Trotsky, and were much the worse for it.
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