cornflake

joined 2 years ago
[–] cornflake@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago

Oh they have a nuance budget but they used it all up this year justifying Israeli war crimes

 

This Bruenig follow up to his recent drubbing of Kelsey Piper was entertaining, but it got me thinking about just what she is now gesturing at.

She contends that cash welfare does not really help much. She presents a few recent studies showing null results for cognitive and health outcomes. She doesn’t present an explicit framework for evaluating whether a particular welfare policy is good, but implicitly adopts an evaluative framework that says welfare programs can be deemed good or bad by looking at the extent to which they promote human capital and related indicators.

I argue that we should look to the more traditional goals of the welfare state: eradicating class difference and social alienation, reducing inequality and leveling living standards, compressing and smoothing income and consumption, providing workers and individuals refuge and independence from coercion by reducing economic dependence on the labor market and the family, among other things.

Now the frame Piper used was relatively banal in the neoliberal era. Everything was about "equality of opportunity, not outcome." But wait a minute, isn't Piper in an IQ-obsessed cult? I thought genetic differences determine people's human capital, and that she was one of the good ones that says "yes and" we should throw a few bones at the dullards for their misfortune. She's also a market fundamentalist that presumably understands that her preferred political economic arrangements lead to ever greater pre-transfer inequality.

When you start with a left hereditarian and take away their commitment to welfare, because in certain RCTs it doesn't change people's human capital enough (a thing they believe is mostly immutable), what does that make her?

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I missed our friend Kelsey Piper joining the fray deep in this quote tweet thread and crashing out defending Big Yud: https://xcancel.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1954785099964383313

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not your main point, but the "this is an ancient feud" line is a mystifying trope. Jews lived in peace and safety among Muslims (and Christians) all around the Levant all the way through the Ottoman era, especially compared to their brutal persecution in Europe. The precipitating shift was modern Zionism, a European settler colonial project with an explicit goal of displacing the inhabitants of Palestine to create a supermajority ethnic Jewish state.

 

The rats would love to have a coherent position on the Palestinian genocide but there's just no one from the polycule that's written about it in their nerd blogs so they're all going to have to continue rejecting all evidence.

After being admonished by Paul Graham for baselessly questioning the veracity of a Palestinian child saying goodbye to their dying father, Yud writes

Why do you believe that any of this is true? Serious question. I haven't been able to find any blog with two serious nerds fighting it out, each side says the other side's stuff is all fake, and each side has compelling instances of other-side stuff being fake.

Aella too finds this all very confusing due to the low IQ of everyone with an opinion

I do really wish someone smart and good at critical thinking would sit down and invest a lot of research into which claims by both sides are accurate and which are propaganda. This would be so good for the world

Nathan Young is also Spartacus, and none of your mean taunts to "open a newspaper" will change that

I respect Eliezer’s public confusion here. I too am confused and struggling to find good sources to understand Gaza.

Nor does people yelling at me make me believe them more.

The important thing is that they are actually very open minded and unbiased and will figure this all out someday when the mass graves are exhumed.

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago

This Thiel interview clip is amazing

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

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

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 2 points 2 months ago

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

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 1 points 4 months ago

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

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 14 points 5 months ago (9 children)

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

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

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

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago

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

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 18 points 6 months ago (8 children)

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

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

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

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

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

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

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)
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