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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2hr ago
Would it? Is that not just most cases of domestic terrorism?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13hr ago
· Edited 13hr ago
There are others around who are far more qualified to make the argument than I am, but my understanding is that the circumstance that Critical Theory is derivative of Marxism is beyond dispute. Wikipedia itself devotes a big section to it, and the introductory paragraph on its history already says,
Max Horkheimer first defined critical theory (German: kritische Theorie) in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only toward understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy (...)
I suppose that the assertion that is more likely to be disputed is that CT is a driving cultural phenomenon or could be described as the principal philosophical basis of US progressivism, for which it is much harder to show receipts. The only way I can see is to painstakingly show the provenance of defining features and tenets of it - value systems built around class/group interest and oppressor/oppressed dynamics, the fundamental rejection of positivism (lay definition, perhaps: the premise that something like a correct way of reasoning can be discovered and yield a "symbol-pushing" way of generating true statements that should be upheld regardless of human interests) and embracing of textual criticism (dismissal of a "text"'s content in favour of a meta-analysis of who stands to benefit from it being accepted and the motivations of those authoring and conveying it) as a tool to implement this rejection, emphasis on subjective experience, and faith-based anticipation of radical changes to society leading to an improvement of conditions.
One could also point at the high correlation between above-average engagement in the Social Justice movement and explicit self-identification as Marxist with all it entails (being concerned with economic oppressor-oppressed dynamics, anticipating a labor-based radical reorganisation of society resulting in utopia), which would be an unexpected phenomenon that warranted explanation if the two philosophies were not actually closely related.
Lastly, my personal experience as someone fairly deeply embedded in academia and acquainted with many Social Justice activists is that questioning any particular tenet of the movement on a philosophical level (like, "why is it actually desirable that black people get the same average salaries?" or "wasn't colonialism a net good?") will inevitably be answered with arguments from/concrete references to publications that explicitly situate themselves in the CT tradition. If the typical follower believes that SJ is fundamentally moral because its morality is asserted by a selection of activists and intellectuals they trust, those trusted assertions of morality are grounded in Critical Theory, and Critical Theory is grounded in Marxism, is it fair to assert that SJ is Marxist? My sense is yes, but there is obviously some nuance there.
I am actually with you insofar as I don't think that it is politically sensible or productive to apply the "Cultural Marxism" label as part of public discourse. This seems comparable to me to the erstwhile push to attack Muslims by saying things like "Allah is an Arabic moon god" - it may be true that Islam was shaped by the polytheistic soup of medieval Arabia, and this may even have great explanatory power regarding its culture and tenets, but in a modern context where most everyone is more familiar with Islam than with the medieval Arabic moon god you are trying to link it to, all it will achieve is making you look obsessive and schizophrenic as it suggests that your beef with Islam is just because you are the sort of person who would have a beef with the worship of a moon deity from 1500 years ago.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
19hr ago
For a parallel that captures a lot of the nuance (and echoes another discussion that happened here a while back), do you think a committed atheist from out of state bristling under Mormon rule in Utah would be justified in lumping it in as "Christian supremacism"?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20hr ago
· Edited 20hr ago
Doesn't the Christianity-Judaism parallel work for that too?
"What on earth does some theory about God sacrificing his own son to himself to absolve all of humanity's sins have to do with the Jews being God's chosen people? How do you do that with 'culture' at all?"
Yet, "Judeo-Christian culture" is a term that is being used, predominantly by Christians. If the Imperial Romans had our version of the discourse and pagans actually spent time tweeting at Christians rather than trying to feed them to the lions as their control slipped, I can absolutely imagine that they would have called the Christians an offshoot of Jewish culture with the intention of associating them with pre-existing negative sentiment towards the rebellious colonial subjects, and the Christians in response to this would have done a public 180 on this (despite continued internal efforts to market themselves as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy) and claimed it to be an insane conspiracy theory.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Germany and Japan both feel like they would qualify.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
People's value functions are based on envy/their relative position. A lot of people would be objectively happier being upper middle class in 1925 than lower middle class in 2025 despite the latter being materially a lot better off, happier living poor in a poor neighbourhood over living average in a rich neighbourhood, and happier earning $50k under a CEO earning $60k than earning $60k under a CEO earning $80m.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Where the feelings of aggression come in is he has a very intense stare, and I really do feel a sense of "this is an angry person looking at me with aggression" when he looks into the camera. This is a startlingly aggressive gaze for a youtuber to be making into the inanimate object of a camera. And the shadow that his ballcap casts onto his face doesn't really help.
Interestingly, at least this particular freeze frame does not actually register as particularly aggressive to me - I just read it as something like "triumphant expectation", like he thinks he just made a winning point in an argument and is waiting for me to concede.
I come from red country; the conservative men I know don't give off "aggressive, uncoordinated," vibes, but rather "more coordinated and chill than average."
To be clear, I didn't posit it as a general trait of conservatives; rather, it seems to me to be something that conservatives now appreciate in their influencers/thought leaders/talking heads.
For an example that separates the traits I am talking about from "working class markers" (as @OliveTapenade suggested), I got the same sense of unexpected aggression from the handful of Jordan Peterson clips I have watched. My feeling there was that he perpetually talked with a tension that sounded like a professional middle class father who was five seconds away from slapping his son so hard that he would fly across the room.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
By contrast I find the generic left-wing affect to be... one of two, it's either an affected sense of superiority (the I-can't-believe-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you style), or it's a kind of fragility? I don't know how to describe it, but if the right-winger feels like they're about to start screaming, the left-winger feels like they're about to start crying. There's a kind of insecurity. In my experience the superior, smug style is more common among men, and the fragile, desperate style is more common among women.
Does this apply just to left-wing politics youtubers, or to any "generically left-wing" (~anyone who does not register as having the aggressive affect to me)? (What about, say, this prolific tech reviewer, or these two default left-wingers talking to each other about vaguely politics-adjacent things?) Do you have any examples that you would consider typical?
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5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
I think that what you are saying might be an orthogonal aspect of the modern left-right distinction, though? The Soviets, the Chinese and the revolutionary French all had no issues with "justice, prompt, severe, inflexible". In the scenarios we are talking about, the putative violence on either side is metaphorical, anyway - the Right "tortures" left-wingers with "facts and logic" or hanging-transsexual animated GIFs, while the Left "executes" right-wingers by summary bans and damnatio memoriae.
Even with the death penalty (for criminals, not heretics), I do also see some tendency towards being attached to the aspect where there is no quick timeline and the subject is kept in the dark whether they will be spending a day or a decade on death row. Admittedly the "free helicopter rides" meme does put more of a dent in my theory, though.
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5d ago
Bluesky is apparently imploding
One tangential thing this video made me realise again is how curiously the culture of the right and the left is drifting apart even in more subtle ways now. This is the nth time I notice that a seemingly quite popular right-wing youtuber talks in a way that is just viscerally offputting for me (socialised Blue even if reasonably heretical, as evidenced by my presence on here). There's something that registers as blank aggression in the manner of speech - it's the tone of voice that I expect to hear if I pass through a US small-town downtown on a Friday night and a drunk manual labourer stumbles backwards into me, thinks in his drunken stupor that I shoved him and scopes me out for a fight. I can't see myself relaxing and leaving this running in the background, the way I could with a mainstream generic TV announcer voice youtuber. The n-1st time, incidentally, was Lunduke, a right-wing open source youtuber beloved of the Algorithm. Clearly this is not about content, as especially with Lunduke he mostly says things I agree with on topics that are close to my heart.
As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you? Do you actually not get the same "this person is on the brink of engaging in physical violence" feeling from it, or is it agreeable because you figure that it is a topic where wanting to become violent is the right and natural reaction, or is it something closer to "the violent vibes are the marker of a particular culture, and that culture is good and precious" (how I figure soypilled left-wingers cope with gangsta rap)?
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5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
It does seem to me like you are on to something here. At least in the US context, "torture bad people until they become good" seems to be more of a right-wing solution, and "execute bad people in the town square and spit on their corpse" to be more of a left-wing one. Perhaps this is just of an outgrowth of individualism vs. collectivism - an (individualist) right-winger would feel that evil must be defeated within every individual, while a (collectivist) left-winger would be more concerned with the evil of groups and think that "reforming" individuals is a waste of time and effort when they are better used as a teaching piece.
(Seemingly relevant anecdata I can't slot into this theory: the concern of Puritan witch hunters with making their marks repent as they were tortured to death; Orwell's fantasy communists being obsessed with the same on a longer timescale, even as their real models didn't actually seem to be so concerned)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
I shared the sense of other posters that he was arguing to inflame/grandstand rather than to either explain or understand, which often presages a dramatic departure and certainly indicates people have "checked out" of the community (as they are no longer willing to exercise the thankless self-discipline it asks for for its sake).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
Better than anything I could write, but I assume you are posting it to this vile den of low agreeableness for a reason. So, some personal pet peeves which in my opinion detracted from it:
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the cast consisting of [generic Anglo name], [generic Anglo name] and a bunch of {REDACTED}s. Names should tell a story; omissions should also tell a story. If this is an internal government brief, why were the other names redacted? I can't suspend disbelief hard enough to remove the feeling that it is "I struggled hard enough to come up with two names that sound like good scifi thriller protagonists and can't be bothered to come up with more". (This is an endemic disease in SCPs - "redactions" following a pattern of "author couldn't be bothered to come up with something that will hold up here" + "some more sprinkled randomly for effect")
- In the real world, perhaps the field linguist would be Croatian, and the archaeologist come with three or four first names and a surname suggesting Norman British stock (because who else majors in these sorts of subjects with zero economic value and a distinct smell of pink ink on a musty map anymore?).
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"Dr. Markham". Seems to also be lifted from the memetic public domain's ideas of how scientists talk to each other (which is actually based on the ways of (notoriously face-obsessed) hospital doctors, who tend to be the only people with a doctorate normies ever encounter).
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More generally, due to the above and more (e.g. dramatic paragraph breaks), my theory-of-mind sense only ever tells me that I am reading the words of an author who wants to tell me a scifi thriller, not the words of a scientist who has to write a concluding report for internal government consumption on a worldview-shattering discovery.
Imagine yourself in the shoes of your characters when writing, not in the shoes of other authors who successfully wrote the sort of story you want to write. Familiarise yourself with what they should sound like: classified US government reports, faculty lists, scientific papers and emails all exist on the internet.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
A more complete account of (1) may look like: the price of farm labor will climb high enough, and American living standards will sink low enough, that Americans will do it.
Not everything can be automated, and as farming labour gets more expensive, Americans (who buy things downstream from farms) will need more money and hence higher wages to sustain the same lifestyle.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
From what I've seen of US school lunches, you don't even need the power of mainstream media for that.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
It's unfortunate that it seems like you have chosen to flame out, but taking your argument at face value - are you arguing for something to the effect of "A (enforcing the FSA) is immoral, and B (preventing federal agents from enforcing it) was an appropriate reaction to it; therefore if C (enforcing immigration restrictions) is immoral, then B is likewise an appropriate reaction to it"? In that case, setting A=9/11, B=the commando raid on Osama's compound, C=illegal immigration, under the reasonable assumption that the majority of US citizens agree that A and C are immoral and B was an appropriate reaction to A, are you arguing for commando raids to kill all illegal immigrants (and/or even those involved in planning their immigration)?
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7d ago
I distinctly remember posters here telling me how great she is.
Receipts please. This really does not mesh with my memory of the period; are you sure it was not just one stray poster somewhere leaving an outsize memory because you found what they said so outrageous?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
Right, well, but can you define Christianity by similarity of vibes? By some standards Silicon Valley Buddhists are more similar to US Protestants than the latter are to Eastern or Oriental Orthodox Christians. Your "American Protestant would know what to do" standard also holds - I fully assume the US Protestant would be less lost at an American Yoga retreat than during Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox liturgy.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
· Edited 14d ago
It always seemed to me like the most obviously divergent thing about Mormonism from typical old-world Christianity is the notion of Exaltation/what is pop-culturally glossed as "you will get to be the Jesus of your own planet one day". One thing all Abrahamic religions are reliably united in is a social cosmology in which all humans are equal (perhaps some negligibly more equal than others) and subordinate to a singleton God, with the pervasive vibe of ongoing subordination (and the attendant bliss of your life and fate being in the hand of another) being the single most important aspect of the believer's experience. The Mormon view, from that reference point, feels almost comically hubristic, making it seem reasonable for the haughty and ambitious to think of the subordinate life as a gauntlet to pass through to earn the master's privileges. Yes, it sucks being Jesus's gofer bitch now, but up with it for a bit longer - think of how one day you'll get to lord it over your own Spirit Children.
Now, I'm only Christian in terms of upbringing/background, but it is easier for me to accept some quirky nontrinitarians as Christian than people who think that there is no category distinction between Jesus/God and themselves (except insofar as they are lower on the career escalator).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
As with teetotaler drug dealers, gay fashion designers or eunuch harem overseers, it can be advantageous to be immune to the temptations of your own supply.
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15d ago
This seems beside the point given that we are seemingly not talking about a case where a "foreign Olympian" was invited to the position because no qualified citizen was available. Rather, the employers either (charitably) thought he was in fact a qualified citizen, or (less charitably) thought that he should be considered one.
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16d ago
The ones you get as a student prominently say something like "valid for work only with DHS authorization" on them, though.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
No, because they are heavily confounded in both directions. The people who choose to remain in such communities against the backdrop of modernity are bound to be ones that are relatively happy to do so, and the sight of modern living is bound to induce some jealousy. It would in many ways be like trying to make inferences about cavemen from the San Francisco homeless.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
The problem you get with an argument that goes that far back to claim that actually people were already unhappy and things were bad is that in order to actually make your case to RETVRN to something, you now need to make the argument that things were better and people were happier before that.
You've just implicitly accused a lot of people of being naive and unable to see the unhappiness and rot in the Boomers' generation. Granting this for the sake of argument, would this not be a strong argument that it is surprisingly easy to be naive in this way about a relatively distant time? Accepting that, would any ideas that you may have about things being better once upon the time, before the boomers with their individualism, television and love marriages came along, not be subject to the same concern, turned back at yourself? How sure can you (and we) be of any impression that the Victorians or Edwardians were happy, when we just saw so many people erroneously believing that the Boomers were? Given that we know even less about those generations, they are more strange to us and have left behind fewer records, misunderstanding their lives would be even easier. At some point you might just wind up believing a nonstandard version of the noble-savage trope that involves your ancestors.
I think of these
"too strong and too weak" is a stretch (I haven't actually seen much Trumpist rhetoric arguing that the Left is weak - degenerate and doomed in the long run, perhaps,but not weak right now)
"contempt for the weak" feels more like outgroup slander as everyone in the US frame has some groups that they value and think the others don't value enough which to them amounts to contempt; probably Trumpists could equally paint "deplorables"/"learn to code"/"flyover states" rhetoric from the Left as contempt for the weak, and it would ring as inappropriate as whatever you are arguing (because I think Eco really intended it to mean contempt for the weak qua weakness: "if you are weak, you suck", not "you suck and you are weak")
"selective populism" - are there instances of Trump suggesting that he represents the will of an abstract People, as opposed to just claiming that he represents the will of his followers and his followers are the better people? (This would cover a lot more political movements)
seem like a stretch. I would even argue that the points are about the same level of applicable to the Russian influence/Ukraine narrative - in particular there there is a lot of "too strong and too weak at once", healthy servings of disagreement-as-treason, obsession with plots and cult of action, and a gradual growth on the militarism axis now too.
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