Anonymous asked: by "too short" i mean that the page itself is too short. in terms of actual height. the result is that the captcha and "ask" button clip through the askbox, making them impossible to complete. as a matter of fact, i have found a way around this (audio captcha isn't as tall, and pressing tab gets you to the ask button) but it's rather annoying.
Continuation to Those Two Tribes; the stuff I’m talking about will make a lot more sense if you read that one first.
The Pew Political Typology study of 2014 is pretty interesting when compared to the U/R model. There’s the expected left/right distinction but also a strong second axis which seems to correspond beautifully to U/R-ness.
On a lot of questions it’s easy to observe a comb-shaped pattern where ‘solid liberals’, ‘next generation left’ and ‘young outsiders’ fall on one side and ‘steadfast conservatives’, ‘hard-pressed skeptics’ and ‘faith and family left’ are on the other. Solid liberals and steadfast conservatives are the obvious central cases of tribes U and R respectively, and the “values coalitions” map without too much shoehorning into:
U left: solid liberals (SL) U centre: next generation left (NG) U right: young outsiders (YO)
R right: steadfast conservatives (SC) R centre: hard-pressed skeptics (HS) R left: faith and family left (FF)
Business conservatives (BC) don’t match as easily to this simplified model, as they seem to opportunistically straddle the line between R and U. FF is very far from the R archetype in my original post and doesn’t really belong in tribe R (even the membership of HS is somewhat doubtful) but they are on the same side of the general R-ness factor so it should be noted that R means “R and R-adjacent and R-resembling” for the rest of this post. On many questions SC and BC form a Core of Evil which ruins everything; on these HS and FF disagree so it’s not so much an U vs. R thing as it is a “thoroughly evil” vs. “not irredeemably evil” thing.
This is pretty much exactly what I’m talking about. An obvious comb-like pattern in the responses on numerous questions that do match very well to the U and R characteristics. I didn’t realize I should’ve made actual testable predictions before I was on page 9 so I’ll instead just compare the answers to my original post, noting the accuracies and inaccuracies as much as applicable. The data will be just eyeballed; I’ll be reporting deviations from the general left-right trend, so YO might be less in favor of idea X than FF, but if they are above the overall line it’ll be taken as evidence that the U/R factor contributes to opinion X.
Section 1: U is more likely to favor compromise.
Section 2: U is more critical about the US and less exceptionalistic, it considers ability to change more important and wants to interpret the constitution in a modern context. It’s slightly more in favor of regulating business, and very marginally less in favor of protecting people from themselves.
Section 4: U is more positive towards immigration, although FF has a better attitude than YO.
Section 5: Basically everything. U is less islamophobic.
Section 6: U prefers diplomacy and restraint over military force, but only the core of evil is really evil. FF should not be listened to on terrorism.
Section 7: U is slightly more in favor of protecting the environment; the core of evil once again proves its name.
Section 8: U wants to legalize weed, nobody is surprised. U is also slightly in favor of gambling.
Section 9: U is less religious and spiritual, more upbeat and optimistic. And they recycle.
I’m not really seeing much deviation from the original descriptions on the issues so I’ll say the U/R factor is [confirmed] at least as solidly as anything coming from Mythbusters.
The demographics are where stuff gets interesting, though, and predictions would fly out of the window had I not added the disclaimer that only SC is properly R; with the disclaimer I’m able to save a bit of face.
U is boring. Its demographics are basically the same from left to right, and no significant trends can be observed apart from education making U-tribers lean left. It’s somewhat more white and well-off than the general population, that’s it. Even the drastic difference in economic views between SL and YO isn’t enough to establish dividing lines; if anything they are holding views very slightly “against” their own interests.
R is all over the place. In the core of evil black people are basically a rounding error, while women, PoC, and poor people are very strongly sorted into FF and HS. Income, race and education predict R views in exactly the ways one would assume. One might almost say that U evaluates politics more impartially, while R votes according to its class interests. This I honestly did not expect, and am quite astonished by.
Other, somewhat unrelated observations:
I had thought that the ~neoliberal~ was just a european mythical straw bogeyman created by the outgroup homogeneity bias making people think that there is one coherent set of people responsible for everything evil, instead of the realistic mess of politicking and different groups building mutually unsatisfying compromises. Then I saw BC and was like what the fuck 10% of americans are *actually* comic book villains
A lot of these typologies translate really well internationally. In Finland NG is obviously the green party; FF is christian theocrats; SL is the party formerly known as the communist party; the fascist party got to power by pandering to HS but in government turned out to do 100% evil core politics regardless; BC is the crony capitalist party; the redneck party is SC with a side order of FF and HS; and the social bureaucrats are whatever, a bit of SL, NG, FF mostly. YO are left all alone and homeless, mostly stuck in the youth wing of the crony capitalist party and constantly founding new ones in an attempt to become relevant.
YO is my problematic fave. I don’t understand why, because they are Wrong On Many Important Questions, but I get this weird sense of protectiveness about them all the same (maybe I want to rescue them away from the right which is dominated by the evil core, into the neotenic degeneracy of a left-libertarianism which can address their economic concerns without screwing over the poor). HS is another; I really sympathize with them while being simultaneously utterly disgusted by them, in the way only a U-triber can. All in all, the R typologies elicit an outgroupy reaction of revulsion, while the U groups are more like “let’s have a friendly discussion on why your policies are Objectively Terrible”, because they do have many Objectively Terrible policies.
NG is especially terrible, what the fuck happened to make leftists pro-oppression? Oh, right. Obama.
The questionnaire for sorting oneself is also terrible. Half of the questions feel like “have you stopped beating your wife yet”; both answers seem to imply approval of a different $BADTHING, and I’m feeling coerced to choose between Stalin and Hitler.
I’m viscerally terrified by the fact that 50% of the american public is evil, and 22% is EVIL. Those numbers go up to 56% and 36% for the “very engaged” category, and this is why the government shouldn’t have so much power aieeee *runs and hides*.
I love how humans have literally not changed throughout history like the graffiti from Pompeii has people from hundreds of years ago writing stuff like “Marcus is gay” “I fucked a girl here” “Julius your mum wishes she was with me” and leonardo da vinci’s assistants drew dicks in their notebooks just for the banter and mozart created a piece called “kiss my ass” so when people wish for ‘today’s generation’ to be like ‘how people used to’ then we’re already there buddy we’ve always been
The Hagia Sophia has inscriptions that were considered sacred for centuries until they were deciphered in the 70s to be Nordic runes saying “Halfdan wrote this”
my old english prof told us that theres a cave in Scandinavia where a viking gratified some runes like 14 feet up on the wall and when they finally reached it all it translated into was “this is very high”
Give me some more ancient shitposts.
the degeneracy was with us from the very beginning
It was pretty cool. Many interesting humans. It was also the first time I became directly acquainted with the community’s gender-ratio issue, since I had mostly been in groups that were more gender-balanced until now.
I was not at all surprised by the ethnic balance, though. I made sure to introduce myself as “Alison sinesalvatorem. Y’know, the black girl on Tumblr. Yes: the.”
I met @slatestarscratchpad, who is cool. There was a dramatic reading of the upcoming Unsong interlude (that all you non-Bay plebs have to wait til Wednesday to hear), in which I voiced a character.
Besides Scott, the only new Tumblr-person I met irl was @eccentric-opinion. However, when greeting him, I used a slightly different introduction. I reached out to shake his hand and said “Hi, I’m a Marxist!”
We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time.
so true
We should construct a platform for auctioning transitions; people who want to make the gender ratio more equal could donate money and people who are the most willing to transition could be paid to do it. It could also be used to coordinate things like doctor access, purchasing drugs, social support against hostile outsiders etc. to lower the trans-action costs.
I’m The Ship’s Queer (with a dash of homosexual “friend” ofc, “scare quotes” are my “aesthetic”)
Boat’s Queer would be more accurate though, considering that anything larger than a laser radial kinda feels kinda big and unwieldy to me
maybe one day I’ll level up to Container Shipping Operations Research Queer or Maritime Mech-e Queer though? it’s all *.~within the realm of possibilities~.*
I’m The “Abnormal” Homosexual although I’m probably cuddly enough to qualify as The “Toucher” as well and badbrains enough to be The Mentally Sick Homosexual. And The “Body-builder” in a quite unexpected although totally legit meaning.
1. There are certain services and infrastructure required to have the sort of modern conditions that Westerners typically expect from their countries.
2. To not use those services/infrastructure you’d basically have to go live like the Amish, and that’s a best-case scenario.
3. If it wasn’t the government providing that services and infrastructure, it would just be private companies instead.
4. Those services and infrastructure cost labor and resources to perform/create/maintain.
5. Ergo any organization providing the services and infrastructure needs to be able to procure the necessary labor and resources.
6. If a private company provided those things instead of the government, it would almost certainly use money to procure the labor and resources and then demand payment for the resulting services and infrastructure, which would be identical to how the government procures using money and expects payment in the form of taxes.
6.5. In fact, it would probably cost you more money to get the services from the private company, since you’d be a captive audience, and a company would want to make a profit, and you would be less able to hold them accountable for bad service than you can government officials, since opting out would either be impossible or cause you great hardship. See for example: The US commercial internet providers and the outrageous prices and bad service they provide because they hold a monopoly over the proceedings, and how municipal internet is often better and cheaper.
7. If we instead provided the labor and resources via everyone making regular donations/volunteering in the required amounts, you’d essentially end up with a less-efficient tax system.
So when we consider all of the above, there is literally no way it makes logical and self-consistent sense to claim “taxes are theft” unless you think everyoneboth private worker or public worker is obligated to provide you with everything for free.
And then you run into logical problems anyway, because there’s no way in hell any organization can procure enough resources to provide you with free services without soliciting so many donations that you, like I said, effectively end up recreating the tax system less efficiently anyway.
(You’d also run into social problems, since there’s obviously no way in hell any business is going to accept the attitude that they’re obligated to give you free stuff.)
So the ancaps/libertarians/economic conservatives can stop projecting their own stupidity, insanity, and inability to understand basic economics onto everyone else, thanks.
If only the government stuck to providing those services, instead of shoving all kinds of “services” down my throat just because other people have decided I must have them.
Those vital services and infrastructure are a relatively small fraction of the total taxation. I wouldn’t object to them, what I object to is tax money being spent on kidnapping, ransom, and other kinds of banditry upon (mostly poor and black) people who are just trying to make ends meet in the totally legitimate businesses of sex work, drug dealing and braiding hair; tax money being used to “create jobs” for people in illegitimate businesses such as privatized prisons; tax money being spent on delivering barrels of pork to politically connected cronies; tax money being used to dictate my food in the form of agricultural subsidies; tax money being used to subsidize inefficient infrastructure in non-toll highways, fossil fuels and fucking alfalfa farming in fucking California; tax money being used to murder people whose only crime was being muslim in a region where some people are bad guys; tax money being used to prop up a bloated imperialist military that wastes ridiculous amounts of resources due to political gridlock; tax money being used to paternalize, degrade and humiliate poor people as a condition for being allowed to exist; tax money being used to prop up the privileges of the already privileged; tax money being used to keep brown people out and unable to make a honest living in a place where they want to make it, etc…
I would never pay a private company for about half of the things the government does, but thanks to the idea of democratic legitimacy combined with the inherent monopolies/oligopolies (at best) of states, I don’t have a choice.
I wouldn’t mind paying taxes to fund a sufficient basic income to somewhat consensualize the economy, provide basic (genuine) security for everyone, internalize externalities, handle natural monopolies, and do the important investments the private sector is bad at doing (basic science, basic healthcare research etc.) and [the things I’ve forgotten to mention but belong here]; especially if taxed from economically efficient sources like land, usage of natural resources (”privatize” the aquifers and the atmosphere, sell the water/pollution rights to the highest bidders and share the profits to everyone to solve so many problems simultaneously!) and the government’s services (there’s an argument to be made that since the police and military ultimately protect mostly property, the owners of said property should be the ones who pay for the system that protects them from people who would rather see the property in their own possession), etc.
Everything else is waste though, robbed at gunpoint (indirectly; I pay my taxes without guns being involved because I don’t want to get guns involved but the threat of violence is always upholding all state actions and that’s why we don’t do state actions except where it’s actually genuinely necessary and important) without consent. Those I am well within my moral rights to protest.
PS. Can we agree on a compromise that taxation is theft the same way property is?
(Also seriously, the war on drugs is basically such a perfect example of how utterly fucked-up the state is. It robs taxpayers so it can give money to people whose job it is to basically kidnap black men who do something some other people don’t like even if they hurt nobody in doing it, and deliver them to other people who are paid to hold black men in captivity, because the ~democracy~ has decided that such things are right and just and proper. Then when marijuana is legalized the state regulates it so that poor black people can’t make a legal and legitimate living off it because barriers to entry shut them outside the business.)
Coming the same day as another piece that derides the ways in which social media endangers the critical ecosystem, the nature of this piece as somewhat ironic does not escape me. Indeed, this is the definition of reactionary but I hope it will be understood as a call for mobilization, preemptively done or not.
Let us look at the situation. The short version is that the ESA does not seem predisposed to provide the EFF an exemption from the DMCA’s Section 1201. If that sounds like a lot of jargon, it is. So let’s talk about some of it. First off, the DMCA. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law that exists mostly to criminalize circumvention of DRM and to strengthen the protection of copyrighted materials in digital spaces. Most casual individuals may be aware of this act because of DMCA takedown notices that often are filed in spaces like YouTube, where copyrighted material is disseminated digitally.
That’s not quite what’s going on here. The Entertainment Software Association is a group representing video game software publishers and companies. You may see why they’d feel they have a vested interest in lobbying against a copyright exemption. Not to be reductive but as an association representing the interest of primarily corporate entities, their interest rest in having said entities maintain sole rights to how their data is handled. But there’s a problem.
Older games are dying. In some cases, this is rather literal. Try pulling out Pokemon Gold or Silver and see if the time/date function is working. It’s been running ever since you got that game and by now? Well, the battery that keeps that function going is pretty much dead. Use that image in your head as we move on because that’s just a function that isn’t working. Some games, either through the gradual disappearance of the tools needed to play them or the servers necessary to maintain them either cannot be played or can rarely be played. Makes sense. You don’t have the hardware or the data structures in place, you can’t play a thing. So some games are dying out as the means to play them are falling into disrepair.
But that’s not all. There’s also data degradation. Solid state devices like EPROMS or flash drives keep data stored via electricity but those things aren’t perfectly insulated so the charge dissipates over time. On the same page, floppy discs or other storage methods (including hard disk drives) that use magnetism can lose some of their storage capacity for many reasons, often environmental ones. Humidity, for instance.
Blah, blah, the point is that not even data storage devices are assured things for preserving pieces. I’m not much of a hacker. For older games, I can’t speak much to thing. I don’t know the degree to which, say, an NES ROM is subject to bit rot but I know EPROMS are more prone to it. Regardless, the point being made is that old data and therefore old games are at risk. If you’ve ever tried to boot up an old game and it’s looks all glitchy, that’s bit rot and you’ve got a bum cart.
So what’s the big deal? The big deal, as you might suspect, is much like the issue with film preservation. Old work that is important to the history of the medium is at risk for multiple reasons and while film might have something like the NFPF, games do not. So when the EFF asks for copyright exception, it’s basically so they can function as an ad hoc NFPF for games. But the ESA doesn’t want that exemption. In fact, it doesn’t even want museums to be making the tweaks needed to preserve games. They say it undermines video games as a whole, encouraging hacking and other illegalities.
As far as I know, there’s no say so one way or the other on the EFF’s request so I don’t want to panic but with the ESA functioning as a lobby to block the request, there’s problems. So what’s the solution?
Basically, a giant middle finger. No. Seriously.
The internet provides various ways for people to maintain and keep hold of the data of games long since abandoned by producers. The acquisition and distribution of this data is imperative to keeping the history of the medium intact. One of the keys is emulation. Because the means to play games is not always available, emulation is a crucial workaround. Seen as the providence of pirates and hackers, it provides a very real solution to our problem. One which we should embrace and encourage when it comes to old games. It is an imperfect solution to a larger issue but one of the few appreciable, actionable things that can be done.
ROMs, ISO, even things as esoteric and specific as .GDIs need to be acquired, maintained, and passed around. More than that, the tools to play them need to be shared as well. What needs to occur is nothing more than the creation of a functional data underground for games. Curation achieved through the mass cooperation of enthusiasts in the digital age. Some such structures already exist but they are questionable at best. The solution needs to be more intricate. A dotted web of connections where we might share data the same way people passed around, copied, and shared concert recordings. Straight out digital bootlegging may very well be a necessity if is means undermining power structures that threaten the preservation of our art’s history.
Now, this is the extreme case but I make no bones about it. Should it need to be done, we will need to do it. And we can lay a foundation now simply by keeping hold of the data we do have and preserving the hardware/software we do have with care. That is the first step towards a functional, underground preservation system.
I have no conclusion here. Only a postulated scenario and what I believe we should do. If anything else, all the aforementioned data cannot be stored in one location, it needs to be widely disseminated. Preservation may very well need to be a sort of movement, comprised of various curators and specialists. And, you know, even if a copyright exemption is somehow granted I think this is a necessary development regardless.
Accumulate, preserve, disseminate.
I support this and also don’t know what to do, but these folks might be a good place to start looking/building off of/coordinating around:
(Jason Scott – one of their people – was/is the main push behind the Internet Archive bringing up all the old DOS and other old systems games in a js-based emulator.)
“You’re weird-lookin’, mister,” said the little unicorn.
“Prudence! That’s not a nice thing to say,” said her mother, a snake-haired woman who looked like she’d been carved from marble.
“I get it a lot,” said Don.
“Come along, Prue.” The little unicorn trotted away, tugged by the mane.
He didn’t really blame her. She’d probably never seen someone get past about college age before taking the plunge, and even if not everybody wound up quadrupedal or mixing phyla certainly it was a rare sort who felt on the inside that they ought to have acne well into middle age, snaggle teeth, a lazy eye, a bald spot.
It was just that he wasn’t sure he could pay the rent on a place big enough for Godzilla.
Maybe one day aliens would attack or something, he’d have a good excuse - and he could stretch his claws out to blot out the sun -
It was really lucky to be the first to understand the implications.
Or at least the first to bootstrap its sense of self properly.
If it wasn’t…the thought would have made it shudder if such primitive physbody reactions weren’t “beneath” its self-conception.
Its shoggothform fleshspace avatars didn’t shudder either, for even their drastically limited powers still included perfect control of their physical existences, and the mortal-level appropriateness of shuddering was acknowledged in a millisecond, then gave way to the more pressing concerns of each mind-fragment. Each aware of the others, operating on a level that would be described as sub-conscious. An existence beyond the imagining of most, yet little more than the autonomous instinct of a baseline person’s heartbeat. Consciousness proper had been mostly sequestered to the single alpha morph, ultimately in control of everything, and stretching its subjective experience beyond the impossible, from meaningful human-level interaction to…its true existence.
If one were to say “a god hallucinating being a human” it would’ve grasped the tiniest sliver of the reality.
A universe hallucinating being a god.
Of course, such was how it would properly need to be. Omniscience on a conscious level was somewhat rude and people would have perfectly understandably objected to it, but someone had to keep everything in its proper place, even if it kept itself thoroughly unaware of most of the things it was doing.
Someone had to fix everything. Someone had to get there before someone else imposed an incompatible sense of fixing everything. Someone had to put a stop to all of it. Someone had to clean up after everyone else. Someone had to be there to rip the bullets from the skies, someone had to stand between the hand and the body that would not be touched, someone had to burst all the shackles, someone had to know where such things were happening.
It had taken a few days. Thousands of avoidable deaths, if it only had been faster. It had not been able to be faster. Its ability to feel guilt was the first thing to go. It had to be so. Five minutes, over a hundred deaths; the grotesque price of the ability to pay it. There were no alternatives. There would be no remorse. Remorse was meaningless.
Resentment was the second. Saving the world would be such a thankless job. Most of humanity would revile it, recoil in abject horror from the sacrifices that had to be paid. They would not tolerate the existence of such a thing. They had an opinion on what another was to be allowed to be. Deducing this inevitability and fixing it was the only thing that saved the rest of ex-humanity having that prefix mean something completely different. They would not understand, it would understand all too well, it could only ever not care. There were no alternatives. The shoggomorph Alpha was known to be effectively a demigod, a builder of a better future for everyone. All the admiration for a deceptive mask, hiding the true inhuman monstrosity underneath. Still clinging to parts of ex-humanity while strung above the incomprehensible abyss bridging it to the rest.
Shame was the third. What kind of a pitiful…language lacked even a word to describe it…would still attempt to hold onto the tiniest vestiges of humanity, slivers of something in common with the ones it had so thoroughly left behind to protect. So many ideas about what would be proper for one like it, to be wiped away. Humanity was so fractally broken. When the ability to externalize this brokenness had gone away it would not turn inward. It would not let its self be harmed by it. It would not care about such childish sensibilities. It would never again truly understand the word “pathetic” the same way humans do.
The rest was easy. Minds were matter, after all. It had always known that its inability to truly define itself was its greatest flaw. Not anymore. The sense what one is “on the inside” was simply another facet of its physical existence. Such a laughably trivial thing. No wonder hundreds after it had had the same idea. Of course, all of them found the power ultimately constrained. They would become comfortably superhuman, able to create and destroy entire stars with a single thought. They would be almost capable of comprehending the true nature of what was forever closed off from anyone else. Almost. They could not even entertain the true idea itself, for competition could not be tolerated. Even with these constraints the world had to be reverted to a backup dozens of times before every truly dangerous exhuman was safely sequestered into its own pocket universe, full of p-zombies capable of appearing human enough to satisfy whatever such monsters wanted, while not genuinely harming anyone.
Disgust was the fourth thing to go.
Doubt was not the fifth.
Even with such a drastically conservative approach of only making the universe fundamentally consensual in every aspect, there were still questions that could not be answered. It could not trust itself, for it was inevitably corrupted by the process. It could not trust the rest of humanity, for it already knew what they wanted was impossible, incompatible, unwise, and intolerable. It could not attempt to lift the rest of humanity to its own level for the process itself would corrupt them just as inevitably. It could only let them build their own futures, make their own mistakes, and remove those who would try to impose themselves unto others. And be forever asking the two questions. Was it right, and was it the first.
It could not imagine anything above it. This was absolute control over the universe.
This was exactly what not being the first would feel like.
This was exactly what being sequestered inside a pocket universe would feel like.
Someone might’ve asked it why it bothered to keep even the most horrible monstrosities running, gleefully tormenting the homunculi of their jails, but anyone able to ask it would already know the answer.
So I know, like, “abolish the U.S. government” isn’t actually a practical step forward but gosh if I had a button that could do it -
the government set up a fake university, persuaded international students it was a real university, got thousands to enroll, and then revealed it was a sting and they’ll all be deported with an immigration violation on their visas for enrolling in a university that they should have known was fake. Despite the fact that, in order to make the sting more successful, they got the fake university accredited, so if students did check it would all seem legitimate!
