07mk
20hr ago
To take the most charitable interpretation possible, Trump should understand, based on how he's been treated over the past decade+ in politics, that everything he does will be attacked and subverted in the dirtiest way possible. As such, not successfully hardening the defenses of the pool against predictable vandalism indicates incompetence on his part.
Of course, had he done that, that would likely open him up to other attacks of incompetence or corruption or other negative qualities.
07mk
20hr ago
It's hard to say, but my perception of those folks is that, for whatever reason, they prefer to see themselves in a video game as the protagonist, rather than to see sexy female protagonists who appeal to their male gaze. Could be cultural, could be psychological, could be just random chance, or could be nothing.
07mk
23hr ago
With some luck, by the time the PC version comes out, generative AI tools will be such that hobbyist modders can mod in the type of content from the older games that's almost sure to be missing in this one, including actual AAA-level cutscenes with voice acting.
07mk
1d ago
Those are what stood out to me, too. If I had to bet, I would easily bet that either this comment was AI generated, had significant AI generation with minimal human editing, or was intentionally human-written to appear AI generated, almost purely based on multiple paragraphs starting with:
Guys, I'm new here, so I'm not sure if this fits
Here is the nuance I want to add,
But here is where the jurisdictional land-grab happens
Let me give a concrete example, carefully
07mk
1d ago
I'd guess you need to be some male equivalent of a hot woman, in this case likely charismatic.
07mk
1d ago
That very well may be true. It seems to me that progressives ought to try to do actual credible scientific research to to figure that out, and, to whatever extent that's true, to use actual scientific tools to figure out how to structure society, systems, organizations, etc. to channel people's tribalism in productive or, at least least deleterious ways. Instead, most have been just embracing their own tribalism as well as ignorance while also destroying our very ability to do credible social science research.
07mk
1d ago
I work in a team of fewer than 10 people, more than half for 6+ years, more than half of those for 15+ years. I also spent roughly 10-15 years in my 20s-30s with a friend group that I'd known since middle school, living with some of them for a decent chunk of that time, and certainly spending many hours with them most weekends for a lot of that time. That has not been my experience.
07mk
1d ago
The one thing I've found that works is combination of being family + regular interaction. If you ever figure out how it could be done to non-family, I hope you'll tell me!
07mk
1d ago
Socializing is a lot like eating well or exercising. Some people naturally stay thin and fit, while others are just really lucky and actually love working out.
I think this is an apt analogy (along with the stuff about how society has failed a lot of people both in terms of loneliness and obesity) but also not quite right. Eating well or exercising, by nature of physics, definitionally causes someone to stay thin (tautologically by what "eating well" means, to some extent) and arguably fit. But socializing doesn't have similar effect for loneliness. I'd say that building meaningful connections with others is what leads to preventing the deleterious effects akin to preventing obesity. One of my great insights that I had as an adult is that socializing by, e.g. spending lots of periodic time with like-minded people who enjoy your company and like you for who you are and vice versa, doing activities that everyone enjoys and/or is passionate about doesn't actually lead to building meaningful connections or relationships.
07mk
1d ago
If we assume that those whose ethnicity was listed as "unknown" are disproportionately Pakistani, there might have been as many as 3,000 Pakistani men charged with sex crimes every year since 2017. If each of these defendants had sexually exploited, on average, two white girls apiece, and for each one who was charged, another Pakistani wasn't charged – all of a sudden, the 250k figure doesn't seem half as implausible as I thought two days ago.
That's a lot of assumptions, though, and I think 2-per-defendant seems particularly hard to justify. By the accounts I read, the ratio tended to be skewed the other way around, where each victim had multiple rapists, often in quick succession. These are grooming gangs, so that makes sense. Of course, a gang of, say, 20, could rape 40 girls for the 2-to-1 ratio, but also, it could be gangs of 40 raping 20 girls.
As you say, we don't know. Which I'd guess is just as keikaku by whoever's in charge of collecting data for the British criminal justice system.
07mk
1d ago
Anecdote from my freshman year of college. I found myself turning down invites because I liked watching pirated shows, and films. A few weeks in I decided to never turn down an invite unless I had a very good excuse. Not disappointed in that choice at all.
I made this kind of decision sometime after college. It's one of my bigger regrets in life, as it raised the amount of suffering I went through in everyday life without providing any meaningful positives. No particular big negative event came out of it, just a constant long-term significant reduction in quality of life compared to the alternative. I ended up regretting it enough to basically reverse it about 5 years ago, never saying Yes to an invite unless there was some specific reason I really wanted to go or to hang out with those specific people. My life has been a lot better in those ~5 years.
07mk
1d ago
I'd consider a World Cup game easily worth it to go if I had the opportunity to do so without paying, but I'd say that basically any public entertainment event as intrinsically torturous, due to proximity to crowds. Doesn't mean it's never worth it, but the positives better be high enough to outweigh the significant figurative torture.
Either that, or it all counts, and as such all fans of sexualized anime are actually pedophiles.
Of course, vanishingly few sex-negative folks or "wokes" believe this, but, like basically all "woke" criticism of any media, it's a convenient tool to reach for when one wants to criticize some piece of media that they dislike in a way that appears to be based on anything other than arbitrary personal preference.
Arguably, this is the very phenomenon happening with Blood Rain, as Stellar Blade, like other East Asian semi-realistic video games such as Capcom's Resident Evil or Square Enix's Final Fantasy, uses a stylized anime-inspired visual style in terms of character design, rather than going for actual human-like realism. The first game actually featured a support character named Lily who actually looks very similar to Evie in terms of hair and facial features (some have speculated that Evie is the child of Eve and Lily, which wouldn't be impossible given the technology of the setting, but also, seems both way too on the nose in name and out of left field in the relationships) and was also commented on as appearing younger-looking in part due to the anime-inspired style.
07mk
2d ago
Agreed. As near as I can tell, progressivism is 100% a who/whom ideology.
Perhaps the same could be said of all ideologies.
The thing that gets me, though, is that progressivism specifically is supposed to be not about that, because it's specifically supposed to be about progress (as the name might imply). Which means progressing away from the old, bad way of figuring things out based on tribalism and moralizing and such, and instead using our modern, enlightened tools to figure out what the best things are. Unfortunately, it seems like there are like 30 progressives who try to think like me and about a billion witches bitches tribalists who simply use the stated principles of progressivism to launder in their own tribal opinions as the Officially Good Beliefs, almost always without conscious intent or even awareness.
07mk
2d ago
That makes me think this is another one of those self-reinforcing cycles, as more and more males lack ability to partner up with women after they enter adolescence due to women being more and more likely to reject them, more and more of their sexual experience is limited to solo activity with porn, which is more and more generated via popularization of both anime and AI, which will be shaped based on what they found attractive when they first started watching porn, which is getting younger and younger, which results in women being more and more likely to reject more and more young men due to their judgment of their preferences.
07mk
2d ago
Unfortunately, that's not really an option for people who are bad at consciously lying, even before you take into account that my sex and race are sufficiently low status enough in the woke hierarchy to negate the positives of being bi. After all, the notion that "gay men are the whites of the LGBT community" has been around for at least as long as the term "woke" has been popular to describe this ideology, and bi men aren't too far off from that. And as much as I wish it were not so, my looks also are nowhere near sufficiently good enough to counteract all that, either.
07mk
2d ago
I'm still a feminist sex-positive progressive. There are dozens of us, dozens! Unfortunately, we're all in hiding, so perhaps it's accurate to say that we all disappeared when the SJW/wokes took over.
07mk
2d ago
The pressure to return artifacts has declined because of Peak Woke, not because of the specific connection of the Benin Bronzes to slavery.
This seems akin to arguing that the reason the water level dropped over the past few hours isn't because of the gravitational effects of the moon and the Sun on the Earth, it happened because of low tide. Taking for granted that Peak Woke being in the past is a thing (I must admit, there are enough witness accounts to make it plausible that in some places, some of the time, some of the most extreme of the woke effects have somewhat receded, even if my personal experience isn't concordant with it), it being in the past is something that happened due to many things that happened between then and now. I don't think anyone can truly know exactly what and how much each specific event went into the recession from Peak Woke, but it seems plausible that scratching the surface of some woke cause and finding previously-unseen facts that are embarrassing to the woke was a major part of it.
07mk
2d ago
Discretionary sentencing should be with respect to the severity of the case details, not with respect to whether the judge feels like sending us all a message
I don't know about this specific case, but my general understanding is that when a judge is said to be "sending a message," it is always understood to be specifically because of the severity of the case details, and the "message" (deterrence) is specifically about making sure the rest of us understand that if we commit some crime that is specifically as severe in the details as this particular case, then we could expect such a severe level of punishment.
07mk
2d ago
Could be, but it's not about the hypocrisy. It's the fact that the exact same arguments, principles, and underlying ideology are invoked each time. It's a reflection of the fact that the arguments are disingenuous, because they're fundamentally based on unfalsifiable faith-based claims that can be picked up when someone dislikes something and then dropped when time proves something popular and well-liked.
07mk
2d ago
I'm only against those last 2 to the extent that they provide incentive to production. To whatever extent that they don't (e.g. perhaps existing images that were pulled from some FBI evidence locker), it's ridiculous that possession or distribution would be illegal. Unfortunately, it's one of those legal fights that doesn't seem possible to win, though. It's also hard to parse out exactly how much the extents involved here are, and some actual studies and models might be valuable, but I don't know if such scientific research exists for this kind of material.
Some people argue that the original victim is re-victimized each time the media is seen; I find this ridiculous as well, as there's no magical link between the markings on paper or pixels on a screen and the original person from whom the light was reflected and captured by a camera. In terms of the harms to the person who consume such media, I believe each individual is responsible for the harm that comes about from their choice to consume whatever media. If we were in a situation where so many people eschewed such responsibility that it was causing societal problems, I could see the argument that being illiberal in this case is worth the tradeoffs, but I don't think we're there, and I'm skeptical that we'd get there.
That said, who knows how fast society will change in the near future thanks to AI accelerating everything, and short-form social media content causing massive amounts of distributed media production by children. It's not a ridiculous concern, but one that I still think is wrong.
07mk
2d ago
Back in those days, one either called Mr. Moviefone for showtimes - please say the name of the movie you’d like to see, now - or just took pot luck when showing up.
Wow, I never knew that Moviefone had gotten voice detection. Back in my days, it asked you to punch in the name, and presumably the Moviefone database had mappings of the first few digits that corresponded to letters of the common movies out at the time.
I recall Uwe Boll being a somewhat household name among gaming nerds in the 2000s due to him directing a number of video game adaptations, including House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark, and even Far Cry. By all accounts, all of these films were incredibly awful (I never watched any), and he was reportedly barely more than a scammer who took advantage of Germany's laws around tax breaks around filmmaking or something to earn a living while pumping these out. He also famously challenged negative critics of his films to boxing matches, at least one of which actually happened. I don't remember the results, but I recall watching some grainy footage of the fight.
Culturally, it seems pretty clear that right-wing media is the subversive, rebellious one right now, even moreso in the filmmaking industry. Given that, it's perhaps unsurprising that what seems like such overt right-wing propaganda is made by someone who's generally been rejected (for quality, rather than any political reasons) by the industry like Uwe Boll. The western film by Ben Shapiro's company which starred Gina Carano, who was kicked off of Star Wars over some, IIRC, right-wing tweets, also come to mind. Thing is, with AI, the costs of producing films is going down very quickly, and so I have to imagine it's only a matter of time before a lot more films with this kind of messaging and this level of production value come out. With that democratization, it won't just be right-wing but all kinds of propagandistic Hollywood-level feature films that will likely come out from all over the spectrum. Should be exciting to see which ones end up winning out, if any.
There's the whole distribution-control as well, of course. Democratic governments have been locking down the Internet more and more, so maybe we're in for ideological filtering of feature films via distribution in the future that's just as strong as it is now via production. I'd hope that Twitter can act as a release valve, as well as torrents, but the latter are too niche, and the former can be censored or brought to heel if governments are motivated enough.
A better defense (IMO) for radical speech, is that even overall “bad” speech has some “good” parts, and you need those to prevent stagnation and decay (like inbreeding). For example, this site has a lot of opinions I disagree with, but occasionally I discover some important fact or argument I didn’t notice before, which aligns with my values (changing my object-level, like policy, opinion).
I agree with this, but also, the fact that you're presenting this at the end of your comment as some alternative or niche defense of free speech in part because the generic "pro-free speech" American normie wouldn't automatically recognize it makes me pretty depressed and reinforces my pessimism about the state of ideological/political discourse in America. When I was growing up in the 90s-early-00s going to hyper-blue/Dem/progressive schools in hyper-blue/Dem/progressive areas of America, this very point was taught to us as one of the - if not the - primary bases for supporting free speech. Literally everyone is biased, literally everyone has blind spots, and so the only way to avoid following biases down a cliff or being crushed by a steamroller coming in from our blind spot is to have many diverse people with diverse perspectives and diverse biases and blind spots be free to speak their opinion without fear of retribution merely for the contents of their opinions, to better mitigate our biases and cover our blind spots. Even so, it was clear that it would never be truly perfect, that it was just the least-worst option. This is also one of the bases of the scientific method and peer review. The thought that the very hyper-blue/Dems/progressives that championed this would turn out to be its most effective killers never occurred to me as a child or even as a very young adult, though by the time I was in my late 20s, it almost flipped to being almost obvious.
Now, there are many failures that led to this happening, but one thing I've noticed is that a lot of people seem to refuse to think recursively. In terms of free speech, we know for a fact that we're all, individually, biased; as such, if we are to judge what sorts of opinions are "within the bounds of free speech" and which opinions aren't, we will helplessly, inevitably, gratuitously, and likely moralistically, falsely judge opinions that we are biased against as being out of bounds, even though, in fact, they are within bounds. As such, no individual or even particular group of individuals can be trusted to make that kind of judgment call. This is why I want opinions that I personally find hateful, evil, pathetic, and even harmful to be spread openly and without any fear by the genuine opinion-holders. The positive contribution to dialogue and society at large comes from the very fact that I and people like me can't read their opinions without shaking and having to suppress our urge to shut them up.
Another aspect is the psychological finding* that fans of teams tend to judge even playing fields as being biased against them, and ones that are biased in favor of their team as being even. As such, if I genuinely want an even playing field, I must seek a playing field that appears biased against my side. This is one reason why I try (try - I'm imperfect) to steelman and to privilege opinions from people who I viscerally or Pavlovianly find, again, hateful, evil, pathetic, harmful, etc., and believe it's the responsibility of anyone who wants to get at truth to do something similar. Refusing to do such on the basis that it's hard or doesn't feel good makes one little better than a blind partisan. I must admit, I'm probably a blind partisan due to cowardice in most contexts.
* The replication crisis does put question to this, but in my biased mind, I believe that this would be one of those findings that would actually come out to be true or true enough if, in the future, psychology researchers were able to gain enough credibility to conclude such a thing from their research.
FWIW, Kalshi is showing about 20% chance that Take Two announces more than 5 million preorders before July 4. There's the factor of the odds that Rockstar announces this before July 4 that's multiplied by the odds that they get that many preorders, so it's hard to figure out what the odds of the actual preorder count being that are. But I'd personally bet against it being 50 million as of today.
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