I don't intend this to sound condescending, but this parallel has been so obvious to me for probably the better part of a decade by now, that I'm surprised that someone on TheMotte would only notice it now. Though perhaps it actually speaks ill of me and my hobby of paying attention to the culture wars around popular media that I noticed the parallels so early and found it so obvious.
The all-woman Ghostbusters remake came out in 2016, almost a full decade ago, and that was one of the earlier big examples of the whole "we didn't fail the audience; the sexist, misogynistic audience failed us by not giving us money to spend 2 hours watching our film" narrative being made. That was 2 years after Gamergate, which wasn't quite that specifically, but it was a major flashpoint in video game culture where major video game journalists, devs, and commentators were explicitly telling their customers that their tastes were wrong, and that they had a responsibility to submit to the enlightened, correct tastes of the then "social justice" (equivalent to "woke" today) crowd. This knocked over some dominoes that resulted in many video games designed to appeal to that SocJus crowd being released 5-10 years later, i.e. the last 5 years. Examples of these include failures like Concord or Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League from last year, as well as successes like The Last of Us: Part 2 and God of War: Ragnarok (I suspect that it's not a coincidence that these successes were both sequels to hugely popular games that built on a strong base).
In film, besides 2016's Ghostbusters, 2017's The Last Jedi, as well as most Star Wars works that followed, and 2019's Captain Marvel, as well as most Marvel movies that followed, were major examples of this phenomenon. And though many of these films did fine or even great in the box office, they had plenty of controversy around more old-school fans reacting negatively to various plot points and characterizations, and then being called bigots in return both by filmmakers and commentators. There were smaller examples as well, such as Terminator: Dark Fate or the Charlie's Angels remake-remake, both of which bombed in 2019.
A big part of it, I think, is that SocJus mentality, of all of reality being dominated by power differentials, and as such, each individual of [demographic] is necessarily disadvantaged compared to each individual of [some other demographic]. This means that if that individual of [demographic] fails or just doesn't succeed as much as they imagine an individual of [some other demographic] would have, then their failure is due to the bigoted society that created these power dynamics that made them disadvantaged, rather than due to that individual's own flaws. This, of course, is how millionaire stars can claim to be lacking in "privilege" - the claim isn't that they're not wildly successful, but rather that they aren't as wildly successful as an equivalent person of [some other demographic] would have been. Also of course, this is completely unfalsifiable.
And if you approach things with that mindset, that belonging to [demographic] means that any failure is due to the structural bigotry that reinforces the power dynamics of society, then naturally, when your film/video game/electoral candidate fails, you're going to blame structural bigotry. I.e. your audience, the gamers, the voters.
Also of course, if you just blame external factors, it hampers your ability to self-improve. But you can still succeed as long as all those external factors submit to your demands; if calling someone racist can get them to buy your game, then that's just as good as just making a better game. In practice, this doesn't really work. But the people making these decisions seem to be in echo chambers where calling people racist does get them to submit to their demands. And while everyone lives in echo chambers to some extent, the left/progressive/Democratic crowd has been very openly and very explicitly calling for strengthening the boundaries of their own echo chambers through censorship of opposing voices. Which leads them to model the general audience very poorly. Which costs you money. If you have a big bankroll, you can keep going with that for a while, but eventually, that money runs out. I think 2024 was a big year for when many of these decision makers finally recognized that they were able to see the bottom of the barrel of money they've been feeding their projects. In video games, we might see an actual closure of Ubisoft this year, depending on how their next Assassin's Creed game - one that had direct inspiration from the BLM riots of 2020 according to a developer, IIRC - does, after the mediocre reception of their Star Wars game last year.
I wonder if the Democrats will eventually have a moment when the stark reality of their failures simply can't be tolerated anymore, resulting in a change in tact. I was hopeful right after the election last year, but most signs since then have made me pessimistic. I just hope it comes sooner than later, because, as bad as SocJus is, I fully expect Republicans to be just as bad if they find that they have nearly unchecked power without a strong opposition party.
07mk
2mo ago
But of course, it takes someone deep down the rabbit hole of intellectualizing how it's different when they do it to completely miss this point.
Perhaps I'm just being arrogant, but there's a real sense of "too clever by a half" in this sort of intellectualizing. Because if you intellectualize it enough, you recognize that all the past racism/sexism/etc. that past societies bought into as the obviously Correct and Morally Right ways to run society were also justified on the basis of intellectualizing, often to the effect that "it's different when we do it." So someone intellectualizing this should recognize that their own intellectualization of the blatant racism/sexism/etc. that they themselves support is them falling right into the exact same pattern as before, rather than escaping from it.
07mk
11d ago
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
Hard disagree. Darwin had a particular style of bad faith in the way he argued his left-wing positions that made left-wing arguments appear dishonest and manipulative, and that's why I personally was glad he didn't come to this site and stopped interacting with GuessWho once GuessWho revealed that he was Darwin2500 from Reddit.
07mk
2mo ago
A part of this that hadn't occurred to me until I saw it pointed out is that there seems to be a sort of donation duel between this lady's case and that of Karmelo Anthony, who's a black teen charged with murdering a white teen during a track meet by stabbing him in the heart during a dispute over seating. I think there was a top-level comment here about this incident before, but there was a substantial amount of support on social media for Anthony on racial grounds, including fundraising for his defense. I get the feeling that a lot of the motivation to donate to this lady is by people who feel that the support Anthony has been getting on racial grounds has been unjust, and supporting her is a way of "balancing the scales," as it were. This isn't the instantiation of "if you tell everyone to focus on everyone's race all the time in every interaction, eventually white people will try to play the same game everyone else is encouraged to" that I foresaw, but it sure is a hilarious one.
Now, one conspiracy theory that I hope is hilariously true, is that the guy who recorded this lady was in cahoots with the lady herself and staged the whole thing in order to cash in on the simmering outrage over the Anthony case. But I doubt that anyone involved has the foresight to play that level of 4D chess.
07mk
7mo ago
I wonder if this explains the bizarre reaction by some feminists to women being called "females," despite not having a problem with them being labeled as being "female." I've seen a number of weird, twisting explanations for why the former is "dehumanizing" or whatever, but all of them appeared as pure motivated reasoning, especially given that no man I've ever heard of has had any problem with being called "a male." Could very well be indeed pure motivated reasoning, meant to put a veneer of justification over what's, at heart, a pure visceral response.
07mk
8mo ago
Has anyone noticed how much vitriol there is towards AI-generated art? Over the past year it's slowly grown into something quite ferocious, though not quite ubiquitous.
I honestly think it's far closer to the opposite of ubiquitous, but it certainly is quite ferocious. But like so much ferocity that you see online, I think it's a very vocal but very small minority. I spend more time than I should on subreddits specifically about the culture war around AI art, and (AFAIK) the primary anti-AI art echochamber subreddit, /r/ArtistHate, has fewer than 7k members, in comparison to the primary pro-AI art echochamber subreddit, /r/DefendingAIArt, which has 23K members. The primary AI art culture war discussion subreddit, /r/aiwars, has 40K members, and the upvote and commenting patterns indicate that a large majority of the people there like AI art, or at least dislike the hatred against it.
These numbers don't prove anything, especially since hating on AI art tends to be accepted in a lot of generic art and fandom communities, which lead to people who dislike AI art not particularly finding value in a community specifically made for disliking it, but I think they at least point in one direction.
IRL, I've also encountered general ambivalence towards AI art. Most people are at least aware of it, with most finding it a cool curiosity, and none that I've encountered actually expressing anything approaching hatred for it. My sister, who works in design, had no qualms about gifting me a little trinket with a design made using AI. She seems to take access to AI art via Photoshop just for granted - though interestingly, I learned this as part of a story she told me about interviewing a potential hire whose portfolio looked suspiciously like AI art, which she confirmed by using Photoshop to generate similar images and finding that the style matched. She disapproved of it not out of hatred against AI art, but rather because designers they hire need to have actual manual skills, and passing off AI art without specifically disclosing it like that is dishonest.
I think the vocal minority that does exist makes a lot of sense. First of all, potential jobs and real status - from having the previously rather exclusive ability to create high fidelity illustrations - are on the line. People tend to get both highly emotional and highly irrational when either are involved. And second, art specifically has a certain level of mysticism around it, to the point that even atheist materialists will talk about human-manually-made art (or novel or film or song) having a "soul" or a "piece of the artist" within it, and the existence of computers using matrix math to create such things challenges that notion. It wasn't that long ago that scifi regularly depicted AI and robots as having difficulty creating and/or comprehending such things.
And, of course, there's the issue of how the tools behind AI art (and modern generative AI in general) were created, which was by analyzing billions of pictures downloaded from the internet for free. Opinions differ on whether or not this counts as copyright infringement or "stealing," but many artists certainly seem to believe that it is; that is, they believe that other people have an obligation to ask for their permission before using their artworks to train their AI models.
My guess is that such people tend to be overrepresented in the population of illustrators, and social media tends to involve a lot of people following popular illustrators for their illustrations, and so their views on the issue propagate to their fans. And no technology amplifies hatred quite as well as social media, resulting in an outsized appearance of hatred relative to the actual hatred that's there. Again, I think most people are just plain ambivalent.
That, to me, is actually interesting in itself. So far, the culture wars around AI art hasn't seem to have been subsumed by the larger culture wars that have been going on constantly for at least the past decade. Plenty of left/progressive/liberal people hate AI art because they're artists, but plenty love it because they're into tech or accessibility. I don't know so much about the right/conservative side, but I've seen some religious conservatives call it satanic, and others love it because they're into tech and dunking on liberal artists.
07mk
6mo ago
I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here. Wording meaningful claims about truth in a way that's meant to sound controversial isn't good, but it's a whole other world away from content-less naked loosely connected declarations that amount to booing the outgroup. Like, the question of whether or not leftists care about child rape isn't pleasant, nor is it nice, but it's a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as No given the political issue being discussed (as a leftist myself, I'm perfectly okay with saying that when I was a younger, more naive leftist, I genuinely didn't care about child rape or other potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration, such as lower wages or suicide bombings; such things were the cost I would gladly have me and my fellow citizens pay for giving more poor people the opportunity to thrive in a first world nation like the USA. My opinion on that has changed since; I think I've gained greater empathy than I used to have for certain groups of people). And characterizing a drug as for aiding gay men in going to orgies isn't nice, but IIRC that was just one off-hand line in a comment that otherwise had some meaningful thing to say about different ways different drugs are covered by insurance. There's actually meat to the bones, along with all that shit.
The comment here by antifa, and IME the occasional leftists who come in "hot" here, are basically pure shit with perhaps some bones and ligaments there. That difference matters to people who care about the meat on the bones, i.e. the actual content of the arguments, but that difference matters little to people who care primarily about getting their views lauded and their outgroup's views booed. This is one reason why, even as a leftist, I find the quality of conversation and discussion here, where it's predominantly populated by people well to the right of the most right-leaning person I might meet IRL. Who cares if they'll drop in little - or big - digs at me and my ingroup here and there or all the time? Their actual substantive criticisms are actually interesting and valuable and the wording and the digs don't affect the level of charity or quality of arguments.
07mk
3mo ago
Zegler isn’t ugly but next to Gadot Zegler looks like a soft 6. Relative casting matters.
Given how they apparently changed the way "fairest" meant in this remake, I actually wonder if the relative looks here was the point. Of course, they couldn't hire someone outright ugly as the lead, but making sure that she's significantly and noticeably less attractive than the Evil Queen (very easy to do when you cast Gadot as her) could have been consciously intentional for the purpose of sending little girls the message that good looks are bad, actually. It's interesting, though, that the original film had a pretty overt message about the evilness of vanity, which gets lost when you replace the Evil Queen's obsession about being the fairest-as-in-beautiful to fairest-as-in-just. I don't know how the remake justifies it, but it seems bizarre that a Queen who intentionally sends her King off to die and oppresses her happy subjects would obsess over a magic mirror's judgment of her as being fair-as-in-just. Perhaps there's some way the Queen's perspective is presented in a way to show that she actually genuinely believes that she is a just ruler? Given how much Disney's been into redeeming female villains like Cruella DeVille or Maleficent, this could've been a good opportunity to show her as a misguided soul who was traumatized by a man in her past that led her to an obsession with being a just ruler that nonetheless turned into evil. I haven't heard that from any reviews, though.
It sounds like much of the film was written with conscious messaging in mind, based on the descriptions I read and saw of the plot, which seems to involve pretty unambiguous pro-Communist messaging, and also an addition of a plot point presenting Dopey as someone unfairly bullied for his muteness and who turns out to be able to talk in the end.
07mk
2mo ago
I see a couple of issues with that scenario.
One is that there will almost always be plausible deniability with respect to LLM usage. There would have to be a slip-up of the sort of including meta-text that chatbot-style LLMs provide - something like "Certainly! Here is the next page of the story, where XYZ happens." - for it to be definitive proof, and I'd expect that the audience and judges would pick up on that early enough to prevent such authors from becoming high status. That said, it could still get through, and also someone who did a good enough job hiding this early on could slip up later in her career, casting doubt on her original works.
But the second, bigger issue, is that even if this were definitively proven, with the author herself outright claiming that she typed in a one-word prompt into ChatGPT 10 to produce all 70,000 words of her latest award-winning novel, this could just be justified by the publishing industry and the associated awards on the basis of her lacking the privilege that white/straight/cis/male authors have, and this LLM usage merely ensures equity by giving her and other oppressed minorities the writing ability that privileged people are just granted due to their position in this white supremacist patriarchal society. Now, you might think that this would simply discredit these organizations in the eyes of the audience, and it certainly will for some, but I doubt that it would be some inflection point or straw that breaks the camel's back. I'd predict that, for the vast majority who are already bought in, this next spoonful would be easy to swallow.
07mk
6mo ago
No one who says "[x] do/don't care about [y]" mean that "literally every individual within the group [x] do/don't care about [y]." This is common sense and shouldn't need to be explicitly stated in a discussion like this. In this situation, the question is relating to how "policies that leftists prioritize/champion have predictable outcomes on child rape such that their level of caring about it is necessarily below others and below some meaningful threshold in order to prioritize such policies." And, again, as a leftist who used to champion such policies, I was by no means unusual as someone who openly said that, if allowing in poor people that Republicans dislike into our country also means that some of those poor people will do things like rape more children in the USA, then so be it. But more common were people who would outright deny that such policies would lead to bad outcomes without doing the very very hard work of actually checking with multiple adversarial sources that disagree heavily with oneself, which is the ultimate form of not caring about those bad outcomes, i.e. child rape in this case. I am perfectly comfortable saying that those leftists would absolutely, 100%, honestly, in good faith believe they care about it, but their lack of curiosity in actually checking if their beliefs about reality are correct shows that their belief about what they care about is incorrect.
07mk
7mo ago
I would kill to see some high quality studies using blinded (I'm not sure double blinding is possible, since presumably a trans person would know they're trans) trials of test subjects interacting with both trans and cis people to see just how common it is to truly "pass." Sadly, the academic political environment makes it so that basically no one who would be positioned to do the research would be interested in having an answer. And even if that were not the case, the number of trans people is so small that getting sufficiently random or representative members of that group seem likely to be impossible.
The way I think of it is that, given how incentivized the current "progressive" trans movement is to present MTF as being exactly the same as females in every way that matters, if there were some fairly significant population of MTF trans people who "pass," there would be quite a few such people who are either held up as examples or who become mini-celebs as activists for the cause. There's certainly no shortage of MTF trans people who obviously don't "pass" that you can find both online and in-person (at least in my neck of the woods around Boston) despite the fact that, again, the number of such people is very small relative to the population. The only person like that who comes to my mind is Blaire White, whom I don't follow, but who I believe isn't on the side of the "progressives" in this.
07mk
2mo ago
Well, if he‘s really not interested in debate, let him leave, don‘t ban him(or threaten to ban him). Call it keeping the moral high ground
I don't see how not enforcing against blatant rule violations is keeping the moral high ground. The rules are right there on the right sidebar, and he refused to follow the ones around things like speaking clearly or being no more obnoxious than necessary or proactively providing evidence, despite being given ample opportunity to do so. Letting the forum be polluted with the type of content that the forum was specifically set up to prevent seems to be immoral, if anything, in making the forum worse for the rest of the users who use this forum because of the types of discussion that is fostered by those rules being enforced (though I'd argue that there's no real moral dimension to it regardless). I don't know if Millard is a reasonable person, but he certainly did not post reasonable comments and, more importantly, posted comments that broke the forum's rules in a pretty central way.
07mk
4mo ago
It seems like trump is massively expanding the scope of executive power versus judicial/legislative power to the point where any president with more than 41 votes in the senate can do essentially whatever they want, with the sole exception of raising non-tariff taxes.
I'm not a Constitutional scholar, and much of this thread goes over my head, but this is one point in particular that I don't understand: how is it possible for the executive, through an executive order, to expand the scope of executive power? Either the executive has the power to declare and enforce whatever this EO declares, in which case he's just practicing power he had by nature of being the executive, or the executive lacks that power, and this EO is just unconstitutional or otherwise invalid, to be struck down by courts or by Congress impeaching him.
I'd always thought EOs were essentially pieces of paper with funny markings on them that the executive likes and his underlings are supposed to pay attention to if they want to please the boss. If the POTUS has the power to bootstrap the executive branch to dominating the other branches of government merely through an executive order, then that seems like a major loophole in the Constitution, which makes me think I'm missing something.
07mk
4d 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
5mo ago
That's not what happened. We've been on a years, if not decades, long loop of Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand, until progressives started using "woke" in a self a descriptive manner, when they were feeling particularly strong.
I don't think this is what happened either. I don't see "woke" as being particularly different in kind compared to its predecessors like "SJW," "identity politics," "political correctness," or "CRT." These were all used unironically to describe oneself and one's in-group, often in a way meant to invoke pride - I both partook in and observed this happening all the time within progressive leftist circles about 10-20 years ago. Even "political correctness," which was a derogatory term in most of the 90s, was being reclaimed during the late 2000s/early 2010s as simply what any decent human just considers as "correct."
Thing is, as Shakespeare might put it, shit by any other name will stink just as foul, and so people figured out that the ideological projects described by these mostly innocuous-sounding terms were actually quite foul, and so these terms became foul, necessitating the shift to a different label. What sets "woke" apart, I think, is that it was the term in use when shit really hit the fan in the mainstream, when the naked power and demands of the "woke" were too large and too extreme for a large part of the mainstream to accept everything just on vibes, but rather compelled people to look under the hood and properly connect all the dots. So it's become difficult, if not impossible, for the SJWs, idpol-types, PC-types of yesteryear to slide into some other, as-of-yet untarnished label. It's sort of happening with "DEI" becoming "BRIDGE," but, I mean, those same 3 letters are still in the latter, and I think the overall awareness of these types of politics is just too high for the sleight of hand to work nearly as well this time.
The term "woke right" seems to be trying to get at a subset of rightwingers who follow a similar sort of resentment- and identity-based thinking when it comes to society as the "woke." And I can why people like James Lindsay - who's the person responsible for like 95% of the usage of the phrase "woke right" that I've seen in the wild - would want to do this; there are few things rightists hate more than "woke," and it's not unreasonable to believe that the dangers of right-wing identity politics could be a blind spot for many anti-woke rightists. But in terms of the meaning of the term, it just seems unnecessary, since it's just describing plain old racism.
The "woke" way of thinking involves justifying discrimination against individuals of race X and in favor of individuals of race Y because, in the past, society was structured to favor race X over race Y, and modern society still suffers from downstream effects of such structures such that individuals of race X today are advantaged over individuals of race Y. This is equivalent to the stereotypical classical racist rationale that, due to a difference in the grace of God/genes/essence/intelligence/etc. race X is intrinsically inferior to race Y, it's just a version that's been adapted not just to be palatable but to be delicious to people who want to consider themselves non-racist.
So whatever cluster of people the "woke right" is describing, it just seems to me to be describing classical racists among the right-wing, just using a label that's meant to provoke a greater disgust response (interesting that, again, since a rose by any other name smells just a sweet, it seems that "racist" has become a less nasty thing to be associated with than "woke").
07mk
6mo ago
This is, again, illustrating the problem with the Motte. It is not that you’re a right winger insulting me a left-winger; you’re being a bad debater. Part of the rules of this site are “speak clearly”, so yes, you DO have to clarify that when you say “leftists don’t care about child rape”, you SHOULD say “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on” or that “leftists believe in stopping child rape but don’t take action”.
No. One of the rules of this place is to be charitable, and I believe that an obvious charitable reading of “leftists don’t care about child rape” is something akin to “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on.” I would agree that wording it this way is not nice, and certainly something that I would prefer to see less of in this space, but it's a world away from the type of crap that the likes of antifa posted.
Okay, but we’re trying to debate and your response was “I think that leftists don’t care about child rape because of my anecdotal experience of being a leftist” and I responded with “anecdotal evidence isn’t enough, do you have evidence outside of that”, and not only have you not responded to my claim about anecdotal evidence you have not responded about providing said evidence. I’m not saying you need to agree to those points or some type of action or whatever, but you have to acknowledge those points so we can move on to the next point of debate or we are literally talking over eachother.
If we're having a debate here, it's certainly not about whether or not leftists care about child rape. Commentary on the truth-value of that was something I put in a parenthetical to point out that the answer of "No" is one that I agree with. You don't have to agree with it, and I don't care if you do.
My actual point, the point surrounding whatever debate we're having, is that this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and to answer with a "No" given the topic at hand. It's not a particularly productive question, nor is it a nice question (though personally, I'd say it's a productive question for a leftist - or really anyone - to ask himself, based on my own personal experience as a leftist who did, but not productive for someone to ask about others). But given the topic and underlying reality at hand, it's a question that makes sense both to wonder about and to answer with "No."
07mk
10mo ago
The fact that Japanese devs are able to create a Western culture inspired game more successfully than Western devs themselves seems to support the original comment's point. I suppose there's Skyrim and other games with similar inspirations made by Western devs, but there's plenty of examples of Japanese devs outdoing Western devs with Western culture inspired games. Obvious examples that come to mind include From Soft's Dark Souls games & Bloodborne, Capcom's Dragon's Dogma and even Devil May Cry games, and Square Enix with Final Fantasy games (notably, when they took a modern Western storytelling approach with a Western-culture inspired fantasy game in Forspoken, in bombed both in the West and East).
07mk
11mo ago
I think it’s the inevitable result of not being able to handle the idea of disagreement. If you don’t have political views, you’re just right, then it’s not disagreement, it’s a bizarre rant.
I think this is correct and just another variation of the prevalence of the word "gross" to describe political/ideological beliefs/behaviors that began about 10-15 years ago among the progressive left. Besides just not having enough exposure to these ideas to describe their negative qualities outside of generic disgust-based ones like "gross" or "bizarre" or "weird," there's also the heightened emphasis on immediate, visceral, emotional reaction as the genuine reaction that one ought to be true to, with a denigration of trying to reason through the issues while taking those emotional reaction into account along with logic and evidence (e.g. Ben Shapiro's "facts don't care about your feelings" line has only been a punchline to showing how stupid and short-sighted he and his ilk are for longer than I knew who Ben Shapiro was). The phrase "not a good look" is also used similarly in a lot of similar contexts, and I'd say it's all an extra-political variation of "creepy" to describe any man that someone wants to denigrate but who lacks any characteristics that it is considered okay to publicly call out as a moral failing.
I also wonder if there's been a sort of secular trend of the term "weird" being used for things that are morally reprehensible by the kids these days. But that's just from me noticing a couple of young-ish YouTubers using the term that way to describe things like an adult hitting on a minor or people purposefully polluting wildlife to film themselves cleaning them for YouTube views (I'd describe those as "predatory" and "fraudulent" respectively, but the folks I watched just kept using the term "weird" to describe those things). The way I understand "weird," it's meant to convey that something is abnormal in a negative way, but as more and more kids are raised in environments that emphasize the celebration of things that are seen as abnormal, perhaps they see the term as just negative, possibly in a visceral way.
07mk
5mo ago
As a feminist myself, I'd agree that that's not the type of stuff that I support as a feminist (in fact, I've spoken out against other feminists who espouse them). Unfortunately, feminists like you or me tend to be either rare or quiet (for me, personally, I chose to be the latter due to noticing that speaking out in the way you did in this comment tended to be met with extremely harsh abuse from other feminists), so I have to admit that comments like Quantumfreakonomics's or FCfromSSC's in this thread are entirely accurate when describing the general group of people who both call themselves feminists and who other people recognize as feminists. I've just had to learn to leave my ego at the door and not feel attacked when people talk about "feminists" supporting [thing I, as a feminist, oppose]. I think having relatively unpopular or at least less-loud (we could be a silent majority among feminists, and I actually suspect that that's the case!) perspective within a particular ideological group unfortunately tends to require this kind of thinking, and this forum in particular tends to have a high proportion of people with fairly idiosyncratic opinions that make them relatively unpopular or, again, less loud compared to the common, mainstream ones within any given ideology.
07mk
11mo ago
All the talk about the shift in "vibes" and re-energizing of the Democratic party under Kamala, as well as the talk about how good this "weird" insult is at owning the Republicans just makes me think of someone noticing an ignorant child tilting his head with a quizzical expression and quickly shutting that all down by ostentatiously shouting out that everyone in fashion agrees that the emperor's new clothes will absolutely revolutionize the industry with its creative use of sleeves or whatever. It's just narrative built on top of narrative said by like-minded people, which doesn't imply it's false, but when the people pushing forward the narrative also happen to be people who like the narrative, largely based on what other people who also like the narrative say, it certainly implies that great skepticism is in order.
The bigger issue I think this raises is, if the narrative turns out to be false and people notice that, then that will result in the many journalists and media outlets that pushed forward the narrative having discredited themselves, which will mean fewer trustworthy resources for the American electorate to learn about their politicians. This phenomenon of journalists discrediting themselves through politically-motivated messaging has been going on at least since the 2015 Trump campaign, and it seems to just keep getting worse, and I wonder if, eventually, something will have to give.
07mk
1mo ago
I almost feel a bit sorry for the assassin. Sans any evidence, my speculation is that he saw the love and adoration Mangione was receiving and decided he wanted some of that by pulling off another senseless ideological murder. But he's just not good looking enough, and the victims not suitably high up on the food chain for him to garner anywhere near the same level of following, IMHO. There's something almost funny about this, him copying Mangione with a cargo cult understanding of the phenomenon, when Mangione himself seemed to have a cargo cult understanding of how assassinations are supposed to work for affecting change.
Then again, I could be completely off about this, and he was a truly devout and deranged ideologue. Or he could gather adoration even more than Mangione. Time will tell, I suppose.
07mk
4mo ago
I've come to terms with the fact that "could" actually means "could not" when it precedes "care less," but I think I've yet to come to terms with the fact that "reign" actually means "to restrain or stop, like pulling on the strap for controlling a horse" when it precedes "in."
07mk
4mo ago
I don't see how it could possibly generate subtitles instantly on the fly for a music video with a runtime of three minutes?
I think your explanation about the AI lying and confidently misrepresenting evidence in this case is almost certainly true. But I don't see how the runtime of the music video would matter for this. If the AI were analyzing the music video - which I don't think it did - it would be analyzing the bits that make up a video file after downloading it from wherever it is, in which case it just needs to process the bits that make up the file, and the speed of that would be dependent on many factors, but certainly not limited by how long the video is. A human might be limited to maybe half the time at the shortest if they watched the video at 2x speed, but I don't see any reason why an AI couldn't transcribe, say, all recorded audio in human history within a second, just by going through the bits fast enough.
It's almost Christmas again, which means every retail worker and most shoppers in general are dreading having to listen to Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You about a sextillion times over the next month. This dread has become such a cliche to the extent that Carey herself has pointed it out after Halloween at least the past couple of years on social media, warning people that it's time to be assaulted by that song again.
My question is, does anyone else still unironically like that song*? I'm not particularly one for Christmas, but listening to that song everywhere is one of the parts I look forward to in December, and when I used to run for exercise, that song used to be one of the mainstays on my exercise playlist year-round. I'm not well versed enough in music to meaningfully explain why I like it so much, but I find the extremely sugary-sweet wholesome lyrics along with the melody to be exceedingly pleasant in a way that few other songs are.
* Edit: I meant anyone else today, after having been forced to listen to it so many times each and every December over the past few decades.
Optimistically, the academics leaving the USA are the ones most ideologically captured, such that their contributions to knowledge production is easily replaceable or even a net negative, as is the case for much of what is purportedly being cut by DOGE. Given how academia has been pushing for the model of uplifting people by putting them into these institutions versus the the model of putting people into these institutions based on their ability to contribute to knowledge production for a couple of generations now, it wouldn't surprise me if even a solid majority of academics could leave the USA and leave the USA's academia better off for it.
Pessimistically, there's enough damage to funding in even in the most productive portions of academia, such that plenty of the academics leaving the USA really do create a "brain drain." I'd guess that academics doing actual good knowledge production are most likely to have the resources and options to pick up their lives and move to another continent, after all.
It really speaks to the immense wealth and prosperity of the western world that academic institutions are able to support so many unproductive and anti-productive academics; is it worth it to get rid of many of those, even at the cost of some loss of the productive ones? Or do we accept those as the cost for maximizing the amount of actual productive academics? The shape of the data probably matters a lot for whatever conclusion one draws. If we're looking at a 10-90 proportion of productive-un/anti-productive academics, and we can cut 50% of the latter while cutting 1% of the former, that sounds like that'd be worth it, whereas if cutting 1% of the latter results in cutting 50% of the former, that probably isn't.
Which then takes us a step back to the fact that we no longer have any credible institutions to tell us what the data looks like. The past decade has seen mainstream journalism outlets constantly discrediting themselves, especially with respect to politics surrounding Trump and his allies, and non-mainstream ones don't have a great track record by my lights, either. So I guess we'll see.
In terms of scientific research of the sort that would make USA stronger relative to other countries, like rocketry or nuclear physics in the past, it seems to me that AI is the most relevant field, where I perceive USA as still being most attractive for AI researchers. At least in the private sector, where a lot of the developments seem to be taking place. The part about that that worries me the most is the actual hardware the AI runs on, which basically universally are produced elsewhere, which is a mostly separate issue from the brain drain.
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