2rafa
16hr ago
There’s almost as much antisemitism on Instagram (have you ever checked out reel comments on anything featuring any Jewish person?) and nobody seems to care at all, least of all Zuck. Hard to believe that’s the reason.
2rafa
19hr ago
That’s not what Moldbug’s theory was. Moldbug’s theory was always that a lot of ‘nominal’ elites were successful finance/tech/etc people who had a lot of money but were actually subordinate in power terms to a class of people who cared more about politics.
2rafa
1d ago
People seem to forget that The Bell Curve was discussed neutrally on major news networks, by academics and in the mainstream press in the mid-1990s, a positive piece on it made the cover of The New Republic at the apogee of its circulation, it was discussed in every publication and had many open defenders. These things always ebb and flow.
Scott has always accepted HBD, almost certainly since the hungarian science fair article in 2017 and likely since the Nrx FAQ in 2013.
2rafa
1d ago
The Hungarian High School Science Fair Project stuff, as the above comment suggests, made his view on this pretty clear, he just chose not to go ultra deep into it because then it becomes your thing and you can’t write about anything else.
2rafa
1d ago
Yes, I think he made it clear he didn’t want to discuss it (all that about witches), but he’s always been open that he believes it.
even if all the Palestinian journalists had been killed
It really was extraordinary just how many “Palestinian journalists” were killed. How many there were in general, even. There appeared to be more “Palestinian journalists” in Gaza than American journalists in NYC, which is quite impressive given that there are likely more in NYC than in any other Western city. Every third man in Gaza appears to have been a Palestinian journalist.
Bibi needed an excuse to do a deal (which the IDF and Mossad and wider Israeli secular-ish establishment, including the banks and anyone remotely interested in the Israeli economy sorely wanted) over the heads of the Kahanists like Ben-Gvir and other extremist religious Zionists.
Witkoff (by all accounts a relatively zionist person himself) being “tough” provides Bibi with the excuse needed to throw up his hands and say “look, we have to do it, we don’t have a choice, it’s going to happen” and accept the deal that most of the Israeli establishment wanted anyway. It had to be Trump’s man because if it was Biden’s guy, the Kahanists would demand to wait until Trump’s guy was in in the hope that he would offer a better deal.
This concisely explains the situation. In the end this is the best deal, the IDF didn’t want to spend years mired in Gaza which would be terrible for morale, Hamas was always going to reform and - with Hezbollah severely weakened, a much stronger border and Iranian foreign policy in shambles - Hamas is less of a risk now anyway. Its full destruction was impossible without permanently destroying the ongoing lucrative reconciliation process with the Gulf Arabs, which can now slowly resume.
2rafa
2d ago
Which led me down the Wikipedia hole. The UK Other White population pyramids are pretty fascinating, there's almost no male surplus at any age across any subpopulation. Noticeable female surplus of White Germans and White North Americans at almost every age. White New Zealander/Australian is less symmetric and "smooth" than the rest.
European women, like in the Anglosphere, are more likely to go to college and emigrate than the men. The men stay behind. The same thing happens within-country. There are more East German women in Hamburg and Munich than East German men. There are more rust belt women in NYC than rust belt men. So it goes.
2rafa
2d ago
It’s not really deputy chief of staff, that’s a completely different hiring track. This pay band is like a mid-level fast-tracked civil servant’s pay for an executive assistant job title working 36 hours a week (ie much, much less than the example of the FTSE 100 C-level EA, who might be on £90-100k but is also working 60+ hours and travelling). Chief of Staffs don’t do scheduling or hiring (they have their own teams / assistants to do that), this person is going to be bringing in cups of tea and biscuits when the CEO of the council meets with politicians and business leaders.
2rafa
2d ago
The job itself seems like a sinecure and I expect any candidate - GM or otherwise - applying would be disappointed. £65,000 for a secretary in the UK is an extremely high wage unless they’re literally the personal assistant to the CEO of a FTSE 100 or something. They already have someone in mind.
2rafa
3d ago
Even traditional cultures have and had forms of protection for married women from sexual violence, namely her brothers, uncles, cousins, father if still alive and the men of her tribe.
2rafa
3d ago
I’m in the US moderately often and didn’t see many homeless people in Starbucks in NYC, Boston, Miami or Seattle over the last year. McDonald’s was always (and likely still is) full of em, but not really Starbucks.
2rafa
3d ago
You’re saying the average man wants a woman to lick her own shit off his dick after anal, eat her own vomit after oral, fuck his mistress in front of his 5 year old son? Go ahead, disappoint me.
2rafa
4d ago
that's pretty obviously false. That's the inherent tension with having a gender whose average participant gets off on the submission- and if they start to resent that for whatever reason, and have the political power to get their top/dom jailed, then arises the incentive to abuse that power.
The easy solution for men worried about this is simply not to engage in degenerate, promiscuous behavior. Oh, you got burned by a BPD whore? Shouldn’t have fucked her. The same, by the way, applies to getting in the outdoor baths of strange old men after being invited to.
2rafa
4d ago
Least shocking MeToo reveal.
In general, I think the press is the right way to go about these things. Jail? No, and in any case as you say the women all sent him texts saying they loved it / it was consensual, which is the nail in the coffin of an assault prosecution.
But social humiliation? Yes, that’s necessary. Demanding a woman lick her own faeces off your dick? Eat her vomit off the couch? That’s objectively degenerate, deeply disturbed behavior, regardless of consent, and he deserves any resulting opprobrium.
2rafa
4d ago
In the sense that the most widely-accepted theory is that all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Jewish-Roman intermarriage in the first few centuries CE, sure.
2rafa
4d ago
We do need to build more, because the UK has the smallest, ugliest houses (barring some good stock inhabited by some rich people and/or pre-1920ish in construction) in the West. We need to be razing entire neighborhoods of shitty 1930s-1970s semi detached streets and replacing them with much larger, better homes, which will require more land.
Since that kind of demolition is going to get blocked on environmentalist grounds, the best option is just to build more and better in the hope that these ugly places collapse in value and homeowners lobby the government to be allowed to demolish and replace them.
2rafa
4d ago
NIMBY lobby is too powerful as a function of democratic politics in a capitalist society, because rich and powerful people disproportionately live in large single-family homes in locales whose character would be damaged by large-scale construction that would also be loud and annoying for existing residents.
The only solution is removing local elites to the greatest extent possible from planning and zoning decisions. This is why in the UK I have long advocated for the establishment of some remote central planning permission authority, perhaps somewhere in a small town in Wales or Scotland, which would approve all construction in Britain and wave everything through over the gnashing of local councils in London or the green belt. In the US the federal system, unfortunately, makes this even more difficult.
2rafa
4d ago
As a neurotic, the best thing is to figure out some way of not thinking about this kind of stuff. I really think this is the key to TMI style Buddhism, the deep metaphysics are irrelevant, the real benefit is in anatta, in detachment, in meditation, in letting go. The happiest people don’t care about this stuff. (You could say the same about political debate forums, but I’d (a) disagree and (b) think some kind of intellectual stimulation is important).
2rafa
5d ago
Even if AGI only improved modestly, what do you think the implications of having an entity capable of doing knowledge work for far less than minimum wage 24/7 are? Mass unemployment, and probably a lot of economic growth.
Side point: have you come around to expecting universal basic income, then?
We could start work on a Dyson Swarm today.
Sure, but this is exactly the issue with what you say when you say:
We understand telomere attrition, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and epigenetic alterations. What we lack isn't theoretical understanding - it's the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale.
“We understand the basics of how to terraform Mars to make it habitable to humans, and have done since the 1950s, probably before. What we lack isn’t theoretical understanding, it’s the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale” is indeed a statement that makes complete sense. We don’t know yet, but reversing aging could easily be a ‘terraform Mars’ level problem.
2rafa
5d ago
I have to disagree. All of this is ridiculous optimism. You can’t describe the mechanisms, the technology, the research routes. “AI will figure it out”. We’re yet to even figure out whether AI trained on human reasoning can get much smarter than us (collectively). AI could automate 95% of human labor and still not even come close to reasonably extending the lifespan of affluent people in rich countries (presumably automated abundance would have a larger impact on the global lifespan, but I’m not talking about that). This is a particularly strange form of AI hyperoptimism (which even I, someone pretty e/acc, balk at) wherein the technology is essentially magic and all we need is a sufficiently advanced LLM and it will literally be able to derive, deduct and synthesize the sum of human knowledge to suddenly find mountains of undiscovered low hanging fruit that no human being or team of researchers, scientists or capitalists ever even imagined, that will likely turn out to be as simple as some kind of cheap novel cocktail of existing drugs and supplements that we just didn’t realize was actually the key to eternity.
How old are you? If you can raise it to 179 or 180 you have a solid (say 30%) shot at the top 6 if you’re also charismatic and good at interview, which in turn means that you can hustle for the top tier of clerkships, big law jobs etc.
But it’s still insanely expensive, 2 years of not making money or developing a career, and no guarantee of wealth, power or (particular) status.
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