cornflake

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

This Thiel interview clip is amazing

Watch Ross Douthat realize for a moment in real time that he's spent a decade making ideological bedfellows with a techno-futurist, fascist Right that wants to see the birth of a "machine god" & is in no way enthusiastic about the survival of the human race in universal terms.

https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1938639600907612610

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Sure there are liars but places like Hacker News are teeming with this enthusiast type.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Oh this blog is dangerous, I might be hear for days

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (9 children)

Ezra Klein is the biggest mark on earth. His newest podcast description starts with:

Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.

Oh, that's what the researchers tell you? Cool cool, no need to hedge any further than that, they're experts after all.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Read here a worthwhile deconstruction of Hanania's bullshit by John Ganz: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/enough

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago (8 children)

Bari Weiss, IDW star, founder of The Free Press and author of "How to Fight Anti-Semitism" publishes and then approvingly tweets excerpts from not-very-convincingly-ex white supremacist Richard Hanania explaining that

These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it's no longer in the opposition.

Quite uncharacteristically, she deleted her tweet in shame, but not before our friend TracingWoodgrains signal boosted it, adding "Excellent, timely article from Hanania." His favorite excerpt, unsurprisingly, is Hanania patiently explaining that open Nazism is not "a winning political strategy." Better to insinuate your racism with sophistication!

Shortly after, realizing he needed to even out his light criticism of his fascist comrades, Woodgrains posted about "vile populism to right of me, vile populism to left of me", with the latter being the Luigi fandom (no citation that this is leftist, and contrary to the writings of Luigi). To his mind the latter is worse "because there is a vanishingly short path between it and more political murders in the short-term future", whereas open Nazism at the highest levels of the American conservative movement doesn't hurt anyone [important].

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Woodgrains and fans are taking a victory lap now for getting Vox to take up one of their anti-diversity memes, claiming that FAA endangered lives by adding a biographical assessment to their application process: https://www.vox.com/politics/399804/trump-dei-democrats-faa

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Excellent work. These pseudonymous post-liberal Nazis creep me the hell out.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

True Anon podcast (began with dissecting the Jeffrey Epstein case) goes deep on Luigi, his shooting, and his grey tribe ideological background. https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-425-blue-118079355

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Post from July, tweet from today:

It’s easy to forget that Scottstar Codex just makes shit up, but what the fuck “dynamic” is he talking about? He’s describing this like a recurring pattern and not an addled fever dream

There’s a dynamic in gun control debates, where the anti-gun side says “YOU NEED TO BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS, YOU KNOW, THE ONES THAT COMMIT ALL THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS”. Then Congress wants to look tough, so they ban some poorly-defined set of guns. Then the Supreme Court strikes it down, which Congress could easily have predicted but they were so fixated on looking tough that they didn’t bother double-checking it was constitutional. Then they pass some much weaker bill, and a hobbyist discovers that if you add such-and-such a 3D printed part to a legal gun, it becomes exactly like whatever category of guns they banned. Then someone commits another school shooting, and the anti-gun people come back with “WHY DIDN’T YOU BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS? I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO BE TOUGH! WHY CAN’T ANYONE EVER BE TOUGH ON GUNS?”

Embarrassing to be this uninformed about such a high profile issue, no less that you're choosing to write about derisively.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Honestly not the most succinct guidance, but here's an Amerocentric style guide: https://styleguide.transjournalists.org/#neutral-health-terms

 

I read this quote today, and it resonated:

"The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn. - David Barbary, Methodist pastor

It certainly rings true for white American evangelicals, but it quickly occurred to me it applies pretty well to longtermists too. Centering the well-being of far-future simulated super-humans repulses me, but it seems very compelling to the majority of the EA cult.

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