2rafa
4mo ago
I haven’t found anywhere with equal quality commentary. Twitter is terribly formatted and seemingly encourages by its very nature edgelording, rudeness and one-upmanship. Reddit is full of morons who tediously invade any serious discussion about anything, and any well-moderated communities are (as we found out) banned from having interesting discussions. So what’s left? A few other obscure forums (DSL is fine but worse than here, with worse writing, and I prefer the Reddit structure) and blog comments sections (where participation is structured around what the singular blog author posts).
When something interesting happens, this is usually the place that I want to discuss it. ‘Experts’ can be found on Twitter, but that’s not really the idea - after all, I’m hardly an expert. Instead, I want discussion about current events with smart, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people in an environment that respects long-form writing, politeness, manners and which is well moderated to ensure the above.
Where else has that?
I know quite a few Muslims who refuse to drink Starbucks for this reason. There are a lot of collages of Jewish-founded or run businesses that float around on WhatsApp etc in the Arab/Muslim world.
In a deracinated, secularizing world in which the core Islamic territory is increasingly divided in two by the Saudi/Iranian Sunni/Shia proxy conflict, Palestine is literally the sole unifying cause for the global ummah, they can’t really agree on anything else.
This also explains Muslim radicalization about it, it’s the only cause that a traditionalist 75 year old grandfather who prays five times a day and his 21 year old feminist art student granddaughter who doesn’t even wear hijab can agree on with similar zeal. For many Westernized Muslims, a combination of generic POC-‘anticolonial’ activism in general and Palestine advocacy specifically is what being a Muslim means to them.
(That’s not unique to Muslims, of course, plenty of progressive Christians and Jews do similar things, but it is important to remember in these discussions.)
2rafa
6mo ago
As others have noted, the sexual revolution is slowly being reversed, even though the proponents of this reversal (mostly) don’t understand what they’re doing. Before the sexual revolution, if you ‘improperly seduced’ (‘took advantage of’) a girl of reasonable social standing and this behavior was revealed (by her or others), you’d answer to her male relatives. Now you will answer to the government (this in itself is not a new phenomenon, the same shift from responsibility of the tribe to responsibility of the state has happened with welfare, policing, consumer fraud protection etc).
In the end, it is likely that some arrangement between men and women will be reached. Until then, Moran is right to warn men that the age of unimpeded sexual libertinism and rockstars fucking their 15 year old groupies without social sanction has drawn to a close.
2rafa
8mo ago
The Metropolitan Police has one of the highest homicide solve rates of any major western urban police force. In 2019, it solved 98% of London's 143 homicides, for example. San Francisco's homicide solve rate seems to fluctuate between around 65% and 75%, and that is one of the very highest of major US cities. London's homicide rate is vastly below US cities with similar (or indeed better, in SF's case) demographics from an HBD purist's perspective.
Generally I find the police here to be moderately competent. They remove schizo homeless people quickly. When annoying street buskers play near my home, they come in 15 minutes to move them along. I've asked them for directions and they've always been polite. The police don't set hate crime laws, politicians do. Police are usually authoritarian personality types, there are always issues with them enjoying the power they wield over civilians. But they enforce laws that are, ultimately, passed by others.
The article Scott cites from Foreign Policy is one of the worst I've ever read on the UK, its argument is absurd and it's full of blatant untruths, and it's written by a hardcore pro-EU culture warrior who cheers every failure for the UK from abroad. In general, both the American and continental press have been very down on the UK since 2016 for culture war reasons, and
Some examples:
The UK is much wealthier than it was in the 1970s. The UK's tax rates on high incomes are high for the OECD, it's tax rates on low incomes that are particularly low, and which represent a central cause of the UK's deficit problem. The US, by far the wealthiest country in the world, has higher inequality than the UK. And in by far the most important measure of prosperity (household per capita disposable income), the UK is just below Denmark and Canada and just above Ireland and Japan. It is certainly poorer than America, but it has been poorer for a long, long time. From The Telegraph:
Apart from a brief period during the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the UK's GDP per head has consistently dragged behind the US since 1880
So this isn't a 'new' trend. The UK is fine, and because of the structure of its economy, it goes through comparative periods of outperformance and underperformance vs Europe. It was comparatively wealthier because of a struggling post-dotcom-bust dollar and a surging pound in the 2000-2008 period, and the effects of this make economic growth since 2008 look particularly anaemic in a way that allows people with a political grudge to bear (primarily against Brexit or the Conservative Party) to write narratives like those Scott cites.
Britain had a brief chance to become a more prosperous country after World War Two. But it was the socialist government of Clement Attlee that destroyed this possibility. His Town and County Planning Act destroyed growth in London and Birmingham to prop up failing northern industrial cities that in many cases had not existed for a century, instead of encouraging migration to the booming south (which had always been where the bulk of Britain's population was based). It also hamstrung new construction around those southern cities. Attlee's inheritance tax uniquely destroyed British family owned small-and-medium sized companies. In every continental country (most notably Germany, which obviously has a currently thriving manufacturing sector), postwar inheritance taxes allowed extensive exceptions for family businesses. In the UK, Labour explicitly chose to avoid these exceptions to attack capitalism, ramming through 60%+ tax rates on estates including businesses, and Britain's extraordinary legacy of skilled manufacturing - the legacy of the industrial revolution and its homeland itself - was destroyed as a result.
The UK is still paying the price for its six year folly with socialism (in part because Churchill and the conservatives who succeeded him after 1955 failed to turn back enough of the changes until Thatcher, and by then it was mostly too late). Britain's rare successes since 1945 are in spite of this burden, not because of it.
The reason the city lost is because the test setters did not have the requisite proof that performance on the test was reflected in performance on the job. It probably was, almost any standardized test like this would be, but their only testing was asking a small number of teachers whether the topics on the test were important to teaching or something.
IQ testing job candidates (even if/when there are outcome differences between groups) is 100% legal in the US. The military does it. Countless civilian employers do it (those famous ‘Google interview questions’ are IQ tests). Police do it. There are companies like Wonderlic, Pearson etc who make a lot of money selling these tests to employers.
But you have to prove the test reflects on-the-job performance within a reasonable period. This is ridiculously easy, employee evaluations and objective measures of success (targets, sales figures, good feedback, etc) will almost certainly reflect intellectual ability with a strong correlation, but you have to put in the work and say “on average, here are the stats that show that the higher you score on this test, the better you do in the job”.
In this case it went against NYC’s politics to argue the test did work, so instead they tried to claim the state made them do it, which seemingly wouldn't have been accepted as an excuse by the court.
Affluent and educated Indians simply have no retort to the core criticism of many people on the DR about India, which is that it is the only place in the world in which the rich are so permanently content with public squalor.
You cannot simply appeal to ‘socioeconomic development levels’. No. African countries with small fractions of India’s median income have much cleaner capitals. I was in Central Africa again last week. Kinshasa is much cleaner than Mumbai or New Delhi. I work, on occasion, with senior African officials across many sub-Saharan countries. One of the first things they’ll do, even the most corrupt ones, as they increase state capacity and collect more tax money, is beautify public spaces, hire people to clean the park opposite the national parliament, that kind of thing. I have walked through shanty-town level African neighborhoods where the working class is and you will see boys picking up litter, sweeping streets and so on. Of course, sheer poverty means these places are still squalid by first-world standards.
But they are much cleaner than even middle class neighborhoods of Indian cities. Even wealthy ones. If you are a wealthy Indian you have probably been to Soho House in Mumbai (a few years ago at least it was one of the places the wealthy younger people hung out, probably less fashionable now). Even there, the street outside was dirty, garbage everywhere, unswept, sandy. Street cleaning has been solved, we have machines for it now, India can afford them (many other cities with much lower median income than Mumbai manage it). This squalor is a choice.
India fills me with a certain horror that the rest of the developing world does not. You see, I can go to Singapore and see what a Chinese civilization that is rich looks like. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is pleasant enough, competently managed and a high-quality place to live. Even the Arabs, when they have money, create a passable or moderately livable society. There are good parts of South and even Central America. Africa is very poor, but as I said, I am encouraged. Only in India are the rich content with public squalor. I cannot understand why. I don’t think even you know, exactly, I’ve engaged on this issue with the many intelligent Indians here and I get the sense that it’s not something they really think about, even though to me it is obviously, by very very far the biggest issue with their country.
I don’t condone the ridiculous racism of the 4chan troll, Indians are by and large decent immigrants to the West. But the question of India’s squalor looms over every stamped visa.
I think he seems to have realized a terrible truth for a lot of WNs who are deeply used to their particular kind of persecution complex and enemy hierarchy, which is that much of the state of the modern west is a direct product of the ‘white temperament’ and white population preferences, possibly on a genetic level.
Someone posted a Twitter video of a Fox News interview with locals in Seattle or Portland or something during the (ongoing) violent crime wave in reply to my Seattle post last month. It’s become a popular online meme because it’s all these very annoying looking white people saying it’s not a problem at all, they don’t notice an increase in crime, ‘what, do YOU pussies have a problem with homeless people now, does it bother you, bitch?’ aggressiveness to the reporter. Just the most annoying kind of stubborn middle aged person, and I would add white because for all the many, many, in most cases worse flaws of other groups I’ve never seen their peoples behave like this, the grandiosity, “no u”-ness, general pigheadedness of their denial is on another level. For all their varied and whacky politics, many Jews I’ve met in NYC would press the button to delete the homeless if they could, and wouldn’t think twice about it. I couldn’t say the same for many Northern European whites. They don’t have it in them, until they do, and then they’re just as pigheaded and stubborn in the other direction.
It reminds me of real life conversations I’ve had with white English people, intelligent, center-right conservative types, about groups, identity, mass immigration, genetics, civilization, and they just shut down. I don’t mean that they shut down the debate, they’re usually polite enough and I wouldn’t discuss ‘edgy’ things with people I didn’t trust anyway, but they shut down internally. They display the exact pigheaded stubbornness that the Seattle video interviewees do, the strange combination of [post] Christian guilt complex and superiority complex and absolute, ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ type emphasis on propriety above policy. Like a Church of England relic unable to deal with the fact that the church becoming a retirement camp for delusional elderly middle-class hippies could be a reason why attendance is down 90% in 50 years or whatever. Some (politically involved people, one a former MP) will even admit the current levels of immigration are a catastrophe, but then suggest in the same breath that what happens will happen, and that above all the focus should be on preventing the far right from making too much hay of the situation and “destabilizing” things. What can you do with such people?
I find @BurdensomeCount’s occasional gloating at whites unbecoming, but when you live here you understand it. Oh, how I have been lectured about tolerance by people who are actively destroying their own country. Oh, the sanctimoniousness I have sat through. Gradually, I began to feel a pull towards a certain contempt for some of the English, for they were destroying not only their own civilization but that of their greater ancestors, and their unborn and innocent descendants, and even that of those various non-Anglo hangers on who had, like myself, found themselves as productive and (mostly) happy guests in their society. They did not understand how precious what they had created was.
What can you do about such a people? They have no will to power, no will to survive. Whatever vitality they once had, they lost. I would gladly sacrifice Israel for a Britain that was both tolerant of Jews and actively pursuing the greatness of its own once-proud civilization, that’s how much I like it here. But I may be faced with no choice but to cast my lot in with my ancestral homeland (real or imagined) because these people have given up, and they’re proud of it.
As the saying goes, you can’t respect people who don’t respect themselves.
2rafa
7mo ago
Three overlapping claims count as Ayys. Here are my thoughts on all three, add yours.
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Life somewhere else in the universe: Very likely, it's quite possible primitive life even exists elsewhere in the solar system.
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Intelligent life somewhere else in the universe: Moderately likely, FERMI paradox can be resolved in a number of satisfactory ways.
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Intelligent life that has deliberately visited earth, in person, regularly since the middle of the 20th century: Very unlikely.
Interestingly, the rate of violent crime in many MENA countries is actually not particularly high.
Everyone remembers teachers in school who could command a class authoritatively to the extent that nobody even whispered when they were talking, and others who would be so weak as to allow the exact same group of, say, 11 year olds to run riot. I remember reading and watching interviews with some of the young male Syrian, Afghan etc migrants to Germany and so on after the 2015 refugee crisis. What seemed to be shared most of all was twofold:
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A deep-seated contempt for Western society for its liberalism. This, of course, is broadly shared by internet rightists, so can hardly be a major point of disagreement.
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The belief, real or fictional, that authority in the West was extremely weak and that, presumably unlike at home, they could get away with almost anything. This, of course, is also broadly agreed with by internet rightists.
Import young men from traditional cultures to a degenerate western society full to the brim with licentiousness, in which many crimes are barely policed, in which traditional morality has all but broken down, and you can’t be surprised if they take advantage.
The grooming gangs of Rotherham were able to rape so many girls in part because they knew there would be no posse of fathers and uncles coming for them. Most of the girls didn’t even have fathers, they were products of single motherhood in the dregs at the bottom of English society. In Pakistan, fathers and brothers risk jail to protect their family’s honor all the time.
Similarly, when it comes to work, Swedish Somalis are no doubt capable of working if the choice is between labor and starvation. If it’s between labor and generous welfare, though, the basis for the decision changes.
Opposition to mass immigration is fair, and there are many reasons why it is justified. But the truth is that - for the most part - these migrants do what they do not because it is in their nature but because Western countries allow them to. The old 4chan “they are laughing at you” really does apply here.
2rafa
18d ago
For some reason I was thinking about the OJ Simpson trial today, and it reminded me of your comment.
The most damning evidence in the OJ trial (barring DNA which was little understood by juries at the time) wasn’t the glove, or the record of Simpson’s movements, or the police interview. It was the fact that his defense could not provide any alternate account of what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman whatsoever. Two young white (well…) people killed in brutal fashion in a rich part of LA, somewhere that would have had witnesses to on-street commotion, and zero evidence (for any alternate explanation). They hinted or gestured at some kind of gang, or a drug deal, or something related to the restaurant where Goldman worked, but they had nothing, not one shred of evidence for even the most faintly plausible alternate theory of why these two people were murdered by someone other than OJ. This from an extraordinarily skilled legal team with unlimited budget to hire private investigators, research leads and come up with theories.
Holocaust revisionism functions in much the same way. Details about the process of execution, the precise methods, quibbles with testimony, calling the veracity of various accounts in question, all mirror OJ’s defense strategy. The glove don’t fit, the police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist who had motivation to lie to convict a successful black man with a pretty blonde wife, and the whole trial was surely just another libel against a rich black guy and, especially after Rodney King, who would doubt the hostility of the cops toward black men etc…
But there was and is no alternate theory. The best revisionists can do is, as SecureSignals does, to gesture at possibilities. “Oh, maybe they all went to Russia, changed their names and lived happily ever after”, or “maybe the Austro-Hungarians randomly overcounted the Jewish population by 400% and there were actually far fewer Jews than anyone thought in Eastern Europe”. None of these are evidenced, they’re not supposed to be. They’re mere gestures, hints, seeds of doubt, held together by a narrative in which devious Jews are permanently hostile to white/aryan interests and therefore are probably lying anyway. There is, as @To_Mandalay has said, no real alternate hypothesis; some revisionists apparently argue that Himmler was supposed to kill all the Jews but then didn’t because he was actually a traitor to the cause, which conflicts with other revisionist theories, which conflict with others.
Revisionists avoid believing in strict alternate hypotheses (for example presenting multiple options in the same book or article and feigning ambivalence about which could be true) since doing so would pin them down and make very obvious the extreme dearth of evidence they’re built upon. But it is reasonable for historians to request that they provide and defend comprehensive and evidenced alternate theories for the disappearance of European Jewry.
The difficulty I have always had with this theory, as I say below, is that it doesn’t explain why the high IQ minority in India - which, after all, would be larger than the population of most first-world nations - doesn’t at least create a developed-tier society for itself.
We have many examples of countries where you have a large population at one level and a minority that performs much better. And whether it’s in compounds or in open cities, they typically live in much more advanced, first-world level communities than the rest of the population.
I watched this recent video about a city that Guatemala’s rich built for themselves. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it looks like a nice European city. Sure, the majority of the country lives in third world conditions, but that didn’t stop the largely European elite from building this. Rich Brazilians too, don’t accept living in squalor, nor do the wealthier South Africans. Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia likewise build clean, functioning, safe and high quality neighborhoods. Even the British themselves did this in India, and the neighborhoods they built are still some of the most desirable in the country, with gardens and parks and tree lined streets.
But the Brahmins, as you say, just give up, or don’t seem to care. And I’ve had this conversation with many Indians, and they all agree (often they bring up the topic; I’m not inviting my own cancellation) that India’s beyond hope and there’s little use even trying to clean it up, it just is what it is, as if both the space program and garbage piling up in a street where traffic is intermittently blocked by a wandering cow are immutable realities of Indian life.
I struggle to understand why all these smart people are content with this, and I think it’s because emigration is an option. If you’re a smart Indian and want to live in a clean and developed country, it’s much easier to move to one (as you are doing) than to carve out a space like that in India. But that’s also pretty sad for India. This is the land of the Vedas, the cradle of civilization. It should look like it.
2rafa
5mo ago
while the US Army has tried to go back to a more "traditional" style of ad where white men parachute out of a helicopter, it's failed to bring back the volunteers[.…]the new ad that dropped on 11/6, "Jump" (Twitter, YouTube)
Failed to bring back the volunteers…in 5 days?
Does it not seem more likely that the US is at full employment and military pay is dogshit? Junior enlisted soldiers in the army are paid, it seems, less than $25,000 a year. There may be additional pay for various things, but given a young man (even with only a high school education) can make double that in some low skill jobs or triple (or quadruple) that in the trades, why would anyone become a soldier? In 2009 when there were no jobs anything was better than nothing. Today, blue collar work is in an extraordinary boom.
It’s interesting that many pieces note the last time there was such a big recruitment shortage in the military was in 1999. What else was the case in 1999? A booming US economy and a thirty year low in the unemployment rate. This seems like antiwoke opinion writers projecting their politics onto the more mundane material considerations that more likely affect military recruitment.
2rafa
5mo ago
Well we can look at the facts, which are that since the 1980s gay rights have become widely accepted, gay marriage legalized across the West; homophobia seriously reduced, and yet at the same time ages of consent have risen (substantially in parts of Canada and Europe), punishments for abuse of children have hugely increased, many more people are in jail for these crimes, and - perhaps most significantly - it’s much less socially acceptable for a 25 or 30 year old man to have a 15/16 year old girlfriend in 2023 than it was in 1973 or 1993. That’s a good thing (in my opinion), but it suggests that things are moving further against the direction you suggest is likely.
RedScarePod isn’t a “left wing” subreddit, the hosts of the podcast were vaguely connected to the Chapo ecosystem but have drifted rightward over the years, but in any case they’re largely irrelevant - threads about the latest podcast episode get only a handful of comments compared to hundreds on many regular threads daily. There is some generic performative conservatism, but I wouldn’t describe it as a right or a left wing sub. It’s a contrarian subreddit for shitposting by young-but-not-zoomer smart-ish people who understand a decade or more of internet culture references. Reminds me of somewhere else…
The subreddit’s main audience is the same group of people who once posted on /r/drama (in fact, it’s pretty much the same picture, and almost every rdrama.net regular who is still on Reddit is on RSP), ie. very online 25-35 year old urban PMC late millennials who grew up in the early 4chan/SomethingAwful era and whose politics, such as they are, are largely unchanged from those shitposting days. Many of those people are also here, of course. The language is generic very online language (“we’re so back”, [x]cel, “it’s all over for [x]”, -pilled) you see it all the time on Twitter and even elsewhere on Reddit. Whenever a very online term breaks into the actual mainstream on TikTok and generic meme pages (eg. “-ussy” posting, remember those days on /r/drama?) it becomes déclassé and is slowly dropped in most contexts.
I agree that there are people who are meta-fans of politics, but I think they’re more likely to be found on other politics subreddits, on Twitter and on Substack. Richard Hanania, for example, is a politics enthusiast. So is Nate Silver.
Most RSP posts aren’t particularly political, it’s less political than Drama was back in the day even before the mods cracked down under admin pressure. Disliking fat people and an endless series of jokes about borderline personality disorder and being gay don’t map neatly into the American political spectrum. There’s a trans-critical contingent but ‘misgendering’ is usually downvoted. Views on abortion are progressive and the occasionally anti-abortion podcast hosts are clowned on by the subreddit’s users regularly for their stance.
To some extent, Drama, RSP and KiwiFarms (in the last case with caveats) are the last remnants of the pre-Gamergate internet, when politics was a thing and people had stances on these issues but they were not always the central and defining character trait that motivated online discussion.
2rafa
10mo ago
Men are incentivized (whether this is by nature, society, life, the laws of the universe, whatever isn't really important) to find one thing they're very good at and to run with it.
For men, beauty is a floor and status is the ceiling. For women, status is a floor and beauty is the ceiling. A man may benefit from his looks, but wins because of his status. A woman benefits from her status, but wins because of her beauty.
Consider two beautiful underwear models moonlighting as baristas to make ends meet - one man, one woman. Who is more likely to have the opportunity to marry hypergamously? Consider two very successful but ugly corporate lawyers - one man, one woman. Who is more likely to have a more attractive spouse than themselves, the man or the woman?
Women's status is assured, but largely set. Men's is not assured, but usually malleable.
This often causes great consternation to members of both sexes.
The popularity of pro-Palestine content on TikTok is primarily due to the fact that Anglo media is increasingly internationalized. Previous generations of social media content saw very little overlap between culturally distinct communities; sometimes American memes would filter down, but memes from the periphery almost never flowed up to the Anglo metropole. With the third generation of social media and TikTok/Reels that has changed, core Anglo users now often see algorithmically successful content from the Spanish, continental European, Arab and South and Southeast Asian spheres if it goes very viral. Some domains like beauty and fashion (where content is primarily visual) are even more diverse.
The Muslim world is almost a quarter of the world’s population. It’s increasingly middle or upper income, increasingly online, increasingly Anglophone. Many influencers who do well in the West are partly or wholly or Arab descent. Major nations like Indonesia and Malaysia are now pretty much full on social media, and their most viral content often makes it to the West, it’s not siloed. The only thing that unites plebs across the entire Muslim world is contempt for Israel. The degree of hostility usually varies, but because many global Muslims have a simp complex around Arabs (eg replacing local dress with hijab and niqab, or thawb for scholars) there is a special race to prove just how pro-Palestinian you are for peripheral (eg. Malay, black African, Bangladeshi) Muslims groups far from the Arabian peninsula. Witness that Malaysia is for example much more anti-Zionist than Saudi Arabia or the UAE, even though Israel and Palestine are on the other side of the world and are inhabited by people ethnically and culturally very distinct from Southeast Asia(ns). But if you speak to Muslim Malays, they see it as their big and noble duty to the Muslim world to be anti-Israel, serving in this sense a function like a crusade.
Helped along by a rapidly growing and ever more powerful Muslim population in the West, plus some good memes, the Palestine complex seamlessly inserted itself into the generic DEI memeplex that already dominates on these apps. This has been a long time coming and has been obviously on its way since at least 2009, maybe earlier. 18 million Jews, as funny as they may be, can’t out-meme two billion Muslims, especially in the current DEI climate in the Anglosphere. The cultural and commercial energy is with them.
It’s interesting to look at this in the wider context of Zionism, because of course the greatest mistake the Zionists made was believing that the Holy Land could be held by the Jews easily and forever onward. But you have to understand that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many bourgeois Jews and gentiles in Europe considered the Muslim world to be a largely passive, defeated people. By the end of World War 1 pretty much every single Muslim country in the entire world was subordinate - whether under colonial rule or indirect suzerainty - to a European empire of one kind or another (the UK, France, Soviet Union) all led by non-Muslims. The young elite of the Muslim world were secularizing, Europeanizing, going to private schools run by French missionaries, urbanization seemed to see declines in religiosity. Many early Zionists, especially on the Anglo-French side, expected that Europeans would rule over the Arab world, including the Levant, forever. After all, the Ottoman Empire was over, the region was largely scarcely populated, local rulers were most fine with serving European foreign policy. Revolts were regular but mostly easily put down by modest European forces. Neither Arab nationalism nor Islamism were yet major forces to threaten Israeli dominance of Judea and Samaria. Israel had a bright future as an informal outpost of empire surrounded by the statelets of various other client peoples.
They did not predict how much the world would change, and now it seems hopelessly naive to imagine it would not. In hindsight it was very stupid to pick a fight with that many people.
As the other replies have said, the vast majority of “homeless” people are unemployed or mostly unemployed people living in their parents’/friend’s/trap house or in their car or couchsurfing. Even the majority of homeless people of no fixed abode aren’t like those living in tents on Venice Beach. These people can indeed be helped by cheaper housing costs or state-subsidized housing schemes. But they also aren’t what is usually meant by the public when talking about the homeless problem.
The problem is with the minority of homeless who are psychotic fent or meth addicted predators. These are the people living on the street in San Francisco or LA and causing problems for everyone else. Demography of the more general “homeless” population isn’t relevant. These are people who deliberately refuse shelters with space because they want to stay on the street to do drugs, offering them housing isn’t going to solve that problem or associated problems with drug-related crime done by people who want a fix.
I was thinking of putting this in the fun thread, but does anyone else think (wokeness aside) that Baldur's Gate 3...isn't that good?
I admit I'm a lifelong Dragon Age stan and will defend that franchise to the end (even for its many flaws), but I've played a huge number of 'classic' CRPGs (including both actual classics like Planescape and Arcanum and modern classic-style games like Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, Tyranny and Wasteland 3) and enjoyed them all.
I really don't like the writing in Baldur's Gate 3. It feels like fanfiction written by fantasy nerds who have never actually read anything that wasn't genre fiction. The romances are really poor and designed to cater to tumblr horniness (yes, even by Bioware standards), characters shuttle between Marvel-humor and absurdly melodramatic 'deep' or 'sentimental' moments with nothing in between. Everything feels like an in-joke or reference. There's a sincerity there (unlike DOS2) , but it's an insincere sincerity, like the moment in a superhero movie before the final battle when everyone suddenly gets serious and someone mentions that their team is like a family.
I played Hogwarts Legacy earlier this year, and that really is a mediocre game (beautifully recreated castle aside) with very average writing and a dull main storyline. But one thing I really appreciate about it - at least now I've played Baldur's Gate 3 - is that it takes its world, ridiculous and weird and nonsensical and full of a billion plot holes though it is, seriously. People in Baldur's Gate 3 don't act the way humans (or humanoid races who are essentially humans on the inside) do in the situations that they're in.
The world feels very small, and very banal, and very modern, and choices are "moral dilemmas" as imagined by a DM who is very active on the D&D memes subreddit. Maybe this is what many players want, as it certainly provides the experience of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons when played with a dungeon master who collects funko pops and has the poster of every MCU movie in their bedroom, but it falls a little short of the best titles in the genre, which are written by people with wider tastes in fiction.
Playing Pentiment by Josh Sawyer/Obsidian, one gets the sense that this is a game written by a man with a genuine interest in the source material and with a broad literary taste. David Gaider, who wrote Dragon Age, stated that his primary influence in the script and tone was the 1968 movie The Lion of Winter, about Henry II's court in 1183, not high art but of which Roger Ebert said "One of the joys which movies provide too rarely is the opportunity to see a literate script handled intelligently. 'The Lion in Winter' triumphs at that difficult task; not since 'A Man for All Seasons' have we had such capable handling of a story about ideas. But 'The Lion in Winter' also functions at an emotional level, and is the better film, I think."
By contrast Baldur's Gate 3's writers appear YA-fictionbrained. The script lacks a trace of high culture or even midbrow influence. The lead writer was, like many writers in games, an ex-game journalist, one of modernity's more ignoble professions. The emphasis genuinely seems to be on recreating the average nerd DM's campaign in digital form, but the whole point of a professionally produced product is that actual writers should be able to do a better job than some software engineer who writes campaigns in his spare time, so this is little consolation.
I also find the gameplay disappointing. This is to some extent by default, since RtWP is a vastly superior mechanic for CRPGs than turn-based gameplay (because it allows one to fast-forward through trash encounters and to play at one's own pace). But even by the standards of good turn-based combat systems, Baldur's Gate 3 is poor. A big part of this is because of the direct translation of many 5e mechanics into a game, which is ridiculous since they were designed for abstraction to make tabletop play viable. The combat system has too many actions, too many redundant spells (ability systems in games where the DM can essentially decide what each use of each ability can do are completely different to rules-based video games) lifted directly from the source material. And too many abilities is a big problem, because the biggest difference between a CRPG and tabletop is that in a tabletop game, you play only one character. In a CPRG, you play 4-6, so the logic of combat complexity changes.
A second problem is the incessant on-screen dice rolls, which are ugly and immersion-breaking (the whole point of digital games, some would say, is that they can put this kind of thing behind-the-scenes). A third issue is that D&D itemization is fine for tabletop campaigns where you can carry a handful of items, your inventory is a box on a lined piece of paper and there are three combat encounters in a 4 hour session, but it works less well in a game where there are mountains of loot and players are used to more interesting itemization than +2 swords or things that provide a single-point increase in one stat. The game is also extremely easy, but that's a more common complaint.
There doesn't seem to me an inherent reason why games can't have good writing. After all, at least some mainstream movies have good dialogue and are written by well-read screenwriters, it's not impossible. I think it's something about expectations. Game designers, directors and fans are so used to only consuming genre/fantasy/scifi fiction that they don't even understand what's possible, what's out there.
2rafa
8mo ago
I think if these work it will have a huge cultural impact, particularly in places in the Midwest or South where almost everyone is fat. Fat people don’t particularly like looking at or being with other fat people either. There are probably 50 million or more beautiful faces waiting to be liberated from their fatness. This could be one of the single biggest aesthetic improvements in modern history.
I think Obama is definitely a fascinating personality. The comparison (and contrast) with MLK is interesting, because as you say Obama isn’t really affiliated with African American identity at all until he decided to enter politics in his mid-20s, whereas MLK was born into the (at the time tiny) comfortable black middle class but nevertheless seemingly interacted through his father’s ministry with a much larger cross section of African American society.
It is unfair to claim that Obama is always very defensive about his fabricated identity, though. He’s quite open in his autobiographies about how he made and remade himself multiple times, sometimes to fit in with white or Asian peers, sometimes to get BPD arthoe pussy attempt to make girls interested in him, sometimes to assimilate more into the black American community. His passages on his arrival in Chicago in Dreams From My Father actually often seem to drip with contempt for the young black men he encounters on ‘ghetto street corners’ whom he regards as living out a delusional fantasy of being men, unable or unwilling to improve the condition of their communities. Of course, he was a master of flowery language and nobody seemed to actually read the book (even though they bought it in great numbers), so this remains barely discussed.
So Barry is absolutely a pseud who fancies himself a great intellectual and writer (and this was always the story from eg. his peers on the Harvard Law Review and so on), but he’s admitted this so many times (in fact I believe he openly calls himself a pseudo intellectual on several occasions) that it’s hard to call this substantially dishonest. I mean, this is a guy who would write his girlfriend letters like:
"Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats," Obama wrote her. "You seem surprised at Eliot's irreconcilable ambivalence; don't you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?"
…the guy is clearly such a dork, it’s hard not to be a little sympathetic. His softboi letters about thinking he might be bisexual are obviously in the same vein. Is he a liar? Certainly. Did he invent a fictional life for himself and then live it all the way to the White House? Absolutely. But his messianic complex is so autistic and slightly embarrassing that one can’t help but be slightly charmed by him, I think. We’re all LARPing our lives to some degree, at least if you believe The Last Psychiatrist.
2rafa
8mo ago
This is just more fuel for the fire of the ultimate Trump-related blackpill:
Even if he gets back into power, he’s going to spend 4 years on an unhinged (and likely fruitless) quest to pursue those he believes wronged him personally (both over his last administration and since) and this revenge mission will 100% take priority over any actual conservative policy.
2rafa
8mo ago
I think it very unlikely that you could not find a woman with whom you could fall in love, build a family and have a happy and fulfilling life. There is a lot to be said, especially if you haven't found this so far, for being strategic in your search. If you'd like someone very trad, joining a traditional religious congregation of your choice could be a good idea. There are plenty of shy, homebody women aged 29-32 who don't hang out on the beach in bikinis (and perhaps a few who do!) and who would very much like to get married to a decent man, which could be you. You're a decade out of college, hardly old enough to give up on the simple happiness that many people in much worse condition (both in history and right now) have successfully found.
Without defending sexual liberalism (with which I have many issues), I think the main reason you feel the anguish that you do is that you feel taunted, by people 'advertising' something you think is out of reach for you (or at least largely out of reach). I don't think it's out of reach, necessarily. You're vague about why you feel you're not attractive to the kinds of women you see out on the beach. What exactly do you think you don't have? It is unlikely you will change the system (as you yourself say, you are no leader of men), but it is likely you can find your own happiness within it.
Who's on Threads?
99% of social media products fail, even those from established and successful tech (even social media) companies. In the last two years alone Clubhouse and BeReal have been extremely well-funded, seen a surge in users, and then fallen into seemingly terminal decline. The default assumption should be that Threads fails.
Still, it's an interesting product. The most interesting thing about Threads is that it isn't really trying to be Twitter. It has no web app and doesn't seem designed for Twitter's main use cases (breaking news/announcements of various kinds, and anonymous short-form internet discussion and meme propagation through networks of people who follow each other with mutual interests).
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Threads has no web app and can't be used signed-out, and unlike both Reddit and Twitter the majority of normal users won't be anonymous, because their Threads account will be linked to their Instagram account. Of course creating a secondary anonymous Instagram account to use with Threads is a possibility, but it's certainly more hoops to jump through than on Twitter.
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'Following' on Threads isn't particularly important. You can do it, and you'll definitely see someone's content, but most of the feed is 'suggested content' that the algorithm thinks you'll like. On Twitter, you build your social network and it sometimes recommends good accounts to follow. On Threads, you start with a default pool of content that is maybe 20% your Instagram friends and 80% top trending, and then over time the algorithm corrects to maybe 20% your Instagram friends, 10% top trending, and 70% algorithmic dopamine rush.
Threads is trying to be the TikTok of text.
This strikes me as potentially a far more compelling business case than Twitter, whether or not Zuck actually pulls it off. Reddit, Twitter, various forums and so on are full of vast amounts of compelling short-form text content - jokes, short stories, news, memes, smut, 'ask me anything' type content, gossip, political or current affairs commentary, the occasional compelling chart or graph or whatever - but accessing them requires effort.
On Reddit you're the person who has to go to a specific subreddit (or sets up a custom homepage with your favorites), looks for the content, sorts it, then manually clicks on each link, sees if the post is good. On Twitter, you slowly and laboriously build out your network of followers by weaving in and out of other people's tweets and replies, clicking on their profiles, dismissing them if they're boring, private or post nothing, or maybe scrolling through them and then following them if they seem interesting. In the end you have a custom feed of X followed, but any time you want to expand your circle of interests / followed list, you repeat some form of this process.
Threads, if it works, will distil all this text into the most compelling nuggets of content (presumably with some kind of monetization or influencer model at some point) and then deliver an infinite conveyor belt of them algorithmically tuned to your exact interests. What Reddit and Twitter require their users to do manually, Threads will automate. You like jokes from 'The Office' or short-form fanfiction of Disney movies or thoughtful criticism of video game mechanics or DC political gossip? (Millions of people do.) Threads - if it's able to build a user base big enough (it probably won't) - will deliver an endless supply of these to you directly, no searching or following or whatever necessary, just content. Just like TikTok.
Like TikTok, Threads rejects large aspects of the 'creator economy' that exists on YouTube, Twitch and Instagram (although the latter is moving away from it). ByteDance recognized that most users don't care where their content comes from, TikTok is happy to blow up one post from a small time creator to a hundred million views (if it's really funny or whatever), then never promote any of their other content ever again if the algorithm determines it's less compelling. The magic of TikTok is that while there are many successful creators, much of the content comes from relative randoms who languish in obscurity posting stuff with 5 views until they have one really funny sketch, or one really adorable video of their dog or whatever, then that gets shared unbelievably widely.
Most people aren't consistently compelling content creators, but millions of people probably tell one really funny joke a year, or have one genuinely insightful realization. On Reddit these moments usually get lost in the noise, on Twitter they're buried because they're made by an account with 12 followers that only posts a few times a month. On Threads, the algorithm can recognize that they're something special due to proportional like rates or sharing or whatever, and promote the fuck out of it. Then multiply that by millions of creators, and you can establish this successful force-feeding of content.
You could outline the history of social media kind of like this:
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A first generation, in which people primarily followed real-life friends or acquaintances of those friends (and so on). Those real-life friends shared their thoughts, pictures, ideas, inane ramblings and so on. This was Facebook and its predecessors like MySpace and Friendster.
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A second generation, in which companies realized that dedicated creators (comedians on twitter, models on instagram, vloggers on youtube) were more compelling than most people's friends, and made content that kept users on the platform longer than your inane high school friend's narration of their mundane life. This is the dawn of 'parasocial' media like modern YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and Twitter. Sometimes people still follow real-life friends on these platforms, but increasingly (especially off Instagram), dedicated creators make up the vast majority of the content they consume. Reddit, as a descendant of forums, gradually evolved into this on many/most mainstream or default subreddits.
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A third generation, in which instead of the 'creator economy' being like a grocery store where users search for and pick out products, the software itself does it for you, learning your likes and dislikes and then delivering an endless stream of compelling, dopamine-hit content that you can scroll through at your leisure without ever having to search for anything, with zero friction. This is TikTok's genius, and it's why TikTok is the only major new success in social media in over a decade.
Threads probably won't succeed, but I think the idea of a TikTok For Text will at some point. The model is just too good for the idea itself not to work.
This is undoubtedly the best-moderated community on the internet. I've never seen anywhere that even comes close. Nowhere else allows the free discussion of politically charged topics while enforcing standards of politeness, decorum and basic writing ability that keep out undesirable users.
This is a place for people who want to discuss certain topics without being called a faggot / kike / whore / cuck / whatever by drive-by plebs and that is both meaningful and rare. I suppose it could be 'better', but I don't see how, and the issues I do have (like the lack of leftist users) seem unsolveable given basic social dynamics. So I think this place is probably the best it can be.
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