4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Have you? I have, and based on my experience the GGP is still making an extraordinarily inflammatory claim (that the interaction with a generic black youth would likely have looked like that) that requires extraordinary evidence (well in excess of either invoking stereotypes or linking an anecdotal video from the internet hate machine).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I still think that it's actually more of a memetic superweapon in the class of bingo boards than an astute observation. Show me one example where someone actually says something that it is fair to gloss by this abbreviation, as part of one utterance, because as far as I can tell, all examples including the present one actually fall into one of the following patterns:
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One person says "X will never happen". Another person says something that may be interpreted as "When X happens, you bigots will deserve it." This means nothing, unless you fall to the old temptation of treating the statements of all outgroup members as being coordinated.
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One person says "X will never happen". Later, under different circumstances, the same person says something that may be interpreted as (...). This is only objectionable insofar as the person revised their former prediction without publicly conceding that they were wrong/miscalibrated/overdramatic before. The culture war is replete with people on all sides being wrong, miscalibrated and overdramatic and making no admission thereof, no doubt fueled by an overwhelming desire to imagine oneself the underdog ("the ingroup will NEVER win this much, since our enemies are too strong"), so I'm not particularly convinced that your outgroup is uniquely guilty of this.
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One person actually says something like "X will never happen, but if X were to happen, you bigots would deserve it". I don't see anything inconsistent about this viewpoint, and I'm sure your ingroup believes lots of things that have this shape as well. If X does later happen, then the miscalibration thing above applies, but that's about it.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
There is no such thing as mutually assured destruction. It does not exist, and the potential existence of such a nuclear exchange is still in the realm of fantasy.
That is not the case with the conventional competition from Asian autocracies, which is real, really happens, and is a real threat that we have already spilled the blood of countless generations trying to control.
Time to press the button?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
If the thesis is actually "members of culture X habitually communicate in the described way (litany of attributes considered negative in our culture, anecdotal transcription optimised for disgust response)", then I'd expect something on the level of scientific papers on the interpersonal value differences and the prevalence of intercultural misunderstandings induced by the different communication style supposedly illustrated by the example. Even then, I would drop the example; if that way of speaking actually induces a negative emotional response in members of our culture. then we should keep it out of the discussion lest we are made more irrational by our own emotional response.
Actually reducing the thesis to "different cultures communicate differently" would be a massive motte-and-bailey shifting of goalposts to a thesis that is so general as to be uncontroversial.
If your feelings on the matter are actually something like "but black people are really this bad, how do we deal with this unfair standard that makes it impossible to prove that in conversation", then maybe it helps to flip the scenario to get another setting in which the required level of evidence and careful wording would at least form a lower bound: imagine a white cook got fired from a prestigious cooking school. People think it's because he's white and there is a pervasive prejudice that white people have no cuisine to speak of. Would you accept someone making the argument with personal anecdotes about being fed canned Campbell's soup, Uncle Roger shorts and Twitter memes about US supermarket toast bread and mayo, or is there a higher standard of evidence you could think of demanding?
So where do you envision this slope leading?
On that matter, I'm not sure that this idea that people should actually be encouraged to think (non-quantitatively) about outrage-provoking edge cases of a policy would at all work in favour of the right-wing agenda. Most right-wing causes (access to guns, religious freedom, restrictions on abortion...) have edge cases that the median grilling centrist will find far more outrage-inducing (school shootings! sadistic pastors running special Jesus camps in their basement! 10 year old pregnant rape victims!) than that some rapist got transferred to women's prison. (Even if we assume that the prison environment is so lax that this basically guarantees that our protagonist will be able to rape the female inmates, they're prisoners! The median normie doesn't know any women who went to prison, can't imagine women going to prison for anything short of "microwaved her 2 year old", and probably has laughed about prison rape jokes when it was about male prisons)
I, for my part, don't find single instances of any of those situations to be particularly meaningful. In this particular case, if the prison can't be expected to prevent the rapist from assaulting other inmates, it seems to me that something is wrong with it that goes beyond admitting biologically male rapist inmates, and would only be hacked around by not doing that. Women sexually abusing other women is a thing that also happens; is the implication that that is less concerning?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
So what exactly are you trying to say? If I understand the story correctly, a red-tribe-allied cartoonist drew some cartoons satirising a weakman version of a blue-tribe-associated measure, and perhaps coincidentally, some group of newspapers stopped carrying his cartoon (along with a number of others, as the link seems to suggest, whose political significance is not clear to me) at the same time. Are you insinuating that the cancellation was not coincidental? Are you trying to say that he drew his satire because the cartoon got cancelled and he knew it would be, or that the cartoon got cancelled because of the satire? (If so, then what of the others that got cancelled?) Do you have any evidence to support either belief?
I have to say I am not a fan of posts like this, which mostly seem to be fulfilling the purpose of introducing takes such as the weakman cartoons which would not meet the discursive standard of the Motte otherwise and darkly hinting at some thing or another, and this is why I cheered on the removal of the "bare links repository" and opposed its reintroduction.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
I find the position that I am reflexively most inclined to subscribe to here to be woefully underrepresented in the discourse: neither side is in the wrong. If a village of hunter-gatherers hunts some elephants, and then the remnant elephant herd tramples the village, goring women and children in the process, would you say that either the hunters or the elephants are wrong and evil? Both sides are just doing what they must to survive (and retain the hope to thrive). If anyone is to blame at all, it's whoever put them in this position where they have no other choice to begin with - but even that responsibility seems to largely lie with diffuse, impersonal and/or simply long-gone forces.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Sure there is, you can't tell other people what they find important.
Surely I can express an opinion on what it's reasonable for them to find important.
It's disingenuous to try to boil the debate down to these things.
I'm not trying to "boil down" the debate to those statements, but just using them as glosses for whatever the positions actually are (which probably gets lost at the soundbite level anyway). As far as I can see, the preferred narrative of the anti-trans camp here is that they seek to protect women's sports from trans incursion (are you disputing that?), and if one side says that we need to do a thing in order to right a historical injustice against a small minority that is subjected to suffering far in excess from that experienced by most people in our society, while the other says we need to not do that thing in order to have fairness in women's sports, then I figure that as a neutral and largely indifferent bystander I'd think that the former side has a pretty good case that they care about their cause because it's important but the other side should not care so much about theirs because it's unimportant. Why do you figure are the people against MtF in women's sports largely saying that they are doing it to protect women's sports? Are you saying we shouldn't take them by their word, and instead imagine that they are fighting for a cause equally as grandiose?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
How so? Are you claiming that any possible set of material about African-Americans is a false conspiracy theory?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I think you are making a lot of very far-reaching claims without bringing a proportional amount of evidence in general, but probably the easiest nitpick is
(as if this something that would ever consider being applied to a citizen of one of the other 82 genders)
Does this have any meaning deeper than dunking on the outgroup by freely associating one thing they do that you find bad with another thing they do that you find ridiculous? Presumably, the "82 genders" line suggests that you are specifically talking about progressive gender self-identification and not biological sex, which is therefore in particular open to biological men as well as women (and in fact its usage by biological men seems to be the part that takes up the majority of conservative mindshare). You claim that "responsibility" is not something that is expected of "one of the other 82 genders". Do you have an example of biological men getting out of child support payments by claiming to be a demiboy, femme or whatever other things you count as one of the 82?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Littering and fare-dodging are hardly what one typically thinks of as a "crime" (or, well, as I said above, I'm an unrepentant multiple-time criminal along with approximately everyone I know).
Responding also to @Jiro above, this is in fact the essence of the question I'm asking - is it actually for the better to arrest criminals no matter what? No human has ever lived in a society anywhere close to a 100% capture rate for law-breakers, and I for my part am not only not ready to tear down that fence but also feeling iffy about it constantly getting pushed around and climbed over. It seems likely to me that plenty of criminals with outstanding warrants continue living a mostly positive-sum life in society; some of them may have passed by my window without breaking it, passed me by in a dark alley without mugging me, and sold me food at a convenience store. I don't think it's obvious that it's worthwhile to reduce incentives for them to do so, just so you can capture some greater percentage of them. I assume the "what's the punishment for being late?" story is pretty widely known around here, too.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I have littered a nonzero number of times in my life and dodged fares even more (especially when I was a poor student). The chance that anything bad would have happened to me if I had been caught for it was basically zero, and I assume that those for whom it is not the case (i.e. the dumb and impulsive criminals you are talking about) realise this. This breeds resentment (even monkeys, I think, have been found to be sensitive to differential treatment) and presumably reduces buy-in into society from those who are at the short end of this equation.
Now, I know that people on the law-and-order spectrum like seeing criminality (especially non-white-collar criminality, i.e. the type they can't imagine themselves engaging in) in absolutes, where you are either a law-abiding citizen or a criminal who always and at all times is about as bad to the society surrounding them as they can manage to be; therefore there is no point in negotiating or doing anything other than identifying and locking them up ASAP, and in particular they would see "reduced buy-in into society" as a moot concern since they are already being antisocial criminals who don't buy in. However, I don't think this is true; most criminals probably don't engage in antisocial acts nearly as often as they could, and I'd wager they don't commit murder or even smash random windows in all situations they know they could get away with it. In fact they probably subscribe to 90% of the same society-sustaining narrative as the law-and-order crowd, with only some cutouts they have rationalised for themselves to violate it in specific ways in particular contexts. If you make criminals feel that they can't be equal members of society even on their "down-"/law-abiding time, this might just stop being the case, and life for everyone would make a turn for the worse.
(Arguably the US is already halfway there in places with certain minorities being actively fed the narrative that society is not for them, but I assume that the set of criminals that would be caught by "turnstile enforcement anarcho-tyranny" - because this is what it would read to someone whose self-narrative is "productive member of society who sometimes has to stray off the good path for very valid reasons" - is not just a subset of those minorities.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
If you had been caught, you would have been fined.
I'm aware. (Not sure about littering, where I lived.) It was a calculated risk I could take.
If a dumb and impulsive criminal is caught littering or fare jumping, they will be fined as well. If they have outstanding warrants, they will be arrested -- because they have just been caught for something other than littering or fare jumping as well.
The bottom line still is that they couldn't take what for me is a calculated and very bounded risk. Fast food can give me gastric distress, but sometimes still is the best option; fare dodging can give me a 40 euro fine, but sometimes likewise is the best option. If criminals were reliably arrested on sight in gastronomic establishments, would they think of it as "shucks, guess it was my bad for doing crime once" or as "fuck this society that has made it clear I can't live in it normally"?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
To give an overview of what I believe is a reasonable bounded-rationality basis to dismiss this objection:
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I am not equipped to evaluate the claims in Alexandros's post in detail without significant effort and time investment (despite being a working academic in a quantitative field).
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I'm not particularly worried about COVID and the societal excesses of the response seem to have already died down, so I personally don't see much value in learning about a surprising therapy for it. It seems unlikely to me that even if something like the contents of this post became widely accepted as truth, the societal response next time something COVID-shaped happens would be much beter.
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Superficially, it seems there is no particular reason why something like Ivermectin (an antiparasitic that apparently works by disrupting the metabolism of fairly complex multicellular parasites) would work against COVID (a virus). I have a strong prior on most medicines claimed to have a minor beneficial effect on popular therapeutic targets actually being completely ineffectual (as this has been my experience).
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On the other hand, the "parasite load" story seems superficially plausible.
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Due to the culture-war dimension of Ivermectin, whose efficacy the red tribe in the US has entangled its social status with (no point in recounting the way this happened here), there is an obvious motivation for members of that tribe to produce compelling-looking arguments for its efficacy. Since Alexandros posts around this community, he seems a priori likely to harbour Red sympathies.
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Moreover, there is a "contrarian" tribe that is motivated by taking down the rationality-orthogonal "trust the science" wing of the blue tribe, and therefore would also derive utility from successfully Eulering in favour of Ivermectin. Many people seem to talk about the abrasiveness of Alexandros's tone. This increases the probability that he's Red or Contrarian and would therefore have the motive to come to his conclusion.
In short, a situation that seems fairly symmetrical to "read this long and extremely compelling essay by a Harvard academic who is also a Twitter superstar using Science and Logic to prove that Blank Slatism is true". If you had unlimited time and resources or a particularly high stake in finding out whether desirable qualities of humans are genetic, sure, by all means you ought to read it and analyse the argument. For most everyone else, it would be more rational to ignore the essay, leave your prior largely unshifted and spend the time it would take to read on something with higher expected utility, like planning tomorrow's healthy breakfast or getting on top of your todo list.
Things that could convince me to take the essay more seriously:
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Establish that the author does not stand to benefit from Ivermectin working, e.g. has impeccable blue tribe credentials.
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Establish that rehabilitating Ivermectin would benefit me personally a great deal.
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Propose a plausible mechanism by which Ivermectin (specifically!) might work against COVID. Some general handwaving like "it modulates the way the immune system operates" won't work; lots of drugs do that, so I don't see why specifically the one that the Blues are raging against and the Reds are swearing will prove once and for all they should actually be in charge should be the one that happens to modulate it just right.
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Relatedly, but harder, shift my prior regarding medicines that purport to do anything more complex than targeting one particular well-understood metabolic pathway not working.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
And that's why I've been continuously asking for public upvote/downvote records. Voting plays a tremendous role in shaping a community, however much we want to LARP as logical supermen who certainly would never be swayed by social approval or disapproval. It's high time we acknowledged that and at least introduced the vague threat of being judged by the direction in which one nudges the forum in this fashion. As I see it, half an hour spent upvoting polemic hot takes one agrees with and downvoting challenges does more damage to the discourse than a single shitpost, and yet nobody has ever been banned or even called out for the former.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Not quite the same: not having custody isn't really "responsibility" that trying to get custody would amount to escaping from, and pretending to be the one gender/sex that is traditionally taken to be entitled to children does not show that the remaining 81 "neogenders" have anything at all to do with it.
The quote you produced is disinformation all right for the "it's a QAnon reference" framing, but referring to people running "drag kids" events as "groomers" does seem like a serious accusation that deserves a bit more justification than the pointing and invoking of disgust reflexes that it is. The standard interpretation of "grooming", as I understand it, is gradual manipulation of the underage and otherwise mentally inadequate with the purpose of normalising the idea that they will be sexually abused or exploited by their adult handlers. I doubt that most people running or supporting those events are doing so with the intention of entering sexual relations with the kids that attend them themselves (and if "encouraging the target enter sexual relations I want to see more of with someone else" is sufficient to meet the definition of grooming, then it seems that a lot of things in our culture since times immemorial would count!), and if their right-wing detractors believe otherwise, the burden of proof surely should be on them. If they detractors do believe that all these progressives are actually in it because they hope to have sex with the ten year olds that they are teaching about drag queens and non-binary gender, protestations to the contrary and seemingly low rate of such sex actually happening notwithstanding, then yes, they are in fact entertaining a conspiracy theory (as there would need to be a conspiracy to conceal widespread pedophilic tendencies and/or actions).
(edit: Per something I found out downthread, there is in fact a legal definition of grooming in the US, which markedly does not cover "introducing children to icky and widely taken to be age-inappropriate sexual activity" on its own)
It reminds me of when "cultural Marxism" became an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory"
Seems like a good riddance to me, because the term was a massive footbullet. The term "cultural marxists" will be resolved correctly by (1) people on your side already and (2) actual cultural marxists, who are in the know about the academic definition drift of "Marxism"; to everyone else, and in particular garden-variety classical liberals who really ought to have been enlisted in the anti-woke coalition much earlier, it just looks like holding up a sign like "actually the main issue I have with my outgroup is that they are dirty commies who want to put limitations on megacorps".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1mo ago
I'm 100% sure that trans isn't real and the medical treatment these people need is for mental illness
What's the working definition of real here? Do you believe that mental illness is real?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
Voters in Britain apparently considered it to not be a sufficiently important issue to vote for a different party over. There is a clear enough choice: you can continue voting for the parties that made it clear in word and deed that they want more immigration, or you can vote for literally any other parties, or you can start your own.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
15 years ago, when I asked my students to name a terrorist, the names that came up were (...) Anders Breivik (...)
Did those students make it to graduation without being whisked away by men in unmarked black helicopters?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
So what about those who feel a very strong internalized distaste for law-and-order types who fantasise about extreme punishments, especially when the extreme punishments happen to always be for members of their outgroup? Many of them probably think that your viewpoint is pretty evil, and would at least be willing to go as far as locking you up in solitary if that were the only way to stop you from actualising it. Do you figure their feelings on the matter are also an evolved taste that certain human populations naturally develop which reflects a logical viewpoint, or do only your feelings align with the truth?
Perhaps some might even like the idea of torturing the would-be torturer. Would you prefer to fight to the death against those people (who, if they don't have a numerical advantage over you, certainly don't seem to have that much of a disadvantage) over who gets to get tortured in the end, or do you think you could come to a compromise where neither of you tortures and you could resolve your differences in a different way?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I think you raise interesting points, and I agree with much of your perception of the "successor ideology" filling a religion-shaped void and your suggested prescription of reining it in under the same mechanisms that our society evolved to deal with plurality of traditional religion, but at the same time I bristle against your offhand conflation of all atheism and secularism with the successor ideology. This strikes me as wrong in both straightforward (I'm an atheist who is not woke) and implicational (there are major secularist countries that have not so far shown a tendency to evolve towards anything obviously shaped like Abrahamic religions at all, such as China, and in much of continental Europe the religion-shaped thing that grew to fill the void absent American influence was environmentalism, not racial wokeness) ways.
Moreover, it resembles another important instance where I've been under the impression that American right-wingers sabotage their persuasiveness by being unable to let go of old grudges, which compels them to argue that the new enemy is actually just a guise over an old ancestral enemy and if you had listened to them back then when they said the enemy must be eradicated then you wouldn't have this problem now - that instance being the insistence of labelling wokism with various versions of "Marxism" or "Leninism". To the yet-unpersuaded reader, that just winds up sounding like a barely-concealed "the actual problem with BLM is that you aren't letting us have child labour uranium mines and totalitarian company towns", and this sounds like "the actual problem with BLM is that you aren't letting us have Jesus Camp where the creepy pastor beats kids with a switch for having impure thoughts".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I don't understand the usage of "corollary" (a straightforward consequence of a previous nontrivial statement) here. Is that the word you were meaning to use?
The FDA tweeted the following over a year ago. Is it normal for the FDA to mock drugs like this?
No, but on culture war it is. This was already after Red cultural authorities had thrown their clout behind Ivermectin, no? The FDA, too, is a Blue technocratic institution; of course it would be tempted to put out communication that lowers the status of the Reds, and in this particular case there was the additional motivation for it that the Ivermectin push was a direct attack on the FDA's authority. One would therefore expect the FDA to attack it independently of whether it works, and so the FDA attacking it is not a signal for or against it working.
I thought it was unnecessary to rehash the backstory, but maybe not. My understanding was that it was associated with culture warring almost from the start: the Blue team occupied the "COVID is scary and untreatable, therefore we need lockdowns, mask-wearing and more powers for our technocrats" position. The Red team found the suggested conclusion unbearable, and tried to respond by attacking every point of the premise. One such push was against the "untreatable" part, and took the shape of asserting that a series of widely available remedies that ranged from completely implausible (bleach) to the merely seemingly random (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin) worked against it (with the implication that if it did, the power grab by Blue authorities would be proven unjustifiable). Therefore, on the balance, up to this point the situation is still as I described: Reds would push Ivermectin regardless of whether it works, and the FDA would pan it regardless of whether it works, so neither observation tells us anything about it. The prior still is that a random drug with no evident mechanism of action on COVID would not work on it.
The "cheap old generic drugs suppressed for profit" argument is a better one, though (there, you would actually suspect more effort to suppress effective ones, as if someone takes a cheap old ineffective drug, they don't get cured and are still on the market for the more expensive one afterwards).
assassinate the wrong person by mistake sometimes
For what it's worth, I don't think it makes a huge difference whether they hit Dugin or his daughter, and Fomin was clearly the intended target (with the 42 other injuries being considered acceptable, considering the MO of bombing a public appearance in a closed room). You might argue that hitting anti-Ukrainian agitators and their audience does not imply willingness to hit random civilians, but few people would have been willing to make that distinction e.g. for the Charlie Hebdo attack (plus I heard diffuse statements that at least one of the concerts yesterday may also have been linked to some anti-Ukrainian agitation).
IS claimed responsibility
There are plenty of historical examples of them claiming responsibility for things they didn't do (some parallel comment brought up the Las Vegas shooting). Not that they wouldn't have the motive and means, but the details here so far don't seem to line up - above all, I can't think of Islamic terrorist attacks consistent with the pattern of perpetrators running and, upon being caught, claiming they were anonymously hired to do it for money, while this is the general pattern for Slav-on-Slav terrorism in Russia including in particular the cases that have been attributed to Ukraine beyond doubt. If all we have in favour of the ISIS theory is "perps are vaguely Muslim", "ISIS claimed responsibility" and "main backer of an alternative suspect agreed with the ISIS claim", that is not particularly strong evidence.
If we are making facile derogatory comparisons, this is also a commonality between free-market capitalists and cannibals, who both exaggerate the individual's capacity to enter contracts in their own interest.
You could even go a bit further and talk about the aspect common to pedophiles (of the subset that does not particularly care for consent) and anti-trans activists, who both believe in the parents' absolute authority to make decisions about the child's sexual development. Statistics are circulating that something like a third of child sexual abuse cases are perpetrated by parents or close relatives, and I'd imagine that the vast majority of the Eastern European suggestive underage model pictures that flooded the *chans back in the days were created with the support of the parents. Surely only someone who is anti-family would presume to interfere with the parents' judgement there!
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