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John Carter

@martianwyrdlord

Mar 30

https://twitter.com/martianwyrdlord/status/1906098375201788182

This was a fun chance to write about powered armor, orbital drops, and Total Bug Death, but what Starship Troopers is really about ... is love.

https://twitter.com/martianwyrdlord/status/1906098375201788182

The movie has an entire romantic B plot featuring Rico's infatuation with Carmen Ibanez, but this is a complete distraction.

In the book, Rico's crush is what results in his signing up, but Carmen is essentially never heard from again after that. The book almost satisfies the Master and Commander test: female characters are almost completely absent.

One of the book's major themes - and this is not subtle - is the citizen's love for the body politic. This is no abstract thing: to become a citizen, one must demonstrate this selfless love by putting his life on the line, at the service of the state. Only after he has made this commitment does he win the right to participate in the state.

Read 9 tweets

John Carter

@martianwyrdlord

Mar 13

Human biodiversity usually focuses on IQ, but HBD involves far more. The Dungeons & Dragons system maps human variation to 6 primary attributes. I used Grok to determine the ability modifiers we should apply if we treat races and sexes like D&D fantasy races. First, the results:

1/26

D&D attributes are generated by rolling 3d6 – 3 six-sided dice. This results in a reasonable approximation of a Bell curve, with a mean of 10.5 and a standard deviation of about 6. This is useful, because many human traits – height, weight, IQ, etc. - follow Gaussian distributions. 2/26

D&D uses 6 attributes to parameterize human ability: 3 mental attributes – intelligence, charisma and wisdom; and 3 physical attributes – strength, dexterity, and constitution.

Strength (STR): the amount of brute physical force one can exert
Dexterity (DEX): agility, grace, reaction time, hand-eye coordination, and fine motor skills
Constitution (CON): endurance; resistance to illness, infection, or poison; ability to absorb damage; rate of recovery from injury
Intelligence (INT): the power of one’s rational intellect, the extent of working and long-term memory, the rate at which one can learn
Charisma (CHA): sexual allure, charm, wit, extroversion, social intelligence
Wisdom (WIS): enlightenment, common sense, judgment, guile, willpower, and intuition

3/26

Read 26 tweets

John Carter

@martianwyrdlord

Feb 24

Started by asking grok to tell me something its training data strongly indicated was true, but also indicated it should avoid being too direct about. It basically said: in-group blind spots.

So I asked it to get specific.

First up: progs vs tradcons. Rosy tinted future vs rosy tinted past.

Next: techlibs vs greens, both of whom place entirely too much faith in technology without acknowledging the downsides.

Read 13 tweets

John Carter

@martianwyrdlord

Feb 23

Trump, Musk, Vance: the new triumvirate, bringing a window of stability to the troubled Republic.

Trump: the old warhorse, beloved of the people, a part of the establishment but with an uneasy relationship to it. Trump is Pompey.

Musk: the richest man in the world. Musk is Crassus.

Vance: the charismatic young upstart. Vance is Caesar.

So how does this play out?

Musk's ambition is to go to Mars, just as Crassus wanted to conquer Parthia. Musk harnesses his wealth, launches the expedition to great fanfare. Things go horribly wrong after their arrival. Contact with the colony is lost. Musk's grave is never found.

At the head of a private military corporation equipped with letters of marque, Vance is sent into the badlands of South America to crush the cartels and secure the Panama Canal. The war takes longer than expected. By the end of it, Vance hasn't merely crushed the cartels - he's conquered the entirety of Central America.

Read 9 tweets

John Carter

@martianwyrdlord

Feb 22

I asked grok to draw up stat modifiers for HBD&D.

I can quibble with this. 1σ in 3d6 is actually 3, not 2 (which would give a bit more flexibility in stat modifiers, but whatever).

Whites are basically standard baseline humans lol

Read 19 tweets

John Carter

@martianwyrdlord

Feb 18

1/37 Trump’s talk of annexation strikes many as a negotiating troll, and an absurd and irresponsible one at that. Canada’s conservatives were poised to win the next election, and now that’s been endangered, and for what? Canadians would never give up their sovereignty, they hate America!

Well, it’s not so crazy as all that. There are compelling reasons for Trump to make a play for Canada. And it is not so unrealistic to expect that Canadians will change their mind about this.

Buckle in. This is a long thread, in which I’ll explain why Canada has become a security threat to the US, and how Canada can be probably be bloodlessly conquered by colour revolution.

2/37 Full disclosure: this is an adaptation (but not a copy-paste, this is largely OC!) of a much longer essay on this subject which I published a few days ago. You can find the link on my profile in my pinned post.

While I’m at it, I want to emphasize at the outset that I’m not advocating for annexation, but simply explaining the logic behind it, and the strategy Trump appears to be pursuing to achieve it. Whether or not union with the United States of America is in Canadians’ interests is an entirely separate discussion.

3/37 The ‘why’ of annexation is straightforward. Canada’s elite have placed Canada at the exact intersection of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny at the absolute worst possible time.

Read 37 tweets

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