domain:greyenlightenment.com
Jesweez
4m ago
Was it Scott Alexander who back in the day wrote an essay about how liberal values are optimized for times of peace and abundance and conservative values are optimized for a zombie apocalypse scenario?
I’ve pretty much incorporated that into a lot of my perception of politics.
The role of conservatives is often to point at something and say that it is dangerous and should be given more due attention.
As a normie lib I often have the reaction of the poster you quote, but also I have to say there have been times that over time I came around to the conservative position that “X represents a danger that we should be more wary of”.
My best example is how I used to be pro-decriminalization of hard drugs in the early 2010s when much of the rhetoric was based around the failure of the war on drugs. I was also pretty liberal about homelessness. But now I’ve come around to the conservative position that we should crack down on those things to preserve the public space for normal people.
Other fronts of the culture war are for example conservatives telling me I should be more afraid of immigration.
But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.
But this does line up with the original essay, being concerned about preserving the environment is something from a peace and abundance mindset, not a survival among dangers mindset. If you’re in a total war for example, the effects your bombs have on the environment don’t fucking matter!
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7m ago
RePhobia
I managed to make some progress on the shooty mechanics. Originally I was planning to just instakill the first thing in the line of fire, but checking out similar games that others mentioneed, like Crimsonland or Halls of Torment, I figured visible projectiles still look cool, and have the advantage of handling all weapon types using the same logic, by simply tweaking some parameters - for instance machine gun and a flamethrower both just spit out projectiles, they just do so at different rates, spreads, and the projectiles themselves have different speeds, lifetimes, etc.
I also opened a Rumble Channel hoping it will allow me to show off animations and not just screenshots. Here's the animation from the last week of November. Compression is still kicking my ass, but you can more or less tell what's going on.
This is this week's progress. A lot of the work was mostly about restructuring the project and cleaning up the code some more, so the bullets don't do anything beyond flying out of the gun. Hopefully I will be able to make the bugs go splat on contact as the next step.
Sloot
8m ago
Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment (including on college campuses) are all types of crime. School shootings are crimes. Hate crimes are crimes (the hint is in the name). Revenge porn and certain kinds of cyberbullying are crimes in many jurisdictions.
Just the usual Who? Whom?, where persons who consider themselves Empathetic care only for the victims of crime depending on who the perpetrator and victim are (and often care more for the perpetrators than the victims) and are somehow suddenly devoid of Empathy and compassion when it comes to understanding someone who’s wary of crime in general.
Crimes where stereotypically (regardless of the actual statistical accuracy) the perpetrator is white or a man and/or the victim is a non-Asian minority or a woman are Problematic in ways that crime in general is not. #StopAsianHate started off strong when the acts of hatred were blamed on racist white MAGA men; it quickly got disappeared when video after video showed who the actual perpetrators were.
Moreover, it makes far more statistical sense to be afraid of crime in general than to be afraid of any particular subtype of crime. A woman's likelihood of being raped in a calendar year cannot be higher than her probability of being raped or mugged or having her car stolen etc. If you are X% scared of being a victim of a specific type of crime, you should be >X% scared of being a victim of any kind of crime, as there is no circumstance in which the former is more likely to befall you than the latter. This is just basic statistics.
Indeed, an amusing instance of Linda the Feminist Bank Teller.
The idea that a disproportionate share of hate crimes or active shooter-style school shootings are committed by white men is a myth that stubbornly refuses to die.
There was a recent shooting by a transman and one by a teenage girl. Nothing wholesome like some gender diversity.
In addition to the selective empathy of Kind and Decent Human Beings, also amusing is the irony that the type of people who pride themselves on being interested in other people—especially from other cultures—are so often ignorant of other people and other cultures. Many Latin American cities, for instance, feature houses with spiky fences and barred windows, rifle-in-hand military/police scattered around places from ATMs to McDonalds. Clearly these stupid Latinx need some tsk-tsking from a smug effete western leftist calling them paranoid pussies and fascist bootlickers. Don’t they know how unwelcome, uninclusive, and inaccessible their houses and public spaces feel to Persons of Justice Involvement?
bolido_sentimental
13m ago
People of the Motte, I am getting married one week from tomorrow. AMA, I guess. And thanks to everyone for many years of life advice. I've been lurking since the days of /r/slatestarcodex, and I genuinely think that the things I've learned from some of you have helped me reach this happy juncture.
Also - any tips to make the wedding day go smoothly, as well as the first few weeks or months of married life? It's just a small wedding we're having - 50-60 people and a reception at the banquet hall down the street. All less than 15 minutes from home.
gattsuru
18m ago
What I don’t understand is why there’s no pushback on increasing the need for certification of the dogs.
It's part of a more-than-thirty-year-old regulation, and the necessary parts of the Department of Justice and Department of Transportation that make up the relevant rulemaking processes are never going to want to get involved in the necessary levels of oversight, nevermind do so with enough clarity and consistency that normal businesses will be willing to take the risk of allowing employees to make a decision. Because a lot of actual enforcement tends to involve veterans, it's a political third rail even for otherwise regulation-skeptical conservatives.
There's some Reason-style pushback, but because there's such a mess for any implementation -- who does the certifications? how do you verify that they aren't just some web template? -- there's no clear better local maxima with a path to reach it short of full prohibition, and there's no political will to do that.
Dean
23m ago
Kudos to the pilots. Allegedly russian ground directed the plane over the caspian sea, where if it had crashed there would have been no immediate evidence of the AA.
ControlsFreak
24m ago
Man, always a banger with you! I'm sure I'll be coming back to this comment many times, but let me start with where I was hoping to start for my actual conversion - chromebook replacements.
ChromeBook replacements / web browser machines: 110%. You can just run Chrome/FireFox/Brave on a local machine, and be happy, or you can install LibreOffice/various calendars/whatever and also have good local offline functionality, if sometimes with a dated UI. The only real downside here is that new laptops running on their Linux compatibility will usually start at four or five times the price. If you're comfortable buying used equipment and swapping out batteries, you can get <150 USD pricing on three-year-old mid-range hardware, but this is extra work and has limited availability.
and
Trying to convert existing Chromebooks to Linux can be doable, but is seldom worth it, and it's not always even possible.
This is really depressing from my perspective. What I love about the chromebooks are that they're cheap (I think I paid sub $200 for each) and small (I think both are only 11.6" screens and 2lbs or less, which I think is about perfect for rolling around and just browsing or whatever), and I barely care that their raw compute specs are abysmal (if anything, it makes the battery life even more awesome). They can play 720p video (more than enough for a small screen), and even when I've done some toy math coding on them, they just made sure that I couldn't be horribly inefficient. I don't even need hardly any storage space as far as I'm concerned; anything big can just be floated up to the NAS. It's super easy for me to have everything backed up (not even using the built-in sync with Google stuff) and just powerwash it and start over if something stupid happens. Even if my hardware just caught on fire later today, I'd be a little sad that I'd have to spend a couple hundred bucks, but honestly, I'd basically not care.
A quick search validated that most of the built-with-Linux laptops I see are significantly beefier/more expensive. I guess maybe the Venn diagram of the people who want super low end hardware and the people who are techy enough to dive in with Linux is extremely small?
Are the main problems for converting existing chromebooks mainly driver support? You called out lid-close (probably important), fingerprint readers (probably not important if I'm shooting for low-end hardware), and battery life (probably no prayer of having comparable-to-ChromeOS battery life, eh?). Anything else? Is there much point in even trying to pre-plan and figure out compatibility issues, or should I just dive in, hope, and know that I might just have to give up and reset back to ChromeOS?
Alternatively, anything in particular I should look for/avoid if I'm considering buying new low-end hardware, for the purposes of flipping it over to Linux?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
26m ago
Musk has shown what side he is on.
You mean the man who decided to make ICE cars obsolete, the man whose stated goal is taking the humanity to Mars is a progressive? What a surprising turn of events!
In all seriousness, it's sad that wokism has somehow become synonymous with progressivism. If Xavier Musk had invented a machine that unleased a swarm of nanobots rewriting him into a biological female, Elon would've been fucking elated to meet Vivian Musk.
He kinda reminds me of an ex-Soviet Jewish engineer, the one who arrives in New York or Jerusalem in 1988 and immediately starts suggesting ways of improving the situation by eliminating Negroes/Arabs. "What do you mean you can't just deport them to Alabama? According to my calculations, if you mobilize the National Guard of the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut you can completely encircle Harlem, eliminate any armed resistance and transport them in just X goods vans, which is just Y trains. I am sure the CSX has better signaling than the Soviet railways and can handle this short-term burst of traffic."
ulyssessword
28m ago
I commented that I found it very strange to assert that you're not scared of crime. Crime is bad. All things being equal, no one would choose to be a victim of crime. Of course some people are more scared of crime than they really should be, but that's a far cry from saying that any amount of fear of crime is wholly unjustified. I may have compared the tweeter to Bike Cuck.
I'm generally not afraid of crime. Or sharks. Or lightning strikes, aneurysms, or food poisoning.
All of them are genuine events which can affect me negatively, but the risks don't draw an emotional reaction from me. However, I also find it strange to draw attention to that fact.
Moreover, it makes far more statistical sense to be afraid of crime in general than to be afraid of any particular subtype of crime.
That's a common error for everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy
If this trend continues, I fear that in ten years' time, anyone who uses the word "the" in a tweet will have people in the replies mocking them as a Definite Article Enjoyer which, per this NPR column and Vox explainer, is a dog whistle for... something.
Reminds me of The Taxman.
Jesweez
35m ago
In what way was it deleterious?
Curious because I’ve never actually heard a serious argument that it was!
Mantergeistmann
36m ago
Live near a small (but pretentious) town in the Northeast USA. I tend to see dogs either inside hardware stores, or small cafes that explicitly advertise being dog-friendly. Granted, those and grocery stores (where I have yet to see a single dog) are about the only places I tend to shop these days, so it may not be a useful observation set.
hydroacetylene
37m ago
Sumptuary laws have existed forever, every society tells you what aesthetic standards are acceptable to some extent.
hydroacetylene
38m ago
Sure, I’m in agreement with you about your dog, taking at your word her behavior training and socialization- I used to have a chocolate lab who was much the same, and bringing her to a restaurant patio was a fun thing to do in the spring that didn’t hurt anyone. But many dogs in public are not nearly so well behaved, and this is a major problem for bringing dogs in public.
I absolutely don’t give a crap about the tender and delicate sensibilities of people who are bothered by dogs in a space. But there are often legitimate issues caused by those dogs.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
39m ago
I don't think anything in this comment contradicts anything in my comment. I did not have black women specifically in mind. I had some examples of women of various races that varied along some of the traits OP mentioned explicitly but decided not to post them. To my mind there is a pretty substantial difference between "I have not met (and may not be likely to meet) a person of a particular race who has the qualities I want in a partner" and "I could never partner with a person of a particular race due to some essential nature of the people of that race." I do think that many of our preferences are substantially influenced by the culture and environment we are raised in but the process of changing that fact is much more a socio-cultural one than an individual one.
2rafa
40m ago
The colonization of outer space is prohibited by the very same kinds of treaties that prevent the colonization of Antarctica. If you can build a city on Mars you can build one on Antarctica. America and Russia could do so tomorrow, it would just be a waste of money and pointless.
Bullshit, I offer a counterpoint:
The JD Vance strategy
Seriously though, admixture is human. Europeans are full of Neanderthal genes, heck my DNA report shows that I have Inuit genes and it's likely because my Viking ancestors stole women from everywhere they went.
It’s in our nature.
Fearing the loss of advanced pattern recognition because some people might hook up with Indians is silly, you’ll just end up with some little mixed Srinivasan Ramanujans running around.
Jesweez
48m ago
Awesome, so it’ll help us address the fertility crisis too
America is so back
TitaniumButterfly
48m ago
Fair enough, though my intent was to be sort of self-effacing by acknowledging that something so offhanded and inflammatory should, legitimately, be expected to have more work put into it. But, also, that additional work didn't actually occur to me as something that would provide additional value, so I went ahead and posted it anyway.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
49m ago
It’s like the white person version of playing one’s music loudly on public transportation. It’s a flex, finding pleasure in imposing yourself upon others, enjoying the discomfort of others, and daring others for a confrontation.
If anything, this argument makes me think differently about speakers-on-the-train guy. I had always assumed that it was a dominance display, but I suppose it entirely possible that they're just actually baffled that anyone would find it offensive. If I take my dog out to a park or a bar with a patio, I do not gain any flexing dominance pleasure and experience nothing but an eyeroll at people that are so deeply affronted by it. I'll grant that there are places that I don't think people should have dogs, but even there, I'm more annoyed by people that are histrionically frightened of dogs than I am by the guy that probably shouldn't have brought his dog into the convenient store.
Except pit bulls, of course. I despise pit bulls.
Elon seems to be pushing this idea that Americans are retarded and need mass legal migration by Indians as happened in Canada and UK which is a stupid idea. It didn't even work economically.
It is interesting to see some themes reappearing:
Identity politics for the migrants and bashing the natives and their racial qualities. While Elon has already started changing policies.
I have also seen some downplayment of discrimination towards white Americans.
Multicultural nation destroying liberalism and the self serving agenda of foreign ethnonationalists who align with it against the native group is at the center of the problems with the politically correct left. It is directly related to oppressing dissenters, and racist discrimination at the expense of natives, and of course the very act of destroying nations, is it self a massive moral problem to put it lightly. Allying with foreign nationalists who are racist is another facet of this and we saw the explosion of anti-white comentary from Indians. The multicultural liberal always sides with such people and tolerates, ignores, downplays, excuse if not persecute those who notice and opposite.
I expect to observe liberals who claim to be antiwoke to continually share some of the worst qualities of the woke and to implement to a greater extend than what they promised the kind of authoritarian double standard policies they claimed to oppose. The story of big business types who are looking for cheap labor aligning with this ideology and its anarchotyranical elements isn't a new thing neither. This also raises the issue of parasitism of such big business types since the migration comes with social, political and economic costs that are passed to the rest of society.
You can't have a nice "non woke" multicultural liberalism. Which is in fact the main liberalism that is on offer today.
Jesweez
51m ago
I think his actions are incredibly based but utterly lacking in 5D chess by not holding it together even until Trump is inaugurated.
Going to go wash my fingers after typing that.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
54m ago
I see your core point here, but I want to quibble with the linguistic specifics. I don't think what you mean by "afraid of crime" and what your interlocutors mean is the same thing. I have encountered people who are annoyingly, performatively "not afraid of crime" in the sense of arguing that it's actually no big deal if cars get broken into. There's zero chance I'm going to back that position and I don't want to be mistaken for it... but I am not afraid of crime. By this, I don't mean that I think the chances of being victimized by crime is zero (I've had my car broken into, for example), but that I don't generally think about being victimized by crime at all on a day-to-day basis. Encountering sketchy individuals will instantly raise the salience of it to the front of my mind, but the modal number of times that I consider whether I'm going to be the victim of a crime in a given week is zero.
Let's flip this to one where I think we're likely to fundamentally agree - are you afraid of Covid? I'm not and I never was. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous from the start that other people similarly situated to myself were "taking it serious" at all. They clearly are afraid of Covid and many of them will say as much. Part of this is clearly about estimations of the severity of the disease, but it's not the whole thing - I just literally do not experience any fear when I contemplate the possibility that I could get a nasty respiratory disease. I will or I won't, but I'm not going to reshape my whole life to avoid something that just isn't all that likely to be an issue.
Another example - are you scared of afraid of dying in an automobile accident? Much like crime, the only time I give it any thought is when something sharply raises the salience of it, like riding a bike near someone that's driving aggressively. Despite the fact that this is probably the thing that's most likely to kill me in a given year at my current age, I don't experience any fear of it. Someone might run a red light, slam into the side of my car, and leave me permanently paralyzed. In fact, someone did run a stop sign and T-bone me, and that one did stick with me a bit longer, but it eventually faded. I just drive down the road, doing normal stuff, completely unafraid of the activity even while I acknowledge that it's the most dangerous part of my life. I actually do want something done as far as policies go (in fact, decreasing QoL for motorists as a tradeoff for walkable neighborhoods is probably my top remaining NormieLib position). But afraid? No, I wouldn't say so.
I don't think this is just a matter of connotation or denotation - I think this really is a difference in the experience or expression of fear.
Many years ago, I visited the town of Smithland, Kentucky; I was there to possibly buy a Lincoln Continental. I ended up not buying it - I have slight regrets about that - but while there I thought, "This would be a nice place to retire to." Just a little tiny town in the total end of nowhere, with houses still being sold for less than 100k in 2024. I wonder if that will still be a viable option when I go to retire in 2058 or so. All I'm really hoping to do in retirement is run a stall in a flea market, play chess, and maybe dig into some really hefty books like City of God.
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