/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

As someone not from the US, I felt it was a thing of the internet that I could ignore.

However, thanks to social networks and a government that, in its last years tried to (and to a great extent managed to) weaponize youth activism and ideological polarization, it seems to be on the rise. Now we have champagne socialist who claim to admire Sweden but want policy that's more like Venezuela, third wavers running around with their ebin premises and rethoric that make Neorreactionaries look like bright eyed optimists, watermelons (and genuine greens) prophecizing about GMOs, and other assorted goonies.

By now I'm just dreading the future, while trying to make a cozy space for myself free of that stuff. My hope is that eventually self interest will prevail, but virtue signaling has managed to have society (I don't want to say cucked, but you know what I mean) for long periods of time.

I read both sides and laugh. I wish I had a culture war discussion forum that wasn't dominated by either side, but that never seems to happen. I think the increasing culture war in recent years has been good for my internet drama supply.

I try to stay neutral and take in a balance of different sources, but feel like I've been drifting inexorably rightwards. I listened to the Horst Wessel Lied six times today and I'm not sure if it's still ironic.

The Culture Wars are usually such a US-centric internet thing that when I talk about politics in realspace with people in my own country, it feels like returning to civilian life at the end of a tour of duty and telling my war stories.

>>6701

>I wish I had a culture war discussion forum that wasn't dominated by either side, but that never seems to happen.

What about SSC?

>>6703

Scott is a weird case in that, while he agrees with the stated object level goals of one side, he seems to not like them (to be fair, they probably started). The comments section reflects this, to a degree, but comments sections are usually to the right of the blogger, so in general it's pretty skewed towards one side, even if the other is not banned and mocked by mere virtue of existing, as is customary in most places where these discussions happen.

I got into some nasty arguments with SJW types at my old job and quit partly because the corporate culture seemed in their favour. (Company was obsessed with diversity, or at least talking about it).

It's also added a lot of a stress to my life in general since if I'm not careful about filtering my news sources I can feel like I'm constantly under attack. Recently I've gotten better about unfollowing people who either disagree or agree with me too aggressively.

>How has it affected you?

Lost dear friends over it.

>Have you picked a side?

>implying

>How do you prevent yourself from descending into madness?

I don't. ;_;

>>6709

How do you prevent yourself from descending into madness at the knowledge that non-autistic humans exist?

>>6699

>How has it affected you?

I get scared reading about what tomorrow's leaders (University kids today) will believe. Actually, wait, scratch that, I mean today's leaders, since guys like Trudeau are fully on board with this stuff.

>Have you picked a side?

The side that's not them. I've started reading right wing blogs since 2013, but I don't really trust the nazi types either. /pol/acks are scaaaaary.

>How do you prevent yourself from descending into madness?

This was never an option.

>>6703

SSC is good. I don't like the comments on SSC, but the subreddit is entertaining, if a little small right now.

I feel like I'm incredibly deep in the culture war, and it affects an overwhelming majority of my discourse both over the internet and in real life.

Whiile I hail from the redder shade of the grey tribe, I honestly feel more like a Doctors Without Borders type of involvement.

"No bad reasoning/arguments" is my creed. And I will go in and perform my handiwork wherever I go.

I've gone deep enough into madness that as a lifelong atheist, I've been citing biblical scripture with regards to Paul "fighting the good fight" and understanding all the connotations he had in store with that statement.

>>6714

Where do you think we are?

>>6710

keeping to myself i guess. i'm used to being alone

>>6699

Can't say it's affected me or anyone I know is involved. Frankly, that makes me a little skeptical it's really a thing and not just people being melodramatic / paranoid.

>>6718

It's much more of a thing in some places (eg California tech industry, academia in general) than others.

Living in a big city in Canada feels like it's the heart of it. Scott Alexander showed me that I'm not completely insane. I don't live in the states but I would vote for Trump.

>>6720

>I would vote for Trump

Ah, so you *are* completely insane.

>>6721

>half the country

>completely insane

Enjoy your bubble faggot.

>>6721

I like how this is always the only type of argument ever made against Trump. His detractors are just utterly incapable of presenting a coherent argument.

>>6723

What's incoherent about "you're a faggot"?

>>6724

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in CFAR, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret AI box experiments, and I have lead hundreds, maybe thousands of people to better epistemic habits. I am trained in Timeless Decision Theory and I’m the top rationalist in the entire Less Wrong Community. You are nothing to me but just another game-theoretical agent. I will precommit to programming an AI to simulate wiping 3^^^3 copies of you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, or any Everett branch thereof, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of rationalists across the world and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that digitally represents wiping out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re probably fucking simulated, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can raise the sanity waterline in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with five minutes of thought. Not only am I extensively trained in cognitive biases, but I have access to the entire budget of MIRI and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the overton window you little shit. If only you could have known what Schelling fences your little “clever” comment was about to cross, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit reason all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking mindkilled, kiddo.

>>6726

>If elected, Donald Trump would make headlines for saying "outrageous" things… and that would be it. He has no particular knowledge of anything except the real estate market, and wasn't even that great at making money http://www.vox.com/2015/9/2/9248963/donald-trump-index-fund

This IS a meme, in the derogatory chan sense. They handwave over consumption, which has obviously been a pretty significant part of Trump's expenditures. also notice that they start their analyses right around the bottom of bad bear markets; that they assume Fred Trump gave his kids all his money in 1974 and continued living until 1999; and that it would have been trivial to sell several million worth of NYC real estate in order to invest the proceeds in the stock market.

>>6727

If you want a serious career politician in the white house, you should vote Gary Johnson, any other choice is a turd sandwich

>Donald "this meme train has no brakes" Trump

>Hillary "I have a vagina and your rights are merely a hurdle to my policy objectives" Clinton

>Jill "we should dismantle capitalism and go back to being hunter gatherers" Stein

Get real.

>>6730

>Gary "throw your vote away" Johnson

Shill harder faggot.

>>6731

It doesn't matter who you pick for president if you live in a solidly red or blue state, so you might as well pick a third party to increase their numbers and maybe show the mainstream parties that there's interest in libertarianism/socialism/etc.

>>6726

>Donald Trump is, essentially, a clown.

>implying this hasn't been true for every American president.

>If elected, Donald Trump would make headlines for saying "outrageous" things… and that would be it.

>implying this wouldn't be the best possible thing an American president could do.

Also nice way to contradict yourself:

>says Trump is running with no platform

>proceed to list several of his policy positions

>>6727

Yeah, what the world really needs right now is America going full speed ahead by choosing another establishment politician. Maybe they can start bombing another country in the Middle-East like Obama and Bush. We all saw how well that worked out.

>>6734

I didn't work out so badly, really. Not good, sure, but hardly catastrophic for us.

>>6736

What do you think that's going to do for Middle East stability? Or your country's for that matter? By all means be bleeding heart, but be a smart one.

>>6735

Sure man, imagine if the US hadn't turned Lybia into a failed state half controlled by ISIS affiliates and viable springboard for the nigger invasion of Europe.

>but hardly catastrophic for us

>us

Are you a kike by chance?

>>6734

I'm sure Hillary 'War is good for business' Clinton wouldn't invade a country in the Middle East like her predecessors. She's after all a democrat, and they never do anything bad. Just look at Obama.

>>6735

helot / dalit / vaisya / brahmin / optimate

hillary / trump / trump / hillary / ???

welfare / wage / salary / tenure / revenue

notice anything?

>>6740

> notice anything?

You have way too much time on your hands if you read through enough of that crap to figure out all of Yavin's pretentious jargon.

>>6738

What you want is a long slow decline of the US, not for it to be burned to the ground. Or at least that's what you'd want if you were smart. But one shouldn't expect patience out of children I guess.

>>6741

> replying to my post on an anonymous rationalist imageboard

pot, meet mirror

>>6743

If any of these posts were tens of thousands of words of turgid prose you can bet I wouldn't read them either.

>>6744

the class post in question is neither long nor turgid, so at this point it's evident you're either impatient or simply thick.

>>>/leftypol/

>>6746

>It's irrational to vote anyway

Do you even TDT?

https://blog.jaibot.com/everyday-superrationality/

>>6746

> announcing updates like we care

> arguing globalist consequentialist heuristics

> thinking voting is irrational

> rejecting the best class model in recent history

can you be any more of a sperg? gb2lw and gossip about the group politics of your shemale polydungeon

>>6748

Why do you even use this website?

>>6749

why are you even this mad?

>>6727

I'd choose Trump over Hillary simply on the basis that I find her so repugnant as a person that I want to rob her of her shot at being the historical First Girl President. (Trump actually strikes me as a pretty fun guy, his egocentrism's probably easier to deal with than Yud's.)

More importantly, though, I really, really want to save America and especially American women from having Hillary Clinton be the female equivalent of Washington, forever. You can't take that shit back.

>>6753

You've got to shade your bid to compensate for the winner's curse.

Consider: Hillary is already viewed as boring now, despite her good chance of being the first women president. In a future where she wins, you must consider how utterly mainstream having a woman president will seem, and how unlikely it is that Hillary will even come close to being Washington in terms of the reverence of future people.

>>6754

Ah, sorry, bad communication on my part.

I obviously agree with you that there's no earthly way Hillary would receive a Washingtonian reverence; that was kind of my whole point. Is this boring technocratic machine politician *really* the person you want to be the first female president? I'd rather it was someone legitimately impressive than a basically evil rich woman loooking for self-glorification and (I suspect) to somehow prove herself to be her husband's equal (even though she obviously isn't since Bill carried all before him with ease and she probably can't even beat a cartoon man).

>>6726

>If elected, Donald Trump would make headlines for saying "outrageous" things… and that would be it.

Here is a list of things he could plausibly do even without approval from senate/congress, YMMV but most of them sound pretty bad to me: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-kleiman/donald-trump-damage_b_11402038.html

>>6756

Yeah, I meant he wouldn't do anything, not that he couldn't do anything.

But I failed to predict that Trump's (alleged) real strategy was "choose a real Republican as VP so he can do the presidentin'". Thus, I must change my prediction to "a Trump presidency would be bad".

>>6756

3,4,5,6,9, and 11, all of these are either actively happening, if not to the same people, or so close to happening that it doesn't matter (11 in which he would require employers stop making public statements to do a thing they are not actually required to do).

Regarding many others there's no apparent reason to believe he'd do that? He's never in his life as far as I can tell trash talked the voting rights act so why would he end enforcement?

#1 is one of the most realistic but

still essentially a strawman, Trump has said anything climate change denialist since before his campaign started. He's clearly not shut up for the sake of his popularity.

At the far end of the scale he promised never to order the military to torture anybody, so number 15 is especially strawmanny.

Then of course there's the ones that are 'terrible thing will happen if the US military doesn't take care of every problem in the world.' I'm simply not willing to take this seriously but I could understand people feeling differently.

At this point I think I've demonstrated that the article is dishonest to the point I'll he's actually likely to do, isn't an Obama policy Clinton will probably continue, or pure panic mongering, so people can see how bad a Trump presidency would actually be:

12 (the first 11 I excluded!): Block all refugees (more specifically he said Muslim ones, and more recently Muslim ones that won't endorse gay rights).

13. Wreck the Affordable Care Act (he's said he wants to replace it with something else, its conceivable he'll sabotage the existing system in order to make that easier to push through).

Aaaaand that's it unilaterally. The non unilateral list has some worrying points to, specifically the supreme court justices (he's talked about developing a shortlist with input from the Heritage foundation), and I think his tax plan is a mess? I only vaguely recall that.

>>6758

>3,4,5,6,9, and 11, all of these are either actively happening, if not to the same people, or so close to happening that it doesn't matter

Can you give examples of these which are "actively happening" under the Obama administration? For example, with 3, Obama hasn't banned Fox News from press conferences.

>(11 in which he would require employers stop making public statements to do a thing they are not actually required to do).

What do you mean? There is an executive order saying federal contractors can't discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity, see http://www.familyequality.org/_asset/9zh089/Federal-Contractor-EO-FAQ.pdf , 11 is saying Trump could change that. I don't think he would personally have any great desire to allow contractors to discriminate against gay and transgender people, but this is the sort of thing he might do as a sop to the evangelicals (like other examples at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelangelo-signorile/no-lgbt-people-arent-exempt-from-donald-trump_b_9318108.html ), especially if he plans to leave a lot of policy details to Mike Pence.

>He's never in his life as far as I can tell trash talked the voting rights act so why would he end enforcement?

Trump does in general want to make it more difficult to vote, supporting voter ID laws that are known to discourage a lot of low-income people who don't have drivers' licenses from voting, and eliminating same-day registration (see http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/heres-what-donald-trump-thinks-about-voting ). It's true he hasn't said anything specifically about the voting rights act that I could find, but I think the suggestion that he just wouldn't try very hard to enforce it is plausible.

>>6758 (continued)

>#1 is one of the most realistic but

still essentially a strawman, Trump has said anything climate change denialist since before his campaign started.

Presumably you meant to write "*hasn't* said anything climate change denialist"? If so that's not true, if you just google "trump global warming" the top search result is http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/03/hillary-clinton/yes-donald-trump-did-call-climate-change-chinese-h/ which lists numerous examples of him saying he doesn't believe in global warming both before and after he began his campaign (on June 16 2015). For example:

>On Dec. 30, 2015, Trump told the crowd at a rally in Hilton Head, S.C., "Obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and … a lot of it's a hoax. It's a hoax. I mean, it's a money-making industry, okay? It's a hoax, a lot of it."

>In addition, he said on the Sept. 24, 2015, edition of CNN’s New Day, "I don’t believe in climate change."

>And on Jan. 18, 2016, Trump said that climate change "is done for the benefit of China, because China does not do anything to help climate change."

He even talked specifically about the Paris Accords, suggesting he'd almost certainly back out of them:

>In a high-profile speech on energy policy in North Dakota on May 26, 2016, Trump attacked "draconian climate rules." He advocated rescinding "all the job-destroying Obama executive actions, including the Climate Action Plan" and said he would "cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs."

>"President Obama entered the United States into the Paris Climate Accords unilaterally and without the permission of Congress," Trump said. "This agreement gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use right here in America."

>At the far end of the scale he promised never to order the military to torture anybody, so number 15 is especially strawmanny.

Only because he says he doesn't define waterboarding as torture, unlike pretty much all of the international community. Anyone who doesn't think it's torture should try being waterboarded themselves, like Christopher Hitchens did: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/08/hitchens200808

Also, he is quoted at http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/06/29/donald-trump-vows-torture-again-i-waterboarding-lot saying he'd like to do "a lot more" than waterboarding, hard to interpret that as anything but inflicting worse forms of physical pain:

>The presumptive Republican nominee has previously embraced the torture technique, saying in the last Republican presidential debate before the New Hampshire primary, "I would bring back waterboarding, and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding."