If you’re arguing about whether the U.S. should weaken protections of freedom of speech, I’m likely to find you a lot more persuasive if you examine other Western nations with weaker free speech protections (i.e. most of them) and the observable consequences of that, than if you expound on the most horrifying dystopia that you can imagine resulting from the opposing side.
Yeah. As someone who’s innately a free speech absolutist, it’s hard to admit that moderate limits on speech aren’t necessarily very onerous and can be maintained for decades (at least) without spiraling into anything much worse, but it’s pretty obviously true. Doesn’t mean the restrictions pass a cost-benefit test,
but it’s pretty obviously true.
I do actually think that European and Canadians restrictions on speech are already onerous, and American 1st amendment jurisprudence is the one major thing that is genuinely politically superior about the US compared to those countries. I keep seeing stories about the cops being called on people for hate speech tweets in the UK that would be unambiguously constitutionally protected in the US, and thinking I’m glad my servers are here and not there.
If I lived in one of those counties I would consider it politically important to move local law more towards the US model, or barring that preventing effective enforcement of censorship law; since I live in the US, I consider it politically important to prevent the state of 1st amendment law from moving even a little bit in the direction of Europe and Canada (which I agree are not dystopias).
the first rule of Internet argument is to make sure your profile description isn’t so embarrassing that it can immediately be used against you.
corollary: your detractors will always find something “embarrassing” about you to use against you so why bother
I made fun of knowyournewmeme and they went to my blog, couldn’t find anything, went to the link for my youtube, couldn’t find anything, THEN went to my twitter from there and saw me retweeting a jontron meme and screenapped that to try to 1-up me
Sounds about right
Already had someone quote my blog description as some kind of “shutdown”, but the joke was on them since it only revealed how clueless they are.
Thank you for the advice, it's really helpful. When you said I should just ask myself if I want to date girls, and if I want them to date me instead, it gave me a weird "huh, I didn't think of it that way before" which sounds silly, but I didn't. I always thought I had to prove I'm gay, or otherwise someone will expose me as a fake, but no. I'm gay. It feels nice saying it.
<3
Like I said, really common! I don’t know why ‘am I gay/bi’ feels like a harder question than ‘do I want to date girls/ do I want girls to want to date me’ but you’re not at all alone in feeling that way or in finding it a helpful reframing. You’re gay! Go be a very happy gay.
Is there a bot that randomly archives Tumblr blogs? Seemingly random posts and tags on my blog are getting archived and I can’t find out who’s doing it or why. I’d like to know if this is a preliminary to a larger-scale social media attack.
amazing how no one is fat in the dark cyberpunk future
dark cyberpunk future, Neo-Tokyo, neon, sun never comes out, black leather, mirrored shades, jacking in to the matrix, corporations, syndicate, retro phones,
No no no you’re missing the plan here.
The megacorporations license you a gene mod which keeps you skinny so you can fit the image their advertising sells, and it boosts your metabolism so that you must eat more food to survive, helping to sell you large amounts of highly-branded junk food while you take on more and more debt.
In the cyberpunk future, the Coca-Cola™ flowing through your veins is the only thing keeping you alive.
Here’s one: orthogonality thesis. People who disagree with you are not just dumber versions of yourself, and making them smarter without addressing their hostile values just gives those values more effective people to attack you with.
Setting aside concerns about the orthogonality thesis as applied to artificial agents, do you really think it’s reasonable to bring it to bear when the agents in question are all still basically structured by the same evolutionary and cultural pressures and the intelligence in question is nowhere near the “you can achieve any goal you could possibly pursue” threshold?
I think extant neurotypes and values provide enough examples of goal-diversity that humanity itself is, to me, the most persuasive argument in favor of the orthogonality thesis. (Though, it’s negation was never persuasive to me to begin with.)
Considering how heavily loaded crime/etc are towards low IQ, I think there’s a significant gain to be made from using genetic engineering to bring up the low end.
Reinforced Straw Man: Sam Harris complained about being misquoted by a friend, to which of his. The friend had argued against the sentiment expressed in the misquote. He defended himself: “My argument still stands, because this is the kind of thing a Sam Harris would say.“
Woosh/Meme Citogenesis: People retweeted satire on twitter. Others only saw the tweet and comment “I can’t believe it’s not The Onion!“ It was the Borowitz Report. Somebody wrote a blog post about the tweet. Others tweeted about the blog post. Somebody wrote a listicle embedding these tweets for Buzzfeed. Somebody else wrote a long article de-bunking the original tweet. Instead of de-bunking a rumour, it repeated and cemented a meme. It directed people to the tweet.
Argument from Paranoia Display: People were scared because of a hate crime. They asked the police to do more. Turns out that hate crime didn’t happen. They asked the police to do more anyway, because their fear was still there. (Coined by @ilzolende)
These frequently occur together in this pattern: Somebody makes a joke about the outgroup. Somebody else who is not in on the joke thinks it’s real. People say something should be done about the outgroup. Outgroup complains. Ingroup counters that outgroup could have said that. Ingroup is scared. Ingroup blames outgroup for being scared. Ingroup is now more scared than before. Something must be done.
If you look into a mirror at night and say “bernie sanders and gamergate were both russian projects to assault american democracy from both sides” three times you become verified on twitter
A lot of talk about the social benefits of Mormonism, Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism talks about the effects of the religion on local communities.
The social “benefit“ of hellfire as a deterrent against crime, in addition to secular punishments like jail or fines should persist on a national level.
Positive effects of Mormon communities extent to their non-Mormon neighbours.
It’s really unclear to me if a belief in the supernatural is necessary to create these benefits, or if the benefits of the beliefs vanish if you’re the only one with them, or if they vanish as a religion becomes the majority in a country.
Religion has one hell of a Simpson’s paradox. The wealthiest nations are also some of the least religious, and poor nations tend to be more religious. But within nations, religion correlates positively with income.
I do not understand this, and I wish I did.
Perhaps they are in some sense less religious, since it is the social expectation that *everyone* be religious in those communities? Whereas in more liberal countries it isn’t just a matter of how religion changes people, but of who comes to religion.
god it’s way past time we dissolved Western Australia
either get rid of all the states entirely and give more authority to local councils, or get rid of the federal government and let states print their own currencies, but the current split between state and federal is incredibly irritating.
That’s the part of the world @mitigatedchaos can be in charge of. It’s mostly uninhabitable, so who cares if it’s fucked up?
I know, you’re probably thinking this is a safe idea. “Let’s exile that lunatic to the vast desert of Western Australia. No matter how many bizarre plans they have, the collateral damage cannot possibly escape to the rest of the developed world.”
And of course, this seems perfectly reasonable. The diagonal of Western Australia is literally over two thousand kilometers in length.
It’s just over two point six million square kilometers in size. Even the construction of a Special Economic Zone kept wet by a nuclear-powered desalination plant would be dwarfed by four orders of magnitude by the shear scale of Western Australia.
But did you realize it’s possible to terraform the Outback with existing technology?
Who would fund such a thing? Well, multiple nations are looking to meet their climate commitments, and the newly-formed state of Technocratic Western Australia would be in a position to supply. A new city would need to be built to accommodate the infrastructure necessary to oversee this enormous project, along with a series of smaller and more temporary towns, allowing a great degree of flexibility in urban planning.
The scale of the project would ensure funding for the new regime for several decades, while power was consolidated and a new culture was forged across multiple immigrant groups brought in to provide the labor for the project. A tiered citizenship system, including education and service to advance up the hierarchy, with special status reserved for national heroes and more voice available in the National Delegation for loyalists, would place long-term political power in the hands of those committed to the new Western Australia.
As the trees spread across the continent, new development opportunities and industries would open up as the temperatures and local climates changed, paving the way for a nation of twenty million by the mid century.
The only thing preventing this future is that I am not in charge of Western Australia.
Cyberpunk Author:
In this dystopian future, people are willing replace their living body parts with machines, sacrificing their HUMANITY for the power granted by TECHNOLOGY. When we can no longer tell where man ends and machine begins, have we not truly lost-
Me:
Wait, so people can use cybernetics technology to change their bodies according to their wishes, compensating for disabilities or reshaping their forms to better fit their identity?
Cyberpunk Author:
Yes, but can we really afford to abandon our natural-
What software are you using to create these renders?
Just Blender for the 3D elements, my dear Anon, with ultra-simple textures down in Photoshop. I was under the impression that most 3D software packages could create renders of this kind?
I like the thing I've heard the British do where the choice of celsius vs. fahrenheit for describing weather is a function of "how impressive does this number sound"
I HATE everything the British do. The sun never sets, more like the empire that never stops eating SHIT
tbh, if I ever see a nationalist blog on Tumblr, my immediate assumption (following the “politics is a mask for your personal problems” rule of thumb) is that they most likely have no sense of order in their own lives and that they have no actual heritage or history to be proud of so they externalize it all into some bullshit about traditionalist Europa or whatever just to have something to be proud of regardless of the fact that whatever they are holding onto is just a fictional version of what is just as degenerate in real life as the things they are running away from
All nations are simultaneously both fictional and real, like money.
The right’s embarrassing, pointless war against pornography is one of the reasons I desperately hope that the new right will phase out religion almost entirely
the battle against porn isn’t just stupid in that it’s entirely unwinnable, but it accomplishes nothing at all. A society without porn is no different than a society with porn.
I think pornography will be considered to be the alcohol of the 21st century.
Some people can drink it in moderation, but others are alcoholics. It isn’t required for health, but moderate consumption doesn’t harm health much. It can interfere with reasoning. There are ethics issues around its creation.
TBH burning political capital on fighting porn is significantly less dumb than burning political capital on fighting the gays.
Note that I’m not in favor of banning alcohol, but I do like the European idea of introducing it gradually.
I just got a notification reminding me I haven’t posted in a week.
The week before that, I got a notification telling me “you have shared x amount of posts this week, your friends are responding well” and it showed me all the people who liked the posts I shared, seemingly trying to encourage me to share more
I’m kinda reminded of Alan Watt’s thesis that social engineering is going to be moving in a direction more like video games
I saw this app on the app store the other day which is like a daily planner, but it’s in the form of an RPG stats system lol. After every accomplishment, you receive these useless experience points, and after certain amounts of accomplishments being fulfilled you “level up”
And the sad thing is that this is actually a very strong motivator. When people are so alienated from their life around them, it can be very compelling to find signals of progress outside of the material world and inside these little digital fema camps we all live inside
I don’t know, the idea of video game like motivators being used to socially engineer society probably sounds crazy at first, but I know I can’t be the only one getting these notifications from Facebook
Social media was always a game, whether it’s upvotes on Reddit or likes on Facebook, it’s all about using points to represent social approval.
But consider also, that posts arrive at random times, they contain messages that you probably won’t fully guess, they’re often short and provide that little hit of dopamine that way. Even a non-gamified social media website has game-like characteristics.
white people are racist by default (in the united states as well as other countries). are you white? congrats, you’re racist, and here’s the explanation:
you grew up in a racist society -> you were socialized to be racist thanks to racism being a dominant ideology -> you benefit from racism -> you’re racist no matter how much u think you’re not.
unlearning it is going to be a constant battle and u will never unlearn it fully. accept this. it is ingrained in you as a result of your upbringing and the media you’ve consumed. the sooner you come to terms with your own racism, the sooner u can better yourself. recognize the problem in yourself instead of setting yourself apart from those “other” white people.
While I fundamentally agree, I feel like this reasoning is what turned my brother into a huge racist so I’m not sure if it’s worth it
The OP post is a mind trap, equivalent to religious sin. The entire purpose is to burden you with a debt that can never be repaid, so they can rope you into their ideology and never let you leave.
Infinite debts are not meant to be repaid.
Still worth it reblogging for that reply by bizzarrodf
I do agree. I just wanted to be a bit more explicit about the infinite debt bizzarodf’s brother either decided to invoke on others or embrace as identity. I still see this stuff from Left/Libs in the US, just one level obscured. This kind of thinking is an exploitable vulnerability.
white people are racist by default (in the united states as well as other countries). are you white? congrats, you’re racist, and here’s the explanation:
you grew up in a racist society -> you were socialized to be racist thanks to racism being a dominant ideology -> you benefit from racism -> you’re racist no matter how much u think you’re not.
unlearning it is going to be a constant battle and u will never unlearn it fully. accept this. it is ingrained in you as a result of your upbringing and the media you’ve consumed. the sooner you come to terms with your own racism, the sooner u can better yourself. recognize the problem in yourself instead of setting yourself apart from those “other” white people.
While I fundamentally agree, I feel like this reasoning is what turned my brother into a huge racist so I’m not sure if it’s worth it
The OP post is a mind trap, equivalent to religious sin. The entire purpose is to burden you with a debt that can never be repaid, so they can rope you into their ideology and never let you leave.
They spend the 3rd most in the nation per student and can’t produce a quality student.
MONEY IS NOT WHAT MAKES SCHOOLS GOOD.
It’s family values and communities. Things the left has been trying to destroy for decades.
I completely agree, they would have been good at math if they’d hated gay people more, you make sense.
Actually, Community and Family don’t require hating gay people (if you aren’t a member of [SUBSET OF RELIGIONS]). It is this blog’s belief that stable and beneficial families can be the new cultural norm without stomping all over the LGBTs.
“community and family are important aspects of a child’s development and can be correlated with success in school more often than not, therefore we know already that there are things we can do to improve school achievement without necessarily pouring money into an already failed and broken system”
“Yeah, sure, we need to hate gay people more, that will fix things”
Fuck, I’m so tired of shibboleths and dog whistles predetermining the outcome of any political discussion. How jaded do you even have to be to interpret “family and community” as anti-LGBT?
Truly, the religious right’s long term use of “family” and “community” as dogwhistles for anti-LGBT have damaged this country. Ranma here is foreign, but many in the United States have developed similar responses on those keywords.
The irony is that gay marriage is would be better from this perspective, since it could be used for increased stable family formation and create more potential homes for adopted or foster children. Also while it normalizes gay behavior (which makes the cons upset because religion) it also normalizes gay behavior (which is what makes it useful) as part of the life script, which should reduce promiscuity (and high levels of promiscuity generally aren’t good for people) and encourage integration with the national culture instead of counter-culture waging culture war.
“Even more terrifying than “not being allowed to disagree with canon” is “the canon is coming from inside the house”.”—@funereal-disease (via bambamramfan)
As a partial synthetic myself, I am ashamed to see someone with “cylon” in their name behaving so poorly, but you know how it is. Can’t be responsible for all behavioral changes for a learning machine entity after they leave the factory.
Once I am Technocratic Dictator Central Director of the North American Union, all persons who use the term “stemlord” unironically will be sentenced to three years in the Discourse Mines.
Early release will be available for those who can pass an intellectual turing test.
I don’t associate myself with anyone who’s fully political because I wasn’t friends with nerds in high school, the fuck makes you think I’ll be friends with the same fuckwits who fantasize about bacon like they got kicked off EpicMealTime and say uncool shit like ‘you tabbernacking sonoffabitch’.
Niggas used to do graffiti, like; I’m too popular for all of you. I’m a social butterfly of charisma, what are you? You’re reblogging drumpf memes and writing Harambe in ballots or getting your shit pushed in by a whiteboy with a bun wearing all black calling you a nazi in your “Praise Kek, born to Deus Vult” apparel which makes no sense anyway, you were born to “god will it”? Nigga that’s blasphemy, uncool
can you please rephrase this in actual english
I don’t associate myself with anyone who’s fully political because I wasn’t friends with nerds in high school,
Full Politicals are all nerds (or were in high school). I don’t associate with them because they are lame.
the fuck makes you think I’ll be friends with the same fuckwits who fantasize about bacon like they got kicked off EpicMealTime
Full Politicals are fat.
and say uncool shit like ‘you tabbernacking sonoffabitch’.
Tabbernack is a Quebecois curse word, from tabernacle, a religious term. Only an uncool person would say it, trying to avoid ordinary regular curse words.
Niggas used to do graffiti, like; I’m too popular for all of you.
OP was popular in high school and participated in activities that require high social status, including violating the law.
I’m a social butterfly of charisma, what are you? You’re reblogging drumpf memes and writing Harambe in ballots
Full Politicals engage in lame, low-status, dork behavior like reblogging low-quality (anti-?)Trump memes.
or getting your shit pushed in by a whiteboy with a bun wearing all black calling you a nazi in your “Praise Kek, born to Deus Vult” apparel
When Full Politicals aren’t posting lame memes, they get beat up by manbun Antifas while wearing lame meme apparel.
which makes no sense anyway, you were born to “god will it”? Nigga that’s blasphemy, uncool
Also, Kek is an Egyptian deity, so putting “Praise Kek” on shirt about reviving the Crusades is blasphemous.
“The personal is the political” is a terrible doctrine. Politics is no friend to truth or justice, engaging with it is risky enough. To invite it into the core of your being is foolishness.
They spend the 3rd most in the nation per student and can’t produce a quality student.
MONEY IS NOT WHAT MAKES SCHOOLS GOOD.
It’s family values and communities. Things the left has been trying to destroy for decades.
I completely agree, they would have been good at math if they’d hated gay people more, you make sense.
Actually, Community and Family don’t require hating gay people (if you aren’t a member of [SUBSET OF RELIGIONS]). It is this blog’s belief that stable and beneficial families can be the new cultural norm without stomping all over the LGBTs.
The hotspot for ‘ghost’ houses — those left empty to appreciate in value — is in the affluent borough of Kensington & Chelsea in London, where 1,399 houses sit empty. The number represents an 8.5% rise on 2015 and a 22.7% rise between 2006 and 2016.
Why on Earth are any people from Grenfell still sleeping in sports halls after the disaster? London and Kensington especially is chock full of empty luxury apartments being sat on by speculators. These must be opened up immediately.
Unless they’re owned by the gov you can’t just take people’s bloody property even if it’s empty that’s why
thats fucked up
The problem in essence is that property owners would rather leave their property empty than to accept less than market value for rent. The question is not “no rent”, it’s “less rent”. Virtually anyone you find sleeping rough on the streets is going to have *some* degree of walking-around money, hardly anyone has literally *no* money. But, the owners of housing don’t want that money, they want market value. They believe that a better offer will come along, and if they accept a low offer they will miss their opportunity for the high offer. It’s a failing of people’s payoff-to-probability calculation.
And also it’s a failing of core concepts of how contemporary capitalism is executed. Not to go too deep into it, the crux is this: If they accept a low offer, their property is worth less. If a fork is sold for five dollars, it is worth five dollars. If a fork is sold for five cents, it is worth five cents. So marking down the rent on a property depreciates the property, marking it up appreciates the property. Because value is determined by common belief rather than any concrete consistencies, sellers try to fix the value of property high and buyers try to negotiate value low. So if one party wants to raise their profit, and one party wants to not sleep on a bench, they have similar ability to set the price but wildly disproportionate levels of need. It’s a conundrum, and there’s virtually no way to feasibly and achievably solve that problem.
set a reasonable level of land tax, then holding on to an empty house in an expensive area costs you money, encouraging you to rent it out or sell it.
Alternatively, allow them to actually build more housing units. Japan isn’t seeing similar massive price spikes in its cities that are undergoing population growth. Send a guy over there and copy whatever it is they’re doing.
Alternative Fact: Japan isn't a real country. It didn't exist before 1853. The illusion of Japan is created by successively more dedicated layers of weebs. Images of Tokyo are filmed on a series of large-scale movie sets with CGI composites. Japanese people abroad are nothing more than paid actors, hired by the anime industry to protect its profit margins. There's no way it could be a real country - it's almost as ridiculous as Australia! Lol, like the platypus is even a thing. WAKE UP SHEEPLE
That’s why most Japanese stuff is anime instead of live action: too expensive to fake the backgrounds and keep finding Chinese actors who can pretend they speak “Japanese”.
It seems like at least one of the things that’s gone wrong with American politics is that the Democrats have absolutely zero interest in taking up the language, priorities, rhetoric or politics of the left, which kind of leaves them without much of a message except for ‘I mean, we do actually know how to govern and when we get the chance to do it we improve peoples’ lives. and have you seen the other guys’. But if people aren’t happy with how things are going, that’s a really unappealing message - and no one is happy with how things are going.
I don’t know what a good message for the Democratic party would be, but they keep losing with this one.
One of the issues is that the Democrats would have to get smarter on policy, not just shift in a left-wing direction. They’d also have to actually follow through better on some of their policies.
For instance, a program of direct-to-employee wage subsidies would help the working class and boost employment. This is to the left of current Democrat policy (increasing the minimum wage), but has some good acceptance by economists. It would also put them in a better position for courting working class whites, especially when the Truckpocalypse hits.
However, they appear to be committed to a policy of demographic shift or even replacement, so it’s unlikely they’ll go for this option.
If I might make a charitable interpretation of @sinesalvatorem Community posts, here…
Let’s suppose our goal is to get religious communities to tolerate LGBT people, maybe by becoming less religious or maybe by just being less fundamentalist about it. (And this sort of thing isn’t just religious in origin.)
It makes sense to know just what it is we’re asking them to give up.
Religion actually is a social technology. Coal is an energy technology. That doesn’t mean soot is good for you.
If a non-religious or religious-but-tolerant community can be designed and instantiated, then exiting from previous non-tolerant religious communities has a much lower cost. (Plus there is the issue of everything else society needs.)
Progressive Christianity is a thing. It’s a thing that has existed for several centuries now, which is abundantly available in every city and most small towns in America. If a “religious-but-tolerant” Christianity were a viable option, you should be able to copy and spread the existing progressive churches to good effect. People can and do move from conservative churches to progressive churches if they find that their beliefs grow out of sync with the conservatives.
Of course, by now you’ve probably noticed that progressive Christianity is dramatically less successful than conservative Christianity. There’s probably a reason for that. You should find out what that reason is.
(And it’s not just Christianity. Reformed and Orthodox Judaism have approximately the same relationship. Progressive Islam is much younger than either of those, but I’d be shocked if it didn’t turn out the same way as the others.)
Honestly, from what I can see, the supernatural stuff is part of the glue that holds it all together, and one of the memeplex’s components about it being true to the exclusion of all other worldviews. You can weaken it a little, but if you weaken it too much, it risks falling apart.
Of course, I don’t believe in the supernatural elements, and many of them I find absurd. (More deeply, I find the entire concept of eternal damnation deeply unethical. …though, there are those who believe it’s only salvation or nothing, which has far fewer issues.)
And in many ways, religious tolerance is based on the implicit possibility that one’s religion could be wrong.
For me though, in my interactions with religion, it seems like it’s trying to hack my brain in ways not so different from Social Justice or Communism, so I intuitively resist. Anything that involves an internal shutdown of mental defenses looks like that to me. (This actually pisses off SJ and Communists more than religionists, at least in this country.) On the other hand, there are men out there, criminals, who found their way back into society through religious conversion, and others who staved off suicide, so you won’t see me posting negatively about Christianity in the West that much.
