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.]
See our twin at Reddit
@sc_griffith everything they can spare except for what they spend on makeup, expensive glasses, leather knee boots and pocket squares?
This is a look at us aesthetic and I’m worried about the child she will no doubt film being delivered while she’s leaning on the kitchen table with her I don’t believe in hot water husband catching it as it comes out.
I wonder how Puerperal sepsis fits in with her lifestyle, it being authentic and all.
I think it's cute when siblings dress to match.
Yeah that lady and her son look real nice.
Gee, I wonder what about the time period from 2015 to 2020 would have prompted the transformation from “occasional youtuber who goofily wears fascinators and cute nerdy graphic tees” to “hugo boss chic”. Must have just been her own changing tastes, couldn’t possibly be related to anything else.
The video title "A Pragmatist's Take on Small Talk" would be much better if it were William James giving advice on navigating the social niceties. Step 1: this hat.
He looks like the child Taron Egerton's Eggsy and Scott Alexander
Fuck me, is that what Scott Alexander looks like?
I really don't like talking shit about people's looks. but the irony of him talking shit about other people's genes, my god. this guy looks like the annoying orange fucked a cue ball
There's an actual explanation in the original article about some of the wardrobe choices. It's even dumber, and it involves effective altruism.
It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.”
Yes and that’s obviously lies, as anyone who has grown up with limited income in a cold area can tell them. Cheap, warm clothing is not bought online (in the US) from Russia, and never from Etsy. In the US it’s bought — if you’re buying new at all! — from Target or Kohl’s or some other big chain. You get layers, you get things used when you can, and the cheapest way to dress warmly is the most normie, uninteresting clothes that are mass produced and sold in low end department stores.
Nothing they describe is practical or cheap. It’s cosplay Kinder, Küche, Kirche, and the journalist repeated it verbatim because she’s a chump.
But a tie is so cheap and keeps you warm!1!!.
They reek evil impersonators who'll try to rip people off. Rip vulnerable off.
And I don't even know who they are.
Grew up in fairly rural upstate New York, where you can expect lots of snow and you can unironically envy neighbors who have working Franklin stoves when the power goes out.
I can confirm all of the above, plus: if you are lucky enough to have an Army-Navy surplus store around, one of your handmedowns is likely to be an N3B parka. Definitely not Russian or German or stylish. But it will keep everything above your thighs warm, except your hands. The pockets are uninsulated.
Oh man, I once bought the most glorious winter coat at an army-navy store. Lightweight, cheap, and so warm.
Once I had money I discovered the glory of high-quality thermals, but if you don't have money and live in a cold house, you try to keep at least one room warm with a lot of closed doors, plastic on the windows and draft stopper door snakes if the house is drafty, warm socks, layers. Nobody without money is buying pregnancy corsets from Etsy to stay warm, what the shit is that.
Warm clothes instead of heating is great, but they manage to subvert it in a very EA way. The way they talk about it sounds almost Calvinist. I wonder if they have some equivalent of the secret TV in the attic.
There’s no reason to believe they live this way in reality. None of these profiles do any actual journalism. None of them investigate whether their claims about their childhood are true. This one doesn’t even talk to the neighbors who theoretically live next door for free (and do the unpaid childcare). This is stenography of neo-fash influencers self-described life and there’s no reason to believe any of it.
It’s true though. They’re not nazis. They’re incapable of being fired by any fundamentally political or spiritual ideals, no matter how ultimately black and nihilistic, at all. Even if these people were full-throated card-carrying members of the American Nazi party marching through Times Square with a swastika flag throwing out copies of Der Sturmer from a Panzer tank they wouldn’t be nazis. The fact is that they’re just the purest distillation of 20th-21st century media culture yet: they’re so utterly saturated in media that the only choice they’ve made, the only choice available to them, was whether to lean into the goodie or the baddie vibe, and they plumped for “baddie” because it suited their contrarian aesthetic and then, without even leaving a ripple on the surface, they slipped into the role and inhabited it so thoroughly that it is, literally, indistinguishable from who they are.
These people are nothing less, and 100% nothing more, than your childish glee at getting to play the villain in an RPG.
Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi."
I’m saying this goes further!
Actually I feel kind of irked that this reply seems to just miss the part at the end of the paragraph that says “it is, literally, indistinguishable from who they are”
I didn't miss it. I just don't see any need to be elaborate about the word nazi, although I do appreciate what a crushingly insulting description of them you gave
Scholars of fascism and nazism do it all the time! The target of quotes like that is supposed to be those who deliberately muddy the waters. The “call a nazi a nazi” principle is a blunt instrument, and there are other tools in the anti-nazi kit.
[some hours later…] ah, the quote is from AR Moxon, whom I happen to know is both (a) not remotely averse to going deeper on what makes the nazis, (b) distinctly averse to not going deeper
you would never see a scene like this in a Nazi household
ok so this is driving me crazy
am I weird for thinking the circle of candles in the fireplace (in a house that’s allegedly unbearably cold) is weird?
is this… are these motherfuckers roleplaying a dril tweet
It’s weird, but it’s normal weird. It’s the kind of thing you see in design magazines and pinterest and the spruce. I don’t know if actual rich people do it but it’s definitely fairly normal middlebrow home decor.
(A lot of fireplaces in older US buildings are vestigial, often blocked up, and are inefficient at heating.)
The prose on that The Spruce link makes me hate the concepts of design, aesthetics, and houses.
"24 Ideas for Putting Candles in a Fireplace" sounds like a McSweeney's headline.
note non-fiction Chekhov's gun on the mantel
Do they own any other outfits?
we're actually very liberal
again. NOT Nazis.
Both of them require glasses. I guess the master race has astigmatism.
my husband and I are just trying to repopulate the world
Can someone please help me understand?
It's like mirror universe Niles and Maris
Their body postures completely bely their need to be relevant and noticed.
Goals ngl
you shoulda lied