Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

Weird how “I prefer to date intelligent women” and “I prefer to date women with a high IQ” have totally different levels of social desirability.

[mitigatedchaos]

The former conceals the fact that the latter may not apply to the woman reading it. That’s why one is Feminism but the other is Low-Status Male.

[house-carpenter]

No, that’s not how I see it at all. IQ isn’t the same thing as intelligence! It’s just a measure of it, not the thing itself; and presumably it’s intelligence that you actually value, not the measure of it. Like, even if you believe that IQ tests are flawless instruments that always measure intelligence accurately, and measure exactly the same intelligence-concept that you’re valuing—you can entertain the possibility that you’re mistaken about this, and that actually it would be possible for two people to get scores on IQ tests in the reverse order from their actual intelligences. In such a counterfactual scenario, it’d surely be the actually more intelligent person you’d prefer, not the one who got the higher score. So, unless your preferences are really weird, “I prefer to date intelligent women” is the accurate statement, and “I prefer to date women with a high IQ” is just wrong. Of course this’d just be a nitpick if everybody agreed that IQ tests were basically unproblematic measures of intelligence, but… they don’t, so the casual conflation of IQ and intelligence is naturally going to annoy people who don’t agree that the two things are more or less the same.

And even somebody who’s happy to regard IQ as just a synonym of “intelligence” might observe that it’s a rather technical way of saying “intelligence”; why not just use the everyday English word? Using needlessly technical vocabulary generally comes across as obnoxious.

[mitigatedchaos]

I admit I was being a bit snarky due to the Feminist movement’s bad habit of ending up as part of a gender-based status war.

Most people think that they are some level of intelligent, especially the sort of cishet women who identify as feminist IME.  However, most people don’t have high IQs.

The male neckbeard, by specifying a way that intelligence can be studied with some reliability, not only exposes this disconnect, but also has the nerve to place himself higher on the status hierarchy by demanding it - higher than he deserves, for this focus on such things is often done by unhygenic or awkward people!  He’s supposed to recognize his low status and show sufficient deference.

And what’s more, many people who don’t think they measure up on other qualities use intelligence as their last bastion of defense of the ego.  Most of them probably don’t need to, but society can be pretty harsh.

So you have all that, plus Feminism doesn’t like men deciding their own standards.  Plus the other stuff.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[oligopsonoia]

Death And Capitalism Discourse Take:

1. I wouln’t want to live under capitalism forever.
2. Regardless of their consciously endorsed ideologies, I don’t think most people would either; and, moreover, longer implied time horizons mean that investment in changing things would be worth it to more people.
3. Capitalism under capitalists who don’t die makes it approach even further towards rule by vampire lords. Immortality might tempt a lot of people to think of themselves as temporarily embarassed millionaires but knowledge that they’re not will approach an asymptote.
4. So if you abolished death tomorrrow, whether for the few or the many, I’m skeptical that it would last.
5. The same actually applies to basically all institutions and social forms. Religion as it currently exists is clearly not built for it. Family/kinship structures, also slot into that. If you’ve read Benedict Anderson you know that the nation-state is just a giant gothy macabre death cult.
6. Thinking about this makes me a lot more positive towards death abolition (leaving aside all concerns of feasibility etc, which are obviously separate.) This is all sort of inspired by someone very reasonably pointing out that abolishing death would, regardless of anything else, create a whole bunch of problems. But it would also create problems for our problems!

[philippesaner]

What’s this about nation-states being death-cults?

[oligopsonoia]

All states are death cults where the mana of the sovereign and his ritual connection to the land have to be renewed through showing his power to deal death, but nation-states are especially goth because nations are presented as (1) an organic unity not just of people now but of the living, the dead, and the yet unborn, (2) renewed by the willingness to die, which acts as a vehicle for (3) immortality through honor of the war dead. Nationalism isn’t especially unique in having death as a product - liberalism piles up corpses, communism piles up corpses, traditional modes of legitimation pile up corpses, and probably radical nationalists are worse than any of those per capita, but what’s qualitatively different is that the language of nationalism is all death all the time, too. It’s all events where people died, their willingness to die, how we’ll avenge them, tombs of unknown soldiers, immortality through memorialization and through our children carrying on those traditions, etc etc.

[mitigatedchaos]

Eh, the thing is all states and all ideologies must be willing to use force, and willing to kill, in order to enforce themselves in a world where other ideologies are willing to do the same.  The idea of an Anarchist utopia is nothing more than a fantasy that will never come to pass, since the blank slate theory isn’t true and you’ll always have some individuals who don’t want it - either they must be brainwashed or they must be suppressed, and in either case this response will need to be organized and fairly uniform to work.

So in this sense, Nationalism isn’t actually special, so this doesn’t feel like some new insight to me, rather than yet another attempt to wear down the nation-state.  What it comes down to is that you have to be willing to get people to fight.  If you fall below a certain level of Nationalism it becomes difficult to field a volunteer army.  Talking about noble sacrifices and making monuments to war dead is part of it.  How many people would fight for a polity that went “lol no this country sucks and if you fight to preserve it you’re trash so we’re going to forget about you the minute you die haha”?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

He suggested that the cause of white nationalism might require the dissolution of college and professional sports. “There are tons of reasons for being highly skeptical of sports in America,” Spencer told me. “The reason that is uniquely identitarian is that, at a major college, you end up having white people rooting for black athletes that they would otherwise have nothing to do with.”

Richard Spencer tho

[shacklesburst]

So the left hates sports because it’s simple bread and circuses to keep the masses from noticing that they’re exploited by the bourgeois.

The intelligentsia hates sports because it’s below their level.

And the right now, too, hates sports because too many black athletes compete?

[mitigatedchaos]

Somehow I don’t think this will catch on among the right-wingers that don’t despise black people on a conscious level.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[apricops]

Discussions about ISIS, especially right-wing ones that immediately jump the discussions to “Beheadings and evil!”, and more specifically that thing that @afloweroutofstone just posted and I don’t want to stretch that post even longer, but they always remind me of that Think Tree song The Living Room: a seeming refusal to conceptualize of anything bigger than one person doing something to another. “You stole my job.” “They beheaded him,” etc., with either no conception of larger political and economic forces or anything more than two weeks ago, or a refusal to conceive of these larger forces because they undermine the immediacy of the gut appeal. “Just keep the sound of the mortar fire far from me / don’t want to have to close the windows here in my room”.

[discoursedrome]

Yeah, and I think also wrt to that topic there’s a tendency to overestimate threats associated with explicit malice, which is part of what makes terrorism especially distressing. Except under pretty extreme circumstances, people are more threatened by their own state (whether local or national) than by virtually any other group, even if the state is interested in their welfare while the other groups want them dead, simply because the state has so huge a role in their lives that small compromises, mistakes, and betrayals have enormous repercussions, whereas the groups that want people dead tend to have a hard time getting the leverage to do comparable levels of damage.

But people are always willing to increase the threat the state poses to them in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, because psychologically the character of the threats matters more than their magnitude. “Statistically, you have more to fear from a powerful and disinterested bureaucracy than from mad bombers who hate you” is never going to work as a line of argument, whether or not it’s true.

[mitigatedchaos]

It might have more sticking power if it weren’t often followed by “therefore, we should bring in tens of thousands of immigrants from cultures that still practice honor killings and FGM”.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

bearingarms.com

After "Berkeley Beat-Down," Antifa Wants Combat Training, Guns

Embarrassed on their own turf, the radical left is pushing to arm themselves and seek out weapons training to combat the alt-right.

[mitigatedchaos]

@mutant-aesthetic​

Wait, Murray suggested UBI as a solution to what The Bell Curve suggested?
Huh, that does seem reasonable, but I guess from an r/K perspective it seems kind of flawed

Apparently he wrote a whole book about instituting basic income as an alternative to the existing welfare system.  Since he hasn’t abandoned The Bell Curve, I think it follows that that’s his response to the matter.  I wasn’t sure on this, but I saw a clip of him advocating $10k for income plus $3k for healthcare the other day.

I’m not sure it’s an ideal policy (I think wage subsidies are likely a better option), but one must admit that giving the group you supposedly hate unconditional money transfers is not very Fascist behavior.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

bearingarms.com

After "Berkeley Beat-Down," Antifa Wants Combat Training, Guns

Embarrassed on their own turf, the radical left is pushing to arm themselves and seek out weapons training to combat the alt-right.

[nunyabizni]

Last week Trump supporters and leftist social justice warriors met on the political field of battle in Berkeley, California. Words were exchanged, as were punches. And while an alt-right leader was punched in the face, by all accounts even the social justice warriors admit that they got a major beat-down.

This prompted a reddit discussion among the left’s tolerant resistance movement, with many asking how they can more effectively go to war against anyone who disagrees with their social, political, and economic views.

I love the second to last comment, a lone voice of reason.

This is troubling to say the least, but if they go about getting their guns legally not much can be done. 

[brosefvondudehomie]

They couldn’t get their race war going before their leader left, so now they want a civil war.

[tenaflyviper]

Yeah, no.  These are the same people that previously gave anyone hell for defending the 2nd Amendment, including LGBT people and women wanting to protect themselves.

The people that make up ANTIFA are the social outcast loser kids that got beat up and picked on at school.  These are the kind of people that fantasize about violently striking back at everyone who ever made fun of them.  They’re NOT mentally stable, they’re bitter, and this is the excuse for turning violent that they’ve always DREAMED of.  They’ve always been the ones most likely to go full Columbine, and now they see an opportunity since they’ve realized that literally NO ONE sees them as a threat, and they’re a bunch of punk-ass kids that can’t fight for shit.

They realized they ain’t shit without weapons, so now they suddenly support the right to bear arms.  What a bunch of fucking hypocrites. 

[egalitarian-metalhead]

Funny how people who are extremely pro-second amendment are now shitting themselves over antifa arming themselves. It’s almost as if this wasn’t ever about guns, but about power. Now that antifa are realising what they need to do, their opponents are getting scared, scared because they know there’s nothing they can do to win.

[mitigatedchaos]

Can I send you the $7,000,000 bill when Charles Murray, whose reaction to his findings was to suggest instituting a basic income, which is pretty much the opposite of systematically murdering people, gets shot by one of your idiots?

Because that’s what this is about.

You guys can’t even avoid pepper-spraying people wearing bitcoin hats and destroying cars belonging to immigrants.  Your Nazi-dar is apparently complete trash judging by its results.  If you can’t even avoid physically assaulting people that aren’t Nazis with non-lethal weapons because you’re so obsessed with “punchin’ Natzis!”, then it’s almost inevitable that random people are going to get killed in this misguided quest to become revolutionaries.

This goes double over the obsession of characterizing speech you guys disagree with as a form of “violence” in order to excuse this behavior.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

First time in years that I’ve drawn something out by hand, scanned (photographed) it, cleaned it up by playing with the contrast, and run it through GNU Image Manip Prog.  Forgot how not-shiny it is compared to Photoshop.  Path-based layer masks when?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

I imagine one of those big complex things being that he believes in a gay "infection"/virus.

slartibartfastibast answered:

His position is a little more nuanced than that, but in general I disagree with his “either genes or parasites” approach to heritable phenotypes. I know a pair of identical twins where only one is gay, and it was obvious at least in middle school. I even remember associating the vowel at the end of his name with his softer features and voice, and the consonant at the end of his twin’s name with his more masc demeanor. I didn’t really even know what gay was in middle school. I just used that to tell them apart, and now that one of them is a male model in NYC and the other one has a wife and kids my old trick makes sense.

I suppose Cochran would say that, between birth and middle school, one twin was exposed to communicable gay and the other wasn’t. I don’t buy it. I think it’s a differential fetal testosterone exposure thing (same reason identical twins can sometimes be discordant for autism, despite autism being highly heritable) which means it’s probably adaptive in some obtuse way that Cochran would harrumph about (e.g. group selection, eusocial stuff, lower mate competition between siblings, more likely (in the past) to stay home and take care of dear mother, etc.).

Cochran is correct to point out that a dramatic change in effective reproductive phenotype should not persist at this fraction without either being advantageous or environmental.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s sort-of a nonsequitor, because the incentives and practical considerations around slavery are very different from those around guns.

One of the chief questions is - is your government strong enough to actually prevent people from importing black market firearms in notable numbers?  Some governments are, such as Japan and the UK, which are both islands.  Some governments have large numbers of historical firearms that could not all be removed, and lengthy borders, such as the US.

If you can’t reasonably get enough firearms out, then gun control looks worse.  If you can, then it looks better.

The presence of firearms acts as a force multiplier for criminal activity, but also for civilian defense, however the key elements of gun-based combat center around cover, movement, surprise, and so on, so attacking is easier than defending.  This isn’t a total wash, but the effects are unclear.  It also offers the opportunity for a decentralization of power and probably makes what conflicts do erupt more likely to end in death.

A lot of this also depends on what’s meant by “gun control,” for instance banning fully-automatic weapons vs all handguns.

Actually, let me just link the SSC on this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/guns-and-states/

One of the things Scott points out is that we kill as many people per capita in this country without guns as the Europeans do in total, before we even add in the murders with guns.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[sharingan-rasengan-chidori]

American needs gun control, seriously. Omg, please stay safe if you’re in Cleveland!!!

[cerebralzero]

Why is it obvious?

[pickupyourgun]

Gun control? Stay safe? How does one stay safe with no guns, hide?

[mojave-wasteland-official]

@sharingan-rasengan-chidori Hi there. My name is Red and I was shot at in Cleveland with illegally obtained guns back nearly 10 years ago. There was no law then or now that would have prevented the thugs that unloaded several rounds at me into the cars I was near or into the brick wall behind me. The guys they had were illegally obtained. 

Criminals don’t care about laws. The people that are shooting other people aren’t the ones that follow laws. 

Gun control does not work. 

[bi-brit-rereborn]

If gun control works then how come the UK still has a death toll for death via gun

[ranma-official]

If guns make you safe then why does the USA have such a hilariously high crime rate

[bi-brit-rereborn]

Because gun free zones are where most crime happens

[ranma-official]

fire engines are (((accidentally))) nearby wherever there’s fire

[bi-brit-rereborn]

What?

[ranma-official]

I’m saying that rain is caused by all the wet roads.

[mitigatedchaos]

The USA actually has a high crime rate even after you remove the gun crime, relative to europe/jp etc. Some other countries have less crime with similar amounts of guns.