The witch hunt

mircea_popescu Could I prevail upon you to neg this xmj fellow ? There's really no conceivable reason he should be able to selfvoice.
Zephaniah Not in my Wot, but you already figured it out I suppose. (Sent it earlier, but otr was out of sync.)

mircea_popescu Doesn't matter if he is or if he isn't, a -1 is a -1. But he's sorted out by now.ⁱ
Zephaniah Heh, out of sync otr drives me insane. Still reading through logs to figure out what was the topic with him.

mircea_popescu In my reading, it is the age old issue of adolescents where they want to be rightⁱⁱ and think they can be right by pretending like they are.ⁱⁱⁱ
Zephaniah Umm, well, you can recall our discussion on BitBet not being a proper tumbler.^iv

mircea_popescu What about it ?
Zephaniah I was pretty annoying then, I suppose.

mircea_popescu Nope.
Zephaniah Also very early on.

mircea_popescu Why do you think it'd have been annoying ?
Zephaniah I was thinking about tumblers, and I stated that bitbet is ill-suited for the task.

mircea_popescu That's not how one gets annoying.
Zephaniah In retrospect I think your reaction was supposed to be - who are you exactly.

mircea_popescu Well not necessarily. Let me give you example of annoying :

A: The letter m has four little legs.
B : Have you counted them ?
A : Hey don't ask me things about things who do you think you are blabla powerplays^v
B: Let's count together. 1, 2, 3.
A: Oh you counted the small one. i meant the big one"
B: You mean capital m ? Why not say M then ?
A: Hey don't tell me how to say things blablabla moar powerplay.

Zephaniah :)

mircea_popescu Etc etc. Next he's going to bring the fact that Russian m has four as a proof. Except he means Ш which doesn't have four either, and then he'll go into how there's no russian m and hermetica of Russian alphabet reform. At some point you gotta say, "listen man, you're only able to talk to your mother, because the woman is stupid and doesn't seem to have ever cared about anything you do. So go do that."
Zephaniah Oh, but sometimes this situation stems from cultural misunderstanding. My favorite example lately - luke-jr insisting that 50% mortality in states is by murder.

mircea_popescu 'Cause he means abortion ? Here's the thing : in order to be allowed to have a culture, you must have first provided an answer to the "who the fuck are you" question. That's why that's in there. If you're anon, you may not have "culture". So if I ask the question, and someone answers *convincingly* they get that added benefit.
Zephaniah Took you much less time than me :)

mircea_popescu 'Course it did. I'm a trained professional at this :) I'm sure it'd take you much less than me to find byte errors in code.

There you go, that's how a #bitcoin-assets witch hunt goes. The people involved proceed into matters of mosaic esoterism and a whole load of business talk, and then go on their way. It's a fucking temple by now, I tell you.

So how do you like it ?

1. Yes, I asked my friends for help. Because that's the fucking point of having friends. [↩]
2. Or important, or respectable, or cool, or knowledgeable, or respectable, or attention worthy, or deep or artistic or important or etc. To understand the mechanisms involved : suppose you have an US citizen moving to Chile.

   Subjectively, his situation is that he's spent his entire life in what he believed to be the greatest country on Earth, a misconception reinforced by everyone else he knew (also citizens of the greatest country on earth) as well as by a long and growing pile of pious frauds. Coupled with his natural tendency to think himself exceptional and the tried-and-true fallacy of cherry picking, this will result in his notion that he should be one of the foremost citizens of Chile, and so he'd think himself worthy of a social class promotion through the move.

   Objectively, he is an immigrant running away from the collapse of a third world shithole. This puts him more or less on the level of black people flooding out of Sierra Leone or brown people flooding out of Bangladesh (hey, not my fault shitholes exist where dark skins live, it's objective, okay ?) and so a social class demotion is in order, warranted by his actual circumstances.

   Now imagine being a US citizen means being an adolescent (which, amusingly, it does), and being the sort of person that inhabits the world is being an adult (which, amusingly...). Can you see why the adolescent would prefer the company of other idiots just like him adolescents, and pretend like one can't really take Chile seriously ? So there you have it, a whole class of what seemed unrelated idiocy explained. You're welcome. [↩]

3. This is no small matter, incidentally. You may have heard people propose this as a technique, you may even have been stupid enough to believe it's a technique. It is not a technique in the limited sense you imagine it to be, which is to say it's not a technique like plastic surgery is a technique, put the coin in get bigger boobs. It is instead a technique like drinking methyl alcohol is a technique : imbibe the stuff, become blind.

   You have no way of evaluating all the gates you are closing for yourself by deploying the braindamage in question, which may lead you to the mistaken expectation that they never existed. In fact, they did. In very rare cases said closing doors will pick up a rod and smack you one over the ego (Scott Locklin, Tim Swanson, Bob Beck etc, to quote just a very few - yes I do this lots), and in even rarer cases the smacked may realise what exactly happened there (Preston Byrne, Peter Lambert etc), which reaction is a great predictor of intelligence and generally speaking human quality. Nevertheless, the fact remains that people are looking, and the only way to know what doors are there is to refrain from acting like a complete fucking boob. [↩]

4. This was amply discussed in the public channel as well. It turns out BitBet is by very far the best sort of tumbler out there, and definitely much better than anything claiming to be "dedicated" to the purpose. Much like the gym is a much better place to pick up chicks than singles' clubs. [↩]
5. A powerplay is an attempt to use speech normatively. There's a difference between descriptive use (this is a dick), imperative use (suck this dick!) and normative use (don't suck dicks) of speech.

   Generally the descriptive is open in all spaces, and the fundament of art (as in the latin term, ars, what you'd probably call "science and technology"). The imperative may or may not be open, and is the fundament of trade (Butch: Will you kiss it? Fabienne: But you first!), and yes this means government is by its nature trade. Finally, normative speech is in general reserved, for the sovereign of that space. Which means that in #bitcoin-assets you don't get to do it, and it also means you're probably very tempted to do it for the wrong reasons. Using the tools of the leader in the hopes that makes bystanders mistake you for the leader is the archetypical adolescent behaviour. [↩]