JTarrou
1yr ago
I smell statistical bullshit.
My normal standard of living has taken a noticeable if not disastrous turn. My pay is roughly the same, my costs are a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries etc.). My rent is up 30%, the value of my savings is down 20%, and the cost of buying a house is up 50%.
Three years ago I had a lot more disposable income. Now, all that might fit fine within the "economy is doing fine" narrative, but it doesn't feel fine to me. What I hear from posts like this is "economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies". I am noticeably poorer today than I was in 2020. All the statistics in the world aren't going to change that.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Naming conventions as class signifiers with implications for discussion of race, wealth, sexuality etc.
I had a form come across my desk today with a really bad name on it. Very stereotypically ghetto black, badly spelled, four middle names (one of which was “Mykween”). The name is too long for the name box on a federal form, so I had to file a supplemental sheet for it. Which got me thinking about why people name their kids stupid and stereotypical names, and what that means for the larger conversation about social divisions.
I live in a majority-minority city, I work with black people, we have lots of black customers etc. etc. There's more than one sort of black person, just as there is more than one sort of every group.
I look around my friend group and co-workers, not a one of them has a name like that. Eric, Dom (Dominic), Reggie (Reginald), Hezzie (Hezekiah), etc. Most of my black friends and co-workers have either very normal “white” names, or old fashioned/religious names. A few have african names, but that's because they're from Africa.
This is because the stereotypically “black” names are more specifically black underclass names. The working class' most serious social problem is distinguishing themselves from the underclass. So they name their kids very differently. And, in turn, if you see a black person with an african (or even better, fake african) name, a political portmanteau or a double-barreled last name, that's a middle- or upper-class thing. Hannah Nicole-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Edna Kane-Williams etc. We see similar patterns in other races, most Cletuses do not attend Harvard and the hyphenated last name is similarly an aspirational middle and upper class affectation. In addition, naming conventions change over time, so what is signalled by a name in one decade may signal something very different later. The name “Isis” dropped off pretty severely after about 2014.
This all brings to mind Scott's parable of the colored togas.
JTarrou
2yr ago
1: I am extremely skeptical of the "role model" thing as relating to celebrities or strangers. Actual role models are people in other people's lives, and no amount of group X in job Y is going to increase that.
2: The problem is that what really does affect the life choices of underclass kids of all races is their role models in the neighborhood, school, and social circle. Who is cool, who gets dates, who is feared, who is funny etc.
For the overwhelming majority of underclass kids, they aren't one black lead actor away from a successful career in law. Their realistic options are welfare poverty, crime, or low-paid, low-status work permanently. Is it such a shock that for many, welfare and crime seem like lesser evils? It's more of a shock to me that so few take that path. The majority still take the low-paid low-status work, in most places.
If you want to create role models for poor kids with low prospects, you need jobs that bring either reasonably good wages or social status, that can be done by people in the bottom quarter of IQ, self control and time horizon distributions. And you need social change among the underclass community to value that sort of effort, rather than viewing it as an attack on their culture and dignity. White people can really only influence one of these things in the black underclass.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Let me illustrate by talking about a game that I was very interested in, bought, and turned out to be shit. This has nothing to do with SBI directly.
For those who don't know, the Payday series is co-op crime shooters, think first-person GTA without cars and with friends. You get heists, objectives to complete, you can do stealth or go loud etc.
Payday 2 was excellent, it still has a strong playerbase despite being released over a decade ago. I played quite a bit of it.
So they announced Payday 3 and I was ready. The initial guff I got from beta testers was that teh game was a bit janky (somewhat to be expected) and the female models had gotten ugly. There were a couple people whining about "diversity" and shit, but nobody really cared if the game was good.
Narrator voice: The game was not good. They made it permanently online, meaning you had to be connected to their servers, even to play alone. You needed a new launcher and a special Starbreeze account. And their servers didn't work. And the whole structure of the game was just......bad. It wasn't fun or engaging. Just a joyless grind-fest with no rewards. If you could even get in to play it, which you couldn't for the first three weeks of release. The relative fatness of the female characters was the least of anyone's worries. Frankly, the models weren't that bad.
The playerbase cratered after an initially decent start. Within a few weeks, the number of people playing had dropped 99%.
According to SteamDB, Payday 3 has a 24-hour peak of just 378 players compared to Payday 2's 31,866
The CEO of Starbreeze just lost his job for his role in this abortion.
And yet, lots of people who didn't play the game defend it against people who did by claiming that they just hate diversity.
It's not about the uglier female models. That's just a symptom of a deeper problem. When you see that in a game, it indicates that the game wasn't meant to be good, it was meant to tick the DEI boxes. IDGAF about the female models in isolation, but I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games. I gave the game a shot, ignoring the trolls whining about unimportant things like how fat the females are now.
Now I'm out forty bucks and I have a game that is worse in every single playable way than its predecessor. Because the studio decided that chubbing up the female models was more important than making sure the servers were functional for a permanently online game.
DEI, not even once.
https://www.ign.com/articles/starbreeze-ceo-out-after-payday-3-disaster
JTarrou
2yr ago
If the question is whether slavery and associated industry was a large portion of the national GDP, it was.
If the question is whether anyone else built anything, yes, they built most things. Slavery didn't build anything except some very nice houses and a lot of graveyards. The whole reason the South gets trounced in the war despite better tactical leadership is that they don't have anything close to the numbers of people, factories and equipment that the North does, and virtually none of that can be attributed to slavery. In fact, it can and has been argued at length that slavery kept the South from industrializing and that this crippled their economy up into the 1980s.
The claim that slavery was in some way underwriting the free states is ahistorical stupidity, and a slanderous historical insult to the people who died to end slavery. There isn't a person alive today who has done as much for black americans as the lowliest, whitest, most racist private in the Union Army.
Ok, definitely not a SEAL here, but as one of the few in the forum with any pointy-end experience, here's my take:
1: I'm weakly against the ban on PEDs in the military. During my time in, steroids were by far the most popular illegal drug, people pissed hot for that shit constantly. Every unit is different, but we were hard up for bodies and infantry NCOs tend to be a practical bunch. I never wrote a soldier up for steroids unless he was also a shitbird. My opinion at the time and today is that if you're taking stuff to get better at your job, I'm not going to stand in the way.
2: When we talk about very specialized schools, we're talking about a very perverse set of conditions. Any special forces unit gets a lot more applicants than they have slots for, so they set up "weedout" programs. For Green Berets, it's Selection, for SEALS it's BUD/S. This is key, these are not training. These are shitshows intended to get gung-ho soldiers to quit. Exhaustion, sleep dep, pain, cold, heat, etc. The cadre will choose targets daily and focus their collective efforts on fucking with one soldier to see if they can get him to quit. The pressure is intense. What they're selecting for is the mental and physical ability to continue suffering indefinitely.
3: For those who are worried about rules not being followed, allow me to set your mind at ease. Rules are never followed, war is a free-for-all. You can do anything your balls and guns are big enough to handle. The idea that soldiers in combat give the tiniest of fucks about back-home moralizing about drugs is ridiculous on its face, and clearly denotes someone who has never met a real soldier.
4: Going out for special forces is a bit like going out for a pro sports team. There's a brutal and brutally efficient weeding-out portion, the vast majority of people do not make it. The collective pass rate for all the schools, training and selections required to become an actual special forces operator is a very small fraction of one percent. Maybe three to five out of every thousand who start will make it to the teams, and even fewer will be able to serve out a career there. We cannot think of these jobs as something that most people could or should be able to do.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I think it's an interaction of a few things, a big one being an old trope about an old bear male figure coming out of retirement for one last score/mission/whatever. Most of the Bond films, most of Eastwood's ouvre, Taken, Black Samurai, True Grit, Nobody, etc. This is, at core, a male fantasy of an aging yet skilled/dangerous man become cynical about the structure his violence has served. He finds a new mission, a new cause and allows himself to be consumed by it, because it wasn't the cause itself he cared about, just the fight. Possible death is treated as penance for any misdeeds or guilt held over from the first, less moral cause, an opportunity for redemption. It's a moralistic view of male violence, a feeling that those who live by the sword should die by it.
Now let's add to this Hollywood's complete inventive drought. They have no ideas and so are resurrecting old franchises left and right to try to get some content. This means a lot of old white male protagonists who have to be dealt with somehow, and half the story is already written. So, Han/Luke have to hand things off to new actors. Cheaper actors. Newer actors who fit the social and political prejudices of the elites, which is mostly anti-white racism and class snobbery.
It is sometimes done well (Gran Torino is a top-5 all timer IMO). But these days, few directors have the chops of Eastwood, the writing has gone to hell in a handbasket, and so we get this cheap propaganda about how all the old heroes are shit and need to be replaced by strangely competent kids who somehow never have a thing to learn or struggle at. This is then sometimes mapped onto racial lines because, well, racist elites. But they do it with gender as well, see the aforementioned Star Wars, the current Indiana Jones etc.
This pattern repeats. An old property, a white male protagonist and some sort of minority successor. We started with Harrison Ford, but we're getting Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and just the name tells you everything you need to know. The woke-washing is at least partially a defense mechanism because they know the products are terrible and rehashed, likely to generate criticism. Moralizing about their artistic vapidity is the best defense they have.
JTarrou
1yr ago
People don't change. Despite every generation thinking they're the first ones to ever apply intelligence and morality to the problems of the world, they are not. The people who live today are the exact moral equivalents of Salem, or Mao's China, or interwar Germany. They're just pushing their bigotries, hatreds and moral panics along different channels. It has always been this way and always will be. We cannot predict which issues will rise to salience, but we can predict with absolute certainty the psychology and behavior of the people in aggregate.
I believe the current mishmash is a religious void being filled by various cults, one of which will eventually rise to prominence and challenge "traditional" (whatever that means) christianity for the default belief system of western civilization. The "In this house, we believe...." posters are the early adherents.
Re-read your Hoffer if you want to know how it's going to play out.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Amnesty International
Why are they painting benches in randome eastern european towns?
JTarrou
2yr ago
My read is a pretty simple one:
Young men are a dangerous and often degenerate demographic and they really have only two motivations: Sex and violence. Sex is what they want and violence is what they can do. One of the prime problems of society is how to get young men into adult society without doing anything too damaging. In the past, this was accomplished with marriage. Boys got married young, and the combination of sexual access, family responsibility and parental attachment was generally a strong enough combo to blunt the worst impulses.
That system is gone now, for most of the developed world.
The intersection with feminism is one of several reasons for this. Feminism wants equality with men, but specifically in the male dominated spaces, not the female spaces they had already dominated for millennia. The problem is that while all people are status-seeking, women are mate-status-seeking. Men don't much care, so long as a woman is attractive and pleasant. Achievement is sexy on a man, it's completely orthogonal for a woman. By gaining status in formerly male fields, women reduced the number of mates they are willing to consider substantially. The success of women in academics and the workplace creates a large and growing sector of the male population competing over a small and shrinking number of women who are poorer and lower status than they are. It also creates the phenomenon of wildly successful women complaining bitterly there are no decent (i.e. higher status/richer) men anymore. And there aren't, because the ladies succeeded in pricing themselves right out of a mate. Men can and will date down the heirarchy. Women (as a generality, exceptions, NAW, all that) don't.
This state of society is unstable in the long run. Young men who are not brought into society will eventually turn on society. And once they turn, it's only a matter of time before they organize, find a cause and start using the only power they really have: a violent death wish. I believe we already see the first stage of this with school shooters, ISIS recruits, etc.
The question is which way women want to go? They can keep the money and status, but they'd have to fight their own psychology and mate down. Or they can give up the money and status and have more mate options that coincide with their preferences. Or they can rely on repression to keep the men in line, but that requires men to do it, the women will still be alone, and people who are willing, even eager to die are really hard to stop.
JTarrou
7mo ago
Let me offer my own theory:
Trump made himself Hitler (in the minds of the left) to credibly signal to the people that he was on their side. He got the political equivalent of a face tattoo. Every hysterical denunciation, every spurious legal charge, every desperate ploy by the intelligence agencies only strengthen his position. The people want to know he won't abandon them like every other Republican. So he proves it to them, by becoming the most hated man in the country. Win or lose, Trump isn't going back.
That's what he does that DeSantis, and Cruz and Rubio and all the rest can't. Reject the Beltway, become a pariah among "polite" society. He is playing the political heel, and in so doing, cements his voting base. This is why all the attacks on him seem to make him stronger, because they do. It's all just more evidence that they fear Trump in a way that they do not fear anyone else. And that's what the party actually wants.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I doubt you can extrapolate much from a year or so of missed recruiting goals in a strong job market.
But there might be a kernel of truth that the sort of people who generally staff the pointy bits of the military are increasingly skeptical of their role as the enforcers of a world order that is explicitly hostile to them, their families, states, politics and demographics.
The most basic issue is that the right is correct to mistrust the government, academia, the MIC and the corporate-activist superstructure. Those institutions had maintained the facade of neutrality for a long time, but decided to burn it all to damage Trump. Now the elites need a new pack of grifters to control this diffuse mob that doesn't trust all their carefully controlled outlets.
Tucker and DeSantis are some of the early attempts to get controlled opposition out in front of this distrust, but they won't be the last. Eventually the "new right" will be either discredited, destroyed or co-opted (probably all three). Just like the "new left" forty years ago, only these poor bastards aren't going to wind up in tenured academic positions once their "revolution" fails.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Nonsense, we've never given weapons to some indigenous radical group because they were fighting the Russians, only to have them turn on us once that war was over!
We know very little directly, but what we do have from the bronze age in terms of written inscriptions is mostly kings boasting about how many thousands of people they killed in various inventive and horrifying ways, how many they carried off into slavery and how many they sacrificed to various deities. This was the propaganda being put out to impress the populace, which says something about the public morals of the day. And the fact that there were several empires maintaining major standing armies, all our evidence points to a time of significant, regular state violence on a mass scale. Many of our remaining bronze age-era human remains were killed, and many of the ones that weren't have healed wounds from repeated violence. Even Pharaohs were sometimes bashed in the head with a mace.
It may be the case that in the smaller societies which left much less historical footprint, violence was less than in settled cities. No way to really tell for sure. What we have says that these people were far more violent than most modern states before the collapse. Then things got worse.
A sample inscription from an Assyrian king:
In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of the heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.
JTarrou
2yr ago
what’s your excuse?
I don't need an excuse for the diet of my species.
Your veganism wouldn't outlast Whole Foods, while my diet is far more "sustainable".
Worse comes to worse, we can always eat the vegans.
JTarrou
4mo ago
I think the most disturbing part is how little everyone with such strong opinions knows about Ukraine, Russia, and the conflict between them.
Russia is absolutely in the wrong for invading, but let's look at the actual political and military realities when we're talking about the issue.
The eastern provinces had a strong enough Russian-aligned sector of the populace (with some surreptitious Russian help) to functionally secede from Ukraine and fight the Ukrainians to a standstill for years before the invasion. Ukraine hasn't had any real sovereignty over those territories for over a decade now.
Yes, it's a violation of their treaty for Russia to take their territory. This may shock people, but governments often violate their treaties. For instance, virtually everyone in NATO is violating that treaty.
The military situation has been fairly static for years. Neither side seems to be on the verge of winning. Both are having trouble with getting enough troops to fight, but Russia can draw from a much larger population, plus allies like North Korea. Ukraine is supplementing with mercenaries, but that's expensive.
The economic sanctions on Russia have failed to impact their economy enough. In fact, it's basically just made Russia less exposed to economic sanctions from the west, and more in hock to the Chinese, who now provide most of their consumer goods.
I support Ukraine primarily in this matter, I support funding and arming them to resist the Russian invasion. But I also think we need to be realistic about what peace will look like absent major escalations on our part. The Ukrainians haven't been capable of recapturing their lost provinces militarily. How long should they keep fighting for territories where most of the remaining population don't really want to be part of Ukraine?
Ultimately, it is the Ukrainians who have to answer these questions, not us. At the end of the day, they still live next to Russia, and we don't. I really hope this war reaches its conclusion soon, and I hope the Ukrainians don't lose anything more than necessary. But unless the military situation changes drastically, the Russians aren't just going to give back the territory. And no one can make them without risking nuclear war. That's the realpolitik situation.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Technology as politics.
Feminism is more a product of the washing machine, the pill and air conditioning than it is political organizing. It is less an ideology than it is a set of opinions enabled by a certain level of technological advancement.
Anti-racism is more a product of the steam engine than it is of any moral progress. All of human history no one thought to free the slaves, until one day from out of nowhere.....the richest and most technologically advanced society on earth invented a way to turn fossil fuels into energy and all the sudden slavery and the racism that supported it isn't strictly necessary. Hence "moral progress".
Today, we all benefit from less-than-free labor in third world nations making us cheaper consumer products. In the most technologically backward parts of the world slavery still exists. That is not because those are worse people than those of us who can afford to pay for the labor that supports our first world lifestyles.
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
What this means for the age of AI is anyone's guess.
JTarrou
2yr ago
I have bad news. It was always this bad and you just found out.
The only thing that happened was a cohort of Millenials thought that Science was a good replacement for Religion, and so convinced themselves that it wasn't populated with the same stupid, scheming, biased humans as every other profession. Now you know what your father knew, and his father before him. There is no one to trust, so get on with it.
JTarrou
2yr ago
The TL;DR is that Ukraine has burned through multiple iterations of armaments and is now reduced to begging for active NATO matériel, hence Germany's reticence to send Leopards.
If this is the level of analysis on offer, it's beyond worthless. Russia too has "burned through" much of their advanced equipment and is now mostly limited to their own domestic new production or mothballed shit from the '50s and '60s. Of course Ukraine wants good weapons, rather than the outdated military surplus most countries have been dumping on them. This is not an indication that anyone is "winning" or "losing". This is what happens in attritional combat.
Germany isn't reticent to send Leopards because the Ukrainians are losing, they're reluctant to send them because they don't have very many and their politics is incredibly fucked up around military matters, for understandable historical reasons. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/21/what-is-stopping-the-supply-of-german-made-leopard-2-tanks
Here's a technical video about IFVs specifically, what sorts are involved, how many, tactics etc. https://youtube.com/watch?v=UGZi-F3tz-o
JTarrou
1yr ago
This is a real key issue that I haven't been able to get anyone to bite on when I raised it before. Exactly what are the features of a group with the right to claim territory and "self-determination"? Is it races? Ethnic groups? Language groups? Any group with the military muscle to make it stick? How long does how much of a group have to live in an area before they have a "right" to the land? How long does that "right" last after they leave?
Everyone acts like there is a set of good definitions and well-established international law here, but there just isn't.
JTarrou
2yr ago
1: Labor isn't woke
2: Railroad crewmen aren't particularly woke
3: Biden's been shitting up the shipping infrastructure for two years and can't afford another fuckup. The midterms are over, but he's up on the block again in two.
JTarrou
8mo ago
People seemed to have defined "election rigging" as specifically electronically hacking election machines to change votes.
Rather than, say, changing all the election rules using emergency powers that didn't pass constitutional muster. Or charging your opponent with seventy-odd felonies, or keeping them off the ballots in some states etc. Or co-opting the intelligence agencies to wiretap your opponents and launder your oppo research.
Or just, you know, twiddling their thumbs while some idiot takes a shot at the candidate.
But by all means, let's mock the "vibes".
JTarrou
1yr ago
A world in which we go from a significant Hispanic and African American Ivy League admissions rate to one that is virtually zero would not be tolerated by the existing social order.
We already have that. Virtually no poor black americans wind up in the Ivy Leagues. The children of wealthy black immigrants do. The children of foreign elites who are also black, or "hispanic" or asian do. Not the actual struggling communities here.
Your whole structure is built on the social identification of poor black americans with much richer, more educated and very culturally distinct groups based on nothing more than skin color.
Yes, so long as black americans think the reason they aren't getting into Yale is that Yale hates black people, not poor people, this will not be tolerated. But that's an assumption that could change quick.
Just to reiterate what I posted on the subreddit prior to Exodus 3:
1: There are two allegations here, one that someone in the student section shouted racial slurs, and one that Richardson was accosted by a white man who told her to "watch her back".
2: The second allegation was the UVU student, but it's unclear what exactly he said. Reports seem to indicate some sort of mental impairment, though apparently not enough to bar him from college. My read is that a weird kid said something weird and this got connected in Richardson's head to the (possibly imaginary) racism of BYU fans.
3: I had to watch women's volleyball for this, so I'm riding it as far as I can. The slur allegation was that someone (or multiple someones) in the freshman section was shouting the slur "every time she [richardson] served". She served once in the second set and twice in the fourth, so "every time" was three instances, specifically. Doesn't really impact whether the allegation is true, but some of the reporting made it sound like the crowd just chanted it for two whole sets. Which would, of course, be difficult to hide on footage.
4: I must say, I am heartened by BYU's second response. Their first was exactly as craven and shitty as we've come to expect, but apparently cooler heads prevailed.
5: Public service reminder that fake "hate incidents" are real hate incidents, just with the valence reversed. Jussie Smollett concocted a hateful and racialized plot to play the victim and thereby victimize white people, Republicans, and Trump fans specifically. To the degree that we believe a racial accusation to be false, I think it is a mistake to classify it as a "hoax". It isn't, it's a false flag intended to harm people. This isn't about sympathy or clout, it's about hurting a race of people based on their race, by making false accusations. In other words, it's the same shitty mob behavior that lead to lynchings in the past. We would not describe a false rape accusation of a black man in the Jim Crow South as a "hoax", but as an act of racism and incitement to violence.
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