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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

if i look back, i am lost
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$LAYYYTER

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@the-pasemi
You are not the Antimemetics Division
Germany’s diplomacy during world war I could be described as “the worst person you’ve ever met who also calls themselves an empath”
This is your captain speaking and yeah we’re not landing. I just feel like we’ve got a really good thing up here and I don’t want to ruin it. This is my home and you are my people
We never have to go back
what if the cambrian period was in hazbin hotel
I can't be the only one who saw that Dramatic Entrance is this now, can I? Am I crazy?
The joker sees this and thinks “oh this is just normal paving”
ohhhh so THIS is the twisted fucking cycle path
"no one reads or thinks anymore" type posts are so unserious. get off tumblr and chisel that into a stone tablet to match how old your specific brand of whining is
hey y'all guess what people in the comments are doing. did you guess breaking the cycle of knee-jerk superiority complexes and admitting that maybe if it wasn't true about the last 500 generations it might not be true now either? well if you guessed that you're really really wrong
Ever notice that when you were a kid, you spent every day in an institution that forces absolutely everyone to read and write all the time, and now that you and your peers are out the people who didn't want to stopped reading and writing? Curious!
"baba is you is political" and "moby dick demonstrates correct use of principles of powerscaling" are the same kind of claim
If "political" was one of the blocks in Baba is You it wouldn't actually do anything when you use it. This, of course, is because Baba is You is political
If I said "There are Chinese spies acting as politicians", I would be called a conspiracy theorist.
It would actually depend entirely on what definition you used
If you said there were Chinese spies in the Senate that would be wacky
If you said there were Chinese spies working for Senators, the answer is "yeah, probably a few"
If you said "the mayor of a town of 50k people is a Chinese spy" the response would be "I guess, i'm not sure it would even be that beneficial to China to do that but if so they've got a lot of potential takers."
Well, the city she was mayor of was Arcadia, part of the suburbs of Los Angeles. If your job is to be a listening post, I'd say it's well-situated to know a lot of stuff.
Not a lot of stuff Chinese intelligence would be interested in knowing, though. Like, not much she knows would be secret.
ah, found the reason why
Eileen Wang, now the former mayor of the City of Arcadia, agreed to plead guilty to one felony charge that she acted as an illegal foreign a
Eftimiades said China is carrying out a "whole of society approach." Unlike Western intelligence agencies, which focus espionage efforts on other intelligence organizations or militaries, China also focuses on spying at a societal level, he explained. "That means that they're recruiting mayors and congressmen with the hope that they'll rise into greater positions."
Once in place, he said the idea is that these leaders could carry out a range of operations on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, including spying on members of the Chinese diaspora who are perceived as dissidents or monitoring the activities of visiting Taiwanese leadership.
For example, federal prosecutors say Yaoning "Mike" Sun, who worked with Wang on the website and as her campaign advisor, closely surveilled the then-president of Taiwan when she visited the area in 2023.
"insert your preferred candidates at the local level and wait for leadership positions to open up" is one way to play the soft power game, i guess
ah, a long-term strategy
makes sense
Three posts above this one on my feed.
I know it’s not reasonable to assume every bad thing that happens is agentic. But I do worry about what will happen when the CCP, or other powerful governments and organizations, try to influence the people of the world to their own advantage.
I don't understand the point you are trying to make. Do you think Japan is part of China? What is the bad thing happening in that post?
China somehow gets their own leekspin from puppeting an american mayor or however the rice is fried
first they came for me and i was all like "hang on, aren't you guys supposed to come for other people first" but they pointed out that they had to come for someone first and we can't all be the guy from the poem and i couldn't really argue with that logic tbh
I do think it's noteworthy that Yudkowsky rationalism is an infohazard for some people in a manner not unlike Catholicism or similar mind viruses.
actually it's not because infohazards aren't real
as near as i can tell, the term originally became popular on scp, then jumped to lesswrong from there, than escaped into the mainstream through nick bostrom. definitely memetic information but not particularly hazardous
infohazards are real in the sense that gambling is problem: some people are weak prone to compulsive behaviour
"Memetic virus" here seems to mean "idea." "Deep in the throes of infection" means "believe". Eliezer Yudkowsky came up with an idea, then used arguments to persuade people of that idea, and now some people believe that idea. This is a very normal and non-scary process that does not necessitate the coining of new terms.
Yudkowsky and his assorted AI-orbiting organizations and "thinkpieces" about Roko's basilisk are mostly a danger to people smart enough to understand the surface level of concepts like AGI and the Singularity, but dumb enough to believe that Yudkowsky is an intellectual of any kind, and not just a very confident jackass who likes to run his mouth and built his reputation on titles he gave himself.
It's typically the kind of people who think someone saying a lot of words is the same thing as making an intelligent, rational argument, and then they will simply adopt the stated opinions of any blowhard who does that as objective truth. His arguments amount to fearmongering and finger waggling, but couched in pseudo-academic language and presented from a fabricated position of authority.
Kinda like that guy who claims to have the highest IQ ever, according to some organizations which he founded and runs and all have fancy titles, but no actual accreditation or recognized authority to genuinely back any of the claims or legitimacy of their own activities. Yudkowsky calls himself an AI expert, holds up his self-appointed title from his AI institute which does not produce AI research, and then says some retarded bullshit about the singularity and how we all have to worship AI or we'll be tortured in Sims hell for eternity, and some people assume that he's really an expert and must know what he's talking about, otherwise why would he seem to sure of himself and have a title that says he knows what he's talking about?
literally the only people who worried about roko's basilisk were people with clinical anxiety disorders. big yud never appealed to it, never used it as an argument, said it was stupid, and told everyone talking about it to shut up and stop wasting time
the reason you think roko's basilisk has anything to do with anything is due to one specific insanely petty Wiki power-editor
I don't even like him or listen to him but it is very very very clear how much of the hatred stems from the urge to punish nerds for not killing themselves, and then ginned up by actual literal communists who cannot ever be held responsible for their actions
People who will pat themselves on the back for being smart enough to not believe in Roko's Basilisk are like people who would pat themselves on the back for being smart enough to not believe in professional wrestling.
Not a good comparison unless there are widespread accusations that talking about wrestling without denouncing and mocking the WWE means you must believe everything they said
Thoughts on “Real Peace” (1983)
(~1,300 words)
I don't know enough about Richard Nixon the man to tell how truthful he's being in Real Peace. Perhaps, some day, I'll listen to the Nixon tapes—I've heard that they're likely to be entertaining.
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Richard Nixon in Real Peace 'gets it' on a lot of the dynamics that I talk about, and he manages to put them into 'down-to-Earth' terms. This was instructive, because it puts into stark contrast the reason that I don't do the same.
There is a top layer of meaning in the text, with mechanical relationships between concepts like Communism, negotiating with world leaders, and so on. Nixon presents small amounts of simple evidence (relatively basic, obvious examples), and provides analogies suitable for everyday life, with a sprinkling of conservative snark at the end of some paragraphs. The problem is that if the reader does not have life experiences close enough to that of Nixon's intended audience, or a personality similar enough to Nixon himself, it is not obvious that the things he is saying (rightly or wrongly) are not merely 'conservative grumpiness,' and thus the entire book can easily be written off by such a reader.
Nixon does not provide a supportive layer underneath the top layer. From many years of arguments and discussions, I have found that it doesn't matter whether I think the top layer is obvious. It is better to first explain the underlying mid-level premises so that the top-level conclusion follows naturally—regardless of whether it is ultimately accepted or not, without this the conclusion will have a tendency to bounce off as 'unreasonable.' Getting the counter-party to recognize the disagreement as reasonable is almost as important as convincing them that the conclusion is true.
Naturally, this would have made the book a lot longer. It also might have made the book worse in whatever its objectives were at the time—it seems written for a more general American readership.
This also helped to clarify how self-identified Communists could read so many books while remaining Communist (and not in the almost-Daoist “everything is destroyed by its own contradictions” sense). Depending on one's own layer of interpretation, it would be easy to misread this book, flag everything Nixon says as false, including things he says that are true, and end up more confused than when one started.
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Richard Nixon in Real Peace somehow comes off as some sort of film noir protagonist—or at least, what I imagine that one would be like. It's difficult to put into words why this is.
How can a man be President and also be a gumshoe? Well, for one thing, the Presidency is an office, and the President is just a man who occupies that office. For another, eventually a man will stop being President.
And when a man is President, he's wrestling with foreign governments, political movements, social trends, and so on—all things that are much bigger than one man.
At first glance, it might seem strange that Tumblr people (generally queer and left-leaning) would enjoy joking about Nixon. From this book, though, it becomes easier to see why, but still difficult to put into words. In any case, Nixon is history, and cannot hurt them anymore (whether he would have or not). The finality of history is, I think, some of the attraction of it—history has already happened, so it's easier to know who was right, and who was wrong. The present, by contrast, often hangs on unresolved questions, in part because they are unresolved.
AI writing about Nixon makes him sound like quite the character.
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As kontextmaschine liked to say, “#same as it ever was:”
As a former U.S. President, Nixon complains about other NATO member countries needing to do more.
Nixon complains about the libs celebrating left-wing revolutionaries.
Nixon mentions corruption, and poorly conceived or poorly managed programs in Latin America.
Nixon also notes the immense importance of oil as a strategic resource for Europe and Japan, as well as implying the importance of other resources in developing countries for maintaining the developed countries. He also emphasizes, as is also the case today, that the United States needs these resources less than Europe and Japan, do.
With the resources (and especially oil) we see a material constraint impose moral ones. It's no wonder Nixon apparently wanted a program to build 1,000 nuclear reactors. The resource dependency limits the ability not to mess around in the Middle East as a region.
Like many on the contemporary right, Nixon also seems to like Japan—and why shouldn't he? From an American perspective, the Japanese diligently do their jobs and they don't cause problems, and as for the Japanese themselves, as per Zeihan, they probably realized that the American world order is a fantastic deal where they get to buy as much iron, oil, and cobalt as their factories can pay for, without having to fight for it.
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To use an example of the style that Nixon himself might have used, the United States spent 20 years in Afghanistan and failed to develop it into an enduring democracy. It was taken back over by the Taliban as soon as we left.
Nixon wrote, “instant democracy is neither possible nor desirable for much of the Third World,” that is, he isn't saying that democracy is fundamentally impossible to develop in third world countries, but he is saying that there are preconditions necessary for democracy to flourish.
Was the American government (a) too idealistic, operating on a baked-down version of our national mythology, (b) too cynical, knowing operations in Afghanistan wouldn't work but not caring, (c) too incompetent, or (d) too poorly organized, and with no one in a position of authority to untie the knot?
To the degree that it's (a), it would be one of the great tragedies of the Trump Era, and indeed the post-2000 era more broadly.
As for Nixon, at one point in the book, he praises Donald Rumsfeld (among a list of others) as a competent operator. I wonder what he would have said had he somehow lived in good health until 2009.
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There seemed a bit of a revival in interest in Nixon among some of the Twitter/X right in the early 2020s. (turrible_tao seems to have been, and still is, a big fan.)
This makes a lot of sense for them.
Donald Trump, the current President, is a loud populist, not an intellectual. (They all voted for him, of course, but some of these guys actually read books. They know why Trump's demeanor rubs some people the wrong way.)
The second term of Obama brought the identitarian turn, which they all hate.
George W. Bush is responsible for the messes in Iraq and Afghanistan. That he's become somehow "respectable" to cable news channels just makes it worse.
Bill Clinton, of course, is a Democrat. (They don't hate Bill Clinton, but there's no point in celebrating a Democrat.)
Reagan did an immigration amnesty.
Eisenhower was simply too long ago, and in any case, we don't make war heroes like that in this country anymore.
Who better, from that perspective, than smart, bookish, paranoid Nixon? Still an American, and still an Americanist, for those who aren't post-American. turrible_tao argued that without Nixon, the Republican brand would not have been set up for Reagan. On the other hand, they seem much less interested in Kissinger.
For Millenials, whose formative political experience was watching the United States go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of a President who wasn't quite so enamored of, and quite so optimistic about, the power of democracy to transform undeveloped countries, might seem appealing.
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As for myself, when I was young, I didn't expect to have much of an opinion about Richard Nixon one way or the other. I interpreted a lot more about politics from my high school history classes than my classmates apparently did.
I have a lot more experimentation to do.
If I worked at youtube I'd be part of the problem. Not "woke", not "antiwoke", just manipulation in general. It really is the devil's machine
I'm sure someone said something about what "rizz" implies but I might as well state it for the record
Reng
Ster
Stit
Tell
Whizz
I need to memorize every CGP Grey video in existence so that when I see someone regurgitating one of that redditor's low iq redditor talking points I can murder them on the spot
Put the bestagons on the flag, chuddie
Yeah I get that the social contract is unjust and it traumatized you. That's pretty sad but not "killing the most conscientious third of humanity is just fine because they're already lost for not adhering to game theory" sad
you have fallen for the ethical version of an optical illusion and you're now insisting other people are evil for not seeing the lines are really curved
the social contract does not mandate endangering yourself to save the most reckless people in the world. it requires the opposite. if you do something insanely reckless you cannot expect other people to endanger themselves to save you.
you would press the red button. you would be right to do so. the framing of the question tricks you into thinking you have to find a way to make the blue button the correct one.
Isn't the brazenautomaton doctrine that irrational social cohesion is the evil god that triumphs over absolutely everything else? And wouldn't that imply that huge numbers of people press blue without thinking deeply about it? I'd be more interested in getting through it without catastrophe than completely writing them all off as defective.
No, I'm not going to call you evil for not even pretending to deliberate about it, I just think you decided years ago that the world wouldn't (generally speaking) be worth saving if you somehow could do it.