Amazing, long post is amazing, long

[LMNO]

Ok, Cain already referenced this, so I'm not trying to say this is the first time this has been mentioned on PD.  But I though the blog post was interesting and important enough to warrant its own thread, so here:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

This is really long, but it's great. It's a variation on The Machine™, on Monkey Mind, on Common Walls, and it's really, really wonderful.


And incredibly long.  Honestly, give yourself some time if you're planning on reading it all at once.

When you're done, I'd like to talk about it.

[Salty]

There's a lot of stuff in there, but these are the things that caught a hold on my brain:

* The distinction between the god's eye view and the individual view. This is a useful way of thinking about things because I often get angry about the latter view. The notion that even individual cancer cells are looking out for their own best interest really hits home the fact that we can't always control something just because it's wrong.

If each nation can't disarm themselves because there will be one or more nations who will take advantage of the situation is maddening when you take the view that it is in our collective human interest to just stop and put defense money to infrastructure and meeting social needs. But it also makes perfect sense. Just what is anyone supposed to DO about that?

* The Vegas thing reminds me of Costco. Just look at that place. It is a bright and shiny example of something really sad. Once the abundance of resources comes to an end, it's safe to say we will no longer have small castles with glittering packaged, mana that reach the sky. That's the sort of thing that people will tell their children and grandchildren about, probably.

* The weakening of the individual who tries to stay outside Moloch's grip, if that's at all possible, has been reeling around my head for days now. There are so many examples of this, big and small. If you are in business, and you don't use the same advertising methods as your competitors, for moral reasons or whatever, you are going to do less well than others. If you refuse to create the beautiful lies people have come to expect from the providers of their goods and services people feel...off. Like something isn't right. They crave the beautiful lies, they demand them, they are the box window and triangle roof of formulaic drawings of houses.

It doesn't matter that there is another way, maybe a better way, maybe an honest way. It's not RIGHT, it makes people feel BAD.

I had more to say about this but I think I have to give it another once over. Plus, it is long and not all of it managed to stick in my brain. Section V confused the hell out of me.

[Salty]

There is something about the way we have to get along socially, to a point, because we just have to, because it's good for us, yet doing so often causes so much harm.

Take something terrible, like the facts that most if not all my clothes were probably made by children. A few moments of sensible thought suggests this is pure madness, considering there are so many people without jobs in the west. Even more so because CHILDREN. Yet, to go around screaming about that, and not going to work, just isn't done. We can't do that, and it won't do any good.

In this example, I think, you take those two views and they get horribly mixed up and the end result is nothing changes at all.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

It's not that long. I was getting the impression it was the size of a novel. I'm glad I scrolled to the bottom of the post to read his concluding statements because 85% of the scrollable space on that page is comments.

Also, I don't think this kind of content is really conducive to reading in one sitting—it's dense, requires learning about supplementary topics (or at the very least, a quick refresher), and it's divided conveniently into well thought out sections.

This is a great piece so far (I'm in section IV). I just found the way you described the length of the post to be on one hand a fair warning because it is long, but possibly grossly overestimated due to the size of the comments section, which are not collapsed, nested, or broken into separate sub-pages. Instead they just follow the post in one long thread (which I actually prefer, but is not the usual convention), making the page gynormous.

[LMNO]

I'm usually used to blog posts being at most 2000-3000 words long.  This is about 14,500 words long. So, for me, long.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

I'm usually used to blog posts being at most 2000-3000 words long.  This is about 14,500 words long. So, for me, long.

I see you completely ignored what I had to say.

[Eater of Clowns]

Read it. It lost me on a few concepts that I'm not familiar with, and introduced me to some debates that I was not aware even existed. I'd like to revisit it and, as Net mentioned, brush up on certain topics, but I found it overall hugely accessible for someone that doesn't generally educate himself to the extent that he should.

[LMNO]

I'm usually used to blog posts being at most 2000-3000 words long.  This is about 14,500 words long. So, for me, long.

I see you completely ignored what I had to say.

Not ignored.  I plan on discussing it in depth tomorrow.  Sorry to give the appearance of slighting you.