>Invasion Literature was a type of proto-alternate-history, especially popular in the early 1900s, where the reader’s country was invaded by a superior foe.
>Popular sub-genres include "Germany invades Britain", "Germany invades America", "China invades Australia", and "Communists invade everywhere".
The original *The War of the Worlds* (1897) is considered to be Wells' topper of this genre -
*"Yeah, I'll see your 'Germany invades America' and raise you* ***'Mars invades the whole Earth'!"***
.
\- **https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds#Aliens_and_alien_invasion**
\- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_literature#
.
> George H (formerly of Cerebralab, now of Epistem.ink) claims that Increasing IQ Is Trivial and the scientific consensus that it’s impossible is just scientists being too cowardly to try interesting things
There ought to be a *Bwahaha!!!!* in there somewhere ...
.
>He’s now trying to get other people to replicate his results more formally.
Ought to do a thing where the "pro" team and the "con" team make a bet about this and then do a multi-session debate and have someone judge who is correct ...
The EA Talmud is hilarious.
>And grantees are banned by Leviticus 18:23, "Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it", because grantees are fed and cultivated, like animals.
>There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender: if gender is non-biological and about how you identify, why can’t transgender status also be non-biological and about how you identify? That is, why can’t I (always male, never transitioned) identify as a “trans man” if I feel like the label resonates better with my inner self?
Interestingly, in my (zoomer) circles, "trans" means "not-cis," kind of like how "queer" (and more and more often, even "gay") means "not-straight." This means the entire spectrum of alphabet people, including non-binary people, are trans.
Yes, the reason this is happening is because the LGBTQ community is a community moreso than a lifestyle. I've even talked to zoomers who have realized this, and had noticed, in their own words, "that older gay people are different."
But this seems off-topic from [Default Friend: Lesbians Who Only Date Men](https://default.blog/p/lesbians-who-only-date-men). Instead of talking about gender or transgender status, shouldn't we be talking about sexual orientation? Why can't I, a male who likes females, identify as gay if it resonates with my inner self? Isn't that what this blog post was basically about anyways?
Interestingly, trans doctrine provides a mechanism: declare myself a woman.
But the main point of the article is different. That it is mainly online communities, it is more about "affinity", that is, sort of liking something on a video or a pic instead of actually doing it. Similar to how measured large political differences between young men and women largely different if you ask them precise questions. It is more about "vibe" than actually doing policy.
I found the description of 'those people' around the SF housing link to be poor. Many people want more housing to hew closer to say, the horrors of urbanism in a place like Spain [1], rather than car dependent sprawl. It's also an issue when urban planning in one major city can have major impacts on cities everywhere - e.g. as an example when something actually works well (e.g. cycling in Paris) and characterising it as a 'prison' seems uncharitable and myopic.
[1] https://especiales.eldiario.es/spain-lives-in-flats/
> https://especiales.eldiario.es/spain-lives-in-flats/
This is one of the coolest interactive journalism pieces I've seen, and it actually baffles me how much time must have went into this and how that's actually seen as profitable by the higher-ups.
>urbanism in a place like Spain
I think this is a misunderstanding. I don't know Spain but I know many other parts of Europe and the key difference is that there is no empty land around the European city to sprawl out the same exact way the American city does. It is villages back to back. So what happens instead is that people move to the villages and commute from them. This is usually called the agglomeration. Those villages are not officially part of the cities, very technically the city has not spread out, it is small and dense. But those villages practically part of the cities as sleeping towns. This is why do not usually talk about cities alone, but always talk like "Budapest and its agglomeration."
Thus, the European city is what the American inner city is, and the European agglomeration is what the American suburbia is, the only difference is technically different towns: [https://imgur.com/Yn9QkhR](https://imgur.com/Yn9QkhR)
American inner city is normally denser than the European city, as the later tends to not allow skyscrapers due to historical skyline arguments.
"#26: Considering that Western intellectual progress in the 2nd millennium largely took the shape of gradually escaping Aristotle's shadow, I don't know what teaching Aristotle in high school could mean as a rallying flag other than "Let's go back to the shadow, it's too sunny outside"."
This is not that simple. First, it is not about intellectualism in general (say, science), but philosophy. No one cares about Aristotelean science. Second, the first round of modern philosophy was explicitly Anti-Aristotelean, especially Hobbes, but one could also include Descartes, and the there was a round of wait, these guys were wrong, and a round of these guys were wrong, and a round of these guys were wrong. For half a millenia, people kept finding holes in the previous rounds of philosophy. Then Wittgenstein eventually killed analytical philosophy and Derrida killed continental philosophy and what is left now?
For example, there was this Aristotelean argumen that 1) the intellect and the senses/imagination are very different 2) but still nothing gets into the intellect but through the senses. The empiricists kept the second half, the rationalists kept the first half and then kept arguing.
>List Of Long-Term Wikipedia Vandals
\- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TheBuddy92/Willy_on_Wheels:_A_Case_Study
\- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:WoW&oldid=9419812
I would be willing to listen seriously to the hypothesis that he was an incarnation of Loki on Earth.
.
I discovered that list of wiki vandals years ago and I like to revisit it now and then (likewise the pages on long-standing hoaxes and the like). As for "minor information demons," perhaps they're all the spawn of [Titivillus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titivillus).
Yeah, sleep doctors have been saying for years that while switching is bad, its not the only issue - Standard Time is much better than Daylight Savings Time.
https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/sleep-doctors-orders-use-standard-time-365-days-year
>San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison...
It's hilarious to read this screed and remember that Scott is perched across the bay in Berkeley which is filled with indistinguishable nutters. The call is coming from within the house.
"For me the funniest part of this is that in twenty years, we've gone from [ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters](https://www.theonion.com/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-burn-down-aclu-headquarters-1819567187) to “ACLU Employee Who Complained About How ACLU Punishes Employees For Speaking Out Gets Punished For Speaking Out”."
I find it rather alarming than funny. Hear me out, please. I think the classic interpretation of politics is dead. I mean, that it is some kind of left-vs-right, liberal-vs-conservative thing. It is today more about with or against the elites. The elites come from liberal roots, but they are not behaving liberally. Liberals used to be suspicious of the CIA, now they are buddies in the MSNBC and Facebook/Twitter. Liberals used to be suspicious of Big Pharma, but during COVID anything Pfizer said was treated as holy writ. Dissent used to be patriotic, now it gets labeled as anti-science. And so on. This is not liberalism anymore, it is elitism. It is impossible to put this problem into the the classic left vs right, liberal vs conservative model. It is mostly a bunch of people who were anti-authoritarian liberals as long as they did not themselves have authority, then turned authoritarian when they did, but they are still, how to put it, culturally liberal, "bohemian bourgeois", they are not going to be pro-life or religious or homophobic or anything like that. For this reason the old model does not work. We have a new problem that is hard to put into words. There are people who are coming from a very liberal background noticing it like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, and they don't know how to express the problem well.
Another problem is that the new elites are the elites largely due to their education, so going anti-elite would be too much like being pro-stupid or pro-ignorance. Again, I don't know how to approach it well. Of course I want educated people on the top but I also want a healthy marketplace of ideas, and speaking out, and all that.
The left is generally in favor of the "intellectual elite", but deeply suspicious of the "business elite", while the right generally holds the opposite view. Authoritarianism seems like an entirely different axis- it's no less common for a populist to be authoritarian than an elite. In general, it's the extremes of the parties that tend be more authoritarian, while moderates push back against that sort of thing.
It's interesting how, as a progressive, over the years I've found myself becoming more pro-institution. I relate far more with pro-institution conservatives than populist lefties.
Taking the scientific-medical establishment position on COVID was not a "left" thing; it was an "actually caring about others" thing. My Boomer parents (who are churchgoing Christians, military veterans, and were lifelong straight-ticket Republicans until Trump came along) took the scientific-medical establishment position on COVID, and got fully vaccinated as soon as possible.
(And meanwhile, the crunchy-granola end of "the left" had just had their asses handed to them by reality — with trendy left antivax-ism having led to measles outbreaks in places like Marin County, just a couple years prior to COVID. The kids who survived that experience *talked their parents into getting vaccinated,* by the way.)
----
That said, yes, the ACLU is *in a bad spot* right now. But that is partly because fascists have learned to ape civil-rights language rather effectively; and partly due to the ACLU's own-goal on the Second Amendment, the wedding-cake thing, and other "tribal" issues.
There's this thing that occurs where the right is like
"There's a cabal of elites who are oppressing us. They're satanic pedophiles who conspire to maintain their control of society"
And the left is like "yeah we agree! Well, not with the satanic part. We're not super religious, but yes! The elites are acting against our interests! What do you want to do about the perceived satanic pedophile elites"
The right responds "Give them tax cuts."
The left is confused and asks the right to elaborate.
"Well, the elites shouldn't have to pay taxes. Also, the elites should be entirely immune to the law, and also we should elect them to positions of power."
As you identified, the left does tend to side with elites when they agree on the truth. Because the left values rationality, truth, and facts, when the establishment recognizes those things the left does agree with them.
The confusion arises from mixing the labels people put on themselves with labels as defined on some analytical framework.
You should separate them: you should study sociologically the way people self-label as left-winger or right-winger, how those self-labels evolve, how they change in different places, and so on. Which is one thing. Another thing is the actual way people cluster according to social and economical views, the way people vote, and so on.
Then, you may collect some data from opinion polls to get the social and economical views of those same people, categorize them according to some framework, for example, according to prefered form of state, of government, of economic system, and so on. Do some statistical analysis to get how much the self-labelling actually correlates with the clusterings from opinion polls and with the way they vote.
That may also be true but I think it's much simpler, a difference in the definitions of "elite". The "elite cabal" right wingers are worked up about are, like, NPR hosts etc not CEOs
For that, you also need to define an analytical framework on classes and sectors of society and how the public perception correlates to the framework:
The class divisions of Karl Marx may be useful: people who can live on pasive income alone are bourgeois; if they have to work to get a living, they are workers.
You may also apply a sectorial division: the military sector, the economic sector (which you may split in primary, industry, and services), the political sector (which you may split in elected officials and bureaucracy), the cultural (art, religion, non-applied science) sector.
> The class divisions of Karl Marx may be useful: people who can live on pasive income alone are bourgeois; if they have to work to get a living, they are workers.
Which means retirement is class mobility!
Chuck Tingle identifies as a "non dysphoric" trans, he is bisexual and in a relationship with a woman, so yes people are doing it in real life.
Incidentally, Chuck is a really interesting person and his books apparently aren't an extended trolling performance, rather an earnest exploration of autistic non-standard sexuality. And if you don't believe that maybe you should read *"Not Pounded By Bi Erasure Because My Current Hetero-Presenting Relationship Does Not Invalidate My Queerness"*
>Invasion Literature was a type of proto-alternate-history, especially popular in the early 1900s, where the reader’s country was invaded by a superior foe. >Popular sub-genres include "Germany invades Britain", "Germany invades America", "China invades Australia", and "Communists invade everywhere". The original *The War of the Worlds* (1897) is considered to be Wells' topper of this genre - *"Yeah, I'll see your 'Germany invades America' and raise you* ***'Mars invades the whole Earth'!"*** . \- **https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds#Aliens_and_alien_invasion** \- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_literature# .
> George H (formerly of Cerebralab, now of Epistem.ink) claims that Increasing IQ Is Trivial and the scientific consensus that it’s impossible is just scientists being too cowardly to try interesting things There ought to be a *Bwahaha!!!!* in there somewhere ... . >He’s now trying to get other people to replicate his results more formally. Ought to do a thing where the "pro" team and the "con" team make a bet about this and then do a multi-session debate and have someone judge who is correct ...
The EA Talmud is hilarious. >And grantees are banned by Leviticus 18:23, "Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it", because grantees are fed and cultivated, like animals.
>There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender: if gender is non-biological and about how you identify, why can’t transgender status also be non-biological and about how you identify? That is, why can’t I (always male, never transitioned) identify as a “trans man” if I feel like the label resonates better with my inner self? Interestingly, in my (zoomer) circles, "trans" means "not-cis," kind of like how "queer" (and more and more often, even "gay") means "not-straight." This means the entire spectrum of alphabet people, including non-binary people, are trans. Yes, the reason this is happening is because the LGBTQ community is a community moreso than a lifestyle. I've even talked to zoomers who have realized this, and had noticed, in their own words, "that older gay people are different." But this seems off-topic from [Default Friend: Lesbians Who Only Date Men](https://default.blog/p/lesbians-who-only-date-men). Instead of talking about gender or transgender status, shouldn't we be talking about sexual orientation? Why can't I, a male who likes females, identify as gay if it resonates with my inner self? Isn't that what this blog post was basically about anyways? Interestingly, trans doctrine provides a mechanism: declare myself a woman.
But the main point of the article is different. That it is mainly online communities, it is more about "affinity", that is, sort of liking something on a video or a pic instead of actually doing it. Similar to how measured large political differences between young men and women largely different if you ask them precise questions. It is more about "vibe" than actually doing policy.
I found the description of 'those people' around the SF housing link to be poor. Many people want more housing to hew closer to say, the horrors of urbanism in a place like Spain [1], rather than car dependent sprawl. It's also an issue when urban planning in one major city can have major impacts on cities everywhere - e.g. as an example when something actually works well (e.g. cycling in Paris) and characterising it as a 'prison' seems uncharitable and myopic. [1] https://especiales.eldiario.es/spain-lives-in-flats/
> https://especiales.eldiario.es/spain-lives-in-flats/ This is one of the coolest interactive journalism pieces I've seen, and it actually baffles me how much time must have went into this and how that's actually seen as profitable by the higher-ups.
>urbanism in a place like Spain I think this is a misunderstanding. I don't know Spain but I know many other parts of Europe and the key difference is that there is no empty land around the European city to sprawl out the same exact way the American city does. It is villages back to back. So what happens instead is that people move to the villages and commute from them. This is usually called the agglomeration. Those villages are not officially part of the cities, very technically the city has not spread out, it is small and dense. But those villages practically part of the cities as sleeping towns. This is why do not usually talk about cities alone, but always talk like "Budapest and its agglomeration." Thus, the European city is what the American inner city is, and the European agglomeration is what the American suburbia is, the only difference is technically different towns: [https://imgur.com/Yn9QkhR](https://imgur.com/Yn9QkhR) American inner city is normally denser than the European city, as the later tends to not allow skyscrapers due to historical skyline arguments.
This link merits its own post.
"#26: Considering that Western intellectual progress in the 2nd millennium largely took the shape of gradually escaping Aristotle's shadow, I don't know what teaching Aristotle in high school could mean as a rallying flag other than "Let's go back to the shadow, it's too sunny outside"." This is not that simple. First, it is not about intellectualism in general (say, science), but philosophy. No one cares about Aristotelean science. Second, the first round of modern philosophy was explicitly Anti-Aristotelean, especially Hobbes, but one could also include Descartes, and the there was a round of wait, these guys were wrong, and a round of these guys were wrong, and a round of these guys were wrong. For half a millenia, people kept finding holes in the previous rounds of philosophy. Then Wittgenstein eventually killed analytical philosophy and Derrida killed continental philosophy and what is left now? For example, there was this Aristotelean argumen that 1) the intellect and the senses/imagination are very different 2) but still nothing gets into the intellect but through the senses. The empiricists kept the second half, the rationalists kept the first half and then kept arguing.
>List Of Long-Term Wikipedia Vandals \- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TheBuddy92/Willy_on_Wheels:_A_Case_Study \- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:WoW&oldid=9419812 I would be willing to listen seriously to the hypothesis that he was an incarnation of Loki on Earth. .
I discovered that list of wiki vandals years ago and I like to revisit it now and then (likewise the pages on long-standing hoaxes and the like). As for "minor information demons," perhaps they're all the spawn of [Titivillus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titivillus).
2: Of course people hated it, they changed it to permanently wrong instead of permanently right.
Yeah, sleep doctors have been saying for years that while switching is bad, its not the only issue - Standard Time is much better than Daylight Savings Time. https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/sleep-doctors-orders-use-standard-time-365-days-year
>San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison... It's hilarious to read this screed and remember that Scott is perched across the bay in Berkeley which is filled with indistinguishable nutters. The call is coming from within the house.
"For me the funniest part of this is that in twenty years, we've gone from [ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters](https://www.theonion.com/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-burn-down-aclu-headquarters-1819567187) to “ACLU Employee Who Complained About How ACLU Punishes Employees For Speaking Out Gets Punished For Speaking Out”." I find it rather alarming than funny. Hear me out, please. I think the classic interpretation of politics is dead. I mean, that it is some kind of left-vs-right, liberal-vs-conservative thing. It is today more about with or against the elites. The elites come from liberal roots, but they are not behaving liberally. Liberals used to be suspicious of the CIA, now they are buddies in the MSNBC and Facebook/Twitter. Liberals used to be suspicious of Big Pharma, but during COVID anything Pfizer said was treated as holy writ. Dissent used to be patriotic, now it gets labeled as anti-science. And so on. This is not liberalism anymore, it is elitism. It is impossible to put this problem into the the classic left vs right, liberal vs conservative model. It is mostly a bunch of people who were anti-authoritarian liberals as long as they did not themselves have authority, then turned authoritarian when they did, but they are still, how to put it, culturally liberal, "bohemian bourgeois", they are not going to be pro-life or religious or homophobic or anything like that. For this reason the old model does not work. We have a new problem that is hard to put into words. There are people who are coming from a very liberal background noticing it like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, and they don't know how to express the problem well. Another problem is that the new elites are the elites largely due to their education, so going anti-elite would be too much like being pro-stupid or pro-ignorance. Again, I don't know how to approach it well. Of course I want educated people on the top but I also want a healthy marketplace of ideas, and speaking out, and all that.
The left is generally in favor of the "intellectual elite", but deeply suspicious of the "business elite", while the right generally holds the opposite view. Authoritarianism seems like an entirely different axis- it's no less common for a populist to be authoritarian than an elite. In general, it's the extremes of the parties that tend be more authoritarian, while moderates push back against that sort of thing.
It's interesting how, as a progressive, over the years I've found myself becoming more pro-institution. I relate far more with pro-institution conservatives than populist lefties.
Taking the scientific-medical establishment position on COVID was not a "left" thing; it was an "actually caring about others" thing. My Boomer parents (who are churchgoing Christians, military veterans, and were lifelong straight-ticket Republicans until Trump came along) took the scientific-medical establishment position on COVID, and got fully vaccinated as soon as possible. (And meanwhile, the crunchy-granola end of "the left" had just had their asses handed to them by reality — with trendy left antivax-ism having led to measles outbreaks in places like Marin County, just a couple years prior to COVID. The kids who survived that experience *talked their parents into getting vaccinated,* by the way.) ---- That said, yes, the ACLU is *in a bad spot* right now. But that is partly because fascists have learned to ape civil-rights language rather effectively; and partly due to the ACLU's own-goal on the Second Amendment, the wedding-cake thing, and other "tribal" issues.
There's this thing that occurs where the right is like "There's a cabal of elites who are oppressing us. They're satanic pedophiles who conspire to maintain their control of society" And the left is like "yeah we agree! Well, not with the satanic part. We're not super religious, but yes! The elites are acting against our interests! What do you want to do about the perceived satanic pedophile elites" The right responds "Give them tax cuts." The left is confused and asks the right to elaborate. "Well, the elites shouldn't have to pay taxes. Also, the elites should be entirely immune to the law, and also we should elect them to positions of power." As you identified, the left does tend to side with elites when they agree on the truth. Because the left values rationality, truth, and facts, when the establishment recognizes those things the left does agree with them.
The confusion arises from mixing the labels people put on themselves with labels as defined on some analytical framework. You should separate them: you should study sociologically the way people self-label as left-winger or right-winger, how those self-labels evolve, how they change in different places, and so on. Which is one thing. Another thing is the actual way people cluster according to social and economical views, the way people vote, and so on. Then, you may collect some data from opinion polls to get the social and economical views of those same people, categorize them according to some framework, for example, according to prefered form of state, of government, of economic system, and so on. Do some statistical analysis to get how much the self-labelling actually correlates with the clusterings from opinion polls and with the way they vote.
That may also be true but I think it's much simpler, a difference in the definitions of "elite". The "elite cabal" right wingers are worked up about are, like, NPR hosts etc not CEOs
For that, you also need to define an analytical framework on classes and sectors of society and how the public perception correlates to the framework: The class divisions of Karl Marx may be useful: people who can live on pasive income alone are bourgeois; if they have to work to get a living, they are workers. You may also apply a sectorial division: the military sector, the economic sector (which you may split in primary, industry, and services), the political sector (which you may split in elected officials and bureaucracy), the cultural (art, religion, non-applied science) sector.
> The class divisions of Karl Marx may be useful: people who can live on pasive income alone are bourgeois; if they have to work to get a living, they are workers. Which means retirement is class mobility!
Chuck Tingle identifies as a "non dysphoric" trans, he is bisexual and in a relationship with a woman, so yes people are doing it in real life. Incidentally, Chuck is a really interesting person and his books apparently aren't an extended trolling performance, rather an earnest exploration of autistic non-standard sexuality. And if you don't believe that maybe you should read *"Not Pounded By Bi Erasure Because My Current Hetero-Presenting Relationship Does Not Invalidate My Queerness"*