#morlock holmes

[sarnakhwritesthings]

yknow i just realized that sherlock bought a mass-produced, grocery store honey for when Morlock was in NYC. But then Trent gets a bottle of honey from his bees upstairs on the roof. GOD I love the details in this show for the little hints of his personality

[brazenautomaton]

@morlock-holmes , what is the fucking answer you're looking for when you do this? What answer will you accept?

Because here is what it looks like to the rest of us: You ask a question that is about the behavior of other people that are not yourself. Multiple people give you an answer about the beliefs and perceptions of other people who are not yourself. You say "No, that can't be the reason, because I'm not convinced of those beliefs and perceptions."

Your mindset as a deeply committed supporter of the Democratic Party is not what other people who are not yourself operate on. You are being told about an image problem the Democratic Party undeniably has, and you are saying "No, they don't have an image problem, because I don't think these things should create an image problem." This is peak "it's the children who are wrong" behavior.

Other people aren't yourself. Other people do not forgive the Democratic Party as quickly as you do. Other people's perceptions of the Democratic Party are shaped by the behavior of the Democratic coalition and its most visible activists even if they are not elected officials.

Polls about the Democratic Party reveal only 29% of people have a favorable opinion about them. This is the lowest it has been in 33 years. They are polling less favorably than a Republican Party that is currently fucking everything up. Compared to the 2020 election, Trump gained points in every racial and gender demographic. These are not opinions or arguments. They are facts about the world.

The Democratic Party has an image problem. It very specifically has an image problem on the subject of race. The minority races that it claims to advocate for, and claims the Republicans are harming, are moving away from it. These are facts about the world.

So what the fuck answer do you want to hear when you ask a question about the behavior of people who hold that bad image? Do you want people to lie and say "No, people don't think this at all, it's all a trick?" Do you just only want to hear "The beliefs of others are irrelevant and your enemies are just black-heartedly evil, let's all reassure each other how our opponents are bad for no reason?" Because I don't even do that about Communists and I am legendary for how much I despise Communists, how the fuck are you going to be worse than me about this?

What the fuck answer are you willing to accept?

[samueldays]

To quote @morlock-holmes who blocked me so I can't reblog his post, imagine if you bought a pocket calculator at the store in 1980, and then in 1981 Texas Instruments sent you a letter saying, "The terms of use for our calculator have changed, in order to use the calculator you agree to waive any right to a jury trial or class action suit against Texas Instruments or any of its parents or subsidiaries. Continued use of the calculator constituted a binding agreement to these terms. If you do not agree you must immediately stop all use of your pocket calculator. No refund will be provided."

Seriously, writing that out really made it strike me even more how utterly abusive the modern age is to consumers.

The EULA, or End User License Agreement is a binding contract which one party may unilaterally change at any time for any reason and in any way they choose; the counterparty may not negotiate or change the terms of the contract and their only remedy in the case of changes that they don't like is to withdraw entirely from the contract.

Such contracts govern all use of software, which, since software governs the majority of our lives, mean that they now govern the majority of our lives.

Want to order a pizza? Better send the legal contract with the pizza company to the lawyer you keep on retainer and after looking over the documents he'll advise you on the legal ramifications of the pizza transaction.

Oh, you don't keep a lawyer on hand to advise you about ordering pizza or playing video games?

Well, then you can't complain if you don't like something buried in page 20 of the contract you signed with the pizza delivery company.

One of the massively dehumanizing things bureacracy does is demand something that is in practice impossible, like, "Keep a lawyer on retainer to scrutinize the terms of every pizza delivery contract, video rental, major appliance, and video game you interact with." and then condescendingly tell you,

"Well, if you don't do something as simple as that, whatever happens next is *your fault* and blaming someone else shows a weakness in your character."

One of the confounding problems if you want to argue with people who have some kind of luddite leanings is that, well, new technology feels nowadays like an imposition from hostile forces who know that they have you over the barrel because, uh, it is that thing. It is deliberately designed to be that thing.

I like having a cell phone. I hate waiving my right to a jury or to participate in a class action lawsuit. I would pay more, as a consumer, for a phone contract that did not have a binding arbitration clause. I couldn't find one.

So I decided that owning a phone was the lesser of two evils, and that will now be treated as a free choice which I have no right to complain about.

After all, if I wanted the right to join a class action suit I could simply forgo phone service and conduct all communications by the post.

And since I am allowed to choose whether I wish to have legal rights or a telephone, I am not allowed to complain about missing one or the other. After all, *I agreed* to give one of those things up :) :) :) :)

I think this move towards mass abuse of consumers really is one of the more underrated factors in, say, modern American politics.

[mitigatedchaos]

You Won't "Beat Trump at His Own Game"

Post for July 8, 2024 5,500 words, 25 mins

[ @morlock-holmes ]

Like, can you guys imagine Donald Trump ever admitting that he lost a debate? Let alone imagine his party *withdrawing him as nominee* because of it? And we're going to beat him at his own game by, uh, doing literally the exact opposite of his game?

[ mitigatedchaos ]

Your plan is to beat Trump by being better at being Trump than Trump is? Damn, son. You got a Texas oil baron lined up or something?

-★-

I watched the first hour of the debate. At one point the moderator asked Trump about abortion. As the Republican candidate, this is a tricky question for him, since evangelical voters would like abortion banned in most cases (and thus presumably every state). Trump then argued that he was leaving it up to the states, and the states would decide. He says that he agrees that the abortion pill should be legal, and agrees with the court ruling in favor of it, and that he supports the exceptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother. Further, he's against third trimester and 'post-birth abortion.'

While banning most first trimester abortion only has 38% support, banning most third trimester abortion has 80% supermajority support. The views of the median voter are in tension: they don't want to force women to have babies they don't want, but they also don't want to kill babies.

Biden stumbles in his delivery of his canned line in response, which appeared to be based on the idea that strict limits on abortion access would de facto nullify the exceptions.

Democrats have repeatedly lied about abortion. Republicans have repeatedly lied about abortion. The whole argument about 'after-birth' abortions appears to be based on political fencing with bills, which Democrats also do. (Something like the classic, "Oh, sure, it's illegal, but will you make it super double illegal? Oh, you won't? That means you support it, then.")

(I should note, at the time, I wrote, "I don't think Americans should trust a single word either of these guys is saying.")

But later, Biden trips over Roe v. Wade and the three trimesters to the point that it's unclear just what the hell he means.

The main CNN video doesn't support comments, but there's a clip that does. The top comment?

we're fucked as a nation

In my opinion, these comments overall agree with my post...

Man, both of these men are so old and tired, though Biden is the older and tireder of the two. ... This guy's like a cat with 6 months to live.

It isn't that Biden "lost" the debate, as in he morally failed to engage in enough preparation. The man is simply too old; no amount of preparation would have worked.

-★-

With the abortion argument, we get a good example of Trump's pattern of exaggeration: "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Every legal scholar, all over the world. The most respected."

There was a substantive debate about this, and in fact there were a number of legal scholars that believed that the issue was, on a legal basis, on shaky ground. This was a common argument over the past two decades. There was not a complete, unanimous consensus.

People talk about Trump lying a lot. For a lot of that, I think they have this sort of thing in mind, but I don't take it all that seriously. This is salesman lying. He is trying to sell you a Trump steak.

Each message has a [social] component and a [content] component. Trump is weighting the [content] component lower, making it less accurate, but the [social] component lacks tactical depth.

I think this gets into some sort of personality conflict.

All politicians lie. They put on a nice suit, tell you some flowery speech, and then go bomb some country in the middle east. Obama was a genius at public speaking, like Hollywood President tier, but the drone war continued.

So, to make up an example (that's less controversial), a regular politician will start talking about "the human dignity" of guys that break into cars, or something, and the initial language will be quite empathetic. But rather than going where this is supposed to go, and improving the quality and safety of the prisons, they'll get you to agree to this nice-sounding language as part of a multi-step maneuver, and then they won't fix the prisons, and they won't properly rehabilitate the guys that break into the cars, and they'll just... release them, to break into your car.

So if someone starts talking about "human dignity," I start looking for where they hid the knife. (I also consider their personal record; I'm willing to entertain that they're serious, but I have to see the evidence of pragmatism first.)

Trump comes in and he starts talking about how, "All the legal scholars agree with me, all over the world. The most prestigious." This translates to, "I'm popular. I make great decisions. Vote for me."

It's so crass that it has a tactical depth of like, one. It's not part of some long and complicated chain. There is no sophisticated ideological permission structure being setup. He's not trying to redefine the language. There is no second maneuver.

So to me, this feels safe.

I'm not expecting to be attacked from some high-level social plane or whatever, so I can relax. This man is a salesman. A lot of what he says is bullshit, but he just wants to sell me something.

I know it's bullshit. He knows it's bullshit. He knows I know it's bullshit. But this deception is so unsophisticated that it loops back around to being somewhat honest, or even friendly. (It's like if you had a mandatory prison gang fight, and technically, they have to "fight" you, but they're not really trying.) Obviously it results in a lower rate of information transmission, though. (What will he actually do? It can be hard to say.)

This is not the same as "lock her up," from Trump's 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. That was concerning, and in fact in the 2016 election I voted for Clinton. But then, he didn't follow through on that.

-★-

Thinking from the other direction, why would someone find the general, "we have the best cows," approach to be disconcerting rather than just annoying? (The Wall was kinda also like that. It's just a big, dumb object.)

Well, if you're used to everything having three layers of social misdirection in order to protect everyone's reputations and social position, and using this to demonstrate loyalty to others, maybe the crass rhetoric makes it sound like anything could be up for sale, with enough votes.

So you're supposed to say the stuff that your network socially agree sounds nice, and if you aren't saying the stuff, that might mean you're planning to coordinate to do something bad. (Why aren't you following the network? Do you think you're better than other people? Sounds like you might be planning to subordinate others.)

But the actual content of the messages doesn't get properly evaluated.

To quote some swing voters from the famous Reddit "sanewashing" post:

Only one participant here agrees we should "defund the police." One woman says "That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said." 50% of people here say they think Biden was privately sympathetic to the position. We are explaining the actual policies behind defund the police. One woman interrupts "that is not what defund the police means, I'm sorry. It means they want to defund the police." "I didn't like being lied to about this over and over again" says another woman. "Don't try and tell word don't mean what they say" she continues. Rest of group nodding heads.

During the early part of the 2014-2022 era, when we had the feminist push, there was a term called "mansplaining," intended to mean roughly "a men condescendingly explaining things to a woman."

In discussion with each other, men may try to assess who is the most knowledgeable or sharpest (in order to lead the discussion), so they may throw a piece of information out there like it's a tennis ball, and they expect you to hit it back. So a man might tell a woman about a book that she wrote, and then expect her to respond with some insight about the passage he was discussing.

From what I've seen, among men this is social statusy, but it's not like, hardcore. From some women, we got tweets along the lines of, "How dare he lecture me about my own book! Does he think he knows better than me about the book I wrote myself?!" It's basically mismatched systems of etiquette. (An autistic woman might have powered through and info dumped about the book to the man anyway until he got tired of the topic, and perceived no insult.)

This was a triple failure.

First, the men did not realize that the women (this kind of woman) have different discursive norms from men, and adapt in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in mixed spaces.

Second, the women did not realize that this was not a male plot to subordinate women. Feminists connected this etiquette mismatch to a larger ideological construct ("patriarchy"). Some of them are probably still angry to this day.

Third, the two groups largely did not reach a mutual understanding on this issue, except for a few honest people (and people less prone to viewing the opposite sex adversarially) in small spaces, coming into maturity.

Which is to say, in this clash of norms, the view based on multiple layers of social indirection as a form of politeness may be socially astute within its own culture, but may be socially maladapted outside of that culture.

Because these social norms are social, they are a product of a local social equilibrium rather than a more universalist analysis, which in practice makes them more particular. Compare economic or scientific ideas, which, while they exist in a social context, have a non-social framework for discovery and resolution.

I don't find it that difficult to understand the median voter wanting first trimester abortion to be legal and third trimester abortion to be illegal.

In the same way, to the median voter and not just conservatives, a slogan like "defund the police" means "defund the police." A lot of the more confrontational slogans produced by this process sound positively unhinged to outsiders - in a way that makes Donald Trump seem normal by comparison.

-★-

There are a good number of right-wing grifters who are out there regularly lying. I don't post much about them, because they just aren't that interesting. The field of politics is constantly shifting, anyway.

But I think it's worth considering how Democrats got into this situation.

To pick another Trump example, some readers may have seen this 2018 video of Trump telling Germany they're too dependent on imported Russian natural gas, and the German delegation smiling at him.

I vaguely recall that this was part of a Trump push to sell more liquefied natural gas from the US to the Europeans.

Of course, Russia did expand their war with Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Germany was importing 55% of their natural gas from Russia.

Brookings interviewed some economists about how the results went down. Russia cut down on gas supplies into Europe in 2021, reducing the amount of stored gas in Germany by the expansion of the war in early 2022. They raised and lowered the amount of gas coming in to Germany until the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline in mid 2022.

So it's likely that Putin's Russia were, in fact, trying to gain leverage over Germany. Estimates from industry CEOs predicted a major recession.

The economists predicted that the situation would be expensive, but manageable, and the damage to Germany's economy was less than expected. Why?

First, the demand for gas was not perfectly inelastic. The dire predictions were based on gas as a bottleneck causing a cascade of missing production inputs ("for want of a bolt, the bulldozer is lost; for want of a bulldozer, the factory is lost; for want of a factory..." one might say). It turned out that it was possible to substitute at multiple points in the production process, so more gas-intensive components could be imported if needed. (As the war was in Ukraine, Germany was not blockaded.)

Second, gas was imported from other sources, including Norway... and liquefied natural gas from the US. (A second source claims that 5-6% of the gas is still coming from Russia.)

Third, the disruption was already on the horizon from 2021, so it was easier to coordinate actors.

So was Trump right? Was he wrong?

Germany was getting about 26% of its energy from natural gas in 2021. If 55% of that is from Russia, that makes for about 14% of Germany's energy supply, not including imported Russian oil. As of 2014, Russian troops were already occupying Crimea.

What I want to argue is that, less than right or wrong, "Getting ≥14% of your energy from a powerful geopolitical rival, particularly one currently engaged in a military occupation just two countries away, gives them potential leverage, and this makes it risky," is obvious.

Going, "Haha, look at this ignorant buffoon who thinks that Putin might exploit providing us with 1/8th of our energy for leverage," is just... It's cringe.

Germany had to reactivate their coal power plants to deal with the energy crisis, but they still had coal power plants to reactivate. The long-term storage problem for renewables hasn't been resolved yet. If they had an energy economy that was 60% natural gas, 40% renewables, and 0% nuclear, they'd be in an even worse spot.

(Lately it looks like people are making a stab at sucking CO2 out of the air and converting it to fuel. Will that be online as a replacement in 2030? That's harder to say. It would be fortunate, because combustible fuels don't have the same security concerns as fission power.)

-★-

Anyhow, that was all background.

How did Democrats get into this mess?

Well, obviously Democrats and left-leaning people in the media made a huge deal of Trump as the exception, Trump as the risk, Trump as would-be dictator, Trump as the erosion of norms, and so on. And of course, the Covid-19 pandemic landed on Trump's term and was very abnormal.

The point of running Joe Biden, from the perspective of the median voter, was a "return to normalcy." This is what voters were telling them by picking the pre-Trump Vice President from Obama's term.

After Trump got in and stopped caring about pursuing Hillary Clinton, I found it hard to buy the idea of Trump as an emergency.

Democrats always seemed to use "Trump is an emergency" as an excuse to behave in worse ways. For example, Democrats argued that protests against lockdowns of community centers like churches were too dangerous to be allowed due to the risk of spreading the virus, but then argued that nation-wide race riots needed to be allowed and that this was the position of 'science' as an institution.

Did the race riots accomplish anything of value? No. The opportunity for normal police reform was squandered on braindead slogans like "Defund the Police," which swing voters think are insane. There was a significant increase in homicide, and this is before accounting for significantly-improved trauma surgery since 1990. If LA is any indication, most of the victims of the increase in homicide were black and hispanic.

They complained constantly about Trump eroding institutional norms... and then eroded institutional norms. By 2022, trust in mass media among independents and Republicans collapsed to 27% and 14% respectively.

This is going to be a long-term problem; conspiracy theories are proliferating due to a lack of trust in sense-making institutions, and sense-making institutions have had their reputations shredded by wasteful partisan behavior that barely moved the needle electorally.

One way to assess how much someone values something is to ask what they're willing to give up to get it. Ask any Democrat on Twitter - what concessions are they willing to make to the rest of America to ensure Trump doesn't get back into office? The answer is none.

A "return to normalcy" would mean using the racial identitarians as expendable shock troops and then dropping them after the election, not getting shut down by the courts for doing "race conscious" policy.

The administration would quietly make changes to shore up the practical (not mere messaging) legitimacy of the institutions in order to cover for the spent legitimacy from the Trump era and run a boring administration focused on policies with supermajority support.

So now Democrats are the weird theater kids, and Trump is the normal guy. (And he's already been President, so publishing a magazine cover calling him Hitler just comes off as hysterics.)

-★-

Why did this happen?

First, as the guy that won the election, Joe Biden is the primary guy with the political capital to reshape the Democratic coalition's priorities. In 2020, Joe Biden had the same problem he has in 2024: he's too old.

There is no Democrat strategic command to impose discipline on the coalition members. There are lots of factions all fighting each other to pursue policy that's aligned with their own interests rather than the national interest, and it's resulting in what I call a coalitional interest deadlock. (For a relatively uncontroversial example, Left-NIMBYs and boneheaded environmentalists oppose housing construction, while pro-immigrationists bring in millions of people... who, when they get here, would need housing. One of these two factions needs to lose.)

Nasty identitarian rhetoric requires no immediate material concessions from these factions, nor does it require any discipline, so we get nasty identitarian rhetoric that does not benefit the country in any way, and is not connected to positive programs (that would require actual work and limiting claims to what's realistic, which defeats the point).

Some of you are probably familiar with the idea of a "leveraged buyout." This is when a private equity firm buys a company with debt, and then typically put it on the balance sheet of the company they just bought out. A firm with too much debt is said to be "overleveraged."

The second problem is that Democrats are epistemically overleveraged. They are making too many bets based on incomplete information, and a lot of the assumptions they're making in the process are not accurate.

Some tech-related online right-wingers believed that mass schooling was having almost no effect on learning or performance, and that it was almost entirely just selecting for conscientiousness and intelligence.

Learning losses from online schooling during the pandemic showed that mass schooling was having an effect - by removing it.

However, in researching the literature on education shortly before the pandemic, I found that getting educational results beyond what schools were achieving was very difficult, and that many educational interventions would fade out. Charter schools only produced modestly better results (for about the same price), in a way I couldn't differentiate from selection effects on parents. (I did find that online charters performed horribly. Well, I guess that's one finding verified by a larger-scale experiment.)

It isn't a matter of funding. Baltimore schools are highly funded and get terrible results.

We lack means to convert funding into results.

(Roland Fryer reportedly managed to beat the average for one class, but as a sign of things to come, he got politically sidelined in 2019. Naturally, he's an economist.)

Line voter Democrats are likely to claim that sub-par US school results are due to underfunding. The condition of scientific institutions is not as bad as right-wingers think it is; researchers know that just blindly slapping more funding on to education won't work. However, the guys in between, the 'officers' of the Democratic coalition, are quite happy to leave the line voters in the dark.

They're probably patting themselves on the back, thinking, "I should leave out the most damaging information in order to protect the weak and marginalized," and then not accounting for the possibility that everyone else in their information chain is doing the same thing.

Because of this, we don't get a more serious conversation that would establish a better method to convert funding into results. (This applies to other domains as well. Public transit in the US is ruinously expensive to construct, particularly in CA and NYC. A "car tax" without the ability to practically construct public transit is just a hateful punishment.)

When a Democrat is talking about "beating Trump at his own game," for example, by pretending that Biden did OK at the debate, this is generally of the form, "we should be more aggressive, deceptive, and selfish."

The Democrats are already too deceptive. It's inhibiting their ability to govern effectively. The Democrats are already too aggressive. A number of the online right being read by Chris Rufo and Elon Musk were once self-identified liberals [1] who were driven away and radicalized by the hostile messaging (which was not connected to practical benefits for society, so this isn't "mere selfishness"). Democrats are already selfish enough; forgiving student debt without fixing the system to reduce the origin of that debt polls 30-40 approve-disapprove.

And for the debate itself...

Bro why do we have 70+ year old[s] running for office? Shouldn't we have someone at least young and more modern? This is like watching a retirement home cafeteria fight 😭

Do you think telling someone like that, "Biden didn't lose the debate," sounds, you know, hinged? At the very least, it certainly doesn't inspire trust or confidence.

-★-

A little while ago, collapsedsquid posted:

Seeing a lot of the "This Trump thing is because everyone was so unfair to Romney in 2012 and he lost" out there again and this is fucking abuser logic man, "Why did you make me hit you? If you'd only put away the dishes like I'd asked then this wouldn't have had to happen" shut the fuck up man.

I had been writing a draft response to this.

Basically, seriousness is both a substantive position and a rhetorical stance. The Bush administration undermined the rhetorical stance on the Republican side due to the Iraq War, which was mismanaged, and in which no nuclear weapons were found. (Some old chemical weapons were found, but not an actual development program.)

Throwing the line "binders full of women" at Mitt Romney didn't help, of course, but it's more like that faction of the Republican party failed to regain its footing.

During the Bush administration, there were comparisons of George Bush to Hitler (it showed up on protest signs, for instance).

In practice, the Bush administration were libcons. Looking at Afghanistan, a mountainous, dry, landlocked country that has a GDP per capita of around $500, they were neither 'anti-racist' enough to decide not to invade and respect the local rule of the Taliban (and their local cultural traditions), nor conventionally racist (or culturalist) enough to conclude that national development would be a tremendous challenge requiring a radical reorganization of Afghan society.

Utilitarianism is generally about maximizing "utility," or subjective positive experience, and assumes that this can be summed across individuals. For example, there is a utilitarian thought experiment in which a surgeon has one healthy patient and five sick patients. If he kills the healthy patient, then he can harvest the man's organs in order to save the five sick patients. (Yes, like in Rimworld.)

There are many problems with a naive utilitarian approach.

However, if we rotate the concept of utilitarianism, we get the idea of moral prices, and morality as something that can be traded off against other factors of production, such as land, labor, energy, capital, and so on. Morality is not like these other resources; immorality can incentivize more immorality. However, this provides us with a potential frame with which to view a more violent and exploitative past.

One way to view the situation is that a radical reorganization of Afghanistan would be morally intensive, not just financially draining.

For example, Afghanistan has a high rate of cousin marriage, which is not common in developed countries. Overriding that would mean prioritizing foreign marriage norms as superior, taking on epistemic debt as the relationship between marriage norms and democracy or economy is more correlative than rock-solid causative, and to the degree that Afghan people resist this change, enforcing it at gunpoint.

While Democratic voters of the era would joke about Republican-voting "rednecks" being cousin-married, the appetite for such a program likely did not exist.

Another way to view the situation is that, from the outside, the Bush administration believed that democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation, were simply what happens in the absence of dictatorship. This view legitimized American power and influence as simply the natural order asserting itself, and argued that asserting American influence was morally cheap.

If democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation are non-trivially the product of particular cultural norms and values, then American interventionism is much more morally expensive.

In either case, Trump represents a "correction" in reaction to the failed project of the Bush administration: conflict and oppression are still undesirable; bombs are morally expensive; borders are cheap.

-★-

As we know, the United States lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. A joke emerged at the time:

"Now the Taliban have to govern Afghanistan."

Discussion in right-wing circles claims that the Taliban won by doing a better job of maintaining basic property rights and resolving disputes than the US-aligned forces did, despite being in a state of war with the US:

The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.

There were, reportedly, complaints from members of the Taliban after their victory, but it would seem that the Taliban were already governing Afghanistan.

Richard Hanania may be a troll, but he went through some Afghan War documents posted by the Washington Post, and I don't think he's making it up. It would seem that while the Taliban were governing Afghanistan, the US forces, well, weren't:

Six months after he was appointed, Bush didn't know who his top general in Afghanistan was, and didn't care. General McNeill had no guidance about what he should be doing in the country.

He has a whole long thread of this sort of thing. It reminds me of reading through the Wikipedia page on the Vietnam War many years after high school history, which made it sound like the US was quite adept with high-technology weapons, but failed to properly identify and manage the political source for the conflict.

Let's return to the student loan debt forgiveness issue.

A typical firm only has a profit margin of about 7-10%. A firm can keep going as long as it's breaking even, so even a low profit margin can still pay wages. However, if a firm is losing money, it will have to sell off assets or lay off employees, reducing its production capacity.

There is investment, in which we spend current production in order to increase or maintain future production, such as by building a factory. If we make a good investment, we'll get the production value back later. There is insurance, which involves moving risk around. For example, you are unlikely to be in a car accident most of the time, but if you have car insurance and you do get in an accident, the insurance company will pay for repair or replacement of your car. [2] This may make you more likely to buy a car in the first place, or more likely to structure your life around the assumption that you will have a car.

Governments can (in theory) spend a great deal on investment or insurance, but they can only spend a more limited amount on consumption spending.

For a college degree that pays for itself, government can loan money at a low interest rate, and the value will be paid back by the person who took the loan later.

For a college degree that doesn't pay for itself, someone has to supply the production that builds the buildings on the campus, fixes the water pipes, reloads the toilet paper in the bathrooms, and so on, and if that's not "the person taking the degree, but in the future," then it has to be someone else.

Someone like collapsedsquid might have the view, "I want the state to subsidize college education. Why should I pre-compromise and reduce my negotiating position?"

To expand on this, "Guarding the state treasury is the work of the right and of capital (business); why should I do their work for them?"

From this perspective, the role of the Democratic presidential candidate is to be the leader of America's left-leaning coalition, the blue team.

But the median voter or swing voter does not necessarily have this perspective. The median or swing voter is choosing between two candidates to lead the American enterprise.

The actual job is President of the United States.

If you win the War in Afghanistan, you have to govern Afghanistan. If you win the US presidential election, you have to govern the United States of America.

That's the prize. If you don't like it, don't run for office.

-★-

Nonetheless, this causes a tension. In order to become President as a Democrat, you first have to win the Democratic primary, which makes you effectively the leader of the Democratic party.

How do you deal with this?

That's "simple": split the issues.

A political coalition has a lot of people and those people have diverse interests. Representing them all at once is too difficult. Talking about them all at once is too difficult. Generalization of coalitional interests into a smaller, more manageable set of principles yields ideology.

Take the issues, and order them by how important they are to the functioning of the country, and how important they are for mainstream voters.

For the issues most important to mainstream voters, aim for a very broad coalition using very general principles. Pass legislation that has supermajority support in the polls, and be loud about it so that voters know what you've done for them lately.

For more niche issues that mainstream voters care less about, aim for a narrower coalition with narrower principles, to reward your base.

The second is the reward for the first. The median voter should be able to trust you on the things that he cares about, and where he doesn't trust you, it's on things he doesn't care about.

Core issues for the functioning of the country will seep into more generic voter dissatisfaction with things like inflation, so it's better to keep on top of those. Whether to be loud about it depends on whether the individual policy that's actually needed has good optics or not.

-★-

If you want to "beat Trump at his own game," you don't do so by talking about how America has the best steaks.

You identify his most important issues, and then you work out how to best steal them from him.

-

[1] "They were elves, once." Extradeadjcb is probably the most prominent example, but it comes up for a number of them. I've written about this before, but ethnic conflict theory by one player creates an equilibrium more favorable to ethnic conflict theory by other players. Lefty Twitter users asked Razib Khan why he attended Extradeadjcb's natalism conference; he replied by asking where the left-wing natalism conference was. That's probably still 20 years out.

[2] It's more complicated than this.

[collapsedsquid]

Been trying a few things with Elon Musk's AI and the more I do I think about a point @morlock-holmes made, this thing really doesn't know how to compose or arrange a shot. Keep trying to do images of "X doing Y to Z" and it keeps just placing them next to one another, here this sea lion seems confused as to the proper way to use a monitor & keyboard. Keep thinking of the various AI propaganda images that get circulated and yeah they all do that, everything's gotta be facing the camera.

[prudencepaccard]

(screenshotting because I was unable to reblog directly from @morlock-holmes, OP has me blocked)

agree 100% with this, as someone who believes very strongly in children's rights and that children are an oppressed class. just because kids SHOULD have class solidarity against adults doesn't mean they do, and when they abuse their peers it's pretty bad actually! it is extremely possible for both kids and adults to be "organized, malicious tormentors." Perhaps not so organized in kindergarten, but certainly by age 9 or 10. I have life experience in this department I wish I didn't!

[wmb-salticidae]

It's unfortunate that Roommate didn't track the year as well. Imagine a gamer of the future starting this up in 2058, only to hit a road block because five years earlier Ryouko got lung cancer.

I was going through some archived scans of 90's otaku magazines, as is my sacred duty, and I stumbled on this ad for a Sega Saturn game I did not know:

The pitch of Roommate (as seen here) is that of a "real time" romance simulation:

What makes it real-time is that the game progresses in sync with the Saturn's internal clock. In that way [main girl] Ryoko is just like a real girl; she has her own daily habits and lives her life accordingly. So if you start the game in the afternoon, you might not be able to meet her because she's at school [...] The purpose is to enjoy living together with Ryoko in real time and communicating with her.

And this is exactly the kind of way-too-convoluted gimmick that sacrifices gameplay functionality on the altar of conceptual novelty based on random technology add-ons present in new-gen consoles of the era that I just love. Obviously the concept of starting a game and having the main girl not be present so you cannot play is completely asinine - but think of the realism!

Between that and the discount-Sadamoto 90's character designs, I wanted to see it for myself; so I spent way, way too long setting up a Sega Saturn emulator. In my experience early CD-ROM-based consoles often require much more bespoke set-ups to get working, in this case custom BIOS files in the emulator firmware directories, and JPN-language ones at that for this game. But I got it to work and oh yeah, this is some early "digital" console era crust:

Playing this game is just painful. The clock of course means that you essentially can't play it at all - looking at YouTube comments on the very few Let's Plays and such that exist, people are reminiscing about how they could never find Ryoko because their schedules didn't align. One person even comments:

This game is for NEETs and shut-ins

Which is a valid demo I guess! But it doesn't really stop there - your house is a "fully realized" 3D environment of bare walls which you navigate with clunky controls. Let me log in and take some screenshots...

Jesus Christ it's 10 pm and you are cooking dinner?! The one time I don't want this ghost popping out of the cracks in the floorboards, I swear...

Okay, got rid of her (She broke a plate -_- you moved in yesterday, girl):

You walk, in real time (step by step) through this pixel museum just...hoping that one of the rooms will contain Ryoko and proc a dialogue event based on the time of day. There is a little more to it than that but that is essentially the gameplay. This would, very obviously, be simply better as a straightforward visual novel.

But you see how that just isn't as cool in 1997, right? This is the era where the fidelity of graphics and the technology for simulation is progressing at a rapid clip, and everyone wants to see the boundaries pushed. Roommate isn't the first "real time simulation" game, but it is the most pure, the one fully committed to the bit. Your house is completely mapped out, the girl has her routine, you walk step by painful step through the rooms because this is "real", you are living it. They even use a live photo for the outside of the house to sell the aesthetic (and also save money):

Ryoko is waiting in the kitchen of that house when you come home from work, putting on an apron, ready to cook dinner. For you.

Assuming you get home at whatever fucking 30 minute window the game decided to gatekeep its gameplay behind! But of course I exaggerate - it wasn't that bad (there are little mechanics you can use to set some schedule times in the game for example), player tolerance for bullshit was way higher then, and you were expected to buy strategy guides for these things. So even though it was panned by critics on release...it was a sleeper hit with a devoted fanbase.

Which means it got a ton of sequels and ports! We don't have to go through them all, though I will share my favorite factoid about the first sequel - "ROOMMATE ~Ryoko in Summer Vacation~" from the wiki:

The character designs are significantly different from the previous game (especially Ryoko's brown hair and large breasts).

Priorities, baby. But some of the ports are interesting because of the changing tech. A version was ported to the PlayStation, which does not have the internal clock a Sega Saturn had. But coincidentally it did have the PocketStation, a handheld GameBoy/Tamagotchi hybrid expansion tool that did have an internal clock and could sync with the game. It also let you track Ryoko's schedule and play mini-games, with some very adorable animations as you can see in this ad for the product that featured Roommate:

This device absolutely reminds me of the Disc Fax system discussed in my Miho Nakayama essay - a very niche product biting off more than it can chew making games overly complex to play but allowing things that would otherwise be impossible (and this one was a good deal more successful at least). Here it allowed Roommate's central gimmick to function - and is super cute, honestly I would buy a standalone tamagotchi version of this game.

The PS1 also couldn't quite handle how the game was built for the Sega Saturn graphics-wise, and as such a bunch of the 3D elements were sanded off into 2D simulacrums - most notably the house:

Which, despite this being a technological downgrade, is way better! It looks adorable, you can actually see what is going on and where Ryoko is, and you can navigate it way more cleanly. God, did...hold on let me tab back to the game...yeah, is there no clock in the original game on screen. That is insane. Anyway the PS1 version had a lot of these cute little graphical additions, even right on the title screen:

It is definitely the better looking version, which is a classic tale - in 1997 the "bleeding edge" of 3D graphics were impressive to players, even through their roughness. Now they just aren't, and so the retro charm of designs that are optimized what the mediums of the time could reliably handle have a lot more appeal.

There was also a PC port in 1998, which did exactly what I suggested and added an "adventure" mode where you could ignore the clock system. They definitely learned over time what worked and what didn't; but the appeal of the gimmick is what first sold it to players in the end.

All of this is to say, don't play Roommate, and if you do just emulate the PS1 game instead of torturing yourself with the Sega Saturn version. Oh...you weren't gonna play a Japanese-only abandonware 90's not-even-eroge dating sim to begin with? Ah, well, yeah, I guess that makes sense.

Man I should translate it shouldn't I? So people can play it...

[loki-zen]

re: hair loss, at what point as a man should you just shave it? I have/had long wavy Matthew McConaugh-hair, and I’m decently emotionally invested in the compliments I used to get. Outside of wanting to look good to women I don’t super care though, that and that my dad always wanted to grow his hair long but it didn’t work out for him, so I’m kinda doing it for both of us.

anyway, I’m on the road to approaching the “woody harrelson at the beginning of Natural Born Killers” hairline, and it’s a struggle. Been on finasteride for like 8 months, and I’m pretty sure it’s making me depressed, plus it does weird stuff to your cum, which is both gross and frightening in its implications. I had good results with rogaine, should probably start that again, regardless of what I do.

At what point does a man become sexier with the buzz cut a la Jason Statham, every Russian guy, etc?

it’s also frustrating because there’s so many memes out there about “creepy balding guys”, like it’s just this shorthand for being a coomer or a serial sexual harasser or what have you. I could live with “ugly balding guys”, there have been times in my life when I was hot and times I was ugly, I’m able to cope with that. But creepy just really sucks. I had a lot of female friends in college, and some women I’m very close to were victims of sexual violence, and so I’m probably hyper-sensitive and afraid of being perceived as predatory in any way. It’s good that I’m aware of the problems, but sometimes I wish I was more ignorant, it’d make it a lot less scary to strike up conversations with new people if I wasn’t crushingly aware of how often women are uncomfortable with men they’ve never met.

(I’m not morlock-Holmes, but I think we have some of the same dating issues)

So first off, it is obviously wrong and bigoted to make assumptions about someone's behaviour or intentions based on what they look like unless we're talking about something very specific and intentional like 'they have nazi tattoos'. If it helps any (I'm not sure it does) I don't think that these people necessarily see a balding guy and think that's a sexual predator so much as they are doing that very schoolyard thing of "we don't like this kind of people (sexual predators) and so we're going to stereotype them as being something we think is unattractive" (you see similar things with fatness and 'neckbeards').

If it is the women you actually know who say these sorts of things (that wasn't clear), it literally might not occur to them that they're making you feel this way because it's just a general-purpose insult to them that's become detached from the actual notion of a person they might know and like who happens to be male and balding.

This sort of talk is actually, if anything, dangerous to potential victims of sexual violence, because the idea that you can somehow spot Creepy Guys and they definitely look different to anyone else will tend to help conventionally attractive guys get away with it!

I don't think there are any hard and fast rules about the hair thing. Lots of guys do look cute with a buzzcut, and it is common (but not universal) in the dominant Anglosphere culture for people to find this more attractive than even very nice hair when that hair has visible male-pattern balding going on. I confess I do have this reaction myself sometimes, but I also find that the more I get to know people the more I see the nicer hair and the less I see the "but it's balding" part, but there are levels that will always look a bit odd to me (eg the shakespeare cut). Which, yknow, isn't actually a reason why people should change their hair, though I imagine you're asking because being attractive to other people is important to you.

Your female irl friends are perhaps best-placed to approximate the sort of views that predominate among the sort of women you're likely to be trying to date, and there are now decent AI tools to give you an idea of what you might look with different hairstyles - maybe try one out, see what you think and ask their advice.

Oh, also, in my personal opinion if your hair is fairly voluminous and past shoulder length you can get away with a receding hairline a lot longer - same with certain careful short but long on top looks, although they can be more fiddly.

[the-dao-of-the-zerg]

Big thanks to @morlock-holmes, @sukimas, @gostaks, @the-grey-tribe and anyone else who contributed their own interpretation of the opening to Bleak House. I learned a lot from all of you, and definitely had a lower comprehension than I would have initially rated myself for. I have read basically no "Classic" literature, so I'm coming at this from the background of a voracious but very modern reader, and I have very little exposure to British culture.

There is definitely a lot more slang than I realized, and wow my social circle here understands the cultural depths of 19th century Britain way better than I would have guessed! :)

[epistemebabu]

"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly burst into laughter, mockingly indicating by some phrase that only a woke cuckcel could be so foolish as to take speech for truth".

I guess the bottom line is that I am really skeptical, and increasingly so, about social arrangements that cash out to,

"If I say this about you, it's fine. It's a joke, or harmless venting, or common sense, or just not something you need to worry about.

"Oh, if you say the same thing about me? That's a big problem and society ought to discipline you."

[machine-saint]

idk how far you are from the rationalist community im just here for the weaponcore.

you being somewhat adjacent to rationality, and not vehemently opposed to it, is a surprise, to be sure. but a welcome one.

in terms of beliefs would describe myself as 80th percentile relative to extremely online trans girls, but i'm not in the community; i rear HPMOR and found a few parts I liked (the time-turner prime factoring thing), though as a whole it's not good work. and i loved UNSONG. but i don't read LW or hang out in any self-described rat spaces.

that being said when I see someone shittalk rationalists I definitely have to evaluate 'is this a principled criticism or are they just laundering cringe culture'; cf also that post from @morlock-holmes about how if you have a laundered bloodstain on your shirt, a group who will sit you down and explain what wearing that to formal events is bad are more likely to be a space you can live in than people that just assume that you know why it's bad

also I'm glad you like the weaponcore :>

[brazenautomaton]

Perhaps it would be easier to communicate clearly on this "rake" and "democratic party's image" thing if you listed clearly what seems to you like (approximately as small as is reasonably findable by you) group and what they would have to do to "not step on the rake" as you put it. If I understand correctly, you claimed that @morlock-holmes incorrectly said that your answer is "every progressive everywhere" as the group and "doesn't say anything stupid" as the action. But what *is* your answer?

I gave an answer in that thread

if you're a group like "the episcopal church" the answer is "don't abandon a program that does something you claim to value deeply rather than help 50 white people and say this is due to 'racial justice.' in fact don't use the phrase 'racial justice' ever again, since it is synonymous with everything people properly hate about progressivism."

if you're a media organization the answer is "don't immediately do an about face on how important refugees are and act like letting these fifty fucking people in is a greivous psychic injury to black people. like if someone gives you an op-ed with the phrase 'white supremacy' in it, DON'T publish it."

if you're a group like "the democratic party" you have to actually make more than zero effort to distance yourself from the malevolent racist progressives. you have to do that instead of pretending you don't know why you're associated with them in the public mind, saying "well it doesn't matter anyway they wouldn't believe us if we did," acting like them saying "you aren't doing all of the things we want fast enough" is enough to prove you aren't associated, and going back to covering for them and enabling them. bare minimum, don't oppose the fifty fucking people being granted refugee status, don't expend any time or energy on it!

it is not that "at least one progressive somewhere said something malevolent and racist," it's that other progressives do not push back against malevolent racists, the group consensus among progressives is very clear and in support of malevolent racism, and progressives are so used to getting their way from Democrats that they throw a giant fucking temper tantrum any time they don't. if the Democrats were pushing back against this at all we would see the giant fucking temper tantrum. if leaders of Democrat- or progressive-aligned organizations were saying "hey what the fuck, that's malevolent racism, that's not what we're about, America should be for everyone" we would see that giant fucking temper tantrum. if the members OF those organizations were able to make significant pushback from within those organizations we would see the giant fucking temper tantrum. we notice you don't care about opposing this and we've already noticed that those people do, in fact, speak for you and until you do more than zero things to break that association we are going to continue to notice it.

[mitigatedchaos]

This one's a lot shorter, Morlock.

[ tsarina-anadyomene ]

I am just constantly horrified by a political landscape that seems to consist solely in memetic repetition without any thought given to what anything means. It's all disconnected slogans and vague images of what a good person believes without any concern for the why.

[ @morlock-holmes ]

It's goddamn terrifying is what it is.

There's a theory of mental development which David Chapman discusses fairly regularly.

I'm not going to name it here, because the theory is just words, and lots of people at an earlier developmental level would say, "I'm the highest number, obviously, because I'm good and the higher number is more gooder." Telling them about it won't cause them to reach a new level of development.

It maps fairly well to what I have observed of social/tribal, formal, and post-formal reasoning.

All of which is to say...

Social/tribal is the default.

Formal moral reasoning reflects the result of actual effort.

Post-formal moral reasoning reflects even more effort and experience.

It's difficult to determine reliably, but society appears to have suffered a decline in the average level of psycho-moral development.

As per my other writing in which peace should be viewed as a layered set of agreements, this makes it more difficult to form foundational peace deals. (Social/tribal moralists don't autonomously understand the purpose of a peace deal, so they'll violate it, and then interpret the blowback as "unfair enemy action" instead of "the reason you weren't supposed to break the peace deal".)

[sapphiresonstrings]

@morlock-holmes Why post it as a reply instead of a reblog?

Can you genuinely not see the difference between these two sentences? They contain some of the same words, that is true.

Think about it again.

Wages are a measure of your value to others mediated by your negotiating skills.

If the price of a good goes down that does not in itself reflect anything at all about value.

Consider the following two sentences as well.

Michelin stars are a measure of the quality of a restaurant according to Michelin star reviewers.

If the Michelin star rating of a restaurant goes down that does not in itself reflect anything at all about the quality of the restaurant.

The map is not the territory.

[tanadrin]

bisexual with genital preferences here. I'm sex-repulsed so I have no interest in having sex myself, but I do masturbate. I'm strongly attracted to twunks and bimbos. I can tolerate some masculinity in women (e.g. muscles, dicks) but I just can't bring myself to be attracted to femininity in men (e.g. long hair, vaginas). I don't talk about this because I feel like I'm messed up somehow for this.

Can you talk more about the subjective experience of being sex-repulsed but experiencing some form of sexual desire/attraction? This is something I have a very poor intuition for.

I don't think you're messed up at all! If @morlock-holmes is correct, you may even have what we could regard as the plurality sexual orientation, i.e., toward masculine men and feminine women, with genitals to match.

[phaeton-flier]

@morlock-holmes

You are correct that there should be more focus on good things Biden has done rather than worse things Trump would do, but if you bring the former up it drowned out by complaints about the bad things Biden has done, and unfortunately there is a not insignificant amount of people who don't understand voting and will simply declare him too odious to vote for.

And, you know, in a fair system where winner-take-all mechanics didn't ensure two parties, that would be a understandable thing to do, but in the Real World it means fascists just take over because they don't shoot themselves in the foot over moral purity.

There's a subset of people who understandably won't see improvements re: infrastructure or the economy as outweighing his dog shit strategy re:Israel, or not being able to singlehandedly overturn supreme Court rulings, and thereby take the idiotic action of not voting.

Focusing on 'Blue no matter who' also means you don't look like you're just a partisan hack, because you can admit faults while still supporting him as a candidate. This doesn't fully work because you'll still be accused of gargling his balls for not wanting Revolution Now, but you have to try.