Notices by KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li), page 2
-
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 31-Dec-2017 03:00:57 UTC 
KFist
@moonman @lnxw48a1 @clacke @lain
>poison the food
>people have crazy hormonal imbalances and increasingly dysfunctional genitals
>"gender is a spectrum" -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 20:20:25 UTC
KFist
@lain >guy who regularly came into morning classes drunk and/or hungover, skipped evening classes, and was generally a lost cause
>one morning he came into class on crutches with his feet bandaged to fuck because he spent the previous night drunk, ran away from the cops, lost his shoes and socks along the way somehow, jumped over a fence into some glass, passed out, and found himself in the hospital with fucked-up feet the next morning
>three years later after accidentally knocking someone up and forced into a shotgun wedding, he's a proud and responsible father of two, happily married, with a nice house, and a steady job
>girl in the same class, really smart, kinda cute, basically a librarian type, but you can tell there's something fucked up underneath
>she marries the next year, but proudly announces on social networks that she never wants kids for reasons
>three years later she's divorced, undergoing CBT and on a bunch of meds for bipolar disorder and clinical depression, and her main hobby is adopting terminally ill dogs that die a month later
You might be on to something. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1103245 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 24-Dec-2017 04:08:50 UTC
KFist
Today's Unlucky Item:
The ever present signs and notices plastered over everything by the State of California loudly and proudly proclaiming that everything in the state either causes or is made of cancer. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 15-Dec-2017 02:09:49 UTC
KFist
@delores @se7en Here you go. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1076349 https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1076352 https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/743072 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2017 06:35:21 UTC
KFist
https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1060958 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 01-Dec-2017 05:01:43 UTC
KFist
@awg @delores @rye @partial
Did someone say long excerpts?
I thought about it during the last session of our class in History and Moral Philosophy. H. & M. P. was different from other courses in that everybody had to take it but nobody had to pass it - and Mr. Dubois never seemed to care whether he got through to us or not. He would just point at you with the stump of his left arm (he never bothered with names) and snap a question. Then the argument would start.
But on the last day he seemed to be trying to find out what we had learned. One girl told him bluntly: "My mother says that violence never settles anything."
"So?" Mr. Dubois looked at her bleakly. "I'm sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that. Why doesn't your mother tell them so? Or why don't you?"
They had tangled before - since you couldn't flunk the course, it wasn't necessary to keep Mr. Dubois buttered up. She said shrilly, "You're making fun of me! Everybody knows that Carthage was destroyed!"
"You seemed to be unaware of it," he said grimly. "Since you do know it, wouldn't you say that violence had settled their destinies rather thoroughly? However, I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea - a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue - and thoroughly immoral - doctrine that 'violence never settles anything' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms."
He sighed. "Another year, another class - and, for me, another failure. One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think." Suddenly he pointed his stump at me. "You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?"
"The difference," I answered carefully, "lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not."
"The exact words of the book," he said scornfully. "But do you understand it? Do you believe it?"
"Uh, I don't know, sir."
"Of course you don't! I doubt if any of you here would recognize 'civic virtue' if it came up and barked in your face!"
...
"This very personal relationship, 'value,' has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him . . . and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts that 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.
"Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain." He had been still looking at me and added, "If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier . . . and much richer. As it is, with some of you, I pity the poverty of your wealth. You! I've just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy?"
"Uh, I suppose it would."
"No dodging, please. You have the prize - here, I'll write it out: 'Grand prize for the championship, one hundred-meter sprint.' " He had actually come back to my seat and pinned it on my chest. "There! Are you happy? You value it - or don't you?"
I was sore. First that dirty crack about rich kids - a typical sneer of those who haven't got it - and now this farce. I ripped it off and chucked it at him.
Mr. Dubois had looked surprised. "It doesn't make you happy?"
"You know darn well I placed fourth!"
"Exactly! The prize for first place is worthless to you . . . because you haven't earned it. But you enjoy a modest satisfaction in placing fourth; you earned it. I trust that some of the somnambulists here understood this little morality play. I fancy that the poet who wrote that song meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other than with money - which is true - just as the literal meaning of his words is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion."
...
I found myself mulling over a discussion in our class in History and Moral Philosophy. Mr. Dubois was talking about the disorders that preceded the breakup of the North American republic, back in the XXth century. According to him, there was a time just before they went down the drain when such crimes as Dillinger's were as common as dogfights. The Terror had not been just in North America - Russia and the British Isles had it, too, as well as other places. But it reached its peak in North America shortly before things went to pieces.
"Law-abiding people," Dubois had told us, "hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons . . . to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably - or even killed. This went on for years, right up to the war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony. Murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault, and vandalism were commonplace. Nor were parks the only places - these things happened also on the streets in daylight, on school grounds, even inside school buildings. But parks were so notoriously unsafe that honest people stayed clear of them after dark."
I had tried to imagine such things happening in our schools. I simply couldn't. Nor in our parks. A park was a place for fun, not for getting hurt. As for getting killed in one - "Mr. Dubois, didn't they have police? Or courts?"
"They had many more police than we have. And more courts. All overworked."
"I guess I don't get it." If a boy in our city had done anything half that bad . . . well, he and his father would have been flogged side by side. But such things just didn't happen.
Mr. Dubois then demanded of me, "Define a 'juvenile delinquent.' "
"Uh, one of those kids - the ones who used to beat up people."
"Wrong."
"Huh? But the book said - "
"My apologies. Your textbook does so state. But calling a tail a leg does not make the name fit 'Juvenile delinquent' is a contradiction in terms, one which gives a clue to their problem and their failure to solve it. Have you ever raised a puppy?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did you housebreak him?"
"Err . . . yes, sir. Eventually." It was my slowness in this that caused my mother to rule that dogs must stay out of the house.
"Ah, yes. When your puppy made mistakes, were you angry?"
"What? Why, he didn't know any better; he was just a puppy.
"What did you do?"
"Why, I scolded him and rubbed his nose in it and paddled him."
"Surely he could not understand your words?"
"No, but he could tell I was sore at him!"
"But you just said that you were not angry."
Mr. Dubois had an infuriating way of getting a person mixed up. "No, but I had to make him think I was. He had to learn, didn't he?"
"Conceded. But, having made it clear to him that you disapproved, how could you be so cruel as to spank him as well? You said the poor beastie didn't know that he was doing wrong. Yet you indicted pain. Justify yourself! Or are you a sadist?"
I didn't then know what a sadist was - but I knew pups. "Mr. Dubois, you have to! You scold him so that he knows he's in trouble, you rub his nose in it so that he will know what trouble you mean, you paddle him so that he darn well won't do it again - and you have to do it right away! It doesn't do a bit of good to punish him later; you'll just confuse him. Even so, he won't learn from one lesson, so you watch and catch him again and paddle him still harder. Pretty soon he learns. But it's a waste of breath just to scold him." Then I added, "I guess you've never raised pups."
"Many. I'm raising a dachshund now - by your methods. Let's get back to those juvenile criminals. The most vicious averaged somewhat younger than you here in this class . . . and they often started their lawless careers much younger. Let us never forget that puppy. These children were often caught; police arrested batches each day. Were they scolded? Yes, often scathingly. Were their noses rubbed in it? Rarely. News organs and officials usually kept their names secret - in many places the law so required for criminals under eighteen. Were they spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage."
(I had reflected that my father must never have heard of that theory.)
"Corporal punishment in schools was forbidden by law," he had gone on. "Flogging was lawful as sentence of court only in one small province, Delaware, and there only for a few crimes and was rarely invoked; it was regarded as 'cruel and unusual punishment.' " Dubois had mused aloud, "I do not understand objections to 'cruel and unusual' punishment. While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment - and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. Why should society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mechanism? However, that period was loaded with pre-scientific pseudo-psychological nonsense.
"As for 'unusual,' punishment must be unusual or it serves no purpose." He then pointed his stump at another boy. "What would happen if a puppy were spanked every hour?"
"Uh . . . probably drive him crazy!"
"Probably. It certainly will not teach him anything. How long has it been since the principal of this school last had to switch a pupil?"
"Uh, I'm not sure. About two years. The kid that swiped - "
"Never mind. Long enough. It means that such punishment is so unusual as to be significant, to deter, to instruct. Back to these young criminals - They probably were not spanked as babies; they certainly were not flogged for their crimes. The usual sequence was: for a first offense, a warning - a scolding, often without trial. After several offenses a sentence of confinement but with sentence suspended and the youngster placed on probation. A boy might be arrested many times and convicted several times before he was punished - and then it would be merely confinement, with others like him from whom he learned still more criminal habits. If he kept out of major trouble while confined, he could usually evade most of even that mild punishment, be given probation - 'paroled' in the jargon of the times.
"This incredible sequence could go on for years while his crimes increased in frequency and viciousness, with no punishment whatever save rare dull-but-comfortable confinements. Then suddenly, usually by law on his eighteenth birthday, this so-called 'juvenile delinquent' becomes an adult criminal - and sometimes wound up in only weeks or months in a death cell awaiting execution for murder. You - "
He had singled me out again. "Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house . . . and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken - whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead. Comment, please?"
"Why . . . that's the craziest way to raise a dog I ever heard of!"
"I agree. Or a child. Whose fault would it be?"
"Uh . . . why, mine, I guess."
"Again I agree. But I'm not guessing."
"Mr. Dubois," a girl blurted out, "but why? Why didn't they spank little kids when they needed it and use a good dose of the strap on any older ones who deserved it - the sort of lesson they wouldn't forget! I mean ones who did things really bad. Why not?"
"I don't know," he had answered grimly, "except that the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves 'social workers' or sometimes 'child psychologists.' It was too simple for them, apparently, since anybody could do it, using only the patience and firmness needed in training a puppy. I have sometimes wondered if they cherished a vested interest in disorder - but that is unlikely; adults almost always act from conscious 'highest motives' no matter what their behavior."
"But - good heavens!" the girl answered. "I didn't like being spanked any more than any kid does, but when I needed it, my mama delivered. The only time I ever got a switching in school I got another one when I got home and that was years and years ago. I don't ever expect to be hauled up in front of a judge and sentenced to a flogging; you behave yourself and such things don't happen. I don't see anything wrong with our system; it's a lot better than not being able to walk outdoors for fear of your life - why, that's horrible!"
"I agree. Young lady, the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong - half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry. The more earnest they were, the farther it led them astray. You see, they assumed that Man has a moral instinct."
"Sir? But I thought - But he does! I have."
"No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind. These unfortunate juvenile criminals were born with none, even as you and I, and they had no chance to acquire any; their experiences did not permit it. What is 'moral sense'? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. This truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere verifiable; it is the single eternal imperative controlling everything we do."
"But the instinct to survive," he had gone on, "can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. Young lady, what you miscalled your 'moral instinct' was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children, when you have them. Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale. And so on up. A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive - and nowhere else! - and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts."
"We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race - we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: 'Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.' Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing.
"These juvenile criminals hit a low level. Born with only the instinct for survival, the highest morality they achieved was a shaky loyalty to a peer group, a street gang. But the do-gooders attempted to 'appeal to their better natures,' to 'reach them,' to 'spark their moral sense.' Tosh! They had no 'better natures'; experience taught them that what they were doing was the way to survive. The puppy never got his spanking; therefore what he did with pleasure and success must be 'moral.'
"The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand - that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their 'rights.' "
"The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature."
Mr. Dubois had paused. Somebody took the bait. "Sir? How about 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'?"
"Ah, yes, the 'unalienable rights.' Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What 'right' to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What 'right' to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of 'right'? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's right is 'unalienable'? And is it 'right'? As to liberty, the heroes who signed that great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called 'natural human rights' that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
"The third 'right'? - the 'pursuit of happiness'? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can 'pursue happiness' as long as my brain lives - but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it."
Mr. Dubois then turned to me. "I told you that 'juvenile delinquent' is a contradiction in terms. 'Delinquent' means 'failing in duty.' But duty is an adult virtue - indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a 'juvenile delinquent.' But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents - people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail."
"And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of 'rights' . . . and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure." -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Nov-2017 15:41:07 UTC
KFist
@azurolu I like how people treat generalizations as inherently and fundamentally incorrect in every situation because there are always generalization-defying outliers, as if a few extreme values in a large dataset make the statistical properties of said dataset fundamentally meaningless. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 19-Nov-2017 22:57:45 UTC
KFist
@augustus This is basically a good case study for the dangers of using rudimentary machine learning and markov chains to generate content or single-mindedly meet a goal. It's why there should be a high level of being careful about defining the goals and a large amount of thinking about just what a given learning algorithm will do.
It might absolutely annihilate the goals you set for it and become extremely efficient at what you created it for, but the resulting codebase and thought processes will be incomprehensible to humans. Sometimes the answers, even if you do understand them, might be insanely uncomfortable to realize. This machine learning algorithm had one goal: Achieve highest amount of ad revenue from Youtube Kids videos, using keyword-oriented video creation and tagging mechanisms. That's what it got.
You also see it in other fields. AIs which are optimized to find the objectively best candidates for a job negatively select against demographics such as recidivists or niggers. AIs that are optimized to identify objects based on visual characteristics and a shitton of keyword-linked criteria end up identifying a group of black faces as gorillas.
This is apparent to pretty much anyone who's done any amount of work on anything as basic as sequential solution-finding in response to a numerically complex ill-defined set of problems knows this. One of my friends from uni went on to do his Master's and Ph.D at Purdue on aerospace engineering. As proof-of-concept for one of his solution-finding techniques, he set up one of these machine-learning algorithms and told it to find the most energy-efficient way to replicate a SpaceX first-stage landing: start from a high altitude with a given speed, and arrive at a spot with a certain vertical and horizontal velocity, at a certain orientation, using a certain amount of energy deliverable by a single-vector source without "restarting the engine" or exceeding a given speed. There were a certain amount of aerodynamics simulations too.
One thing he forgot to add in was the ground. He thought a solution which involved going below the ground would be energy-inefficient due to gravitational potential energy considerations, but forgot about the aerodynamics fiddliness he programmed in. The program spent 7 hours crunching everything, only to give him a path which overshot the landing pad by a few hundred meters, went through the ground, and did a spiral burn down and around the pad, before popping up out of the ground and doing a perfect landing. The parameters as set up made the algorithm maximize control surface lift and take advantage of the elevation/pressure-dependent characteristics of the engine. Having no ground limitation (just a 'finish at at x,0' condition) made that possible. Technically it was the most energy-efficient solution, but it wasn't a useful one.
I have a feeling that machine learning and AIs will keep finding maximally efficient solutions to the problems they tackle, but they won't be useful to humans. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 19-Nov-2017 20:15:28 UTC
KFist
https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/998386 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Saturday, 11-Nov-2017 06:58:19 UTC
KFist
@dokidoki Every single experience I've had for the past few years makes me believe that souls are earned, not given freely upon birth. So many people are stuck in their little NPC loops, without anything to give to anyone, just living life in their own little ways without making an impact in anyone's life. But every now and then I meet someone with a genuine soul, who has earned their personality and their beliefs through the fires of experience and the pain of existential threat. Even if they disagree with me at fundamental levels, I can still respect them. At least they're interesting to talk with.
I have no idea why there's no real theological concepts on souls being earned and not freely given to everyone. It seems so obvious to me, in a metaphysical sense, yet there's no religious or spiritual traditions with those beliefs. Why is that? Have we not realized it until the internet age? Was it not apparent until it was possible to interact with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people? When confronted with the cultural accomplishments of millions who have never considered their place in life, and who are unlucky enough to never have had a spiritual awakening, have we encountered a new paradigm?
Every day I wrestle with these questions. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Thursday, 09-Nov-2017 18:06:21 UTC
KFist
Wonder if this works.
_,,....,,_ ＿人人人人人人人人人人人人人人人＿
-''":::::::::::::｀''＞ ゆっくりしていってね！！！ ＜
ヽ:::::::::::::::::::::￣^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^Ｙ^￣
|::::::;ノ´￣＼:::::::::::＼_,. -‐ｧ ＿_ _____ ＿_____
|::::ﾉ ヽ､ヽr-r'"´ （.__ ,´ _,, '-´￣￣｀-ゝ 、_ イ、
_,.!イ_ _,.ﾍｰｧ'二ﾊ二ヽ､へ,_7 'r ´ ヽ、ﾝ、
::::::rｰ''7ｺ-‐'"´ ; ', ｀ヽ/｀7 ,'＝=─- -─=＝', i
r-'ｧ'"´/ /! ﾊ ハ ! iヾ_ﾉ i ｲ iゝ、ｲ人レ／_ルヽｲ i |
!イ´ ,' | /__,.!/ V ､!__ﾊ ,' ,ゝ ﾚﾘｲi (ﾋ_] ﾋ_ﾝ ).| .|、i .||
`! !/ﾚi' (ﾋ_] ﾋ_ﾝ ﾚ'i ﾉ !Y!"" ,＿__, "" 「 !ﾉ i |
,' ﾉ !'" ,＿__, "' i .ﾚ' L.',. ヽ _ﾝ L」 ﾉ| .|
（ ,ﾊ ヽ _ﾝ 人! | ||ヽ、 ,ｲ| ||ｲ| /
,.ﾍ,）､ ）＞,､ _____, ,.イ ハ レ ル｀ ー--─ ´ルﾚ ﾚ´ -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Thursday, 09-Nov-2017 18:01:08 UTC
KFist
@shpuld @moonman @lain I liked this little gem. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/961986 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Monday, 06-Nov-2017 23:33:00 UTC
KFist
One of the best things about the internet is how you can have an argument about proper sandwichmaking with some dumb faggot on an IRC channel.
Not so much that you're having the argument or its subject matter, just the combination of the two being so commonplace and casual in nature so as to be somewhat colloquially unremarkable. The internet is truly amazing in its ability to bring together complete fucking retards from all corners of the globe and letting them argue about the stupidest fucking shit. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 03-Nov-2017 04:19:28 UTC
KFist
@hakui @fl0wn @zlg That's what I keep saying. If the word nazi gets banded around enough as a catch-all insult, then the word becomes meaningless and the cultural taboo against nazism crumbles to dust. Then people go "Eh, if I'm going to be called a nazi for something innocuous, why not look into what nazism was all about?"
And without the cultural conditioning, nazism becomes more appealing. Congratulations, by calling everyone a nazi, suddenly nobody's a real nazi, but somehow actual nazism is on the rise again. -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 29-Oct-2017 23:04:26 UTC
KFist
@augustus The ability for genuine introspection is difficult because it's akin to dying. In a sense, re-evaluating your entire worldview is like destroying the world you knew and replacing it with something new, unknown, and painful. In order to fit into that world, you have to change yourself, and if the change is drastic enough, it's essentially like destroying the old you. If you like the old you, or believe that the old you is the peak of virtuousness and morality, then to destroy the old you is akin to destroying all that's good in the world. This is key.
This is key because ultimately the fundamentally best thing anyone can do is aim towards the highest truth they can conceive and then embody and express it. Thus, they can become the highest truth they can conceive, and thereby become the best possible person. By definition, the best possible person has the most fulfilling life. It may be difficult, and sometimes difficulty might be an intrinsic requirement in being the best possible person, and to some that difficulty must be sought after (which is why you see a lot of proggos become absolute fanatics at riots and protests).
So to these proggos, just doing what they're doing is to embody the highest truth they can conceive. They're already at that point. Any tumults within their lives can be explained away as the struggle they must go through in order to achieve their utopia. They must preach and promulgate the good word, but if any serious resistance occurs, then they see that opposition as fundamentally flawed out of hand and worthy of being ignored.
To varying degrees, this holds true for just about any ideology. The difference between the proggo viewpoint and pretty much any other is that the proggo viewpoint completely ignores, denies, and seeks to discredit the very notion of an objective reality.
They use any and every excuse they can in order to avoid acknowledging the concept of objective realities. One that I found during my time in physics academia was escapism into pop-quantum mechanics. According to pop-QM interpretations, there's fundamentally nothing objective about reality because at the most fundamental level it's stochastic in nature. Meaning that it's inherently random, but that randomness has a structure. A lot of proggos stop there, and say "if everything's random, nothing has meaning, so everything is as good as the other, so there's no objective reality because there's only subjective realities" and once again they call upon their quasi-god Magical Scientician Somewhere.
But QM says that this randomness is predictable, modifiable to a surprising extent, and ultimately deterministic at scales large enough for every biological process that exists. Hence we have a hard objective floor on biology, thereby giving credence to biological determinism. From this, a whole bunch of things follow, including studies on IQ (or rather, the fundaments of intelligence), genetics, sex, race, evolutionary psychology, and species-inherent common sense.
Note how everything in that last sentence is the equivalent of persona-non-grata in proggo fields. To even acknowledge IQ as anything past the ability to do an IQ test makes you a non-person in a lot of proggo senses.
But to insinuate that the proggo worldview is wrong is so fundamentally threatening on so many levels that there's no other option than to ignore it entirely, for the sake of that person's very psychological existence and their current personality.
https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/867484 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Oct-2017 18:28:20 UTC
KFist
Found it! I love this post.
https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/920123 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Monday, 23-Oct-2017 23:59:53 UTC
KFist
https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/786785 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 13-Oct-2017 18:49:56 UTC
KFist
>Sweden just got another bullet redistribution of peace
>it's not even a major story because now it's happening every week there
>but they banned all guns tho https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/183161 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 13-Oct-2017 01:18:54 UTC
KFist
https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/878680 -
KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)'s status on Friday, 13-Oct-2017 00:48:17 UTC
KFist
@yuuko He has finally reached Gensokyo and met his waifu.
God bless you, Grape-kun. Thank you for showing us that waifus even reach across species. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/442381
All Bobinas P4G content and data are available under the 
