this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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The highlight for me is coming up with some weird pseudoscience justification for why it’s okay to hit your kids.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (3 children)

"Malcolm had a turbulent childhood that he clearly doesn’t want to talk about. He comes from a wealthy family and grew up in Dallas, but was sent to a “troubled teen” residential facility when he was 11. The only reason he can give me for being sent there was that his parents were getting divorced and were locked in a bitter custody dispute, and the judge “thought I shouldn’t be with either parent”. After that, he lived at a private boarding school, with his fees and expenses covered by a family trust. “I have no beef with my parents. My childhood was hard, but my adulthood has been easy. Can I say a parent did a bad job if I’m happy with my life today? I don’t think so.” "

L to the O to the motherfucking L. These people are just reacting to their trauma and acting like they've found some magical answer to life being hard. Their poor children.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Every article on pronatalism in the past few years has been these two Thiel-sponsored white nationalist dweebs and nobody else. Why the fuck does the Guardian fall for this shit too.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

@dgerard

I contacted the reporter via her website, to ask what motivated the story when the Guardian just wrote about them last year, and if the couple's PR rep (who I assume exists) had instigated it.

I don't really expect to hear back but it sure would be interesting to know.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's worth noting in the Grauniad's defence that the piece which mentioned them (among others) last year wasn't a commissioned interview article, it was a column by Arwa Mahdawi. Columnists usually have a regular gig to write opinion pieces on some topic relevant to their interests and then submit them for publication -- in other words, they don't have an editor telling them to go and cover something, they write about what they feel like writing about even if it turns out to be at odds with the paper's editorial policy (e.g. Simon Jenkins, who is a Guardian columnist despite regularly expressing some highly un-Guardian-reader views). As Mahdawi is a columnist who regularly focuses on feminist issues and the United States this would be entirely within her field of interest.

Still doesn't mean these people deserve yet more coverage, though. I hope their kids get out of this toxic family having suffered as little harm as possible from a mother who apparently thinks that the only solution to "cheap, good-quality snowsuits bought from Russia" not fitting when you're pregnant is dressing like a tradwife and a father who really doesn't seem to like them and who does an abuse in front of a journalist which he thinks he can just explain away with pseudoscientific bullshit as "hey, that looked like abuse but it wasn't, it was SCIENCE".

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

some weird pseudoscience justification for why it’s okay to hit your kids.

It is to me so weird how often this comes up. A big plot point in starship troopers (the book) was that due to not hitting kids (and a vague handwave at criminals but mostly kids) western democracies fell for example.

Now I wonder how the NRx with their pro corporal punishment stance (which iirc Scott liked) feel about hitting kids.

Im also annoyed at how much words are written about the Collins. Stop promoting these doofuses. (They have come up in sneerclub before)

E: a thing I was wondering about, with the pronatalist technofetishists, who say that both we will all die out by lack of births as old people starve, and who fetishize AGI and robot labour causing a post scarcity world, that seems contradictory, I wonder how the Rationalists deal with this contradiction.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (14 children)

Im also annoyed at how much words are written about the Collins. Stop promoting these doofuses. (They have come up in sneerclub before)

Apologies. First time poster, all that stuff.

The corporal punishment thing is a weirdly Anglophone obsession -- assaulting (sorry, "smacking") your kids has been a crime here since 1977 and the kids seem to be alright as well as having the bonus of being less likely to have grown up surrounded by violence and the threat of violence. In 7 years here I've seen exactly one person hit a child in public (looked a lot like a visiting grandma from elsewhere) and it came as a real shock. The more the Collins types (and, of course, fundie types) try to justify this as "normal" the less normal it appears to everyone else.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Starship troopers was written in 1959 so it predates the ban by a bit at least. (I assume there was already research on it being bad in the works then, as ST goes out of its way to decry the social sciences as fake research, but their moral system which is based on math (never explained in the book, which is prob good as it would be highly contradictory, as going to war to save a few POWs is seen as just, no matter the number of lives lost) is correct. It is a really weird book to read in 2020).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

I've actually read Starship Troopers a long time ago and it's probably not too far out of line politically from other "silver age" SF. Heinlein had a weird career...

FWIW from memory Samuel R Delany (Black gay SF author) wrote somewhere that the realization that Johnny Rico was from the Philippines (he speaks Tagalog near the end) was very liberating for him personally as a form of inclusion. And Heinlein could probably truthfully state the only way he was "racist" was he was against the Bugs but for the entire human race.

The movies' lack of any PoC character whatsoever was probably Verhoven's way of playing with the Nazi imagery.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Valley Forge, PA

Yep, checks out.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

hmm I don't actually know the context here, mind sharing?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

York and the surrounding counties are currently very much a culture war battleground. There’s a bunch of school board initiated censorship, bomb threats against libraries (and then subsequent defunding of those unless they promise not to do anything that could cause offense to domestic terrorists), that sort of thing. (Edit: forgot to mention the hate tracker, some more stuff I didn’t think I wanted to know about my own neighbors)

That crap is done by people and I imagine these folks are among those doing it, and so are their friends and neighbors.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

City very much in the heart of Pennsyl-Tucky

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

@Kata1yst

Not really? It's just the Philadelphia suburbs. 14 miles northwest of where I saw Fishbone and Primus.

Pennsylvania gets a looooot more Pennsyl-tucky than that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

“Suburbs of Philadelphia” is pretty funny to me - it’s a 2:15+h car ride there from Philly. Americans might consider 100 miles a short commute, but dang. When does a part of PA stop being a Philly suburb and start being a Pittsburgh suburb?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

@antifuchs

50 miles, not 100 miles.

25 miles each way is not that big of a deal. In college I spent six months commuting 40 minutes each way (traffic gods willing it wouldn't be longer) from 31st street to Springhouse, PA.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Fair. I always thought of Pennsyl-Tucky was more a state of mind/politics rather than an area, but I'm not a local and haven't been in the area for years so I'm inclined to believe you.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Ah these are the dudes with the unbelievably cringe Reddit dating history.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (5 children)

The Collinses are atheists; they believe in science and data, studies and research. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement

This is just gonna be eugenics, isn’t it?

Malcolm describes their politics as “the new right – the iteration of conservative thought that Simone and I represent will come to dominate once Trump is gone.”

What’s that now? Neo-alt-right? You can’t just add another fucking prefix anytime your stupid fascist movement goes off rails.

One of the reasons why I chose to have only have two children is because I couldn’t afford to give more kids a good life; the bigger home, the holidays, the large car and everything else they would need.

Yeah, what about giving them love or a warm relationship, or, you know, time?

And then they wonder why those generations have shitty relationships with their parents when they seriously believe that what they need is a big fucking car, as if that’s the variable that was missing in all of this.

Excuse me while I go and hug my daughter. I need to de-rationalize myself after reading this.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

What’s that now? Neo-alt-right?

I assume it is neoreaction. Not sure if you are a recent poster here, or were aware of sneerclub when it was on reddit but we talked about NRx there every now and then. (Not a fan).

I don't know if the Collins are NRx, what I do know is that neoreactionary podcasters love the Collins. (According to a quick google search). And bonus for David Gerard, Grimes has reached out to the Collins source is the grimezs long post on Grimes her links to all this shit

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Well damn, I used to lurk on old sneer club, but I gotta admit I missed that particular rabbit hole so far.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (3 children)

they are sponsored by Thiel, so 'ave a bleedin' guess

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

I love how the journalist just reprints their reskinned Great Replacement theory at face value.

And importing people from Africa to support a mostly non-working white population – because you didn’t put in labour to support non-working white people – has really horrible optics.

Ah, so the reason you’re concerned about falling white birth rates and don’t want immigration is because it’s racist to allow “people from Africa” to immigrate to your country. Got it.

I appreciate that the journalist was shocked by the bad parenting but I’d have appreciated a little more fact checking on the naked racist conspiracies.

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