king-of-men

[king-of-men]

Ok... why does it exist? Like, what's the actual answer to this rhetorical question?

#government #come to the ancap side #we have free-market cookies whose quality is ensured by the reputation of the baker #you are so close! #why does it exist? #indeed! why does it?!

[king-of-men]

Say the sentence "The War in Iraq reduced Islamic extremism as a political movement" out loud and try not to laugh.

This is fair, but it also seems relevant to mention that there was a time when Islamic extremism as a military-political movement controlled quite an impressive swathe of Syria and Iraq, and then got hammered flat by the US occupation garrison plus local auxiliaries. And since then it does seem to me that we've heard somewhat less about Islamic extremism, at least as a major terrorist threat reaching into European cities. So, that's not directly and straightforwardly the war in Iraq but it does seem to grow out of it. I think you the argument that American military engagement in the Middle East, or perhaps even the GWOT generally, did eventually reduce the attraction of Islamic fundamentalism at least so far as armed jihad goes, passes the laugh test.

Oh lets drag up some more 2000's politics debates - Noah Smith had this take today:

So bait is bait, but I think this fun bait, I'll take this. Its a definition game (what does "win" mean) but that can still be elucidating.

There is obviously a sense in which the US won the War in Iraq - which is extremely easy to reveal by looking at Afghanistan! Unlike there, where the explicit, named enemy of the US outlasted us, overthrew our imposed regime, and took power, in Iraq it is true that the country is currently governed by the system the US built, and it rules with relative stability. Not ideal, but hey its not Syria or anything. This would in fact be *shocking* to people in the 2000's - back then the general vibe was that Iraq would descend into full-on civil war. People openly discussed throwing in the towel and just letting the country split in three. And then all of that just fizzled out over time, and people started buying into the system. Its not glorious "nation building" but it looks like it stuck. It is fair to say that Iraq is not in fact a disaster case study in the nation building timeline (from an outcomes standpoint, from other lens like humanitarian its different), and its often unfairly seen that way.

But there is just no coherent definition of "win" divorced from strategy, divorced from goals. Imagine if the US today jointly invaded Israel & Gaza both, and hey throw in Hezbollah too, what the fuck ever (Pro tip: don't do this) with the goal of setting up governments that did whatever the fuck they wanted, don't care, as long as they don't attack each other anymore. And we got Iraq today as a result? Eh, I won't fight you too hard if you call that a win. This magical funland scenario hit the target, right? The US wanted to de-escalate regional conflicts in the region, it did that. How nice a place those are to live or w/e wasn't the point.

In Iraq, "not falling apart" was not the goal. The goal was end Sadaam's WMD program, which well raincheck on that, but moving on was also to End Terrorism by Sending a Message to other enemy countries like Iran and also building a beacon of secular, liberal democracy in the Middle East to show the people that there was a better path to Islamic Fundamentalism, thus reducing its strength in the region.

It Did Not Do That.

Man, can I not emphasize enough how much it did not do that, how much the War in Iraq did not reduce the strength of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East. It is literally, not figuratively-literally but actually-literally, one of the greatest own goals in the history of strategy since war has existed. I have explained that part in more detail too often in the past to repeat, but do I even need to? Say the sentence "The War in Iraq reduced Islamic extremism as a political movement" out loud and try not to laugh. You can't, its too absurd to get past your lips.

From that lens, the proper lens, I do not think you can call the War in Iraq a win. How stable Iraq is, while a dodged bullet for its people, barely scratches the surface of what would need to be shown to call it a win; and I see precious few nails that can join it.

#recent unhappy nearby things #ideology counts - but it does the counting with a sword #middle eastern conflict

[king-of-men]

I think the Tumblr 'For you' algorithm is getting subtly better, or at least less hilariously terrible; I posted about this couplet a couple of days ago and here it is on my dash. And I'm also seeing 'poetry translation' posts that I didn't before; it's almost as though Tumblr has caught up with the height of 2012 tech and can now do literal string matching on tags! Or maybe they added some AI?

The British poet and politician Hilaire Belloc summed it up nicely in 1898:

Whatever happens we have got

The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

"Why the West Rules – For Now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future" - Ian Morris

#tumblr meta

[king-of-men]

Refractal, stylus on rainbow paper, January 2023.

#refractal #rainbow paper #january 2023 #art of the children of men

[king-of-men]

Don't recall how I first found it, but I followed the Sequences as they were first written on Overcoming Bias, and argued physics with the sage Yudkowsky in the comments.

Fellow rationalist-adjacents: How did you find yourself orbiting this particular little subculture originally?

I found @ozymandias271‘s twitter when @pervocracy linked about them leaving the Good Men Project, and got sucked into rationalist twitter after that. When twitter completely broke their UI for the kinds of conversations I liked to have, I migrated to tumblr.

#kom is an old #alla youse noobs can get offa my dash #do not speak to me of reading the sequences #for I was there when they were written

[king-of-men]

Rereading some Sequences, as one does, and came across this gloss on Orwell:

If you wish to imprison people for years without trial, you must think of some other way to say it than “I’m going to imprison Mr. Jennings for years without trial.”

But that appears to be optimistic. We are now, indeed, locking up Mr Jennings for years without either trial or euphemism. Either because he is an "enemy combatant", at Guantanamo; or because his trial in our clogged courts cannot be scheduled until three years from now, and he cannot afford bail, or we don't choose to grant it.

#recent unhappy nearby things #politics and the english language #I was there when they were written

[king-of-men]

I feel like this doesn't work as well as Facebiter Mike because someone with INT 30 ought to be capable of learning from their mistakes. An adult topaz dragon is supposed to have WIS 15 - not as sky-high as the INT, obviously, but still way way better than the average human. You can drop Axel down a good standard deviation from his species average and still have him be wiser than the average human. Which I admit isn't that high a bar, but come on; INT 30 plus above-average WIS ought not to be completely incapable of examining their own assumptions and worldview, or distinguishing ought from is.

So the Facebiter Mike post has really taken off. For those who haven't seen it, it's about an ancient white dragon who's the biggest, most dangerous villain in the area despite being (as dragons go) pretty dense. I decided to look up Mike's polar opposite.

Now, I don't have all my up to date 5th edition handbooks, and in any case I'm not looking for something super-obscure like epic planar dragons. In the old 3.5 Monster Manual, a newborn white dragon begins at Int 6 and a great wyrm white dragon tops out at Int 18. That latter score is still a genius by human standards! But for a dragon, Mike is fairly dumb. You've probably noticed that the chromatic dragons are all evil and the metallic dragons are all good. But there are also gem dragons, who are all neutral, and who in previous editions were all psionic. (And they probably still are, but psionics no longer has a separate system from magic in 5e.)

Topaz dragons are all chaotic neutral. A baby topaz starts off at Int 14, which is smarter than the average adult human, and a great wyrm peaks at *30*. The odds are that the most brilliant wizard your PCs have ever heard of has an Int score of maybe 26. Topaz dragons are inhumanly brilliant. This is what the MM says about their personality:

Topaz dragons tend to be unfriendly and selfish. Though they are not malevolent, their erratic behavior makes any dealings with them unpleasant and dangerous.

Here is the mighty dragon Axelysterizastshijyxxporentantrikaster. Out of necessity, we'll call him Axel. He hates it, but even his lowliest minions get to call him that or they'd all be dragon chow.

Axel is not evil...in theory. He can think of a million ways the hardscrabble feudal monarchies that rule most of his high-fantasy world could be improved, and he will happily explain them to you at length. He is smart enough to realize that improving the world will probably better his lot too, in the long run, and so he has many cleverly amoral schemes to bring that about. True, some of them involve political assassinations and/or mass murder, but those are details. All of them end with the recognition that he is the most important being on the planet...and why not? By all rights, Axel should probably already rule multiple planes as a semi-benevolent despot. He is twelve moves ahead of everyone else in political three-dimensional chess.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world is playing checkers.

All of Axel's complicated schemes are Batman gambits that founder on the failure of other people to live up to his sky-high standards. No one else in the world can fathom the spell diagrams that need to be set in place to implement his mass production system of self-driving flying carpets, and anyway they're over-engineered junk that require thread that can only be produced in one specific, highly-polluted demiplane. Give him the chance, and Axel will talk your ear off about the fallacies embedded in hereditary monarchy, and he's not wrong, but not only will he bore you to death, at the end of the day he's a libertarian, same as any other tech bro, and if you can't keep up with the magitech curve he sees no reason not to sell you to a meat-product farm to pay your debts. (The closest he ever got to humor was an accidental replication of the Monty Python bit about strange women in ponds distributing swords. He wasn't trying to make a joke and ate the councillors who laughed.)

In terms of his theoretical capabilities, Axel is the least effective overlord in more than three hundred separate Material Planes. Sure, he's ruled a few dwarven corporate states in his day; he's not an idiot. But ultimately they all founder on his completely unrealistic view of society, which veers between "everyone else is capable of living up to my capacity with a little work" and "everyone else is a lazy dumbass". He was once defeated singlehandedly by a kender warlock whose patron was a genie in a lamp because said warlock had no comprehension of the term "work ethic". Axel never gets anywhere close to being killed; if adventurers close in on him, he shuts up shop, leaving a false trail to one of several patsies set up well in advance. But deep in his scaly heart, he knows that one day he will perish of old age, his dreams utterly unfulfilled, because he's surrounded by idiots.

#dungeons & dragons #gem dragons #int is not wis but they are not completely unrelated either

[king-of-men]

Ok but I propose for consideration: "to marshal".

I know we have the word "nationalize", but really, the opposite of "privatize" should be "generalize".

#puns #fun with language #also my proposal outranks yours

[king-of-men]

I completely agree with this, except for the bit where it wants me to 'concede' that shelter is not a human right. Who's 'conceding' anything? Bro that's what I've been saying this whole time, that's my exact position from the get-go. You've got no rights that involve anyone else lifting a finger on your behalf.

if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right

#work beg steal or starve #there is no fifth alternative #and human rights do not change this #they just hide stealing or begging behind a veneer of middlemen #economics #modus ponens modus tollens

[king-of-men]

Sure, but the theorem specifies a "real, differentiable" function. That's already assuming away rather a lot of possible nastiness.

I love when a textbook has a theorem that is just the most obviously true shit, like girl I sure hope so, if that weren't true I think math would fall apart!

#mathematics #nitpicking verging on having an actual point

[king-of-men]

What if I am a Boeing employee?

wsb is so fucking funny actually

#boeing #insider trading #in that case my employment contract likely forbids me shorting the company #bad incentives #on the other hand they can't fire me on account of I quit #to live off the profit from shorting the shit out of them

[king-of-men]

Incorrect. If the Hamasi were 'operating' from an ambulance, that is, shooting from it or getting from one fighting position to another or otherwise using it for basically anything except transporting wounded, then they were in breach of the conventions and targeting them was entirely fair. Indeed if such misuse is routine then all ambulances become valid targets even if they happen to be actually transporting wounded at that moment.

Now, obviously you don't have to take the Israelis' word as gospel, maybe the Hamasi were indeed wounded and not abusing the Red Cross. That'll have to be figured out case by case. But the story they are giving would in fact be a defense at the Hague, if true and the trial was fair. The laws of war don't actually forbid the side you dislike from shooting people, believe it or not.

#Israel #war crimes #recent unhappy nearby things

[king-of-men]

This is more of a joke than a poem, but it took me about half an hour to create the video, and that's very much the right level of effort for today. And anyway it does rhyme and scan. I chose Gulf War images more or less at random, as the most recent war in which Western armies had a machine-guns-versus-spears level of technological advantage against an adversary that tried to fight open-field battles of formed regular units; and Bergen dialect because it comes most naturally to me, and also allows the formation "ha'kje" which formally-correct Oslo Norwegian would stiffen into "har ikke", spoiling the scansion.

Norwegian text:

Samme ka, så har dog vi maskingevær. Det ha'kje de.

#poem #poetry translation #english to norwegian #hilaire belloc #bellocs maksim #fun with language #kom translates poetry

[king-of-men]

The basic intuition at work is that short of the most apocalyptic return-to-the-stone-age scenarios there's always going to be some kind of money, that is to say, some good that everyone will accept in exchange for their labor because they expect that everyone else will accept it in turn. This solves the triple-coincidence-of-wants problem with barter: If I have chickens and want shoes, you have shoes and want beer, and some other guy has beer but wants chickens, there's a three-way trade we can make but it's not super trivial to discover - we all have to be at the market at the same time, or check very carefully through the bulletin board, or whatever. If we have money, then I sell my chickens to beer guy for money, take the cash to you to get shoes, and you take it to beer guy whenever you find convenient.

Now you're right that this 'money' stuff doesn't have to be gold, specifically. In POW camps in WWII it was cigarettes, ancient Egypt used grain, and of course in the US today it's entries in the central ledger of the Fed. But there's always some kind of money. And to be useful as money there's a couple of things you want:

Divisible - you can split it up easily. Chickens are not that great as money because it's difficult to make change.

Storable - doesn't rot easily. This is where precious metals really shine.

Testable, checkable - not easily forged, and you can quickly see how much a given piece is worth. This is why coins have ridged edges, so you can see at a glance that they're the standard weight and don't have any dust filed off; and why they have a standard weight in the first place so you can just count them and don't have to break out the scales.

Homogenous - any one piece is like another. Again, chickens are bad for this - if I owe you a chicken you'll be pissed if I give you the scrawniest one in my flock, except of course that you do the same thing whenever you get a chance.

Portable, easy to move around. Gold's good for this because even a little is quite valuable at current prices. Cows, less so.

Scarce - if anyone can pick it up off the street, why would they expect anyone to take it in trade? This is why, when I was a kid, my carefully thought-out scheme to use rubber bands as the base currency within our group of playmates, with specified rates of exchange against nails and blasting-wire, collapsed when someone's (wrecker! saboteur!) mother gave their child a whole bag full of the things.

These are the advantages of gold over things you can eat - and incidentally, it's actually kind of good if money is useless for anything else; the cigarette money of POW camps tended to go up in smoke, causing deflation until new care packages arrived.

So the bet is twofold: That After The Collapse there will still exist something-or-other that works as money, and that gold has a pretty good chance of being that something. The first one is basically a no-brainer, the second one isn't a certainty by any means but it's a perfectly reasonable bet. Personally I would actually put my ticket on silver, because gold is a little too scarce IMO - to get the this-is-money meme going, you want something that lots of people can lay their hands on, where you can reasonably expect that at any given moment most of the population has some. Silver "was money" over most of the world for much longer than the gold standard lasted! But that's a point of taste. Other people put their faith in ammunition, or cigarettes.

So I'm not very knowledgeable about this stuff or about economics in general but...from an economic perspective what is the point of gold? It seems to me like a lot of people who buy gold do it because they think that civilization/the modern economic system/the stock market are on the brink of collapse (funny how that always seems to be the case) and after The Collapse fiat currency will be worthless but gold will still be valuable.

And I just think. Even if you accept their premises (and I don't)...why would gold still be valuable after The Collapse? You can't eat gold. It doesn't have much tangible use (or at least there are plenty of other things with more tangible value than gold). Basically it seems like they think gold will be valuable because everyone will agree that it's valuable, which feels like exactly the same criticism they make of fiat currency!

I guess the other reason I've heard is to protect against inflation, which feels slightly more reasonable I guess. In any case though I just have a hard time believing that stashing gold bars under your bed is going to protect you if the economy collapses.

#economics #theory of money

[king-of-men]

Seems similar? In that it's a useful statement if you're doing cladistics (what's related to what?) or aquatic farming (can you milk it or eat its eggs?) but less so for marine biology (what things live in water?).

The IUCN criterion used to exclude Pluto and the other dwarf planets–that they don't clear their orbits–is very useful if you're studying how stellar systems form and evolve. From that perspective, the eight major planets really are in a different class from any other bodies in the solar system, and probably deserve their own name. But if you're doing "planetary" science–i.e. studying the bodies themselves–then it's completely irrelevant. As far as anyone knows, the size you have to be to clear your orbit doesn't form any kind of natural boundary where the dynamics of geology or atmospheric chemistry abruptly change. For that matter, one of the other IUCN criteria, that you have to be orbiting the sun directly, is also not that relevant.

This is the crux of why terminological conventions shouldn't be treated the same as other kinds of scientific knowledge. Even if you can make the claim that the convention is in some sense objective, it will still be contextual. Statements about utility always are. Statements of scientific fact, on the other hand, should at least be true (if not relevant) in any context, regardless of by what means or within what discipline they were discovered.

#science discussion

[king-of-men]

Rainbow Diamond, stylus on rainbow paper, January 2023.

#rainbow diamond #rainbow paper #january 2023 #art of the children of men

[king-of-men]

Why would Space Marines keep their dicks? (Any Space Marines.) They are warrior-monks who cannot reproduce with baseline humans anyway. For combat optimisation you obviously reabsorb those useless, vulnerable lumps and their humongous energy budget, and rewrite the relevant parts of the brain to do something useful like analyse the vast flood of data from the improved Eyeball Mark 2. If any hormones are needed to maintain muscle tone and aggression that can be supplied by the extra glands the geneseed is adding anyway, but it's hardly likely that the DIvine Emperor wasn't able to improve on the likes of testosterone. Chimpanzees have testosterone, or did before the Earth was turned full planetary city. If you're going to combat-optimise humans the reproductive system is obviously the first thing to go; the literal appendix is more useful.

No, see, they're not female space marines. It's a gene-seed thing. The aspirants are perfectly normal men, but they grow tits, lose facial hair, and have facial shape changes after implantation.

(And yes they still have dicks under the armor)

#40k #worldbuilding #the emperor protects #sometimes by combat-optimising his forces in ways those forces might not entirely endorse if they were free to speak HERESY and DEFEATISM #but they aren't so it's ok #anyway it makes them less susceptible to Slaaneshi influence