Jack Gladney posted:

I'm not listening to that turd bloviate for that long. What's the gross meat of this hissy fit?

icantfindaname posted:

sure but then you get the guy doing Imperial Japan apologia and that argument sort of falls apart

Avenging_Mikon posted:

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

And this is why progressives always lose

Phobophilia posted:

its even better when gbs retards turn up to lecture other threads on racism

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

And this is why progressives always lose

quote:

Omnilibrium is a social site that tries to improve online filtering. Instead of a big pot of Reddit-style karma that shows everyone the most upvoted posts, it tries to show everyone posts upvoted by people whose opinions have previously been correlated with theirs, with various customizable options to decide how much you want to be exposed to differing opinions. It needs more users for a good trial run, so check out their FAQ and then join in.

quote:

Omnilibrium is everyone's own echo chamber/circle jerk.

Woolie Wool posted:

Whites invented racism, built racism, defined all the (entirely arbitrary) racial categories, and maintain all its institutions. All other racist projects like the WWII-era Japanese Empire are only variations on the white theme. Racism is not just about capitalism, it's about white people themselves, who they are as people, how they understand themselves, and how they relate to others. If white people in the US instituted communism, they would work racism into it, even if it caused the communist project to implode. Racism may have started as an economic exploitation machine but it's grown beyond that, the tail is wagging the dog and now racism defines white people as much as white people define racism. Activist Tim Wise told an anecdote about how his mother got dementia and moved into a nursing home, and one day, this woman, who had campaigned against racist policy all her life, snapped and called her black nurse a friend of the family to her face. His mother had forgotten how to walk, how to read, how to write, even her own name, but she had not forgotten that she was white and the lady in front of her was a friend of the family, an Other, not fully human, and by attempting to exert authority over the white woman, the friend of the family was stepping out of her place. The whiteness remained when most of her other faculties were lost, and with her higher mental functions destroyed, the whiteness asserted itself in its ugliest, most primal form. That is how deeply ingrained racism is.

Cingulate posted:

The content is boring - he's just complaining about his detractors misrepresenting him. E.g., he'll say Jerry Seinfeld himself shouldn't be subjected to security checks due to the extremely low chance of him blowing up airplanes, and some guy called Greenwald whom Harris is absolutely obsessed with will quote that as, Harris says people like Seinfeld should not be checked. The point is that stuff like this must have driven Harris extremely mad. Like, the fact of the existence of people who'd not give your thoughts fair and full appreciation is driving him insane. Just listen to it for a bit - ignore the content, tune it out mentally, just listen to his tone.

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Does he talk about when he wrote that we should logically nuke Muslims but then got extremely mad that nobody was engaging with this plausible and not terrible thought experiment properly? That one never ceases to be funny

quote:

It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of devout Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence.

quote:

What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? ... In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.

divabot posted:

SHUT UP DAMMIT NOBODY WHO IS NOT YOU CARES THE THREAD HAS A TOPIC LET'S GET WITHIN A GODDAMN MILE OF IT

so anyway

Has anyone else read Nick Land's recent-ish horror short, "Phyl-Undhu"?

Themes include:

• the Pied Piper trope, where technology will seduce your children away
  
• a techno-sorta-cult that is Totally-Not-LessWrong
  
• Roko-style basilisks
  
• including one at the end of everything that the techno-sorta-cult is attempting to immanentise
  

It makes it plausible that Land has, with “The Dark Enlightenment” and writing entirely in allusion and running the Xenosystems comments section as a salon for fuckwits, been taking the piss this whole time.

Also includes two essays which were clearly the working notes: Abstract Horror Part 1 and Abstract Horror Note 1.

It's a Kindle short, I would only suggest you buy it if you have a strong ethical belief in paying for indie Kindle shorts. I certainly didn't pay for my copy, though it's actually not terrible (certainly vastly superior to HPMoR) and I might if I guilt myself enough.

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Sort of, except his scenario in which we must nuke Muslims is... if we believe that they had the capability (never mind the intent) to nuke us. His justification for this seems to be that OF COURSE Islamists will nuke us given the chance, since they believe in fairy tales and have the makings of a 'death cult' (his words)



Of course, other religions also believe in paradise/heaven and are pretty keen on conversion, but it's OK for them to threaten everyone with possession of nukes because, uhhhhhh, Islam is just different okay

Cingulate posted:

From Scott's recent link post:

quote:

Omnilibrium is a social site that tries to improve online filtering. Instead of a big pot of Reddit-style karma that shows everyone the most upvoted posts, it tries to show everyone posts upvoted by people whose opinions have previously been correlated with theirs, with various customizable options to decide how much you want to be exposed to differing opinions. It needs more users for a good trial run, so check out their FAQ and then join in.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

When you buy a copy, you get an e-mail from Nick Land personally that says "Tank You Veddy Much". No idea what that's about.

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Sort of, except his scenario in which we must nuke Muslims is... if we believe that they had the capability (never mind the intent) to nuke us. His justification for this seems to be that OF COURSE Islamists will nuke us given the chance, since they believe in fairy tales and have the makings of a 'death cult' (his words)

Of course, other religions also believe in paradise/heaven and are pretty keen on conversion, but it's OK for them to threaten everyone with possession of nukes because, uhhhhhh, Islam is just different okay

Nessus posted:

Didn't most of the near-misses during the Cold War turn into near-misses rather than a nuclear exchange due to moral decisions on the part of the Reds?

The Vosgian Beast posted:

I kind of thought this would peter out by now.

Cingulate posted:

The convenient story is usually one about the conscience of a specific Soviet soldier who decides not to push the button, instead of following his murderous, inhuman orders.
The official Russian protest is the Soviet system was never so hosed up as to leave the decision of obliterating the western hemisphere to one man's decision (plus some of the then still-new computers).

Cingulate posted:

The convenient story is usually one about the conscience of a specific Soviet soldier who decides not to push the button, instead of following his murderous, inhuman orders.
The official Russian protest is the Soviet system was never so hosed up as to leave the decision of obliterating the western hemisphere to one man's decision (plus some of the then still-new computers).

Literally The Worst posted:

there's a million steps to get to it but at the end of the day it's one guy going "well the world's on fire gently caress it"

RagnarokAngel posted:

It also happened on the NATO side too so I'm not entirely sure why everyone focuses on Russia. Makes a good story I guess.

Nessus posted:

I think it's because the Soviets were portrayed as kill-thirsty commu-monsters who all rose from their Lenin Pods to crush capitalism and shoot freedom in the skull before having a big parade that can only be interrupted by the Wolverines, so there is novelty in discovering that the average Soviet was a lot closer to a thoughtful character out of a Russian novel.

Cingulate posted:

From Scott's recent link post:

quote:

If you want to learn something important, compare the graph in Vox’s The Budget Deficit Is Way Too Low with anyone else’s graph of the budget deficit.

quote:

This is the only proper response to a teacher taking off points because you didn’t “show your work”.

quote:

Chanda Chisala at Unz Report is on a roll

quote:

An argument against affirmative action

divabot posted:

The link is to a completely stereotypical stdh.txt of the Imgur variety. See the stdh thread for much more.

divabot posted:

Scott totally has nothing in common with neoreactionaries.

...

which he spends a 245 word paragraph describing in detail before revealing it's from the Heritage Foundation.

Phobophilia posted:

its even better when gbs retards turn up to lecture other threads on racism

Cingulate posted:

From Scott's recent link post:
Let me use my scientific education to translate this.

Cingulate posted:

The convenient story is usually one about the conscience of a specific Soviet soldier who decides not to push the button, instead of following his murderous, inhuman orders.
The official Russian protest is the Soviet system was never so hosed up as to leave the decision of obliterating the western hemisphere to one man's decision (plus some of the then still-new computers).

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

What about the submarine incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis where 2 of the 3 people required to initiate the nuclear torpedo agreed to do it and one rejected the idea and wanted to wait and see?

Cingulate posted:

1. I doubt we will ever truly know what exactly went down there. Maybe it was a one-man thing. Maybe that's just a story.
2. physically unleashing large-scale nuclear war did at that point not truly depend on something like a single button press; a nuclear-tipped torpedo could sink a ship, but there was no armada of long-range MIRVs aimed at every major population center above the equator. Someone would still have had to radio the bomber squads (and Jupiter missiles) into action. A nuclear-tipped torpedo striking a ship would in itself at worst have caused a loss of life within an order of magnitude of e.g. the downing of Iran Air 655 or MH-17.

But I'm not doubting there may have been such scenarios. Just that when considering these scenarios, we must keep in mind our own ideologies, and the ideologies of those who've transmitted the story.

A Fancy 400 lbs posted:

History sans ideology is one of the world's most annoyingly persistent myths.

Cingulate posted:

How does this relate to the debate?

Cingulate posted:

For those not as interested in Scott as I am: there actually is a thing Scott hates more than Feminism.

Education.

Edit: I am not joking. Scott has a weird hate-on for all things schooling.

Scott was a terrible teacher posted:

When I was a student, I hated all my teachers and thought that if they just ditched the constant repetition, the cutesy but vapid games, the police state attitude, then everyone would learn a lot more and school would finally live up to its potential...

And then I started teaching English, tried presenting the actually interesting things about the English language at a reasonable pace as if I were talking to real human beings. And it was a disaster. I would give this really brilliant and lucid presentation of a fascinating concept, and then ask a basic question about it, and even though I had just explained it, no one in the class would even have been listening to it... So finally out of desperation I was like “Who wants to do some kind of idiotic activity in which we all pick English words and color them in and then do a stupid dance about them??!” ...sure enough everyone wanted to and at the end some of them sort of vaguely remembered the vocabulary.

By the end of the school year I had realized that nothing was getting learned without threatening a test on it later, nothing was getting learned regardless unless it was rote memorization of a few especially boring points, and that I could usually force students to sit still long enough to learn it if and only if I bribed them with vapid games at regular intervals.

Yet pretty much every day I see people saying “Schools are evil fascist institutions that deliberately avoid teaching students for sinister reasons. If you just inspire a love of learning in them, they’ll be thrilled to finally have new vistas to explore and they’ll go above and beyond what you possibly expected.”

To which the only answer is no they frickin’ won’t. Yes, there will be two or three who do. Probably you were one of them, or your kid is one of them... But there will also be oh so many who... when you say that the true test is whether they feel connected to the tradition of inquiry into the mysteries of Nature, they’ll roll their eyes and secretly play Pokemon on their Nintendo DS thinking you can’t see it if it’s held kind of under their desk.