Belphegor posted:thanks for your advice on debating the internet rationalist community but I dont think I will.
lol. the shalizi thing is excellent rhough at least and i feel very self-conscious about revealing how much i know about lesswrong. please do not ask any further questions thank you.
Belphegor posted:Parenti on China, for anyone whoever wondered. The last section concerns China circa 2007.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
I would be curious to know whether this remains his view because while I can understand where he was coming from this really has aged like milk
graphicalUSSRinterface posted:cars posted:Mismeasure of Man is a real good book not just on its topic but for teaching readers about a model of pseudoscience that governs some of the most well-funded and influential disciplines in contemporary society, not just in the “sciences” but also business, advertising, marketing, etc. The general idea being, if you can set up a complicated-looking equation that solves for X, then X is something in the real world. Apply that to a lot of “economics” in the saltwater/freshwater sense and it dissolves like a pulp novel in the rain
oh i missed these. i just made an effortpost on this topic on fb. ill share
if you want to get into the nitty-gritty details of why iq realism is stupid i would uh recommend these posts. if for some reason you hate yourself enough to engage in debates with the lesswrong community about the validity of iq , i will warn you that attempting to cite gould will get you trolled to death and laughed at for being a normie npc libtard or whatever so id recommend against it. their rebuttals do not address gould's points of course and gould makes a really incisive criticism of iq even to this day if you just need to know why its bad. but dont even attempt it in an argument. these links will give you more credibility as in their insane mythology shalizi is a high iq chad that they respect despite being tragically mistaken about his sensitive libtard views that despite how nice they are just frankly dont align with reality or whatever. even then shalizi is unfortunately outdated as he gave up even trying long ago, there are many rebuttals but as with gould they all drastically miss the point. these guys never fucking stop and they are all stupid as fuck and insanely invested in their simplistic self-serving mindset. if you understand shalizi and gould and shit and just idk scientific methodology it becomes easier to critically read the rebuttals if you so choose. we really need another fighter out there whos uhhh shalizi-tier to engage with these dumbasses but currently there is no one and i really dont blame people for not wanting to attempt that important work. but theyre saying this stuff and it all goes unchecked idk anyhow. link http://bactra.org/weblog/cat_iq.html
also, im aware that the lesswrong community are not the kinds of fascists who say npc and libtard and make a pathetic attempt to distance themselves from the ironypoisoned and low-iq groypers who do so. but read this and fucking tell me how its any different lmfao https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k2KwBEq4ToXnvZSbz/on-the-nature-of-agency
Basically the only thing you need to make the race/iq people look stupid is free time and enough lack of intellectual integrity to assert stuff in favour of your argument without looking them up. Like 90% of the time they copy/paste the headlines of right wing -funded studies that contradict their own claims. Here's me pwning one of them:
A tautology is correct by definition. You can't have a wrong tautology.
Oh lawl. You're literally a guy who searches for logic terms on wikipedia. No my cranially challenged friend, a *correct* tautology is correct by definition. A *wrong* one is wrong, also by definition.
Race is just a category used by taxonomists that some human taxonomists applied to people.
No.
It's not "right" or "wrong" empirically any more than its "right" or "wrong" to classify different subspecies of animals.
Categories (or tautologies, etc.) are right or wrong depending on the context of their usage. Race qua racism is wrong.
Presently, there is a great ongoing debate about the validity of collapsing many subspecies designations. It's a philosophical question not an empirical one.
Irrelevant. There is no "objective" (as in immanent, ubiquitous and absolute) standard of genetic variance or its effect on speciation. Whatever debate is going regarding subspecies is neither consulting, nor attempting to create, such a standard.
There's no consistent way to refute racialist category formation without also refuting other commonly held categories such as species or subspecies.
This is so fucking dumb it hurts to respond to it. Differences in actual scientific definitions of inter-species variation do not justify arbitrary definitions of interracial variation. Literally no one cares whether categories are eo ipso refutable.
And don't stalk me weirdo!
You're getting paranoid about me noticing your posts when you're clearly an alt-right larper? Time to get banned, asshole.
Given something like the species problem, what is the justification for calling something like any species concept an "actual scientific definition" versus calling a racialist category an "arbitrary definition"? Is it just "lots of western scientists from the post-WW2 era agree with me"?
Based on research done and concepts fleshed out over decades vs making declassed white lumpen-petitbourgeoisie feel good about their increasingly precarious status within late-stage capitalism.
The original conceptions of race weren't about some white people with economic anxiety, they were an attempt to categorize the obvious differences in humans by people with a genuine interest in fields like taxonomy.
No.
A lot of the same voices which categorized humans into races and developed early taxonomy came up with the same categories and principles of categorization you're defending such as the traditional species concept.
The origin of the concept per se is irrelevant in the context of human beings because there are actually a lot of those from many cultures and eras, all of which have undergone dramatic changes stemming from class/racial/economic/political conditions (as opposed to any real evidence). Also worth mentioning - tedious fuckwad incels like you would be at the bottom of pretty much all of them.
You are actually hopelessly dumb. LOL. Bye.
Thank you for choosing to discuss these incredibly important issues of our time with me.
vimingok posted:Basically the only thing you need to make the race/iq people look stupid is free time and enough lack of intellectual integrity to assert stuff in favour of your argument without looking them up. Like 90% of the time they copy/paste the headlines of right wing -funded studies that contradict their own claims. Here's me pwning one of them:
A tautology is correct by definition. You can't have a wrong tautology.
Oh lawl. You're literally a guy who searches for logic terms on wikipedia. No my cranially challenged friend, a *correct* tautology is correct by definition. A *wrong* one is wrong, also by definition.
Race is just a category used by taxonomists that some human taxonomists applied to people.
No.
It's not "right" or "wrong" empirically any more than its "right" or "wrong" to classify different subspecies of animals.
Categories (or tautologies, etc.) are right or wrong depending on the context of their usage. Race qua racism is wrong.
Presently, there is a great ongoing debate about the validity of collapsing many subspecies designations. It's a philosophical question not an empirical one.
Irrelevant. There is no "objective" (as in immanent, ubiquitous and absolute) standard of genetic variance or its effect on speciation. Whatever debate is going regarding subspecies is neither consulting, nor attempting to create, such a standard.
There's no consistent way to refute racialist category formation without also refuting other commonly held categories such as species or subspecies.
This is so fucking dumb it hurts to respond to it. Differences in actual scientific definitions of inter-species variation do not justify arbitrary definitions of interracial variation. Literally no one cares whether categories are eo ipso refutable.
And don't stalk me weirdo!
You're getting paranoid about me noticing your posts when you're clearly an alt-right larper? Time to get banned, asshole.
Given something like the species problem, what is the justification for calling something like any species concept an "actual scientific definition" versus calling a racialist category an "arbitrary definition"? Is it just "lots of western scientists from the post-WW2 era agree with me"?
Based on research done and concepts fleshed out over decades vs making declassed white lumpen-petitbourgeoisie feel good about their increasingly precarious status within late-stage capitalism.
The original conceptions of race weren't about some white people with economic anxiety, they were an attempt to categorize the obvious differences in humans by people with a genuine interest in fields like taxonomy.
No.
A lot of the same voices which categorized humans into races and developed early taxonomy came up with the same categories and principles of categorization you're defending such as the traditional species concept.
The origin of the concept per se is irrelevant in the context of human beings because there are actually a lot of those from many cultures and eras, all of which have undergone dramatic changes stemming from class/racial/economic/political conditions (as opposed to any real evidence). Also worth mentioning - tedious fuckwad incels like you would be at the bottom of pretty much all of them.
You are actually hopelessly dumb. LOL. Bye.
Thank you for choosing to discuss these incredibly important issues of our time with me.
this is extremely epic also
shriekingviolet posted:i find lesswrong kind of fascinating sometimes because its a really cool case of symbol referent confusion. they have this idiotic aesthetic idea of what intelligence is supposed to look like and they find that superficial likeness so compelling that the actual work of coherent thinking is discarded as a wasteful digression.
yeah i was thinking a while back, when I was teaching myself about the farce shit-show pseudo-sub-discipline of "catastrophic risk" and encountering some of these guys' names for the first time, how that exact development, that same aesthetic fixation over the most sweaty and grimy aesthetics, was probably a big reason why such people dove into the pipeline from '60s Western Trot parties, etc. into the "neoconservative" racket when they had the support within their class to do it, instead of just becoming granola-company Todd Gitlin Democrats to push the same politics from a softer comfort zone.
it was the most insecure nerds among the types who shape their affect completely around the anxiety everyone feels that they'll say something and be proven wrong by someone who knows more, and take up Marxism to act that out because of some accident of circumstance, which isn't peculiar to Marxism in any way, really. that gives them little time and energy for e.g. understanding what Marx or Lenin are saying somewhere and engaging with it, because they're caught up in the panic that they don't understand it instantly and they'll be shamed in public for it, and the result is, they think all knowledge is sophistry, but they'll arrive at something defensible and substantial if they build enough crenelations on their own fragile ego.
so now they see witch-hunting campus Marxists, alongside cretinous Krauthammer-level "realist" foreign [policy] punditry, as easy street for them, because they're still making poor arguments that don't do anything but appeal to excitable types, but they think they're leveraging the knowledge that everything's just like that, deep down, convincing themselves their time shouting at people from behind a hash pipe was just preparing them for their true calling. i speak in the present tense because, sure, younger people fitting that description are out there on "The Left" today, though i don't know where they'll end up exactly.
there's a counter-current to this, and I think it's a cheap and easy and very old opportunity for people on "The Left" to practice self-loathing by howling that this counter-current doesn't exist, which is big on the Internet but which people did long before the Internet existed, and that howling's not only objectively wrong but shameful. the counter-current is how it's at least a relatively easier fit for people who stay in socialist circles to think, Okay, I'm good at this, and this person's smart about that, and I don't have to be the best at something for it to be a good idea to apply myself there, and it doesn't mean I can't get better at other things, because it's just generally more compatible with trying to stick with those politics rather than flee them.
it's what you and c_man are talking about in the other thread and I agree with, I'm better at stacking chairs and taking minutes than I am at knowing about the movement of the dinar or whatever. even when it comes to org work, i know prison books programs and tear gas procedure and various anarcho-teen stuff, i'm not a membership-drive expert or a wizard of the mass line. but admitting that and using a bit of economics to understand the value of the relative benefit i can provide where i can, that frees me up to learn more of the stuff i don't know and not be exactly as stupid and useless about it later.
Edited by cars ()
cars posted:was probably a big reason why such people dove into the pipeline from '60s Western Trot parties, etc. into the "neoconservative" racket when they had the support within their class to do it, instead of just becoming granola-company Todd Gitlin Democrats to push the same politics from a softer comfort zone.
it was the most insecure nerds among the types who shape their affect completely around the anxiety everyone feels that they'll say something and be proven wrong by someone who knows more, and take up Marxism to act that out because of some accident of circumstance, which isn't peculiar to Marxism in any way, really. that gives them little time and energy for e.g. understanding what Marx or Lenin are saying somewhere and engaging with it, because they're caught up in the panic that they don't understand it instantly and they'll be shamed in public for it, and the result is, they think all knowledge is sophistry, but they'll arrive at something defensible and substantial if they build enough crenelations on their own fragile ego.
so now they see witch-hunting campus Marxists, alongside cretinous Krauthammer-level "realist" foreign punditry, as easy street for them, because they're still making poor arguments that don't do anything but appeal to excitable types, but they think they're leveraging the knowledge that everything's just like that, deep down, convincing themselves their time shouting at people from behind a hash pipe was just preparing them for their true calling. i speak in the present tense because, sure, younger people fitting that description are out there on "The Left" today, though i don't know where they'll end up exactly.
yeah on the local level I'm seeing an explosion (in radical left terms, so like a dozen) of young extremely zealous trots who are very excited to talk to you constantly about who they've read and can't explain a fucking thing about what they've read.
I used to know the local Trot Boss and he was a nice enough reasonable guy once you got past the goofy ideas, he wasn't shy about his classic trot contempt for the reds in the city but considered fighting with them to be foolish counterproductive bullshit. a year or two ago they replaced him with some lunatic from out of town (probably CSIS lol) and now it's fucking crazy, they spend all their time and energy on red bashing and send a flight of winged monkeys to harass every public event, and the sick horny glee on their faces is real disturbing.
... I read a local favorites cookbook because I'm domestic as fuck these days, gonna try out some recipes this week
cars posted:it was the most insecure nerds among the types who shape their affect completely around the anxiety everyone feels that they'll say something and be proven wrong by someone who knows more, and take up Marxism to act that out because of some accident of circumstance, which isn't peculiar to Marxism in any way, really. that gives them little time and energy for e.g. understanding what Marx or Lenin are saying somewhere and engaging with it, because they're caught up in the panic that they don't understand it instantly and they'll be shamed in public for it, and the result is, they think all knowledge is sophistry, but they'll arrive at something defensible and substantial if they build enough crenelations on their own fragile ego.
so now they see witch-hunting campus Marxists, alongside cretinous Krauthammer-level "realist" foreign punditry, as easy street for them, because they're still making poor arguments that don't do anything but appeal to excitable types, but they think they're leveraging the knowledge that everything's just like that, deep down, convincing themselves their time shouting at people from behind a hash pipe was just preparing them for their true calling. i speak in the present tense because, sure, younger people fitting that description are out there on "The Left" today, though i don't know where they'll end up exactly.
a certain person who will go unnamed went through some nasty stuff in an org and started saying well demcent is the problem. to me that seems very wrong. seems to work outside the us! everyone has a different objection to leninist politics. one of my more academic ex-wwp friends is going on about how "utopianism" is the issue. none of it seems even remotely close to a good objection, and is clearly motivated by disappointment in not having their narcissistic aspirations fulfilled. you expected the wrong thing from this, and its because you have social media damage and grew up in america. that said i am pessimistic about the us completely, though china is extremely epic and going to save the world, and im going to move there if i ever get an opportunity
c_man posted:Reminder that the lesswrong guy wrote a retelling of harry potter if harry was a libertarian
so just harry potter
Her momma was a famous pop singer which goes a way in explaining the adventurism. She later went to jail again for insider trading in the early 2000s which is so stereotypical for the new left right
Edited by marlax78 ()
Bablu posted:is torkil lauesen's the global perspective worth blowing 40 bucks on?
kersplebedeb
S P L
E B E
D E B
Bablu posted:is torkil lauesen's the global perspective worth blowing 40 bucks on?
yeah its a great book imo (although i thnik the price when i bought is was quite a bit lower..?)
Crow posted:deadken posted:ehhh in the history of communism as Eternal Idea trotskyism is a p insignificant deviation, antirevisionists are right a lot of the time but theyre worrying about all the wrong shit
Lin Biao:
in the end, the essence of revisionism is the fear of death
sounds like they're worrying about the right shit to me
cool quote
marimite posted:typing lin biao into the rhizzone search bar and reading all the great posts
i really want to learn more about lin biao and his 'coup' and whether it really was fascist or whatever as claimed afterwards
one thing that stands out to me is how many of the characters are descended from aristocratic/pseudo-aristocratic families that are incompatible with the new, liberal order of st. petersburg and they either bend themselves to fit in or end up completely broken. even the 'good path' for raskoviskov's friend and sister is inherently parasitic -- translate foreign liberal books that they even acknowledge is mostly drivel into russian for the burgeoning petersburgian intelligentsia, well were did this new bourgeois get their money? from the blood of the proles and serf obv. staying afloat means becoming a willing adornment to a cruel and injust system, whchi is a relatable theme! but the real surprise for me was that the 'crime' of crime and punishment was
the patriarchy
seriously, every character that is portrayed as morally reprehensible, even undeserving of life, is motivated by a strong desire to control women. the two dudes what want to turn raskosikov's sister into a slave are the primary antagonists, and in a book where the morality of smash-and-grab murder is carefully considered they're held in basically unquestionable contempt. despite that, there really wasn't any good analysis of what to do with/about men like that other than instinctive disgust, which i suppose is a good place to start. there's a lot more obviously-- morality as a concept, how people deal with ambitions beyond their means, i honestly think the book made me start eating healthier in general because raskoviskov is fucking starving all the time and it stressed me out! i understood after i read it why dosto is known as a master craftsmen of writing.
in conclusion, the book is too friendly to it's cops. 2/5 stars.
* it's really fucking funny and balzac is a wizard. engels wasn't joking
* the depiction of intergenerational trauma sustained by commodity fetish cuts deeps
* we can only assume eugene's ambitionz to conquer bourgeois paris and rise above the fetish would have failed just like balzac failed and just like everyone who attempts such a thing is doomed to fail
'May the Father who created man, curse him.--May the Son who suffered for us curse him.--May the Holy Ghost, who was given to us in baptism, curse him' (Obadiah)--'May the holy cross which Christ, for our salvation triumphing over his enemies, ascended, curse him.
'May the holy and eternal Virgin Mary, mother of God, curse him.--May St. Michael, the advocate of holy souls, curse him.--May all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers, and all the heavenly armies, curse him.' (Our armies swore terribly in Flanders, cried my uncle Toby,--but nothing to this.--For my own part I could not have a heart to curse my dog so.)
'May St. John, the Praecursor, and St. John the Baptist, and St. Peter and St. Paul, and St. Andrew, and all other Christ's apostles, together curse him. And may the rest of his disciples and four evangelists, who by their preaching converted the universal world, and may the holy and wonderful company of martyrs and confessors who by their holy works are found pleasing to God Almighty, curse him' (Obadiah.)
'May the holy choir of the holy virgins, who for the honour of Christ have despised the things of the world, damn him--May all the saints, who from the beginning of the world to everlasting ages are found to be beloved of God, damn him--May the heavens and earth, and all the holy things remaining therein, damn him,' (Obadiah) 'or her,' (or whoever else had a hand in tying these knots.)
'May he (Obadiah) be damn'd wherever he be--whether in the house or the stables, the garden or the field, or the highway, or in the path, or in the wood, or in the water, or in the church.--May he be cursed in living, in dying.' (Here my uncle Toby, taking the advantage of a minim in the second bar of his tune, kept whistling one continued note to the end of the sentence.--Dr. Slop, with his division of curses moving under him, like a running bass all the way.) 'May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in blood-letting!
'May he' (Obadiah) 'be cursed in all the faculties of his body!
'May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly!--May he be cursed in the hair of his head!--May he be cursed in his brains, and in his vertex,' (that is a sad curse, quoth my father) 'in his temples, in his forehead, in his ears, in his eye-brows, in his cheeks, in his jaw-bones, in his nostrils, in his fore-teeth and grinders, in his lips, in his throat, in his shoulders, in his wrists, in his arms, in his hands, in his fingers!
'May he be damn'd in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance, down to the very stomach!
'May he be cursed in his reins, and in his groin,' (God in heaven forbid! quoth my uncle Toby) 'in his thighs, in his genitals,' (my father shook his head) 'and in his hips, and in his knees, his legs, and feet, and toe- nails!
'May he be cursed in all the joints and articulations of the members, from the top of his head to the sole of his foot! May there be no soundness in him!
'May the son of the living God, with all the glory of his Majesty'--(Here my uncle Toby, throwing back his head, gave a monstrous, long, loud Whew-- w--w--something betwixt the interjectional whistle of Hay-day! and the word itself.--
--By the golden beard of Jupiter--and of Juno (if her majesty wore one) and by the beards of the rest of your heathen worships, which by the bye was no small number, since what with the beards of your celestial gods, and gods aerial and aquatick--to say nothing of the beards of town-gods and country- gods, or of the celestial goddesses your wives, or of the infernal goddesses your whores and concubines (that is in case they wore them)--all which beards, as Varro tells me, upon his word and honour, when mustered up together, made no less than thirty thousand effective beards upon the Pagan establishment;--every beard of which claimed the rights and privileges of being stroken and sworn by--by all these beards together then--I vow and protest, that of the two bad cassocks I am worth in the world, I would have given the better of them, as freely as ever Cid Hamet offered his--to have stood by, and heard my uncle Toby's accompanyment.
--'curse him!'--continued Dr. Slop,--'and may heaven, with all the powers which move therein, rise up against him, curse and damn him' (Obadiah) 'unless he repent and make satisfaction! Amen. So be it,--so be it. Amen.'
I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, my heart would not let me curse the devil himself with so much bitterness.--He is the father of curses, replied Dr. Slop.--So am not I, replied my uncle.--But he is cursed, and damn'd already, to all eternity, replied Dr. Slop.
(yes, the zionism in the intro is making me Squint but i think i could get something valuable out of it)
tryna learn some Ethics over here bc i realised recently just how politically confused i was
swampman posted:tristram shandy
lo posted:i really want to learn more about lin biao and his 'coup' and whether it really was fascist or whatever as claimed afterwards
I have no idea but I found an old (probably) CIA-produced book on this when rooting through the China section of my local bookstore. "The Conspiracy and Death of Lin Biao: How Mao's Successor Plotted and Failed" by Yao Ming-le which apparently alleges an elaborate coup plot and coverup. Published back in the eighties under an assumed name. The introduction was written by Stanley Karnow, a CFR member who married a woman who worked as a U.S. embassy attache in Algiers, so I assume the book was published for some kind of purpose. Kinda curious to know what it was.
Went with Marshal Peng Dehuai's memoirs instead.