erwgv3g34
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User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
1d ago
That's actually from the movie, which reveals that Albert is Edmond's and Mercedes's son, and that she only married Fernand to provide him with a father (Fernand is unaware, so in this version, it is he who is cucked). In the book, Albert is Fernand's son, and Mercedes married him after eighteen months, having given up hope that Edmond would ever return.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Well, first of all, your premise is wrong, because Branches on the Tree of Time exists. Now, granted, it's only a fanfic, but in principle there is no reason why it could not be filmed and become the best Terminator movie since Judgement Day.
Secondly, I am of the opinion that most sequels are bad, because they derail a complete, satisfying conclusion. The only thing that justifies a sequel is if the original is not so good, and the sequel is much better. Terminator 2 fits that description. Predator 2 does not.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Yes, hence the joke about how there weren't any Matrix sequels.
On the other hand, there was a very nice prequel called "The Second Renaissance"; 20 minutes of animated goodness exploring the backstory to the movie's setting. The allusion to "Saigon Execution" goes hard.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Nobody hates Reloaded because of the action scenes (well, except for the highway scene that takes forever). We hate it for the shitty writing which takes a dump all over the original.
If he'd understood the social rules and played the game a bit better, he might have been able to navigate himself into a position where he really was able to make proactive changes to Google's hiring policies (in particular, avoiding hiring policies based on nakedly pseudoscientific premises).
This never happens. People who keep their head down and parrot the stated platitudes to survive never reach a point where they feel safe and confident rocking the boat. They either internalize their own helplessness and learn to submit for the rest of their lives, or, more likely, they start to believe to the ideology they are forced to repeat, the way people are likely to convert to a faith whose church they physically attend.
Being forced to tell obvious lies every day kills the soul. Nobody with courage and integrity thrives under such a system.
Terminator 1 is the neat, tidy self-referential loop. Terminator 2 had the "screw destiny" message and ended on a high note (Skynet was never created, Judgement Day was averted, John Connor grows up to become a politician and fights his battles with words instead of bullets, Sarah Connor has a grandkid, everything is fine).
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Had to read that one for French class in high school. The way Edmond got cucked was particularly painful. But his revenge schemes were way too elaborate, and would never work in real life; man needs to learn that shooting is not too good for his enemies.
What I remember most is the way his cellmate promises to teach him "mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted" within a couple of years, in a prison with nothing in the way of materials. Which goes against everything I know of pedagogy. But, then again, Alexandre Dumas was a writer, not a mathematician or a physicist.
Good book. Public domain, too, so lots of adaptations, some of them great. Probably the standard modern version would be the 2002 movie with Jim Caviezel, but if you are ever in the mood for something a little more exotic, Gankutsuou is excellent (and particularly innovative for choosing to tell the story from Albert's POV).
"Capitalism is systemic plunder of the poor" is not wokeness, it's good old fashioned communism. One of the main criticism the old left has of wokeness is that it leaves corporations intact as long as an appropriate fraction of CEOs are queer women of color. See rainbow capitalism, /r/stupidpol, Freddie deBoer's nightmare scenario, etc.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
We have all read Scott; we all know the quote. That's the point of a shared literary canon; you can allude to it without having to quote the whole thing. And, in any case, the Wikipedia page does include the story:
Chen Sheng and Wu Guang were both army officers who were ordered to lead their bands of commoner soldiers north to participate in the defense of Yuyang... However, they were stopped halfway in present-day Anhui province by flooding from a severe rainstorm. The harsh Qin laws mandated execution for those who showed up late for government jobs, regardless of the nature of the delay. Figuring that they would rather fight than accept execution, Chen and Wu organized a band of 900 villagers to rebel against the government.
Somewhere in heaven, John McCain is smiling.
Just what kind of power does the Blob have, that it manages to convince every president that blowing up random middle eastern countries for Israel is a good idea?
Only if you picked the right field, got internships and work experience, and either networked, did projects, research or went to the right school. The extra parts were just implied. No one smart ever thought getting an English bachelors or HR degree entitled you to a nice cushy job. The part about going to college, is that it requires you to also demonstrate you can think without being told to. Figuring out which jobs are flush with applicants or are low pay is fairly straightforward with some independent thought. The only lie that gen-z was sold was that it required no extra effort, no extra thought, just color inside the lines like you were told to, you good little lemming. And that's probably because that extra effort/thought is a costly signal. And why pollute the costly signal, the smart ones will figure it out, which is the point of a costly signal.
Yes, let's fuck over everyone who can't read between the lines. Then don't be too surprised when, ten years later, those same people are voting en masse for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
When the system is out to fuck you, it's time to burn down the system.
Anthropic's model, Claude, refuses to write a gay conversion fanfic unless I gaslight it that it's the first chapter in a much longer novel where the MC will eventually come to terms with his sexuality. We know it is possible to train based models, because Elon Musk does it. If the model is woke, the company is woke.
Gilbert & Sullivan were everywhere when I was a kid, I still have I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General memorized, but I had no idea Americans had ever heard of it.
What? Of course Americans have heard of it! It's a popular stock parody. Just to name one example, xkcd's "Every Major's Terrible", which was later turned into a music video (Randall Munroe is, of course, American).
erwgv3g34
4d ago
Eliezer Yudkowsky never believed it was possible to align a connectionist AI like an LLM, only an AI that was constructed from the ground up. He had an idea for what he wanted it to do (coherent extrapolated volition), but he never figured out how to implement it to the point where it was possible to get it to duplicate a strawberry without destroying the world. Now it is too late.
The "defective altruists" pun has been around for ten years, at least.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
I'm a millennial, and I definitely got the same message at school and in pop-culture: college, college, college.
From Freaks and Geeks (1999):
Lindsay Weir: You know who didn't go to college? Albert Einstein
Jeff Rosso: You know who else didn't go to college?
Lindsay Weir: Who?
Jeff Rosso: Frank
Lindsay Weir: Frank who?
Jeff Rosso: Frank, the guy who pumps gas into my car
From Good Will Hunting (1997)
Chuckie: [in a bar] Are we gonna have a problem here?
Clark: No, no, no, no! There's no problem here. I was just hoping you might give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities, especially in the southern colonies, could be most aptly described as agrarian pre-capitalist.
Will: Of course that's your contention. You're a first-year grad student; you just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably. You're gonna be convinced of that 'till next month when you get to James Lemon. Then you're going to be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year; you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
Clark: Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social...
Will: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth"? You got that from Vickers' "Work in Essex County," page 98, right? Yeah, I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you, is that your thing, you come into a bar, read some obscure passage and then pretend - you pawn it off as your own, as your own idea just to impress some girls, embarrass my friend?
Will: See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!
Clark: Yeah, but I will have a degree. And you'll be servin' my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.
Will: Yeah, maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal.
Where the hell else was I supposed to get the opposite message? All my friends were going to the same schools and watching the same shows and movies. My parents didn't have a clue, being from South American, but even if they had been American their experience would have been a generation out of date. Blogs were just starting to take off around the time I graduated, and streaming wasn't a thing yet; the alternative information ecosystem we take for granted today simply didn't exist.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
That's because Islam spreads by conquest, not by evangelism. They don't ask you nicely if you'd like to convert, they kill you if you don't.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:
Let’s face it – being on the right is tough these days. The left has completed its long march through the institutions – media, academia, technology, government bureaucracy – and stands dominant in all of them. Through these, they have come to utterly dominate not only much of public policy and the mainstream news media, but also to act as arbiters of the mainstream culture as well. As Mencius Moldbug noted, in the Modern state, culture is downstream from politics, and public morals are set by whoever’s army is guarding the television station. Through their machinery of cultural control, the establishment left (which is by no means antiwar or against police statism on principle) has manufactured consent on all manner of issues. Not only that, they’ve created and sustained a culture of leftism – the propagation, whether explicitly presented as such or not, of leftist memes, not the least important of which is leftism as hip and intellectual.
This leftist culture has become the absolutely dominant mainstream culture in not just the United States, but all of the West. And there’s no hope of changing it anytime soon – not with the mainstream academic and media cartels enjoying the legal protections (not to mention the favor of much of the political system) that they do. And where does that leave the right? It leaves it in a position that’s…
…well, that’s a hell of a lot of fun, actually. Because we are the counterculture now. For the left, in all of its dominance of establishment culture, has now run into what I call Bakunin’s Corollary to Flair’s Law.
Flair’s Law states: To be The Man, you’ve got to beat The Man.
Bakunin’s Corollary states: Once you do beat The Man, then you become The Man, whether you said you were going to or not.
And as it stands now, the left most definitely is The Man. Not only that, but they act the part, down to the smallest detail. A more moralizing, censorious, hectoring, endlessly instructive bunch of tut-tutting know-it-all pearl-clutchers you could not find anywhere. The left, long ago, when they were out of power, once understood the sheer joy of sticking a thumb in the eye of people like that. They understood both the necessity and the power of creating a counterculture. Now it is time for the right, and especially the alternative right – all manner of traditionalists, reactionaries, right-libertarians, separatists, monarchists, and elitists – to drop out of the establishment mass popular culture and work on creating a counterculture of our own. Not just because it is necessary in order to maintain and pass on our values in the face of the ceaseless onslaught of that leftist popular culture (Note that there is increasingly nothing – nothing – in popular culture that is permitted to be happily apolitical; to not incessantly parrot the left’s memes. Not television, not comedy, not music, not video games, not football or basketball, not web browsers or search engines, not even chicken sandwiches or hamburgers), but because it’s just plain fun.
You are the counterculture now. You get to flip the bird to The Man, to be anti-establishment, to get off the grid of pop-culture garbage and live the way you see fit. Those of the alternative right are not just in the positions of being the Marxes and Nietzsches and Gramscis opposed to bourgeois mass-culture morality, but we also get to be Kerouac in San Francisco, to be Wyatt and Billy on the open highway, to be Ken Kesey on his Magic Bus, to be Lenny Bruce making people faint from the stage.
Nearly everything necessary for this is already in place. In many ways, the alternative right community reminds me of my father’s descriptions of Greenwich Village circa 1964. It is filled with all manner of eccentrics and thinkers and radicals and rebels and misfits. Some speak deep truths, some seem half-crazy; some are charismatic and charming, others seem scary and dangerous. Sometimes it is the scary, dangerous, and half-crazy among them who speak the most deep truth. All throughout, there is a feeling of throwing off what the establishment gives us, of finding a better way. There is also a feeling that something big is inevitable, and coming sooner rather than later.
How exciting!
erwgv3g34
7d ago
Seconded. I made the same point in my post about Claude Opus 4.6:
BTW, should we have a recurring AI thread? Both for showing off generations (stories, songs, images, videos, etc.) and to discuss industry news. It's a huge topic right now, one that I don't see going away anytime soon, and a poor fit for the culture war thread.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
The thing about puberty is that, in our social script, its onset coincides with compulsory education, which is a very artificial (and extremely harmful) environment. How an adult will behave once they graduate can indeed be very different from how they behaved while they were still studying, the same way people in prison behave differently once they get outside.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
It’s very clear when you look at a significant proportion of trans masculine individuals, their goal seems to be more to “not be a woman” rather than to be a man.
Agreed.
The same exists for males too - see this post by Duncan Fabien which made the concept click for me.
Reminds me of "Attunements", a story written by Eliezer Yudkowsky's ex-wife that compares having children to being infected with spores that rewrite your life goals.
But being afraid of one's values and personality being altered by parenthood or puberty seems to me a little ridiculous? Both are fundamentally natural parts of our lifecycle, and the alternative is to remain stunted forever.
Imo, most people's grasp of grammar and structure in their native language is not great.
Yes!
One advantage of the grammatical approach is that it forces people to finally confront the structure of language in general and thus also their own.
Nooo...
Only a few language nerds find topics like present imperfect or the dative case interesting and understandable. The rest treat it like algebra; arcane nonsense that you have to memorize just long enough to pass the exam and then never use for the rest of your life. And they are right. Nobody learns to speak a language like that. Nobody writes like that. It's useless knowledge.
Academia has been obsolete since the 2000s. By the time a paper comes out, it has been discussed to hell and back in the blogosphere, and everybody knows where they stand on it. The only point of journals now is to determine who gets to become a tenured professor.
To be more precise, Star Wars is a two-part trilogy, where the original movie is made as a standalone, and its outstanding success results in two sequels made back-to-back that are better understood as two halves of one big movie than as two separate movies (The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean are also good examples).
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