i guess clarification is needed given "-american." i thought it was apparent. OP is talking genetics, HBD. "-american" is in this context meaningless, it is only present to avoid the obvious absurdity of wondering why 1.5 billion east asians aren't producing great english novels. but it is even more absurd to use this framing as the gotcha for "where are their great novels--they aren't particularly creative--they aren't particularly intelligent" when east asian storytelling in the west has success ranging from merely incredible in video games to total domination of the market in comics and animation.
3.4 NOVELS: Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?
that's poetry and prose. beyond that, japanese creatives apropos manga and anime are the most successful and among the most interesting storytellers in the world. i consider pure prose as incomparably above illustrated stories, so the great mangaka do not compare with the great authors of the last 150 years, but below the likes of hemingway, mccarthy, faulkner, rushdie, coetzee, updike and of course mishima/kawabata/ishiguro/murakami, and above almost all other living english language authors, are katsuhiro otomo, akira toriyama, hiromu arakawa, masamune shirow, kentaro miura, and also sunrise/"hajime yatate".
3.3 MUSIC
ref. above. when adapted, many of those iconic japanese series have iconic scores by japanese composers.
one of the greatest living producers is the filipino chad hugo. the biggest japanese artist in pop right now might be rina sawayama, i don't know, i don't listen to much. steve aoki is successful, mike shinoda extremely so. the popular lofi owes much to the various -waves, especially vaporwave, which itself pulls heavily on work like tatsuro yamashita/japanese citypop. but these aren't straight causal lines, music is collaborative, between partners like hugo and williams and between generations like yamashita to macintosh plus, and that's ignoring everything else vektroid worked off. i'd sooner criticize pop anyway for lagging behind, all the brilliant producers work in hip hop and electronic. what's popular on the radio today uses techniques kanye worked out 20 years ago.
great artists often have troubled childhoods where their creative expressions go from psychological escape to literal escape. i think this is why the US black community produces so many singers and musicians, and this could explain why the asian community of the US, half as a whole (which it certainly is not) as large as the black community and far more economically successful, seemingly produces fewer great musicians. forcing a kid to play piano or violin for 13 years isn't going to turn them into a superstar, they have it or they don't, they'll be exposed and fall in love or they won't. how many white kids play instruments in school but never do anything beyond orchestra or band?
and again to close . . .
Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?
many, varied, and incredibly easy to find. the concluding point of your short essay was to discredit yourself with profound cultural illiteracy. you should consider this an opportunity to reexamine how you think about the world, as you are wrong.
jake
5mo ago
It is what some judges do, very few. The nine on the Supreme Court.
District judges have no authority to issue injunctions against the President, and we know this because the first time it happened in the history of this country was by Judge James Robart in 2017. Do consider the history of this country: FDR hasn't quite passed from living memory, Trump may violate many contemporary norms, the travel ban violated no historic norms and represented no sweeping and dubious exercise of executive authority. Certainly not compared to the sweeping, unprecedented and wholly unconstitutional exercise of judicial authority by who ended up being multiple district judges attempting to actively restrain the authority of the executive. This is why SCOTUS ruled in favor of the XO per curiam.
I don't know if this is the hill where Trump should invoke Jackson -- probably because I expect SCOTUS will issue another per curiam -- but unless district judges are permanently shaken of the delusion that they have the constitution's endorsement to issue sweeping federal injunctions, let alone those against the executive, that moment is inevitable.
jake
1yr ago
When I saw the second Dr. Strange movie and Benadryl's character was invited or spoke of the coming wedding of his former love interest played by Rachel McAdams I said to myself "He's gonna be black." He was. When I opened Helldivers for the first time and the cinematic played I didn't know the camera was going to shift to the spokesman's family, but if I did I would have correctly guessed his wife would be black. When the only information I had about the Fallout show was a white woman lead I knew she'd have a black love interest (if she wasn't gay). If I see a mom-coded woman in a commercial the expectation most congruent with reality is if there is a person also in the commercial coded as her partner they will not be white, and this is a pattern so frequent my normie Fox News father and even my normie-leftie brother have separately remarked to me about how all the media they consume, primarily sports so mostly advertising, features interracial couples, most commonly white-woman-black-man.
The Western institutional left is abundantly clear about their desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities. It is the most perfect case of denying out of one corner of their mouth and bragging out the other, they will not break stride as they say "It isn't happening, racist. It's great that it's happening." That intent is attempting to be realized in casting for shows and films and advertising. The interracial pairing is not "novel" but remarking on it being a thing that has happened is no response. Nobody's saying this has never happened before, what they're pointing out is the obvious politics behind the sudden preponderance in all media of one of the least common pairings in the real world.
Casting a woman to lead a television adaptation of a media franchise primarily consumed by men is a separate expression of the same thing. They are not attempting to meet the expectations and wants of their audience, they are attempting to be proscriptive, views and profits be damned.
jake
7mo ago
The justification for this ruling was that unstable people listened to Jones, right? So Jones is culpable. I don't even agree with prosecution under "incitement of imminent lawless action," it goes against our entire philosophy of law. If a person who would not otherwise commit a crime, would do so if told by the right person, they can't be held accountable. If for no other reason than the continued function of civilization, we are required to hold all adults as solely responsible for their actions.
To maintain civilization we must also be free to challenge all "established" narratives, at any time, for any reason. The United States owes its continued existence to its foundational documents assuming the worst. 1A assumes that unchecked, the government will lie, so people must have legal protection for calling out those lies. 2A even more so, which accounts for the possibility and need for violent revolution. i.e.; "1, so you can shed light on their tyranny, 2, so you can kill them if all else fails." It assumes bad actors will appear and so enshrines the ability to fight them, while holding the spirit of the whole, the whole of the people in good faith in vesting the power to fight them with the people.
It's also why, and you can call it wasted rebelliousness, I consider this as absolute moral mandate to call Sandy Hook a hoax. The government conspired to destroy a man for questioning it, downthread there's debate about "He would have had to pay less if he'd done it/well actually he might be sued for more if he'd done it," yeah but not much more, and that's the point. His punishment for questioning appears to be in the realm of the monetary punishment for having committed it. It's a hoax. The system is a hoax, that it's unquestionable is a hoax, everything about it could be true, and it's still a hoax.
Gun control is never happening. So the masses laugh as in this ruling the families make the short lives and most violent deaths of their children part of nothing greater than a soon-forgotten joke. It's disgusting.
jake
5mo ago
John Green is a good point of discussion in philanthropy apropos USAID. The mediocre king of YA and man who appears truly convicted in his beliefs has, in addition to his tuberculosis charity, also contributed in fighting maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. He uses some of his money to, he believes, improve the world.
Does he? Are we a net positive when we spend money on maternal mortality and tuberculosis in the third world?
You ask John and the NGOs involved in these efforts what the causes are and they'll rifle off a list of things money fixes. For Sierra Leone, if they had better infrastructure, more hospitals, more trained medical workers, antenatal care and all the supplements in the world, their rates would fall. For tuberculosis, the relevant parts of the above and also staff ensuring patients complete their regimens. Americans regularly fail to complete antibiotic regimens, what of those in far poorer, far less equipped nations? Their failures are prolific. They use the wrong medications, or the right ones at the wrong amounts, and either way the patients at unacceptable frequency fail to complete their regimens.
Add to this pharmaceuticals in countries like India pumping out genericized versions of American pharmaceutical products under government license and we reach the outcome of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.
And all this happened under robust US aid spending. More money in a year than John Green, who does well for himself, will make in his lifetime and beyond with the royalties of his estate. We can no longer afford to tolerate these practices. The solution is not more money, we've tried that, it's not infrastructure, health workers, medication access. The solution is those countries cease public treatment of tuberculosis, it is travel bans, and it is drone strikes on factories making knockoffs.
This is where John Green, Scott and EA utterly fail. It's true that with first-class western medicine far fewer mothers in Sierra Leone would die, but the root cause is population health, it's the genetic basis for particular risk and susceptibility to postpartum hemorrhaging. Throwing money at Sierra Leone will not solve that population health issue, it will also not improve its socioeconomic conditions. Nigeria is far wealthier, similar rates. Liberia at least for a time, far lower rates. Haiti, same as Liberia. When those mothers live through one birth, what happens? More children, more daughters, more future mothers, more future aid necessitated. But at least with Sierra Leone and broadly with efforts to lower maternal mortality you can't say an obvious externality is superbugs. With tuberculosis we know outright the process is creating superbugs and the response somehow has been "give even more money."
No, it is no longer time for that. If India cannot manage its tuberculosis issue for itself, if India has to keep on stealing American weapons against illness only for their population to dull them flat through misuse, they don't get help anymore, they don't get to make our drugs anymore. They must live or die on their own mettle, because they aren't playing a domestic game with domestic consequences, they're toying with a pandemic. Every dollar spent "fighting" TB in the third world is a dollar spent adding fuel to the fire of a real global health crisis. I can't blame John, he's so charmingly naive that he's constitutionally incapable of considering the solution is doing nothing at all. I can blame Scott, he knows better.
Directionally I agree with EA and with the moral judgment of value in eradicating disease. I believe it in completely, but lifetime treatments, fighting and suppressing and temporary cures, these do not constitute eradication. When we can engineer treatments that do eradicate, when we can target population health through genetic engineering, such as in reducing the risk of postpartum hemorrhaging, when we have the panacea that can wipe out AIDS and TB and whatever else, it won't be merely worthwhile but our true moral obligation to see it through the world over.
But efforts that increase suffering -- like increasing populations by creating more mothers at risk in Sierra Leone, creating more people throughout sub-Saharan Africa who will ultimately become infected with HIV in excess of those spared of mother-to-child transmission, and separately causing the emergence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, these are not actual charity and they are not love. Blindness to the consequences of your actions from whatever flavor of naivety is not love, knowing what is truly best for someone and acting in accordance with that is love. Love would be making treatments in Sierra Leone dependent on subsequent sterilization, same for PEPFAR. Love in India would be establishing secure facilities where under no circumstances are patients permitted to leave during their entire course of their regimen. Call it Directly Observed Treatment, Until Cured. It may sound cruel, but our current "kindness" is leading many of these countries straight to hell.
i thought about not saying this, then saw so many responses
guys, it's fake. it's a fake story. the so-socially-stunted who asks that IRL then goes hard at defending his obliviousness wouldn't be yet astute enough to know that sub, think of it as a good place to ask his question, and know he should use a cutesy throwaway called "throwRA." all those subs, RA, TIFU, AITA, are full of shitty writers posting varyingly obviously fake stories and getting loads of engagement. downthread here are two way more obviously fake stories about a woman whose husband "has become a robot", OP outs themselves as fake when they're trying to flex their prose in the update, and about a jewish guy who discovered his girlfriend is extremely antisemitic. the OP of that story? yeah banned from reddit, probably for dodging the ban they got because of their last fake story posted to RA.
i'm not surprised people who frequent what are among the shittiest subs on reddit chomped the bait but cmon. is there good in "provoking discussion" no probably not unless it's reflecting on credulity, and also how upvotes might, might work in highly niche communities but once used by the masses just become Likes and spur a race to the bottom. modern dating is certainly unideal. stories like this help make it worse.
My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality
Every society everywhere on Earth for all history up to the 20th century exerted sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice or else it collapsed. Religious language framed what they already knew, now we don't know and today it's framed purely religiously. Christianity has kept record of its inspired line on biotruths and their peculiarities -- non-consanguineous marriage for life with many children -- you'll see certain lifestyles were discussed from frame of their harms being known in common wisdom. The lecher or the whore were already seen as contemptible, moral lessons weren't "It's bad to be a whore," everybody knew that, so they were "Divorcing your wife makes whores of both of you."
Our connection with this common wisdom withered and died in the age of rapid modernization and individualization, so some Christians, already on the fool's errand of attempting to reconcile their faith with society, could only present their opposition in heavily religiously connoting or outright religious terms. It's bad because God says it's bad, true, but that's at the top. At the bottom is "You'll sleep around in your 20s, get married in your thirties, have one kid, maybe two if you're really lucky, not deeply love your husband, divorce him when your kids are out of the house, and every cold night in your lonely bed be unwarmed by the memories of the dalliances of your youth." It will ruin your fucking life, that's why you don't do it.
Secular society moving past these doesn't come from science. If anything the scientific paradigm should be hyperfixated on healthy, responsible human sexuality. Creatures have reproduced sexually for a billion years, mammals diverged 300 million years ago, 100 years of sexual insouciance might as well not exist on the epochal timeframe yet here we are. Looking down from a period of .0000003% of the history of our biological class and with absolute sincerity and absolute lack of any awareness these people say "Yeah sex doesn't mean anything, it can just be for fun." We feel this dissonance cognitively and viscerally, it's part of the constant psychic background radiation driving everyone crazy, we engage in behavior we know instinctively as destructive and then throw cash at our best so they target their tremendous mental faculties at justifying what we can conclude from intuition and pure reason as wrong. I can only wonder what sort of writing Scott would be putting out if he'd moved to a small Jewish community in New England and married a sensible reformed girl who wanted lots of kids. I can only wonder how much of his tremendous brainpower is sequestered in its quiet battle against a billion years of evolution screaming NO NO NO NO NO!
But it's not about science, it's about greed. It's about the money and power drawn from a destabilized society, and you bet your ass it's about top-% men being able to have sex with whichever beautiful commoners they want, using them up and discarding them. I'll use the socialist's most apt phrasing, it's history's true and greatest transfer of wealth, a self-sustaining fire consuming each new generation.
Have you been to Alabama?
Many times. Huntsville Space Center, c'mon.
There are people who you could persuade with this weak anecdote, I'm the wrong guy. One, because you're talking about the general geographic region in which I live, and two, with rare exception those very rural areas still have functional uncorrupt county-level governments, running water, electricity, telecommunications, waste removal services, and facilitating the rest, good roads, because right now there are enough high h people to make up for the low h people. Those places are also orders of magnitude safer for a foreigner to walk through alone, especially a woman. Versus India, where "an amalgamation of the most grotesque personal attributes imaginable" might more Indians than there are people in North America.
But those insults are yours. My attitude on this is we are strengthened by immigration of truly the very best of anyone into this country. The very best. The chief problem of governance is the sociopaths and specifically the long-since suppressed immune response against the cancer that is those sociopaths. With enough time they always get in, and then they weaken and weaken the system, allowing more sociopaths to get in or otherwise game the system. There's well over a billion Indians, so it's just math that genetically-top-percentile-prosocial people from the subcontinent will be a massive raw number. Yet I look at pictures from India and I think, where the fuck are they? You wouldn't know it, and that's because what's also a massive raw number is those of top-percentile deceitfulness and other antisocial behaviors, and they've been allowed to build entire industries in India around their sociopathy, including gaming American immigration.
I like India, I like Indians, or I have a general affinity for them all, I imagine especially when comparing me to those who I share views with on this. With McCarthy's passing, the greatest living author is Salman Rushdie, he's Indian. One of the few actually deserving Booker Prize winners of the last now 20 years is Aravind Adiga, another Indian. Gukesh Dommaraju just became the youngest world chess champion, the second Indian of the last four champions. I've seen pictures, I've seen the beauty, I know there are brilliant people, there's just too goddamn many for the United States to practice anything less than brutal selectiveness about who of them gets to come. Most especially when Indians here show such nepotism in hiring, while pursuing corporate practices and legislative efforts to make it so their own can more easily get into this country.
jake
6mo ago
I saw the news and read through this list, this table should comprise those inmates who killed multiple people:
| Name | Sentencing Year | Race | Dead (Injured) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dzhokhar Tsarnaev | 2015 | Caucasian | 6 (281) |
| Robert Bowers | 2023 | White | 11 (6) |
| Kaboni Savage | 2004 | Black | 12 |
| Dylann Roof | 2016 | White | 9 (1) |
| Johnson, Roane & Tipton | 1993 | Black | 7 |
| Kadamovas & Mikhel | 2007 | Baltic, Slav | 5 |
| Sanchez Jr. & Troya | 2008 | Latino | 4 |
| Thomas Sanders | 2014 | White | 2 |
| Julius Robinson | 2008 | Black | 2 |
| Brandon Council | 2019 | Black | 2 |
| Alejandro Umana | 2010 | Latino | 2 |
| Edward Leon Fields | 2019 | White | 2 |
This is insulting. A mass commutation for lesser crimes I would be more understanding of, but for the list of commutations to include Kaboni Savage, a person so befitting his name a court and jury in Philadelphia, who I think it's fair to assume would be highly sympathetic were there something to be sympathetic about, sentenced him to death. The office of President, because Biden didn't choose to do this, could hardly act in a more patronizing manner, and also, with the pardon of Savage, one more plainly ideological. It's pure political dunking, not a stand against the death penalty, else he would have issued one for every inmate. Nor was it a commutation based on actual severity, Savage was certainly more harmful than Bowers, and with the success of his drug dealing he might have negatively impacted more lives than Tsarnaev, who probably only missed a commutation because there would be universal uproar followed shortly by a guard strangling him in his sleep. Roof and Bowers, well, we all know why their sentences weren't commuted.
jake
1yr ago
If January 6, 2021 was the day Trump's second term was confirmed and had leftists behaved identically to the red hats, people here wouldn't even bring it up, because they'd have no reason to bring it up, because there's nothing unusual about leftists interrupting political processes.
Statements like this reinforce the grand hoax. There was nothing unusual about the day, its only unique quality was the right engaging in a particularly visible protest. It wasn't transgressive, the left behaves far worse far more often; it wasn't a threat, they would have brought guns.
Last week the country and world saw Joseph Biden is the de jure but not de facto President of the United States. The party that has branded itself on "democracy" shows no felt obligation to clarify to their base the man they voted for is not the actual Executive. It goes without saying they will lie about anything and the significance of 1/6/2021 is one such lie. Sadly it's not their worst.
jake
3mo ago
From what you've quoted and a certain other line in the article, this stop doesn't seem entirely random.
Machado was driving to work Wednesday with two other men
...
According to Machado, the agents said the name of a man who had a deportation order, someone who had given Machado’s home address.
...
The two men with him were taken into custody. He does not know why.
jake
1yr ago
The loss in quality in video games must also be mentioned. I don't know enough about the field to understand how improving technology has changed it; I assume as engines and graphics continue to improve, the demands for their effective functioning also rise, so studios, to a point, need to hire more people than teams of the past. At the same time the lovely little LOZ-riff indie title Tunic was mostly done by 1 guy, and while to modern standards for graphics and length it's unremarkable I do think its brilliance, and of course the other 1-guy masterclass of Stardew Valley reveal the core problem in the gaming industry: too many people.
Halo 3 to the day is one of the most technically impressive games ever made and compared with modern studios it was a skeleton crew of some dozens of staff. The campaign, though quite brief compared to CE and 2, is memorable, has excellent setpieces, and still holds up (just played through it again.) After the campaign, their attention was not spared when it came to the multiplayer. First was a robust replay system, it wasn't the first replay system, but it was fantastically done, I filled my 360 hard drive with noscope clips I was able to pull via downloading the replay at the end of a match, then cutting the segment from the replayed game, often recording at additional angles for pierce-through-multikills or sniper ricochet shots. Then there was the excellent map editor, allowing significant customization of what weapons and vehicles spawned on maps, where players spawned on maps, and the gameplay rules for those maps. Where Zombies had been a popular custom game mode in Halo 2, they gave it full support in the Halo 3 mode of infection and variants of maps designed to have fortified positions from which to mow down the endlessly-respawning zed team. The real meat of these were basically gone at the launch of Halo 4 despite it also being on the 360 and "despite" them having significantly more employees. Again I don't know the field, but I know enough to know about Brook's Law. What are all those extra hires really doing?
Overproduction of managers/elite is a known thing, I'm sure someone else has made the observation of this really seeming to be a problem in everything, overproduction of ostensibly qualified workers for every sector. Video games went from very niche to an industry where single companies could make a billion dollars per month, it's no wonder so many people started graduating after an education pipeline meant to get them in the industry, in whatever specialty. People who didn't really want to work on video games, but think it's something they could do because they like video games, or people who didn't think much of their options. A lot of them being "writers" who would prefer to be authors or working in Hollywood, but while they don't have the chops to do any of that, they have a degree and they know someone in the industry or especially they fill the right checkboxes, and they're hired in and their incompetence makes it into the game, either in the writing or downstream of their slow and low-quality asset/programmatic work on the game.
All that said, my GOAT stack is the probably-normiecore of Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and Red Dead 2. It's a good time to be playing games, industry struggles ignored.
tl;dr: IMVHO, because of the size of the industry, too many people resort into working in video games rather than the earlier days of the field being mostly obsessive nerds powerfully driven to create
Also, AI is coming for video games just like it's coming for Hollywood. Bug testing and QA may never go away, but in our lives we will soon enough see a wide field of auteurs like Eric Barone and Andrew Shouldice, except they'll be putting out titles on the level of Deus Ex and Halo.
jake
1yr ago
In May 2020 there was a real chance my mother was going to die alone in a hospital room because of fascist policies enacted to stop transmission of an illness that doesn't kill people. Day after week after month after year I still see people entirely seriously using the term fascist to refer to those most opposed to pound-for-pound the worst lie in the history of this country. Of course I know they don't truly understand what fascism is, if they understood it, they could recognize it; if they recognized it, they would realize everybody screaming fascist over the last 10 years are those most inclined to supporting and perpetrating fascism. I know it just means to them "this thing is viewed by my ingroup as bad, and with this term I am signaling to my ingroup that I am one of them." It's galling, at times I've felt the temptation of a rage and frenzy, but I'm pretty good at keeping a cool head and I know when it comes down to it the people saying these things are deeply unserious.
You provide no substance here; the story of Carlson's supposed texts is old and baseless. Dominion sliced apart internal communications and arranged them to falsely portray things like Carlson hating Trump. His frustration has been known and as a non-federal-voter with limited subject interaction with Trump supporters, my impression has been they too view him as not delivering much on what they had hoped. If he's actually grifting, well his latest grift is getting Alex Jones back on Twitter and being Melania's pick for VP so I imagine Trump might be wondering if he could get any more Tucker-tier grifters on his side. On the prosecution, Carlson voicing concerns is easily explained; he believes the system is sufficiently corrupt to baselessly convict. I'm sure /pol/ is full of the blackpilled who would describe moral certainty of Trump's innocence and equally of his inevitable conviction. Nybbler might have even said it here already. Thinking that means any of them believe he's guilty is kafka shit.
But that's not what I'm here for, this is: is the American government bursting at the seams with depraved criminals? You can answer wrongly, but it's yes.
I have a postulate I put here a while back detailing my view on election fraud, most briefly it's "If possible, certain." The basis is that depravity. I saw someone here last week thinking apropos "They would [defraud voters] if they could" a suitable response is nevertheless "Sure, where's the evidence?" But no, you don't understand, if you truly understand how they are criminals who will take whatever they can the only rational consequent is "Can they prove they didn't?" And so likewise with the prosecution of Trump when you truly understand the overwhelming criminality present within the American government it's not the midwit's pattern-match of "whataboutism" it's the necessary consequent of "Can everyone involved prove their allegiance to justice?" Nope, they can't. So what do you go to, "He's a unique threat to the constitution"? Government organizations and taxpayer dollars censored speech, 1A out. The left is quite clear on guns, 2A out. NSA soldiers spying on homes and American citizen communications, 3A and 4A out. Or to cut to the quick, believing people who don't pay taxes should get to vote, that's the foundational ethos of the country out. The law doesn't matter to these people and the constitution doesn't matter to these people. (And please, I speak not the map but the territory.) What remains?
Trump won't be convicted. If and when this reaches the supreme court they'll rule 8-1 on what could be the utterly flimsiest of procedural issues that won't otherwise be immediately applicable as precedent for however many thousands of cases. The 8 members of actual merit will understand this is all politics, and so those 8 members of actual merit, appreciating their places in history and/as the only people with real power and real principle in 21st century America, will decline from participating in fuckery befitting the Roman senate.
So, if you too understand this truly, that this is entirely politically motivated, then you won't waste my time with the unserious person's poor gotchas or crimestop pattern-matches. Trump could have broken the law, probably even, so arcane is much of American law, but the law doesn't matter to those prosecuting him so why waste everybody's time here talking like it does? Trump does however represent a threat to their particular order, and that finally brings us to the only thing worth discussing in this entire affair: of Trump or those on the side of his prosecution, who deserves power?
My mother survived, and a politician I campaigned for as a bright-eyed youth got my dad in the hospital room. I'll back him forever for that just as I will never forget those who made it so I had to make that call.
jake
21d ago
I think that’s also a very good counter example to all the people who say that there are no conspiracies because they are impossible to keep secret
MKUltra showed this when a couple dozen universities across the country were dosing unknowing participants with psychoactives and it took congress investigating something else to uncover it. People are in fact so good at collectively shutting up one could wonder if a separate conspiracy had anything to do with the appearance in common wisdom of "number of participants" as a weighty variable in the success of plots.
jake
1mo ago
the law firm Trump sanctioned earlier this year, only to drop all sanctions against them after they eliminated DEI policies and promised to do $40 million of pro bono work for
himWhite House initiatives.
jake
6mo ago
There's something not right here, I hear familiar bells of dissonance. I notice I am confused.
Opposition to immigration is the principal impetus for the right. Not just the American right, opposition is the common view among the native peoples of all western nations. The belief of what to do isn't uniform, but "Too many, greatly reduce" is dominant. Musk shows an awareness of this, he's also shown an awareness of the discussions of the deep online right apropos "You have said the actual truth." He should know. Consider also his loudly backing AfD, a party that can be defined by its opposition to immigration.
If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right? If his shift as has been supposed by many including myself was about viewing the left as a threat, how does he not view the right as a graver threat for their anti-immigrant sentiment extending to close the tap on his source of engineers? How does he ever buy Twitter? Or, after buying it, carrying out the lifting of bans, diving into the discourse of the right, and seeing there "No we mean literally all of them are going back," realize what he's courted, renege and cut a deal? The media would need maybe two weeks of news cycles and his image would be rehabilitated for the normie masses while in the background he received the necessary assurances of allowing him to continue his corporate administration as he sees fit. But there again, if how he wants to manage his corporations by his ostensibly aggressive prioritization of foreign labor, why does he ever consider the left a bigger problem than the right?
I had more and I cut it down and now I've again written more than I think I need because I'm pretty sure all of you reading this knows all of these points. What I run into is that for the last few years for Musk, though really it seems it's been basically all of his career, people have bet against him, for the absurdity of his ideas, for supposed incompetence, for ignorance, more lately for him being "evil", and they've lost every time. This must be stressed enough, they have lost every single time. Or at least every single time it's mattered. So I look at him and wonder, how does he believe the FEU view? He's not evil, stupid or incompetent. Did he just not know what's actually happening?
People are complex but plenty of times it is the mundane or contradictory explanation rather than the fun/schizo/5D chess theory. I'm probably grasping at nonexistent straws, as I so often do. Sure, he believes in this one area of hyper-pure tabula rasa egalitarianism, despite living a life of evidence against it. Sure, he holds the root ideal that underlies the California approach to homelessness and crime, not to mention trans advocacy, he's just not extrapolated one more step to shake it off.
Still I think a possible explanation for his response is this: he believed talent came from India because he had convincing, not necessarily good and certainly not great, but convincing enough reasons to believe it did. In a very short period of time he has since discovered those hiring for his corporations have prioritized Indians because they are Indians, have praised and promoted along Indians because they are Indians, and may be benefiting in appearances from work done primarily by not Indians, all while repeatedly rejecting superior talent because they are not Indian. And so he has struggled, in recognizing his mistake and perhaps in rationalizing against a roiling blood rage at not simply being taken for a fool, but taken in such a way that it is a direct attack on his life's work of getting off the rock and making humans an interplanetary species.
I don't know. Again I'm grasping at straws in seeking fantastic explanation over the simple and probable one. But, and I'm paraphrasing what Sam Hyde said in his video, if this is a real belief for him, not something from a lack of knowledge and understanding but something he won't get past, he's not the man we all hope he is, and he will lose.
jake
8mo ago
What is the steelman for the establishment being unable to steal elections?
Not unwilling, unable. Arguments from unwillingness, such as the ostensible criminality of mass electoral fraud, are tautological, as they assume the ability to read minds. Arguments of it being unnecessary are supremely tautological, as their first assumption is legitimate elections. Tautologies are not steelmen.
That sufficient measures exist to stop illegal voting; that sufficient measures exist to prevent the mass injection of fraudulent ballots; that relevant executive agencies have an interest in auditing elections and investigating to the fullest extent and neutrally charging electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud; that the courts have an interest in neutral hearings of electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud; that the media has an interest in investigating and neutrally reporting to the fullest extent electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud. The caveats of "fullest extent" and "leftist electoral fraud" are necessary, as no national-scope investigation has happened, and while there are rarely stories of left-aligned individuals being charged with electoral crimes, relative to those, stories of right-aligned individuals being charged with electoral crimes occur far more frequently. For the sake of charity, I will agree the inclination to criminal behavior as equal among the left and right, it is however no question that support for criminal behavior is a dominant ethic of the modern left. For these, the probabilistic assumption is one side is caught and/or reported on less often.
Do also consider the history of American conspiracies; principally, that evidence indicates coordination and silence are solved problems.
And to repeat myself, "it's a crime" and "they didn't need to" are not positions of a steelman. Not unwilling, unable.
As I said downthread, as someone in deep red country the conversations I hear have an underlying apprehension of violence that rises by the day including today. I don't believe in their hearts these people want violence, but as the right is the political alignment predicted by having superior-to-average faculties at assessing danger, I think even if only intuitively they understand and greatly fear how swiftly we approach violence as the only way out. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who know when to draw the sword. If and when it happens, it will be the right and only time.
The thought of this as being what stops Trump is many things, all of them wrong. There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man." Farcical. There will be topical complaining from RINOs, the establishment-GOP will continue searching, as they surely have since 2016, at finding a way to keep him out, and in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes. This conviction completes the ascendance of the man as the idea of the total rejection of the establishment. The establishment understands this, and is thus why they attack him with a wholly unparalleled ferocity; it is exactly the same reason those who land on the turbo-normie-left-side-of-bell-curve-meme support him. They don't have to think and wordswordswords, they viscerally understand power against power.
People try to contextualize what's happening in so many irrelevant details, ignore the minutiae. It has never been about vice, it has never been about ambiguous business dealings, it has never been about brashness, candor and honesty. Politicians as a category are the least ethical humans in this country, why would they care about any of this? It is about a man who refused to kneel when demanded by seated power and has risen to threaten their entire existence. This conviction heralds the imminent arrival of the pivotal figure of American history. It doesn't have to be Trump, but where we are in the reverberations of history is no earlier than the election of Buchanan.
Speaking as a former reddit powerjanny, not that insider knowledge is necessary as the admins posted this publicly, the Reddit "Russian bot" story was a total fabrication.
Outside of the post by [see link], none of these accounts or posts received much attention on the platform, and many of the posts were removed either by moderators or as part of normal content manipulation operations. The accounts posted in different regional subreddits, and in several different languages.
Karma distribution:
0 or less: 42
1 - 9: 13
10 or greater: 6
Max Karma: 48
Admins banned 61 accounts. It wasn't unusual for me to ban more spam accounts than that on multiple single days in any given month, and very often those accounts had already accumulated thousands of upvotes.
The American intelligence apparatus had highly politicized reasoning for depicting Russia as an adversary. They're also part of the true power in this country, so personally I just can't find credibility in their words. After all, I saw for myself the proliferation of the bot hoax on Reddit. I can't say with certainty China was or is shilling on the site, but I can say how I was on /pol/ more than anything else just after Wuhan was quarantined, and those coronavirus general threads had videos from China of things that never happened. If Chinese cyberwarfare finds value in sliding and psyopping /pol/ and fielding an army of "wolf warrior" bots on Twitter, it's fair to suspect them of doing the same on Reddit.
I'll also say, having been introduced to just a taste, Chinese meme culture is incredibly complex, brilliant, and funny, all this even passing through translation. Heavy state censorship in the information age is cleverness' perfect crucible and surely some number of those people take their talents to contribute them to the state. If they haven't been doing any of this and it's just all a series of unfortunate coincidences, I don't think it's because they're lacking citizens who know how to talk like Americans, argue like Americans, and truly so importantly, meme like Americans.
jake
6mo ago
/pol/ had the kill shot years ago. How are they good for us but not their home country?
If we answered that question truthfully we could have a serious discussion about exact numbers to allow, rather than having to "dance" around it with the sledgehammer of the elimination of all H-class Visas. We could say, biologically, there is a maximum and knowable quantity of immigration candidates from any given country with average standards of living below the West.
Then, if we were allowing more than that umber, we would know either our standards were slipping, or they were being gamed.
Europeans and certain other populations exhibit a high average level of civilized behavior, call that inclination h, following from g. Russia is very close to the US, in many ways more civilized, but I would still feel confident saying measured on the whole, Russia is one standard deviation below America in h value. One step of degradation below Russia is not India, so India must be at least two steps below Russia, which means it is no closer than three below the United States. In comparison, Iceland is probably one sigma above, and Japan two.
I think this is imprecise, that there are external factors to an extent, but there are such obvious differences looking from India, to the US, to Japan, that there's something intrinsic and gestalt that speaks broadly to the peoples, and that does feel close enough.
For an Indian immigrant to match, they would need come from a population at least 3 sigmas above India's average h. This rejects almost all Indians, from 1.4 billion to 1.9 million. It's less than that, though, because if you want to improve a country, you can't bring in people who are only average. So the actual line starts at 4 sigmas, and that reduces it to about 45,000.
I have no problem believing there are about 45,000 Indians who would contribute to the strength of America. It's math. Here's the problem, I would assume a minimum of half of those persons intend to live out their days as citizens of India, using their talents in their own country for their own gain. Also consider others in that population will have immigrated elsewhere, such as Europe. This means short of calamitous conditions wherein only America is a viable immigration target, we should have a soft cap of 20,000, to in no circumstances exceed the hard cap of 45,000.
We're well over that. In 2023 (Page 32) there were 279,386 H-1B issuances to Indian nationals. Ignore everything I just wrote, I know that number immediately as gross excess. The US isn't lacking, in anything, to the degree that it requires the importation of nearly 300,000 laborers from a single country. Especially when you remember, that's just the H-1B admissions.
Despite this, it is conceivable the number could exceed 45,000, but only if we instituted extremely strict requirements, ensured those requirements could not be gamed, abolished birthright citizenship including retroactive revocations, etc.
jake
1yr ago
... but it creates extremely entertaining and compelling movies and stories that actually have plausible deniability, such that you seem like a madman if you perceive an agenda aligning the content in such a way.
I have different but kind of parallel thoughts on this.
The first is in how the Left is critical of I'll say older standards of beauty and the "male-gaze" side of female sexualization. I won't say this as as categorical, but within the Left some do have a clear interest in putting characters in TV and film and also major studio video games who would not traditionally be considered attractive enough for mass media. In the Tolkien Rings of Power, the mightiest and fairest of the Elves remaining in Middle-Earth, Galadriel, is played by Morfyyd Clark. There are poor style choices here, keeping her pristine amidst battle would emphasize her otherworldliness. There is also an unfairness in comparing Clark, and almost any woman in Hollywood, to Cate Blanchett. But I seriously doubt casting took a hard pivot because they didn't even want to try competing with Blanchett. I am certain they had better options they forewent because Clark is "mid" for Hollywood. Film is full of more examples by the day; Halle Bailey would rightly be a model, she has incredibly striking features that would make her fashion advertising gold but she is so far on the "alien" side of model-alien-androgyny (as an aside, "androgynous", when you really evaluate those it describes, really just means "girlish") that ignoring other perceived issues with the film, the sharp features of her face hurt interest In The Little Mermaid. What helps I'm sure with Anya Taylor-Joy's success is not just her skill at picking roles in good films, but specifically films that benefit from a kind-of alien looking actor like herself.
In video games, there's Aloy in the Horizon series, Abby in TLOUP2, MJ in Insomniac's Spider-Man 2, and The Hero in Fable 4 (or Fable not-4, I don't know and I'm not bothering with the articles elaborating on it.) I think they accurately recreated the face model for Aloy, but in Fable, and I won't be surprised if there are changes, they made the character uglier than her model.
Given there is some political interest, and again I'm not painting with a wide brush, but given there is some clear interest in subversion of traditional beauty and traditional relationships, the most powerful content-producing AI couldn't produce subversive content on these lines because it isn't logically possible. If a person wants to look at beautiful women then ugly women, no matter how otherwise compelling the setting, won't light up those biological hardwires. If they want a story of that great man hero, "actually male heroes suck" in the most otherwise beautiful setting won't do anything for them. If they want a story with the traditional nuclear family, the great story around the queer poly cell isn't going to do anything for them. Of course harems might, and the terminal diagnosis for this poly fad is the most terrible return of the harem, but harem stories are eminently male-gaze, so that's not happening.
My other thought, my original thought, is on the technology. If the technology of AI-generated shows and films reaches the hands of the people, their cultural output will blot out the sun. The entertainment industry, in its current state, will be utterly incapable of competing in a world where random creatives can generate compelling television as quickly as they can write it. The Nolans, the Villeuneuves, the Mendeses, they'll still have success, but when John McCrae can put out himself Worm and Pact as shows, or when the many successful Royal Road writers can make shows of their works, or when some guy in his basement can produce Peter Jackson's Rise and Fall of Gondolin, when Orson Scott Card (who I hope will leap at the tech) can make adaptations of the Speaker and Shadows Saga. When fans in places western copyright law can't reach can use this to make a 100% book-accurate show of Harry Potter, Hollywood is fucking over.
Will they let this happen? I think Sora was the canary, the final warning. I think if they aren't having all-legal-hands 24/7 (in spirit if not actual) from now to Inauguration Day 2025 they too will have a terminal diagnosis. But I think, and I dearly pray, the tech will go too far too fast and it will reach the people before Hollywood even realizes they should be planning to stop it.
jake
2yr ago
architecture nerd here, looks essentially modern, no fusion. southwest accents. could be better, modern southwest has many beautiful works.
could be much worse. a lot of purely modern houses are dissonant, inhuman shit. that house doesn't do anything interesting, it also doesn't do anything terrible. inoffensive.
i imagine gates will spend very little time there. isn't that the thing with those 8 figure fantasy mansions? all that time and effort to get it and no time to enjoy it. gotta keep grinding. except maybe notch.
I think there's some measure of trolling in spirit here, but maybe some real insight too, just hiding. I see the argument, history not changing, no matter how fine the margin, is still history not changing. Trump got a pic that's getting him 100 million votes (re. my now-Over @ 105), but how's that +15MM votes and ~+3 states won (I'd take the over on 42.5) going to change his presidency vs one where he wins by a lesser margin? If a conspirator comes forward and says the attempt was orchestrated through USSS, Trump would have historic mandate, but that's a discussively comical magnitude of "if", and ifs aren't happenings.
It also makes me think of the other, other "great historic" picture of Trump: on the DMZ with Un.
In a different timeline this might have been a picture historically comparable to those of Nixon with Mao, and with Deng. But as good as the pic is, Trump left office, Nork's back to belligerent insularity, nothing happened. I wonder if I caught some psychic headwinds, I've been playing Dishonored (no kill total ghost ofc) the last couple days, and as I was walking yesterday around noon I fell down a Wiki hole reading about Korea's tumultuous more-than-20th century. Assassinations, coups and cults. Korea marched on, it's a tech, cultural and athletic powerhouse. One of their recent presidents was impeached, tried, sentenced to prison in 2018 and pardoned and released in 2021. Is that a happening? I don't know, how much did Korea change? The first woman in East Asia to be popularly elected as head of state, ending in scandal and prison, and how many people outside of Korea know? Not many, doesn't seem like Korea even felt the bump. So was it really a non-happening?
I'm not being coy. If "happenings" require a moment where a country is on the fulcrum and a decisive action forces the lever, maybe they are rare. (I'll use "moment" from here forward because "happening" is too slangy.) Was JFK's assassination such a moment? If it was federal actors, could you really say their moment was killing a President? They had to get to that point. So was it the conspiracy? But that doesn't come ex nihilo, they had to know they could conspire, so was the moment when the federal government changed so actors within could foment ideas of killing an adversarial Executive? Well when did those conditions arise? FDR? Where did that tyranny originate? Was he a communist? For the sake of this point and this point alone assume he was. So when was the moment? His swearing-in? Or was it being shown it could work, so the October Revolution? But was that a moment, or was it the long consequence of the Communist Manifesto and Marx? Well what was the moment in Marx's life? And what precipitated that moment?
"Nothing ever happens" is interesting to me, but even not reduced as I've done, so saying yes, JFK's assassination was a moment, the October Revolution was a moment, it's interesting to me because it's still necessarily a very holistic reading of history. In that there is a sensibility; holistically, Obama's election wasn't a moment, so many moments preceded and produced the America of 2008 and he was in the right place at the right time. Trump likewise, so many decisions were made and moments happened before he ever ran, before he was the nominee and the victor. Holistically these are really the long outcomes of the thoughts and actions resultant from the psychic ebbs and flows of the masses and any particular moment, even a very loud one, might be nothing, and it's not until much later that we know. Yeah, right now we don't know. We can't know. I like the zen of "Nothing happens until it does." There might be wisdom in it, "Don't rush to history."
Tom Crooks rushed to history. He grazed Trump, killed a supporter, died after catching a bullet or several to the head, and nothing happened. Maybe.
I would have supported prosecution for Milley for at a minimum his apparent call to China. I would have also supported a fair investigation without necessarily a trial for Fauci, as I could believe he was the voice for a large or even very large group of people. But for both, I never actually thought they would be prosecuted. Even after everything it's still not quite how we do things in this country, and these men are old and already disgraced, they were before Trump's victory, and now especially, and so it's free, empty and yet still symbolic magnanimity to let them go off into retirement.
A pardon is a brand of shame. Granting implies guilt, accepting confirms guilt. For Milley, it's confirmation of his mutiny and sedition. For Fauci, whatever the specific crime being pardoned, probably gain of function, it will be viewed as a confirmation that everything he did was illegal and thus wrong. The right I see just knew they were criminals, they feel affirmed their beliefs. Some I see on the left are glad because either they fear tyranny and view this as protection or because of open spitefulness, others I see are blackpilling among themselves about the confirmation of guilt, about another new and terrible precedent, and about the general degradation of justice.
I wonder about "arising from or in any manner related to his service" per the actual text of the pardons @Gillitrut links below. I'm not a lawyer, so for all I know this phrasing is known by precedent as synonymous with a blanket pardon, but it reads to me like it's clausal to what they did in the course of their official duties, meaning it's not a blanket pardon. That if Milley killed a prostitute during lockdown the pardon wouldn't apply because it didn't arise from or relate to his official duties and that makes me think, mutiny isn't part of his official duties either.
Edit: Glazed right past "Any offenses against the United States"
I thought the odds of their prosecution before this it would be low, I still think it's low, but I think it's higher now than it was before. Whatever happens, for their legacies, they weren't mercifully granted pardons, they were inflicted with them.
I see you're a sockpuppet. I don't know if you're a venting lefty or a trolling righty or some other kind of bait, but there's something I've never seen talked about, and it's worth talking about. This topic is endless tragedy and comedy, tragic where the real villain of the 20th century, communism, wasn't vanquished, and comic where we explore the history of the word "fascism."
Other commenters here have already observed how "fascism" and "fascist" have become meaningless pejoratives, and that's what's funny: fascism has always been a meaningless pejorative. You can cite dictionaries but if you look at the original critiques by Marxists, be it Clara Zetkin or Trotsky or Georgi Dimitrov, you'd see it was meaningless when they wrote and spoke about it. It meant nothing. Well — almost nothing.
Zetkin:
Trotsky:
Dimitrov:
I actually laughed the first time I read Trotsky's full critique because it really is just "Fascism is when the fascists get in there and fascist all over the place."
When you pare away the rhetoric you see exactly what they're doing: Our righteous freedom fighters, their fanatical terrorists.
"Nuh-uh, you're the ones exploited by powerful people who hide the truth and want to take away all your rights!"
They hated their opposition because they were a proletarian revolt who wanted to fix the existing system instead of overthrowing it and implementing communism. That's it, that's literally all it has ever been, commies mad that people saw through their horseshit but recognized the power in banding together. What else would communists do but wordswordswords slander them as having dishonest motives? And dishonest motives, oh boy. Look at every communist government in the last 100 years. "Not true communism" yeah maybe, but the purpose of a system is what it does, and every communist party that has ever risen to firmly control a country has behaved in exactly the same way. Tyranny and genocide.
What's happened since Trotsky et al. is not what I would call classic leftist behavior so much as the inclination that begets leftism as a method of obtaining political power: control of language. I do feel this is an important distinction, because where I view leftism poorly is almost entirely on the ones who manipulate language to equivocate and ultimately deceive, not those of their voters who believe they're doing good and want to out of genuine altruistic impulse. Unfortunately the people who reach high power from the left frequently use those techniques. There are minor exceptions in parts of Europe but it's not the case in the major leftist establishments of the US, the UK, France, and Germany, and they influence their comrades elsewhere. They manipulate terms, they equivocate and deceive. Like "fascism." They've had a century to define it around Nazi villainy, and then they adjust and readjust the definition so it can always be used to slander their opposition. The changing definition also probably continuously adds to the social inertia against anyone who might stand up and say "Hey, wait a second, the original definition was what?"
It's taken on socioreligious power, it's analogous to religious conviction. For me to tell someone "That's not fascism" or especially "You don't know what fascism is" is like saying "Good is bad, bad is good." It's a fundamental difference in paradigm, so such a statement has negative weight. It's meaningless.
There are governments who called themselves fascist and that would mean something here if the relationship between communism and fascism were discussed honestly, but it's never been honest. Fascist persists as an insult because communists persist, entrenched in power, and being masters of manipulative language, had means after obvious motive to downplay the horrors of communism and play up the horrors of nazism (both bad, the former orders of magnitude and uniquely worse). And we're humans and we can't help but calling our enemies the worst names we know. From Truman likening Dewey to fascists to generations of kids matriculating under communist professors who see fascism in everything and it repeats and repeats and repeats.
It's about to stop.
If I called one of my irreligious friends a reprobate sinner they'd laugh. They'd think I was joking, the word has no meaning for them. That's happening again. We're in the cultural singularity and culture is progressing very fast indeed. In at most 10 years, fascism and racism and sexism and every other -ism and -ist and -phobe, having finished the sprint from "No we're not/You're the real fascists" to "If it's bad, so be it" to "u forgot the gigachad" will then move into pure mockery, just as I would face if I went to proselytize in ratheism by condemning their lives of sin.
I'd like to believe there's value still in arguing this, and maybe things change just right in the coming years and we can have a real discussion, but that's the best case for this idea, approaching it on its angle and in good faith. I'm not approaching this idea on its angle, but I do mean this in good faith. Every last bit of power is being wrung from those words, its a score of levers about to snap off their fulcrums, and all the people who hold to these need to understand this and be prepared for when those words they use to frame their very sense of politics and the world become meaningless.
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