07mk
2yr ago
So that story is entertaining on its own right, but it's also an interesting examination of the best ways to respond when someone points out an error of yours. Speaking for myself as someone who jumps at the opportunity to self-label as an egotistical narcissist, it seems like adopting a regular habit of admitting mistakes is plainly self-serving. It's almost a cheat code for how well it can bolster one's credibility, and I don't understand why it's not more common.
The basic contours of being motivated to save face are obvious enough, sure, but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse! I'm guessing there must be some other benefit here (assuming, of course, people who refuse to admit error are behaving remotely rationally) but I can't understand it.
I'm reminded of a quotation by Elena Gorokhova in her memoir about living in the Soviet Union, A Mountain of Crumbs, a version of which is commonly (mis-?)attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.
The idea seems to be that, if you have absolute power over your audience, then you don't need to bother with all that "credibility" nonsense. You just tell them whatever you want to tell them, and you don't particularly care if they believe you or not, because they have to pretend to believe you, lest they face the consequences.
07mk
2yr ago
Many academics posit that the concept of mammalian sexual dimorphism is a conspiracy of straight white men to oppress everyone else.
I don't think "conspiracy" is the right term for what they're positing. They don't believe in some smokey room where all the old straight cis men gather around to coordinate how to socially engineer everyone else to their liking. It's rather an emergent phenomenon in society that is downstream from all the old straight cis men oppressing everyone else. The upshot is that they get to claim vast nefariousness akin to a conspiracy but also get to stay strong in their views when all the evidence indicates that there's no actual men in smokey rooms coordinating anything of the sort. It really is an innovative worldview that has just enough layers of obfuscation to be acceptable to people who consider themselves intellectual while also retaining the passion and fervor that grand conspiracy theories can inculcate in true believers.
And notably, this phenomenon itself seems to be an emergent one, rather than the result of a bunch of power-hungry "academics" coordinating with each other to produce the ideology with the perfect combination of contagiousness and fervor for their audience. Rather, I think it's the result of simple evolution, as similar ideologies that were too conspiracy-minded or not totalizing enough got weeded out, leaving behind the highly optimized ideology that has been so successful in taking over so many institutions today.
Nowadays there are guys that brag with their inability to change a flat tire (true story).
I'm actually curious, what exactly is the brag here they were making? I've encountered people who can't change their own flat tires, but I've yet to encounter one who was anything less than sheepishly ashamed of this, much less proud enough to brag about this lack of ability on their part. Is it just that they enjoy such a luxurious life that they can just throw money at people to do this for them, even in unplanned emergencies?
Nowadays we live in the opposite culture - knowing is discouraged. The car works by magic, the iphone works by magic, the washing machine too.
I'm reminded of anecdotes I've heard from teachers mentioning that their students today don't understand computer filesystems. Everything is just done via app, and the idea of using a browser to download a file to a folder on their hard drive, then navigating to that folder in an explorer program, copying the file to another folder where it needs to be, and opening it with another application or whatever is completely foreign to them. It sort of makes sense given the environment in which they grew up and learned computers, and it seems similar to my own attitude towards cars, which is that they really are just a black box magic, and if something goes wrong, I go to my local mechanic magician to get it fixed. Because learning the magic myself just seems like more trouble than it's worth. When I was learning computers, I had to learn the filesystem to actually accomplish anything. Now, kids don't have to, so they don't.
I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing or either.
07mk
2yr ago
I'd like to discuss the best ideas my political opposition has, but I'm increasingly concerned that "signal boost liars" is the best idea my political opposition has--or, if not their best idea, maybe just their most pragmatically effective.
I don't think that's is a very charitable way of describing this, but I do think there's a grain of truth to this that could lead to fruitful discussion. When I read this description of what happened, not having heard of this person before and taking the top-level post at its word, the first thing I was reminded of was the affair of Jussie Smollett, whose hate crime hoax was initially met with immense amounts of support and sympathy, leading to a TV interview where he theorized that the supposed hate crime was motivated by his outsized criticism of "45," i.e. Donald Trump, before the absurdities in his story quickly caused the public perception tide to turn against him. I think anyone with a clear head or a belief in ethics would have recognized the hoax was both bad in itself and highly likely to be bad for himself, but I'd wager Smollett had neither. And the adoration that he received in the brief period before his story broke down was very real and very sizable, something I'm guessing he truly got a lot out of.
And this in turn reminded me of the affair of Jackie Coakley, the University of Virginia student whose story of being gang-raped as part of an apparent frat house hazing ritual was the basis for the Rolling Stone article A Rape on Campus by Sabrina Rubin Erdely which made waves about 10 years ago before it was retracted by the publication for purportedly lacking in veracity. I don't remember it too well, and Coakley wasn't a public figure like Smollett who actively tried to publicize herself, but I recall what little we got from her was that she genuinely stuck to her guns that the story was real, despite the lack of evidence.
What these highlight to me is that there are some people who are so narcissistic and lacking in a sense of ethics and honesty that they're willing to lie in an effort to gain... something that feeds their egos. I don't know if it's called sociopathy or what, but I feel like it's very similar to the kind of mentality we see in (people I think are) scam artists like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or possibly Sam Bankman-Fried or the guy who ran the Fyre Festival or Travis Pangburn. Who knows why they are the way they are, but they're that way, and they'll likely always be with us.
So as a society, it falls on the rest of us to have norms and rules and laws that allow us to accurately detect and prevent/punish people like that. And I think if you want to be charitable to your "political opposition," their failure is that they've created an environment that provides weak points for people like that to attack.
Another thing associated with your "opposition" I was reminded of when reading this post was "Believe Women" (FYI the fact that Jones in this story is a woman is tangential to the point I'm making, not least because her claim isn't one of sexual abuse). There is some controversy over what this actually means, muddled by the fact that "Believe All Women" was also a common variant of the phrase for a time, but the most charitable version of it that I've encountered is something like, "In the past, accusations by women against abusers were automatically treated with hyperskepticism, leading to many men to get away with abusive behavior, leading to more women being abused. Like it or not, you, by nature of living in this society, are also infected with this tendency towards hyperskepticism. In an effort to correct this injustice, you when judging the veracity of the next woman's claim of being abused, you should err on the side of believing her." This most charitable version still literally means that you personally should override what you personally believe to be your best judgment: your very ability to judge is not to be trusted, in favor of, well, "Believe Women."
The "Believe Women" meme is only one in a long line of similar memes and messages about overriding one's own best judgment in favor of taking claims at their word based on the particular scenario and identity. "Lived experience" is probably the most famous one. And there's a real belief that this is the ethical and just thing to do here, supported by a scaffolding of narratives around oppression and history and what is really believed to be social science. That the current oppressive structure of society has essentially infected the minds of everyday people with invisible - or "implicit" - biases that tilt them against the words of certain types of people, which must be actively fought against by consciously overriding their very ability to judge things.
When you have this sort of norm of shredding one's skepticism in certain circumstances, it becomes very easy to convince oneself that any particular case that makes one's enemies look bad must fit the circumstances. You do that enough times, and it just becomes automatic, to determine one's own skepticism based on how bad it makes one's enemies look, rather than based on the actual specifics of the situation at hand. And this norm has been pushed and pushed and pushed as the only correct thing to do in many influential leftist circles.
And let me be clear, I don't think this is well intentioned; but what I believe it is is an attempt at being well intentioned. This sort of downstream negative impacts aren't immediately obvious at first blush, but neither are they so counterintuitive and complex that it would take a genius to figure out. Every individual who believes in pushing some sort of sociopolitical message has the responsibility to think through things at least enough to figure this out. And the people who pushed this sort of norm hadn't. And so they failed in their attempt to be well intentioned. But they don't outright believe that "signal boosting liars" is their best idea. They just find themselves doing it because the norms they follow have corrupted their ability to distinguish between liars and truthtellers in cases where the lies are very flattering to their side.
I think this is a trap that everyone everywhere can fall into, and due to the asymmetry between the right and the left, the way it instantiates on the right-wing is different, looking more like authoritarian hierarchical organizations, such as the church. Our society has done a bang-up job in explicitly identifying and subverting such organizations for at least the past few decades, and I think (hope) we're catching up to doing the same for the left versions.
I've heard a variation of this joke, that a man marries a woman hoping she doesn't change, which she inevitably does, and a woman marries a man hoping he will change, which he inevitably doesn't.
07mk
2yr ago
People are drawn to that beauty and the imagination of it. “I want to be her” is common among women too. It’s common because the experience is unique, impossible to replicate, impossible to learn, impossible to buy (unless you’re very, very close and can finish the job with cosmetic surgery in your mid teens). And that impossibility of attainment (if you’re not already there) is true for men and women alike. A lot of autogynephilia that transwomen experience seems, to me, to be this almost gender-neutral impulse.
This seems very analogous to a similar and mirrored phenomenon I've been noticing in a non-trans context. Which is, feminists looking at the lives of extremely successful men and ascertaining that but for the patriarchy keeping them down, women could all live lives like those 99th percentile men. When, in fact, the lives of a 99th percentile man is just as out of reach for basically every man as it is for every woman.
One particularly acute example of this I saw recently was in the show Velma - which I haven't watched but watched this clip of - which involved the title character, an Indian-American girl, dressing up as a man and immediately being considered attractive by all the women in school while doing gross things like burping or eating garbage, getting a job over a woman by handing in a paper scribble resume saying "I'm male," winning an art competition over a woman who painted an intricate beautiful painting by rubbing "his" butt over some paint and then over some canvas, and immediately being listened to when taking over a stage during a dance party to order people to go home. The idea that a short, chubby, effeminate Indian boy would enjoy such social/professional advantages in such settings is... something I would consider delusional at best, and the delusion is understandable if the thinking is that every man goes through life like a 99th percentile man.
More broadly, these just seem like the Apex Fallacy.
07mk
7mo ago
So what needs to happen is that trans friendly politicians need to lie, and then quietly do it anyways. Don't worry, trans friendly advocates in media, and trust and safety teams on social media will cover for you.
I've noticed that trans advocacy seemed to be copying along with the successful gay marriage advocacy of the past, and this looks like another possible example. Back in 2008, when presidential candidate Barack Obama came out explicitly against gay marriage, it was considered just common knowledge among my peers that he was lying in order to help the good guys gain power. Obama's stance on gay marriage hasn't been relevant in a long time, but as of the last time I talked about it with friends, they seemed to still believe that Obama had been lying at the time, rather than that his position changed at some point while he was in office.
I have no idea how many people actually believed his lie, assuming that it was a lie, but certainly telling such lies in order to sneak in more "extreme" positions wasn't disapproved of and, by my perceptions, quite lauded. So it does seem reasonable to suspect similar things going on with trans advocacy. However, this doesn't seem to be working in this case for a variety of reasons, including the fundamental physical differences between what gay marriage and trans advocacy demand. There seems to be a sort of cruel cosmic joke here with trans advocates trying to follow in the successful footsteps of the gay marriage movement but as a cargo cult just copying along the superficial aspects.
07mk
8mo ago
But, anyway, all these comments trying to relate this to his cancellation are truly baffling to me. How can you all be so tribe-brained? The NYT and some weird anti-rats with vendettas trying to cancel him is completely orthogonal to Trump being a horrible person, a horrible leader, and an initiator of democratic backsliding in the US (with a possibility he will become even more of one, whether he wins or loses). Harris and the DNC did not pen articles about Scott being problematic, and even if they did I suspect he would still (rightly) support Harris and the Democrats in the 2024 election, because their opponent is Trump.
I could express a sort of faux-bafflement at the blatant lack of self-awareness and/or hypocrisy in this paragraph, highlighted by the parts I bolded, but that would be dishonest at this point. I just find it depressing.
Because what's clear to me is happening here is that many posters have, in good faith, honestly concluded that the Democratic party and the larger culture that it's a part of are bad things, and that they were hoping that Scott's experience of being burned by this would lead him to correcting his own earlier delusions that they're not all that bad. When people laugh at supporters of the leopards-eating-people's-faces party for getting their faces eaten by leopards, the point being made isn't that these supporters should tribally go against the party that hurt them, it's that they should have recognized that leopards eating people's faces is just a bad thing that they shouldn't have supported in the first place. Sometimes, the person comes to this recognition once the consequences of such support become personally unavoidable; other times, the person looks at his daughter's torn-off face and offers up his other daughter face-first to the same leopard while other people praise him for proving that he's principled by taking a costly action.
Of course, it is tribal thinking to, in honest good faith, believe that leopards eating people's faces is wrong in a world in which a significant team exists that supports the leopards-eating-people's-faces party. A less tribal conclusion to this person's continued support would be that, "Perhaps I ought to rethink my judgment that this whole cancel culture thing is all that bad, if someone who ostensibly got burned by it is still supportive of the exact same forces that led to him getting burned."
This is isomorphic to the honest good faith belief that Trump is just that bad of a person, bad of a leader, bad of a ward of democracy, etc. that he's a bad choice for POTUS. In the presence of such a major team with skin in the game that disagrees with this, a less tribal conclusion would be that, "Perhaps I ought to rethink my judgment that Trump is such an obviously or extremely bad choice for POTUS, or that my preferred choice for POTUS is any better."
Now, we can actually analyze these things non-tribally and try to conclude if the kinds of principles that led to the smearing of Scott is actually bad in comparison to how bad of a leader Trump is, as well as how much influences these things will have in the US depending on who's elected. I, for instance, think it's reasonable to conclude based on the fundamentals that Trump has demonstrated a lack of seriousness in how he governs through his first term, which works out mostly okay but which creates significant risk in emergencies, and this is worse than the emboldening effect that a Harris presidency would have on the people who brought forth the culture that led, among other things, to Scott getting smeared. But complaining about others being tribe-brained while also declaring that Trump is just so horrible is just trying to eat your cake and have it too. Either accept that other people can be just as tribal as you and come to the honest, good faith conclusion that [thing the other side likes] is actually horrible just like you have, or actually rise above the tribalism.
07mk
1yr ago
4chan is one of the closest things we've gotten to that in the open web, and back when I used to use 4chan with any regularity over a decade ago, I recall thinking that it was not only usable, it was far more usable than any other "social media"-type websites, along with having an overall better social ecosystem (the enforced anonymity might have been the key to that one, though). Seeing how social media websites have evolved in the time since, I get the sense that the comparative advantage of 4chan has only gotten greater (though it seems 4chan itself may have changed in that time to become worse, so who knows).
07mk
1yr ago
People stop thinking 'trans' is a thing and it's illegal to call someone by different pronouns than they were born with?
I just want to comment on this one thing, which is that this matches a pattern I've noticed by many people where they just project their own way of thinking to the other side, just reversed. The notion that any meaningfully mainstream pushback against SJ would involve illegalizing calling someone certain pronouns is pretty absurd. It's the SJ side that wants to illegalize such things, and the pushback is by people who want the chips to fall where they may without legal coercion.
Similarly, the pushback against SJ in transness isn't that "trans" isn't a thing - it's that it's a very different thing than what SJ claim it is. Of course, many in SJ would claim that that's the same as saying it's not a thing, but that's just word games; the fact is, the JK Rowlings of the world acknowledge that there is a category of people who identify themselves as "trans" - this clearly is all that is required to think that "trans" is a thing. They just don't believe that "trans" is the kind of thing that places obligations on other people to submit to the person who believes themselves as "trans" in terms of things like pronoun usage, prison assignments, shelters, sports, etc.
07mk
1yr ago
Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope
To me, this is one of the key issues of the whole thing which makes it just a non-starter. The degrees of freedom there are in determining who is the underdog and who isn't is effectively infinite, because human capability of self-deception is effectively infinite. So if one takes on the framework of the "righteousness of the underdog," then step 1.00001 that follows immediately after this is to deem [whoever I like] as the underdog, while twisting logic in any way required to reach that conclusion. By the time we reach step 2, step 1.00001 is long forgotten, and any scrutiny about that step is shut down as picking on the underdog who has been Firmly and Uncontroversially Determined to be the Underdog in this situation. It's just naked bias and favoritism with a particularly flattering narrative that makes it easier for people to believe even when they like to think of themselves as disliking naked bias and favoritism.
This is why when I hear "punching up" and "punching down" in the context of comedy or satire or the like, I always translate "up" to "direction I want punches to be thrown" and "down" to "direction I don't want punches to be thrown;" in practice, that's what they mean and only what they mean.
We’re not going to show the full statue of David to kindergartners. We’re not going to show him to second graders. Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age. We’re going to figure out when that is.
This really caught me off guard. Really, not to kindergartners? He states it as if it's just obvious that no decent person would show this famous statue in its entirety to kindergartners just because it has anatomically correct genitalia. I don't know if it's American prudishness even as an American, since American prudishness has changed a lot in the past 30 years I've lived there. I have to wonder if Donald Rumsfeld's John Ashcroft's, per correction below practice during Bush 2 of covering up breasts of statues when he was speaking in front of them had downstream effects I didn't anticipate.
But I think there's at least something to it; when I was growing up in Korea, it was pretty normal for cartoons and comic books for kids to have full frontal, often in comedic contexts (and always in non-sexual contexts - since sex didn't even mean anything to the target audience of <10 year olds). This was the case for Dragon Ball, a Japanese comic book series which is internationally popular including in both Korea and the US, and in which I discovered censorship of the protagonist Goku's dick and balls when I came to the US and read English localizations.
Also, I was randomly reminded of something from the DVD commentary of the 1999 film Election, a very good comedy about a high school president election, where one of the last scenes of the film starts with a close-up of the genitals of some statue at the Metropolitan museum. Apparently for TV/airplane/otherwise age-restricted versions of this R-rated film, they had to cut that opening shot, despite the fact that the statue was right there at the front of the museum for anyone walking in front of it to see.
07mk
11mo ago
If the option is somebody who might know less about cool thing y you're into, but also doesn't complain there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing, a lot of people are going to side with the person who knows less because they're less annoying to be around, even if you don't care one way or another.
This doesn't really track, because if you don't care one way or another, then it'd make more sense to find the annoyance in the people complaining more, more loudly, more violently, more disruptively, etc, and the amount of extraneous noise and controversy created by people complaining the exact opposite - that there aren't enough non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing - is about an order of magnitude greater. If one is less bothered by calls for this ideology than against it, then that would mean that they certainly do care one way or another.
I'd also note that the description of these types of people "complain[ing] there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing" is highly uncharitable at best and just downright strawmanning at worst.
I think a big thing your side doesn't get is the actual reason for the desexualization of games is actually less evil SJW's, but the fact that programmers, engineers, and actual gamers are getting older, having kids, and it's far more defensible to a wife to be playing a game on the lbig living room TV with characters that look like the modern Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, or whatever the game people have determined is full of 'ugly' people, as opposed to the polygons with boobs of the late 90's.
This also doesn't track for a few reasons. One big one is the fact that the very idea that it's more defensible to a wife to have the modern visuals versus polygons with boobs of the late 90s on the big living room TV is an ideological one. To some extent, what visceral reaction someone has is outside of ideology, but deciding whether or not to submit to that visceral reaction certainly is within ideology. This was one of the core arguments in the fight for gay marriage in the 00s - some attempt was made to convince people just not to find the idea of gay men viscerally disgusting, but the larger point was made that even if you do find them gross, this should play no part in the way you treat them. If there was some movement to get rid of gay men in media because it's just far more defensible to display non-gay men on the big TV due to people tending to just find gay men gross (whether or not this is actually true isn't relevant), most people would recognize that this would be ideologues pushing forward their ideology.
And speaking of movements, another big issue here is that we do have explicitly ideological movements that explicitly call for the kinds of changes we're talking about, with self-proclaimed examples of changes made explicitly for hewing to the ideology. This doesn't mean literally every last case of these types of changes is ideologically motivated, but it certainly points in that direction generally.
And the types of changes we see are consistent with the explicit goals of the movement and not so much with just wanting to put more defensible stuff on the big screen (which, again, would still be due to ideologues pushing their ideology). If the motivation were just that, we'd expect to see changes generally limited to taking costumes from stripper-level to, I don't know, something like dinner party-level. Maybe make some armor more properly covering. But we're not limited to just that, including androgyni-fying women and adding racial/sexual-orientation diversity. "Defensible on the TV" can somewhat track for jiggle physics on women wearing stripper outfits (again, still ideological), but really, not at all for having characters that aren't sufficiently diverse in a racial/sexual-orientation dimension. That's the kind of thing that's barely even noticeable to a typical viewer, and the ones who do notice it almost always tend to do so for ideological reasons (the very idea that there's something to notice there is, in itself, ideological, of course).
Furthermore, all this taking place in the context of the general increased accessibility of media that, in the past, used to be considered inappropriate makes it rather doubtful that this particular case of media transformation is driven by some secular desire to avoid what's inappropriate to show on the big TV. Often, the very same individuals who call for putting less-sexy women in games are also the ones who call for exposing kids, wives, and other general laypeople to media that's even more sexually provocative than a sexy woman jiggling around in a stripper outfit. So the push for these changes is primarily a push for changing what people do and don't consider appropriate to see on the big living room TV - which is almost explicitly a goal openly espoused by a massive ideological movement right now (and has been for, well, I'd guess longer than I've been alive). Given all that, the idea that these changes aren't being driven by ideologues (who have openly said that they want to cause the types of changes that we're talking about now) but rather by individuals making decisions about the type of media they themselves would feel comfortable showing to others just doesn't hold water.
The causal connection between "type of game devs would feel comfortable showing on their living room TV" and "type of game devs would want to make" is also something that seems to have greatly weakened since the 90s as well. Because of the more niche, less lucrative nature of the industry in the 90s, dev teams tended to be small enough that you could believe that the main decisionmakers in major titles were ones who actually enjoyed those games and were working towards one that they would want to play. Today, due to how much those things have changed, the executives making these decisions have other priorities they have to meet. One would normally think that the overriding priority would be profit, but other entertainment media, namely movies and TV, have shown that ideology is an even more pleasurable drug than money to plenty of executives.
07mk
1yr ago
Secondly was this essay by Uri Berliner, their longtime senior business editor, creator of the popular "Planet Money" podcast, and one of the very few white males/not-super-liberals still in a position of authority at NPR. I really recommend this essay. He lays it out how, sure, NPR was always left-leaning, but it had intelligence and integrity. It's changed.
Not having read this essay, one thing that really stands out to me about the headline and the URL is how it frames NPR as the active party that "lost America's trust." This is in stark contrast to 99% of the recent mainstream narrative about people coming to view journalists and journalism outlets with mistrust and even disdain, which is more along the lines of, "Why do these dumb ignorant fucks not trust what we publish, when we're doing everything right? Clearly they must be getting manipulated by disinformation merchants who just know so well how to appeal to their tiny little minds." Back when journalists being less trusted by the public was becoming an issue during the Trump administration, I recall thinking that this should be a time for introspection for journalists, for them to question why they - literal professional writers and speakers - were just so bad at communicating that they were losing out not just to a politician but a politician of the dishonesty level of Trump. Such introspection has been rare indeed, and it's both nice to see it here and unsurprising that this guy was penalized for performing it.
For my own part, I grew up listening to NPR and I used to love it. The voices, the production value, the journalism, all of it was high-quality. It really stood out in the world of FM radio, where everything else is staticky, ad-filled garbage, and tends to play the same basic pop-classic rock-rap top 40 garbage over and over. In the world before podcasts and sattelite Radio, NPR was the only halfway intellectual content on the radio. Now it just feels like a podcast from some random student activists who have been triggered by Trump to the point that they're on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. I seriously can't stand listening to it anymore, it's just amazing how deranged and annoying it's become.
I used to listen to NPR a ton as a kid in my parents' car and also in my young adulthood which was 10+ years ago now. The rare times I drive these days, I still put on NPR, but I honestly can't stand it either, and I'm not sure if it's because I changed or because NPR changed. On Reddit's /r/stupidpol (subreddit for leftists who consider identity politics to be stupid), I read someone say they play a game whenever putting on NPR to see how many minutes it is before there's some mention of a racial or sex/gender-related angle to whatever story they're covering, and they almost never go past 5 minutes; ever since starting to play the game myself, I actually rarely go past 1 minute these days. Could just be coincidence given, again, I rarely listen to any radio anymore these days, but I suspect it's not.
At least, the few times I tune into Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, it's still mostly enjoyable. The kind of self-satisfied smug "obviously the mainstream progressive Democrat narrative is the correct one" attitude can be kind of annoying, but it honestly doesn't seem any worse than when I was a kid - I've just become more aware of the biases I used to have - and I still find Paula Poundstone hilarious.
07mk
1yr ago
Of course, on seeing this news I immediately wondered why it would count as "punishing" women to prevent them from doing something men don't generally have the option of doing (that is, making money by flashing breasts).
Twitch management has generally been known to be sympathetic to what's widely called "woke," and in that worldview, any discrepancy in stats that seem to disfavor [certain classes of people] is automatically definitive proof of some sort of bigotry. We see this in stuff like hiring, school admissions, and crime as well. Here, more women than men get caught breaking these rules, so the rules must be sexist. The reason being that more women break the rules because women, unlike men, have greater opportunity to gain money by breaking these rules are irrelevant.
I must admit, I feel like this is a rhetorical point you're making, rather than genuine confusion, because the people of this ideology tend to be very open about this. I think Ibram X Kendi has a well known quotation that whereever he sees racial discrepancy, he sees racism. It's just that with sexism here.
07mk
1yr ago
According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy. In comparison, 2,590 kids died from a gunshot in that same year.
With those numbers, you’re exceedingly unlikely to know anyone with kids going through those procedures. To me, this just seems like a moral panic amplified through the news in order to distract the masses from real issues - the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, inflation, wealth inequality, social services being stripped away, the erosion of the middle class. Why do you care about this? Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?
If even 139 adolescents of the 2,590 kids gunned down every year were all targeted by followers of the same ideology who were all following a standard playbook on best practices to gun down adolescents and members of that ideology were openly teaching it in public schools with support from public institutions, that would absolutely be a controversial issue that people talk about all the time. Heck, I'm pretty sure that'd apply even if it were just 14 adolescents a year. Salem Witch trials killed what, 19 people like 300 years ago? It's not a culture war issue, but it's still brought up a bunch to this day, in a large part because it was a case of our religious and governmental institutions all being complicit in, if not actively participating in, the unjust killing of those people.
And that's the missing piece from all these things like the housing crisis, corruption, school shootings, etc. At best you can say that social services being stripped away is largely from conservative/Republican ideology, but the rest, there's no particular ideologically aligned group of people actively pushing for this stuff with support from powerful institutions at every level of society. These are mostly just standard-issue societal problems which often do have culture war implications but which lacks any powerful institutions who are full-throatedly yelling to the skies that this is a Good Thing. The amount of people who say they love corruption and want more of it and will shout down anyone who tries to convince others that corruption is a bad thing is too small to matter. Even the Trumps of the world will frame their corruption as actually not-corrupt or a correction to a deeper corruption. In contrast to youths going through medical transition where you do see plenty of people doing those very things, all following a similar playbook from the same ideology which has massive institutional support.
07mk
2yr ago
Is it a boycott, or is it just that they're putting out shitty products that people are wising up to and no longer want to pay for? Though wokeness plays a (significant) part in them being awful, many of their recent works would have still been completely awful regardless of the messaging.
07mk
2yr ago
But assuming the allegations are false, what then? The natural inclination is also to deny, except you're in a legal bind. Any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying.
This is the part I find a lot of problem with whenever this topic comes up, often in the context of sexual assault/rape accusations. I don't think any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying. It necessarily implies that the accuser is wrong. Given what we know about the fallibility and malleability of memory, particularly when stressful situations are involved, it's entirely possible for the accuser to be honest to the best of their ability and still be completely, entirely wrong about the facts of what occurred. I don't know if this affects the legal calculus of the potential defamation suit; is the claim that an accuser is making an incorrect accusation for whatever reason - without implying that the accuser is lying - defamation? I don't know, but that's the actual pertinent issue than the claim that they're actually lying.
07mk
2yr ago
As an aside, Tom Cruise might be weird as fuck, but that mother fucker knows how to make a fucking movie. Sure, he's no Stanly Kubrick. But in a world of complete and utter drek, someone autistically repeating the steps movies used to take to be good, whether he understands what he's doing or not, comes off like a savant.
I legit think Cruise is one of the best filmmakers of all time, at least within the role of "stunt actor." How many people have ever strapped themselves to the outside of a plane that was taking off, much less done it 8 times just for the sake of creating entertainment? Given the continual development of CGI technology, he also might be one of the last such figures, since it won't be too long before we can get literally identical results on video without putting real people at such high risk.
07mk
2d ago
I agree with this take a lot. I think there's a real "if there's a table with 10 people and 1 of them is a Nazi, then it's a table with 10 Nazis" kind of phenomenon going on here. It probably doesn't exclusively go one way, but I seem to observe it always going one way, which I think reflects a way that the modern mainstream left seems to model ideas as akin to infectious diseases, which can spread from person to person merely through contact and which can contaminate entire areas merely by existing in one section of it.
07mk
3mo ago
I haven't read the Hanania article and thus can't speak to his arguments, but if more economically libertarian states tend to have more abundant housing, then that seems to be the mechanism by which Americans come to preferring to live in such states. Revealed preference for economically libertarian states doesn't mean that someone is judging states on the basis of their economic policies and preferring to move to one that's more economically libertarian. Revealed preference means that states that are more economically libertarian tend to create conditions that cause more people to decide that moving there is a better decision than moving elsewhere. The abundance of housing could be one of them. So I wouldn't say that that's misleading.
07mk
1yr ago
Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate. Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.
I find this apparent feigning ignorance endlessly frustrating. The writers and academics who call themselves "progressive" are very open about their desire and willingness to manipulate the populace into believing things they want them to believe by putting in certain tropes into the fiction they write. This is justified on the basis of their stated belief that all fiction manipulates the audience, and so it's better to do it with conscious intent for causes they consider socially just instead of doing so unconsciously while merely focusing on creating an entertaining/meaningful work of fiction which they contend inevitably reinforces the status quo which they find bigoted and intolerable. It's not always possible to nail down this as the cause of any given individual case of uglification, but given the prevalence of these types of people in fiction production and the ubiquity of this narrative, I don't think benefit of the doubt is at all justified, and it's perfectly reasonable to default to the presumption that any specific case was due to ideological intent until proven otherwise.
And if we were to follow the same standards by which such people deem fictional works as "white supremacist" or "patriarchal" or "heteronormative" or whatever, there would be no question that we could conclude that these were caused by ideological motives: as long as someone can write a convincing-sounding essay connecting some work of fiction with these concepts they consider bigoted, it doesn't matter what the creators were thinking or intending, these works are ideological and for a bad ideology. If the creators had nothing but pure entertainment-focused intent or even if they were actively trying to send a message of equality, then that just means that they fell prey to their implicit/unconscious biases which proves just how entrenched white supremacy/patriarchy/etc. really is. But double standards are also justified on the basis of relative power and such (which themselves are justified by someone writing a convincing-sounding essay).
You see this more broadly with people claiming not to know what "woke" or "critical race theory" mean. It's a kind of dishonest bit of self deception that fools no one other than themselves. I just wish they would loudly and proudly stand up for what they believe in, proclaim that they are trying to manipulate the populace for the purpose of a better, more socially just world, and let the chips fall where they may. I find Scott Adams to be... a very silly person not worth paying attention to, but when he said that he was hypnotizing people, including through the very same message of informing them of this hypnotism, because his hypnotism would work even if the audience was consciously aware of what he was doing, I could at least respect that more than this shell game of implausible deniability many writers and activists on the left like to play of openly claiming a desire to manipulate the audience and then acting shocked and appalled that others would accuse them of making creative choices meant to manipulate the audience.
07mk
1yr ago
Overall I'd say, "game writing was never good." Most classic games barely even had writing, either because it was pointless for an arcade-action game, or because there just wasn't enough memory or disk space then to handle a lot of text. Japanese games had an especially tough time with text.
And, aside from technical issues, a lot of games just don't need a lot of writing, and made a design decision not to include it. They tell the story in other ways. Famously John Carmack decided to put only the bare minimum of story into Doom because “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.". It's only in more recent years that it's just expected that every game must have some sort of story, with full-time writers cranking out the content.
I think this actually explains why game writing in the past was good compared to now; having barely any writing because they didn't need a lot of writing can be very good writing, if it serves it purpose exactly as needed. To build on Carmack's analogy, a film whose entire script is: "Did you order the pizza with extra sausage?" "Yes, but I'm afraid I don't have any money. How ever will I pay you?" or the like has much better writing than something like Rise of Skywalker. The writing in the former doesn't need to be any longer or deeper than that in order to accomplish its goals, and trying to accomplish more with the writing would likely be counterproductive. With the greater production values and focus on narrative in many modern AAA games, writers have a lot more degrees of freedom, which means more room for error and also more rope to hang themselves with. That's even without considering the overt attempts at injecting ideological messaging that has plagued much of modern writing, in games and other media, which was much less common in older games, in a large part just due to older games not having as much writing.
07mk
1yr ago
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.
I think it really speaks to the utter incompetence of the types of writers that work at and are sympathetic to Sweet Baby Inc that even by these extremely low standards, the writing they produce is recognized as significantly worse than the standard dreck of AAA game writing. The way that they allow their ideology to completely subvert their ability to write "good" characters and narratives - again, "good" only by the extremely low standards of AAA video game writing - is actually pretty fascinating, especially given that these are people who specifically claim to have insight about how to write good characters and narratives. This seems to be the same phenomenon as in the film/TV industry where even literal Marvel movies have had what little artistic merit they had nearly completely destroyed in a large part due to this type of writing, with the financial consequences that follow.
I think it's a good reminder of the fact that, in life, things are never so bad that they couldn't get worse, and whether or not it does get worse matters.And, in fact, it's often the case - certainly in this one - that many people are actively pushing to make those things worse while telling you that it's better.
What does putting oneself in the shoes of the individual being questioned have to do with it, though? We can empathize with dishonest, bad people while still appreciating it when they get more revealed for being dishonest and bad to more people. When someone like SBF gets put on trial and convicted, I can empathize with him while also appreciating that it is a good thing that our court system coordinated to kidnap him, judge him, and condemn him to imprisonment for some amount of time, TBD.
I think this sort of badgering works in cases like this where there's an obvious noble - if controversially so - goal behind it.
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