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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
27d 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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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
27d ago
· Edited 27d 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
28d ago
· Edited 28d 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
29d ago
· Edited 28d 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
29d 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
29d ago
From what I've seen of US school lunches, you don't even need the power of mainstream media for that.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
29d ago
· Edited 29d 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)?
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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