Political Whores posted:

It's always been amazing to me how much the idea of "darkest Africa", as in a land of savages without history, took hold of people considering that the Berlin conference was in 1884 and states like Dahomey and the Asante kingdom are only overtaken by the colonial powers in the late 1890s/early 1900's. It's not like these times are lost in the misty depths of history, there's loving photo evidence of complex societies available on the internet right now.

Silver2195 posted:

Isn't that the person who claims Beethoven was black?

quote:

The logic goes something like this: Beethoven’s family, by way of his mother, traced its roots to Flanders, which was for sometime under Spanish monarchical rule, and because Spain maintained a longstanding historical connection to North Africa through the Moors, somehow a single germ of blackness trickled down to our beloved Ludwig. This very theory—that Beethoven was descended from the Moors—has re-appeared in several works throughout the twentieth century. Jamaican historian Joel Augustus Rogers (1880–1966) popularized this theory in several writings around midcentury, but the birth of the myth can be traced back further to approximately 1915 or even earlier according to music historian Dominique-René de Lerma, the world’s leading scholar on classical composers of color. Rogers asserted [...] that Beethoven—in addition to Thomas Jefferson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Browning, and several popes, among others—was genealogically African and thus black.

Jack Gladney posted:

Does this one count?

DarklyDreaming posted:

This is a grown man doing cosplay in an official photo. He is not wearing a suit and tie, nor is he holding a cigar. He is wearing a Don Draper costume and I feel that's all I need to say about him and all that he stands for.

DarklyDreaming posted:

Karl May, and Hitler made his generals read the books for the wisdom they contained:

quote:

"My whole adolescence stood under his sign. Indeed, even today, he has been dear to me in many a desperate hour..."

Jack Gladney posted:

Actually, a lot of the DE people in this thread are basically just a super-suit or industrial accident away from being a supervillain if you think about it. Probably not a coincidence that most of them love comics.

But a dominatrix is probably the closest thing to a real-life supervillain that actually exists.

ikanreed posted:

Diogenes.

Pope Guilty posted:

In Libertarian bullshit economics, "Time Preference", for those who don't know, is the idea that the reason white people are wealthier than non-white people is because they're better. You see, white people have a lower time preference for their gratification, and can save and invest and wait for their rewards, while other races have a high time preference and thus squander their earnings immediately and make themselves poor. Here it's used in the middle of an openly racist screed, but in general if you see it in Libertarian/neoreactionary writings the meaning is almost always "poor people are poor because they're dumb" or "blacks are poor because blacks are dumb and incapable of making good decisions".

There's a real concept of time preference in non-horseshit econ which simply expresses that an individual's utility calculations can be influenced by the tradeoff of gratification now vs gratification later, without being an estimate of individual worth, but of course if you're busy sucking off Ludwig von Mises you don't really care.

The Story in Question posted:

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”

“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

Jack Gladney posted:

Yeah, they fall for that poo poo all the time because they can't tell the difference between their idea of how the world should work and how the world actually works:

https://reason.com/blog/2015/05/19/is-the-seasteading-dream-really-dead

It's like they live in a science-fiction story every minute of their lives.

neonnoodle posted:

Likewise w/ the "Marshmallow Experiment" that every smug conservative rear end in a top hat likes to trot out-- it's also partly a test of how reliable you consider the promises of adults. If you live in a world where adults are constantly lying to you about rewards that never arrive, there is more reason to take what you can get now.

Political Whores posted:

Lol. They were going to let him present his programming language. Maybe the problem is that this conference is terrible.

quote:

When All It Takes to Be Booted From a Tech Conference Is Being a “Distraction,” We Have a Problem

Yarvin’s canceled presentation centered on Urbit, an idiosyncratic software platform he created, and an associated virtual machine called Nock. I’ve read the specifications, and Yarvin’s project is an intriguing attempt to create an entirely new, universal computation framework based around a virtual machine that is truly distributed from the ground up, so that even tiny amounts of computation can be apportioned across multiple machines. It may, as I suspect, be utterly impractical, but it’s undoubtedly different and a worthy experiment. I would attend a talk on it. But I wouldn’t be able to at Strange Loop now, thanks to a strange figure named Mencius Moldbug.

That’s the nom de Web under which Yarvin writes mind-numbing political tracts. Yarvin/Moldbug is a self-proclaimed “neoreactionary,” an unabashed elitist and inegalitarian in the tradition of Thomas Carlyle, one of his heroes. (He fits neatly into the “Natural-Order Conservative” category of a conservative taxonomy.) His worldview: Democracy sucks, the strong should rule the weak, and we could use a good old-fashioned dictator to clean up this mess. That, and he believes that “human biodiversity”—as in the “science” of racial differences, ŕ la The Bell Curve—is real, valid, and very important. Neoreactionary thinking is far more complicated and far more verbose than this—which is in part a deliberate attempt to keep the great unwashed from paying too much attention to such Important Thought. If you’re curious, the tireless Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex has written extensive rebuttals of neoreactionary theory, which go to prove Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” The neoreactionaries make up a small and mostly ignorable corner of the Internet, but because they include a number of techies and wonks, they have drawn attention and criticism from outlets like the Baffler and the Daily Beast, all of which served to raise the neoreactionary profile far higher than it ever would have made it on its own. If you want serious reactionary activity, look to Congress.

Normally I would have no cause to write about neoreactionary politics—it is eminently inconsequential—except that Yarvin was tossed out of Strange Loop because of his writings. Strange Loop creator and organizer Alex Miller made this public statement regarding his decision to rescind Yarvin’s invitation:

quote:

A large number of current and former speakers and attendees contacted me to say that they found Curtis’s writings objectionable. I have not personally read them. ... If Curtis was part of the program, his mere inclusion and/or presence would overshadow the content of his talk and become the focus.

The decision to toss Yarvin is foolish but not because it’s censorship. By making the issue about Yarvin being a “distraction,” Miller has created a perverse incentive. By that logic, anyone could get tossed from the conference if enough people object for any reason at all. Miller admits as much when he says he hasn’t even read Yarvin’s political writing. (I can’t blame him.) Ergo, make enough noise, and you can get your target kicked out of Strange Loop. This is the mentality of “no platforming,” as it’s known in the U.K., a tactic that was once used to exclude (sensibly, in my opinion) National Front members from public life but has now become so widespread that even the hard-left New Statesman is objecting to the practice. If the problem is, as Miller wrote to Yarvin, that people’s “reactions are overshadowing the talk and acting as a distraction,” then all objectors need to do is create a distraction to get a presenter thrown out.

eschaton posted:

Exactly, isn't the author of the Slate article a neoreactionary himself or at least a fellow-traveler?

Only a white man would have posted:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/10/how_to_end_gamergate_a_divide_and_conquer_plan.html
How to End Gamergate
A divide-and-conquer plan for dissolving a toxic online movement.
By David Auerbach

Gamers are people, too.

Gamergate must end as soon as possible. The human cost in harassment, threats, stress, and sheer nastiness is too high. People, disproportionately women, are harassed and doxed on a daily basis—in a few cases, even driven from their homes under threat of rape and murder. The Gamergate “debate,” such as it is, currently boils down to people screaming “It’s actually about ethics in gaming journalism!” and “It’s actually about misogyny in the gaming world!” at each other on Twitter. People are forced to take sides or else get caught in the crossfire.

It is imperative to stop Gamergate because it’s currently a troll’s paradise, providing cover for a whole host of bad actors, whether they’re pro-Gamergate, anti-Gamergate, or simply wantonly malicious. Whatever a troll does under the cover of Gamergate—such as doxxing actress Felicia Day or offering free game codes to accounts that send death threats—is guaranteed to get a lot of attention (far more than typical Internet harassment) and to be blamed not on the individual but on Gamergate collectively. For a troll, this is a perfect setup: maximum effect, minimal exposure. I could dox any woman in gaming, and Gamergate would get blamed. So as long as Gamergate drags on, trolls who care less about games than about causing chaos will wreak havoc. Even some of the anti-feminist members of Gamergate still try at least to appear reasonable in order to get their distasteful points across. It’s the psychos, the hateful teenagers, and the diehard trolls who perform the scariest acts, and both sides of Gamergate serve them well. As a thoughtful IGN editorial put it, “[A]dditional visibility only encourages those who want to use the Movement as a means to stop rather than start discussions.” (For this reason, I will not be repeating the grisly details of specific harassment incidents here.)

I recently spoke to a number of vocally anti-Gamergate people and asked them how they planned to end Gamergate. Nobody knew. The standard reply was, “Gamergate should stop harassing people,” which is not an answer. The best I got was, “Gamergaters will get tired of it eventually,” but that’s not good enough. These people are watching a house on fire and refusing to dial 911 because they’re trying to shame the arsonist into making the call.

(For those who think I have gone too easy on Gamergate, please imagine here the worst invective against Gamergate you can imagine, including comparisons to the Cultural Revolution, the Black Death, and Jeffrey Dahmer.)

From the beginning, no one has really contested the idea that much of the gaming press is crap.

You probably can’t kill Gamergate altogether, any more than you can kill misogyny. Even Gamergate’s own members can’t stop their movement, since there’s no central authority. They’re able to manage coordinated action to a point, such as with letter-writing campaigns and attempts to police harassment coming from their ranks. But they can’t stop trolls and lunatics from sending death threats. (Neither can the FBI, it seems, as Amanda Hess reports.) They can’t stop the frequent breaches in tone that go well beyond the bounds of civility. Because they can’t suddenly dissolve their movement, instead you need to reduce the number of active Gamergaters through a strategy of divide and conquer, until what’s left is too small and rancid to appear appealing or effective.

What I’ll try to present below is the quickest way to reduce Gamergate’s members from thousands to hundreds. It is a political plan, not an ideological one, designed to curb the harassment without promoting any particular agenda. You can educate people later not to be misogynists, once people have stopped getting hurt. This isn’t Stonewall.

WHAT DIDN’T WORK

Ending Gamergate will not happen by moral grandstanding. Let’s quickly go over tactics that have been tried so far to stop Gamergate, none of which have worked:

Hyperbolic comparisons of Gamergate to ISIS, the KKK, fascists, terrorists, Ebola, child pornography, etc., etc.
Endless ridicule and antagonism of Gamergaters on Twitter.
Convenient erasure of Gamergate’s many female, LGBTQ, and minority members, however wrong they may be.
Telling Intel and others they are misogynist cowards when they pull advertising.
Hauling out celebrities to condemn Gamergate and telling them their heroes hate them.
Threatening to blacklist Gamergate members from the gaming industry.
Wishful-thinking pieces like “So Long, Gamergate.”
Fire-and-brimstone sermons like “Stop supporting Gamergate.”
Shutting all gamers (not just Gamergate members) out of media discourse.
The old “video games cause violence” canard, unproven as ever.
Defective quantitative analysis.
Defective social science.
Obtuse social theorizing.

But how do you deal with an amorphous, leaderless, chaotic, and incomprehensible movement like Gamergate?

[...blah blah blah convert the moderates by being nicer to them don't call them bigots don't be mean to them aren't there a bunch of jerks on the other side too? and hasn't this actually resulted in more ethical gaming journalism?...]

So here’s the deal: After gaming journalism, tech journalism, and Gawker have begun to clean up their acts, after there’s some real admission of bad faith and hypocrisy on the part of some of these journalists, and after there’s some good conversation going with the moderates, the movement will start to fracture, as moderates will feel that a) the press is coming to terms with its own shortcomings and b) there are some unpleasant extremists in Gamergate. At that point, the only force keeping moderates in the movement will be inertia.

That’s when the gaming industry should declare an amnesty. Set a date before which using the Gamergate tag will not be cause for blacklisting, disqualification, or other prejudice in the industry. With any luck, some trust will have been forged between moderates and non-Gamergaters, and the moderates will be willing to leave the company of men’s rights activists and hateful teenagers to rejoin mainstream society. A few conciliatory apologies and “Things were said …” editorials would greatly help matters. (You should also lay off the “misogynerd” talk during this time, and preferably forever. That’s not critique—that’s name-calling.)

You may be understandably hesitant to make such an offer to people who have been associated with the Gamergate movement. But if South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission can do it, I don’t think I’m asking so much. The particular flashpoint of Gamergate will recur in different forms, and you want as many people on the side of decency as possible.

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

Somehow I don't think that article proves what you think it does.

Jack Gladney posted:

I sense a lot of simulation behind the author's thoughts on women.

neonnoodle posted:

Yeah I phrased my post badly -- I didn't mean that LLR is a neoreactionary of the same movement, but rather that he's an example of what happens when people and their batshitinsane ideology become cults unto themselves. Like I could see Moldbug and his followers becoming similar. That certainly has happened to a degree with Paul Elam.

neonnoodle posted:

American conservatism has a fetishistic set of symbols and dog-whistles around the 1950s -- when folks left their doors unlocked and everything was the Andy Griffith show! The unspoken message being, "Things were great until all THOSE people started getting uppity!"

quote:

Imagine that a time-liberated version of vigilante George Zimmerman sees two youths walking through his neighborhood: black, hoodied Trayvon Martin of 2012, and a white teen from 1959 (say Bud Anderson from Father Knows Best). Based purely on statistics of race and era, which one should Zimmerman most fear of harboring criminal intent? Answer: He should fear (actually, not fear) them equally; each has about the same low odds of committing a crime.

For nearly all serious and minor offenses, including homicide, rates among black teenagers nationally were lower in 2011 than when racial statistics were first collected nationally in 1964. Black youths’ murder arrest rates are considerably lower today than back when Bill Cosby was funny (long, long ago).

We don’t associate Jim and Margaret Anderson’s 1950s cherubs with juvenile crime—but that’s based on nostalgia and cultural biases, not fact. Back then, nearly 1 in 10 youth were arrested every year; today, around 3 in 100. Limited statistics of the 1950s show juvenile crime wasn’t just pranks and joyriding; “younger and younger children” are committing “the most wanton and senseless of murders… and mass rape,” the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency warned in 1956.

Since the sainted Fifties, America has seen rapid teenage population growth and dramatic shifts toward more single parenting, more lethal drugs and weapons, increased middle-aged (that is, parent-age) drug abuse and imprisonment, decreased incarceration of youth, decreased youthful religious affiliation, and more violent and explicit media available to younger ages. Horrifying, as the culture critics far Right to far Left—including Obama, who spends many pages and speeches berating popular culture as some major driver of bad youth behavior—repeatedly insist.

And after 50 years of all these terrible changes in American culture? Today’s young African Americans display the lowest rates of crime and serious risk of any generation that can be reliably assessed.

In the last 20 years in particular, the FBI reports, rates of crime among African American youth have plummeted: All offenses (down 47%), drug offenses (down 50%), property offenses (down 51%), serious Part I offenses (down 53%), assault (down 59%), robbery (down 60%), all violent offenses (down 60%), rape (down 66%), and murder (down 82%).

New, 2012 figures from California’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center reveal that the state’s black youth show the lowest level of homicide arrest since statewide racial tabulations were first assembled in 1960. Nearly every type of offense—felony, misdemeanor, and status—is much rarer among black youth today than in past generations.

The black youth crime drop is not due to “getting tough”—just the opposite. In 2012, a record-low 231 California black youth were locked up in state correctional facilities, compared to over 2,000 in the mid-1990s, and 800 in 1959, the first year numbers were kept. “Status crime” policing of black youth, reflected in curfew, loitering, and other non-criminal-stops, also has fallen to record lows. Little solid evidence connects policies to reduced crime, except maybe for the correlation with increased college enrollment.

You can see from these paragraphs why the huge improvements in behavior among America’s, and particularly California’s, African American teenagers over the last 20 to 40 years is a distressing development for so many powerful interests across the spectrum.

quote:

The sad reality is that authorities, academic experts, politicians, and geriatric-media reporters (the average age of news consumers is well over 50) of 2013 simply do not know how to deal with a young black population that is not committing shootings, robberies, drug mayhem, and gangsterisms in mass numbers—let alone one that is dramatically less criminal than the older generations deploring them.

Woolie Wool posted:

Why doesn't this guy just drop the charade and embrace his inner fash? He hangs out around fascists, he kind of sort of criticizes but not really fascist thought all the time, he seems completely obsessed with these neoreaction dorks. Everyone already knows he's a goddamn fascist, he cam give it up now.

quote:

ozymandias says:
May 25, 2015 at 10:45 pm

Scott, Topher did not “agitate to get you shunned.” He said multiple times in his post that he does not think banning all anti-feminists is a good idea, and specifically mentions that he does not think banning you is a good idea. I mean, you couldn’t have at least linked to the post so people could check it out for themselves?

And, frankly, I think this post and its comments is evidence *for* the claims in Topher’s post. You interpreted a post that specifically and repeatedly talks about how it does not want to kick you out of anything as advocacy for kicking you out of effective altruism, which is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of a pro-feminist blog post. And this entire comment section is people being knee-jerk defensive of you without considering whether the accusations are remotely justified. (You’ve said yourself you’re irrational about feminism! Why is it slander when Topher agrees?)

quote:

Scott Alexander says:
May 25, 2015 at 10:54 pm

I did not accuse Topher of “agitating to get me shunned”. I said he was “trying to take statements of mine out of context to paint this blog as violently anti-feminist”

Other people are discussing getting me shunned. I very much avoided attributing that opinion to Topher, something you seem to have missed before deciding to post your comment above. I’ve edited the post to make the lack of Topher-accusation clearer, but I think you’re looking for trouble here. Please stop accusing me of being untruthful, stop implying I didn’t read Topher’s post, and generally stop.

I did not want to link to Topher’s post because I don’t want to reward him with page views or attention for having written it. I think he is needlessly fanning the flames of an internal-EA issue in a very provocative way in order to create drama, ruin my reputation, and ruin the reputation of EA. I think a reasonable person would have noted that I have been very quiet about feminist issues for several months now and tried to address this issue more quietly instead of publicly sensationalizing it and me. I would prefer to discourage that kind of thing rather than start a toxoplasma of rage thing.

Merdifex posted:

Let's discuss the "insights" Scott gleaned from NRx and Moldbug. Is that whole "Moloch" concept actually something insightful or novel?

Tiggum posted:

Doctors can be really good at their job while simultaneously believing some really dumb stuff. Expertise in one area doesn't translate to superior reasoning in all areas.

Magnus Manfist posted:

But the idea that I've got an IQ 135 and you're 128 or whatever so I'm smarter is dumb, and used by dumb nerds who have no actual meaningful achievements to point to.

Night10194 posted:

Are you loving kidding me. Who looks at Qin and goes 'Yeah, those were excellent ideas?'

Woolie Wool posted:

The whole point of such a question is to short-circuit such an appeal by pointing out that masculinity is defined by culture and time.

Cingulate posted:

DUDE GET OFF THE INTERNET
THIS ISN'T HOW NORMAL PEOPLE TALK

divabot posted:

As I just noted on the HPMOR thread: See this summary from Christopher Hallquist of Yudkowsky's explicitly anti-scientific stance, and Scott's blustering reply. Let none call Scott's reply utterly mindkilled or "my ingroup is good no matter what, you filthy apostate." Both of these guys actually studied philosophy; one uses it.

Woolie Wool posted:

Someone once gave me a copy of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis from Harvard University Press by Dr. Edward O. Wilson, is this real science and not because I'm extremely suspicious of evolutionary psychology.

Syd Midnight posted:

And when Yudkowsky, who IIRC had been taking a rare vacation from modding his forum, returned like Moses from the Mount and saw them all freaking out over the Future Robot Devil someone had just thought of, his reaction was "YOU FOOLS! YOU HAVE NO IDEA THE DAMAGE YOU HAVE DONE!", scrubbing every mention of it, and banning the topic forever and ever, which means that Yudkowsky himself either believes he is protecting his flock from a literal Robot Devil that could be watching them and plotting their torture right this very moment, or he thinks that the Basilisk is just one of those "dangerous ideas" but only his followers comprehend it, so it is only dangerous to them. Those are the only explanations in which his followers are smarter than everyone else and he is even smarter than his followers, so he has to believe one or the other. That's like, Baysean.

Cingulate posted:

Warren Ellis posted:

There are doubtless a ton of hot takes about Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart’s recent detailed statement about his current lifestyle and philosophy. Everyone’s done jokes about Soylent, including me, so we’ll leave that to the side. One summation of his new statement would be that he’s living the classic 80s cyberpunk lifestyle – living off a single solar panel and a butane burner, wearing clothes made by subsistence-wage workers in China that he throws away when they get dirty, and writing long, confused philosophical screeds that probably largely make sense only in his head. It would be both pointless and cruel to go after every single example of choplogic and error. All that should be taken from his statement is that he treats humanity in much the same way he treats food — as something “rotting.” The guy’s going to be found living in an old bath in Oakland in five years, and we should only feel pity and concern for his well-being.

Seasteading’s been and gone for the second (third?) time, the secession and Six-State-California guys have been and gone. It is that time in the cycle where the Libertarian App Future Brothers start living off the grid, buying guns and getting good and weird out there alone in the dark. I wonder how we’ll look back at this whole period of the last five or ten years. At how the digital gold rush and the strange pressures of a new, yet accelerated, period of cultural invention cooked a whole new set of mental wounds out of the people swept up in it. Yes, sure, it gave us sociopaths who prefer humans to be drones and believe that everything is rotting. But I think, reviewing the era, that we will be sad. I think we may look back and consider that, one more time, we saw the best minds of our generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves after an Uber that isn’t actually there because Uber fake most of those little cars you see on the Uber app map.

MizPiz posted:

John Brown is always a good goto.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

That's because they are not too fond of Continental Philosophy in general either.

divabot posted:

edit: PUA for philosophers by Phil Goetz, who used to be one of the less silly LWers. (tl;dr Žižek's wife is hottt therefore be more like Žižek. Of course, this is probably the only way to sell Žižek to LW.) This was promoted to the front page.

quote:

People I expect to be acceptably rigorous:

Sam Harris (atheistic morality & philosophy): .58, 7 books in 12 years.

Race Realists posted:

Came across this dipshit by accident

http://www.elocutioner.com/

quote:

I tested in the top half of the top one percent in intelligence for this country.

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

That, plus he's an ubermensch who could snap them in half with one hand while simultaneously writing an academic paper with the other

Samovar posted:

I think these idiots think that S.A. tries to be some kind of... elite space on the internet looking down on everyone else?

What they seem to fail to realise is that everyone does that to everyone else on S.A.

Smudgie Buggler posted:

Because I'm not comfortable with belittling people and calling them evil when they're not promoting harming anybody, and I'm not OK with other people doing it either. It wasn't a deflection; I thought that was obvious from the fact I was asking the question.