4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
I think you are missing the linchpin of the worldview, which is an axiomatic assumption that persistent group differences in outcomes can't be just, natural or accidental. The fundamental equality of groups (rather than individuals) is as close to a central dogma of faith as you can get for the dominant secular religion, and everything you observe follows quite easily from trying to square this belief with observed reality. Do you have a better explanation for US statistics that does not violate this belief than that somehow, despite superficial appearances, pro-white bias must have found a way?
(Regarding the bafflement, surely smart and rational people being unwavering in a religious belief should not be surprising, given humanity's track record.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
I think the OP in particular has a distinct smell of the sort of "darkly hinting" that is the hallmark of the most partisan and unpleasant CW forums; it's clearly selected as a scenario that is likely to elicit inconsistencies or difficult corner cases in OP's outgroup's ideology, and thrown at a bullshit generator trained on outgroup ideology in the hope of generating a particularly juicy weakman display of an imagined outgroup member squirming in cognitive dissonance. A tribally flipped counterpart would be something like an interview putting random rednecks on the spot with questions about scenarios involving Russians, Ukraine and trad values - letting their stammering stand without comment - except GPT is not even a real progressive subject. Just because you don't say the "boo" out loud, this sort of thing does not become any less boo-outgroup.
I don't think this result quite disproves "poverty => crime" except for a very naive version of that theory. Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo, any more than a 30something lifelong incel would become a well-adjusted normie with normie attitudes towards women if given plastic surgery and a flask of post-singularity AGI-designed pheromones to make him irresistible.
(The naive version would be something like "I have no money, so I calculate that going to steal some is the highest-EV action for me to take now". I doubt that real-life decisions to do crime are usually taken in this fashion; more likely that it's similar to those culturally evolved cassava processing rules, which would also linger for a while even if you supplied tribes with non-toxic GMO cassava. Presumably pro-crime poor communities outcompete anti-crime ones.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1mo ago
This forum isn't rDrama and I would hope that it doesn't turn into it.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
https://aella.substack.com/p/a-disobedience-guide-for-children
The ideas of Author #1 in there strike me as something that could only possibly have been written in hindsight by someone living in a culture such as the modern Western one where physical violence in childrearing is taboo. It is telling that they did not actually take the window-breaking option at the time: as someone who was actually raised in a spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child culture (RU), contra
So you're 4, or 8, or 12, and you break a window and tell them you'll do it again if they assault you again. They're shocked, this can't happen, the world is awry. They ban you from TV or computer or whatever.
the idea that a real 4- or 10-year-old would choose an extended TV/computer ban over being slapped or belt-whipped strikes me as a preposterous failure to understand the value function of children, and even for a 15-year-old, this is only moderated by 15-year-olds' greater capacity for principled/ego-driven defiance and sourcing other entertainment. I wager that the author confuses the magnitude of their present indignation over having been hit as a child for what they actually felt about it at the time.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
Some variant of "why do we have so many right-coded extremists and so few left-coded ones" has been discussed in this community and its predecessors every few months since its inception, and one standard answer is that the left-coded extremists have alternatives and superior BATNA on their side. If you are a vegan or tankie, you do not need the acceptance of this forum, as there is a large number of subreddits or real-life communities or whatever available to you with little threat of expulsion or censure - so why bother submitting to our onerous and humiliating rules?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Does this kind of evidence change your mind at all?
Infinitesimally. The probability of the observation at hand being induced by any mechanism other than aliens - 8D chess psyops, crankery, attention seeking combined with amused indifference from the military - continues dwarfing the probability of it being induced by aliens.
What would?
For starters, any footage that is not conveniently just situated around the boundary of the relevant detection process's confidence range. The 'aliens' signal continues to get more elusive in a way that neatly tracks our civilisational advances in detection and analysis, and more people signalling respectability and status claiming that it's actually the real deal does little to me since their respectability and status signals seem to be geared towards a different demographic than mine.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
25d ago
The core thrusts of this article strike me as "galaxy-brain takes", in the sense of throwing Occam's Razor to the curb and going with the most dramatic rather than the most plausible interpretation. If you've actually spent any amount of time on the internet as a rubbernecker motivated by something other than confirmation of your biases, you will know that most of the material India is being singled out for is hardly unique to it; in fact a 4chan white supremacist might be somewhat dismayed to find out that many a European has formed a mental image of their beloved all-white Middle America that is only somewhat more flattering than this movie's depiction of Indians. (A while ago I binged police bodycam videos that involved a barely verbal middle aged guy in sweatpants being questioned outside of a wooden shack over the apparent presence of his mother's week-old corpse in the bedroom; druggies reenacting the 2001 monolith scene over one of their count being arrested, someone with the build of Jabba the Hutt being dragged out of a trailer, etc.; all of the aforementioned being white) Admitting only a bit more diversity, there is good video material like this.
You read a lot into normies' discomfort and inability to watch the movie for any length of time, but the straightforward explanation there is that the unapologetic racism of the narration is extremely far outside the Overton window and this is just a standard human reaction to having well-internalized language taboos violated in front of them. I have American friends who are perfectly enthusiastic to discuss all sorts of edgy voldemortean propositions but get physically uncomfortable if a hard-r "nigger" is enunciated in their presence (I learned that this is a good way to dissuade real-life usage of various twitchspeak inflections of "pog(ger)").
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
10mo ago
Textbook (Blogpost?) case of toxoplasma. The closer you get to the "too far even for the ingroup" line without crossing it, the further your statement will spread, as the outgroup will signal-boost it in disgust and outrage and your ingroup will signal-boost the outgroup disgust and outrage towards something that is in their eyes actually still okay if somewhat edgy (if they are this up in arms about that, can you be sure they will tolerate things nearer and dearer to your heart?).
I think like this question has been answered multiple times, and you never seem to as much as acknowledge the answer: the value that it adds is that it counters the argument that differences in average outcomes between ethnic groups are evidence of discrimination, perpetrated by either members of better-performing groups or anyone who is casuallycausally involved in the outcome or its measurement.
This argument is currently ubiquitous, which is not surprising because if HBD is false, it's compelling. It's also being used to justify a wide range of measures that I believe to be materially disadvantageous for most humans, morally repugnant and often also concretely detrimental to myself (since as a working academic I have encountered the gamut of measures from finding myself on the wrong side of quotas to being hit with pressure from above and busywork due to vocal individual students who underperformed while belonging to a putatively disadvantaged group). Do you disagree with the point that if HBD is false and yet we observe the outcomes that we do, measures such as quotas, embedding of political officers in institutions that produce excessive discrepancies, loyalty/attitude tests for workers in outcome-assessment jobs and mandatory reeducation are at least justifiable?
You offer up "colourblind meritocracy" as an alternative to HBD as if in the world where the consensus belief is not-HBD plus we must have a colourblind meritocracy, people would look at the differences in outcomes and just go like "shucks, guess we must try at the colourblind meritocracy thing harder". This strikes me as very far-fetched. Certainly, if I had an axiomatic belief in non-HBD, I would think the state of reality is horrifying enough to warrant most of what is being done, only more and better.
I think this is very bad moderation and the equivalence between the GP and the post you are responding to is false. This is already the case on a purely syntactic level: the OP makes an assertion, while the response asks the OP for his opinion (even if you could argue that the question is more of a "have you considered this" type than of the "I want to know the answer" one). Moreover, OP uses wording with insulting baggage ("sore loser") while the response is more neutral ("good", as opposed to bad, loser).
More generally, as I see it, prompting culture warriors who ascribe bad qualities to their outgroup to ask themselves if their ingroup is actually different in that regard is an important technique for keeping the heat of the discussion low: it promotes empathy, as one is encouraged to wonder why both sides act the same if one of them is so right while the other is so wrong, and prevents the "deathballing" dynamic where one tribe reaches a critical mass of common knowledge that everyone agrees their outgroup is worse than them and starts feeling more confident about coordinating meanness.
Finally, you noticeably did not threaten the original poster with a ban, despite the open egregiousness there. I don't know if it was intentional, and might well be a consequence of OP having been a singleton in your eyes while you spent hours dealing with separate anti-OP posts, but the way it winds up looking to anyone reading the thread top-to-bottom is blatant favouritism. The result of moderation leaning one way is that besides making some more people check out altogether, everyone who still cares about the balance of the community will try to counterbalance - i.e. go out of their way to make those perceived as receiving the moderators' favour feel a little less welcome. This means more antagonism going around. I'm trying to be charitable of your perspective here, but choosing which patterns/bandwagons to ignore and which ones not to is also a way of expressing favouritism: a moderator with opposite biases could have considered the responses to OP in isolation, while moderating OP (or any of the recurring posts in the same spirit!) with something to the effect of "next person who makes a top-level post with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?' eats a ban" (and actually following up on it).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
Kulak has previously stated that he does it deliberately to confuse present or hypothetical future stylometry, though this always seemed like the net usefulness would be dubious and the "aesthetic choice to look like grandpa's Facebook tirades" theory is quite plausible.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
8mo ago
Who is "our great enemy", here? Personally, I'd say that my great enemy are people unwilling or unable to extend charity and kindness to those holding viewpoints or values they disagree with.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
You don't need the "real" there - it's all auth-on-auth warfare. Any form of actual liberalism can only flourish briefly as the authoritarian supermajority considers it the lesser evil as opposed to having to fight against other types of authoritarians.
I hear far-right commentators excited about revocation of citizenship as if it's the easiest thing when it actually seems like the hardest and most fraught option. Even without the concrete issue of venerable and widely respected international agreements specifically against it, producing an appreciable number of stateless individuals - especially a particularly criminal and undesirable sample of stateless individuals - would be seen as shitting on the international commons. It's not like people on your territory would magically disappear if you revoke their citizenship, and so all you would actually be doing - assuming you don't keep them firmly locked up yourself after revoking their citizenship - is that you would be telling other countries that you will refuse to take responsibility for them or take them back if they somehow make their way into those countries. Doing this would quickly turn you into a pariah state in a way in which no amount of concentration camps, draconian laws or firing squads, targeted against your own, would.
I understand some proponents' attitude towards that would amount to a "so what, sending a big fuck you to the rest of the world is a feature, not a bug"/"if everyone hates us that means more jobs for our people and military", but it seems that many others instead subscribe to a fantasy where if France revokes the citizenship of an nth-generation criminal African then after much wailing and gnashing of teeth some African country nobody can point out on a map will step up and admit that the individual in question is actually theirs (or perhaps that they can run a country-level paternity test that will identify some Equatorial Guinea as on the hook for child support in best reality TV fashion).
I want to reheat this spat I had with @Amadan about moderation, in the context of someone calling an outgroup artist a "leftist creep". At the time, I was quite taken aback by Amadan's assertion that this is in fact considered to be within the rules, and if it now is, I want to propose changing the (interpretation of the) rules so that it is not. I don't think it's hard to derive a prohibition of this from "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary", or "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion", and my understanding of moderational standards at some high points of the Reddit era is that it would have been.
Generally, I feel like we have been drifting away from the "police on tone, not on content" ethos that had made this community great. On one hand, policing on tone has become anemic, as can be easily told from the near-complete absence of the formerly ubiquitous subthreads where people complain about having been policed on tone when their tone was more than justified by the ABSOLUTELY OUTRAGEOUS conduct of the outgroup (a good sign that something is being done). On the other hand, community sentiment and moderation conspire to increasingly channel us into what feels like a consensus position for some sort of "bourgeois rightism", which affirms common right-wing social and economic positions and muscularly asserts its aesthetics while putting a lid on tendencies (excessive HBD and antisemitism, but also the idea that elites are above the rules) that are seen to mark the threshold of a slippery slope towards intemperance and extremism. This window is bounded to the right by actual moderator action (like the latest crusade against "JQ-posting"), and to the left by the anarcho-tyranny of giving the existing majorities a lot of slack in bending the rules when responding to deviants.
That being said, I do not even get the sense that this was at any point decided as explicit policy. Rather, it seems like it simply arises as a blind spot, because our moderators, while generally doing a genuinely admirable job of keeping their personal opinions concealed, have personal positions that are close to the space described above, which removes the first-line instinctual response towards casual "microaggressions" directed at the outgroup. Moreover, the community has already self-selected so far in the same direction that any opposing feedback tends to come from people who are at the threshold of flaming out like I have been for the past few months, and therefore don't come across as the most level-headed dispensers of advice. Please, assuming you still want conflicting opinions, try to at least consider this as a plea to allocate a few more cycles to imagining the experience of the community for someone who is at odds with the above whenever you make a policy decision.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
10mo ago
As a sort of trans skeptic, I find this discussion to be missing the point. I have an internal notion of "men" and "women" which, however elegant, "just" or in correspondence with simple criteria like chromosomes it is or isn't, has served my model of reality quite well so far. Why does some political group arrogate to itself the right to replace this notion, or really any part of my map, with one that they favour? Maybe the median person is used to their concept space being dictated from above by teachers, journalists and politicians, but I thought of our social contract as entailing that adults at least in principle have the right to be persuaded rather than threatened into updating their thinking. No other element of the progressive policy package seems to go quite as far towards demanding submission in thought rather than merely in deed.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
...but he's authorized to provide generic, wishy-washy details? If what he said did not violate any confidentiality agreements then I would expect it to be corroborated far more widely, including by numerous current government workers. If he did, then why didn't they already arrest him and why would any reasons for not arresting him yet not also apply if he also said something more concrete? If he was explicitly authorised to release what he said so far and nothing more, then either this is a psyop or I would have to update my understanding of how the US government does good-faith information disclosure.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1mo ago
This all reads as "cultural victory of the nerds, as delivered by an evil genie" to me. I read for fun, don't like relaxing on the beach or partying, and travel for the same feeling of immersive escapism that I would have gotten out of a good book or game while shutting out as much as possible of the "real world", and have been earnestly telling everyone I want to go into academia so that my work is my hobby is my work and "work-life balance" is just for the poor suckers who sold out 8 hours of their every day doing something they hate since long before this HN grindset hustle culture took root. Now, suddenly, I'm surrounded by all these people who apparently feel compelled to pretend to be me, because it's the cool thing - and they hate every moment of it, and respond to any displays of the preceding genuine sentiment roughly in the same way as one would to a teacher's pet or the guy who honestly believes in Our Corporate Mission and excoriates the cynical coworkers who just want to collect a paycheck. At best, I get reactions that parse as "wow, you're trying harder to pretend than I ever could, I should learn from you".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1mo ago
If it's any solace to you, I'm a leftist of yesteryear and I don't feel like I'm winning either. Any accusation that I'm just unhappy because this is "too much of the same thing I advocated for" rings hollow - where exactly is the conservation of direction here? I fought against squares and religious nuts trying to ban me from reading and writing the things I wanted to read and write, and briefly things seemed to go uphill, but now I am once again fighting against people wanting to ban me from reading and writing the things I want to read and write. Same for reality-based policymaking, avoiding war, et cetera, all of which used to be considered leftist causes, and I can assure you I wanted them for themselves rather than because this was just what lay in the direction "left" happened to be pointing in at the time. Surely the people who you see as winning nowadays will "lose" eventually too, whether this will be in a way that you would recognise as "their thing going too far" (transracialism?) or something that looking forward from the present era will be as utterly unrecognisable as "left" as the push for joining the Ukraine war or bad-word censorship in every home would have been 50 years ago. Chances are whatever wins at the time will still be considered "left", but should this have any impact on how we feel about it? Do you feel differently about Chinese battles from the Warring States period if you learn that the winning army was called "left" (for entirely unrelated reasons to our modern terminology)?
It turns out that the past and future are usually not just some foreign country, but more akin to the actual Aztec Empire. Greater people than us have tried to do something about it to no avail. You know that meme prayer that ends with asking for serenity to accept the things you can't change?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1mo ago
Isn't that by Kojima (a Japanese Westaboo, but not exactly western)?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2mo ago
Chicken rather than Prisoner's Dilemma: the penalties for defect-defect are higher than for cooperate-defect.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
So you think that if open Marxists were fired - or racism became a protected political belief - the two would equalise or outright invert in status/acceptability? This doesn't explain why intellectual elites in the West leaned Marxist since well before any sort of social sanction against racism materialised, or why right-coded beliefs (Gun rights? Car culture? Millenarian Christianity?) are low-status in the US even when they have no obvious connection to anything giving legal cause for termination or themselves protected.
I think the explanation is much simpler: the utopian end point of racism registers as evil against mainstream Western morality, while the utopian end point of Marxism registers as good. Doing evil for the sake of evil is just evil, but doing evil for the sake of good is at most misguided and tragic. You can dispute any of these judgments, but holding out for the One Weird Trick (abolishing workplace civil rights regulation) to let you skip the hard work of persuading people to change their moral calculus does not seem to serve much of a purpose.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5mo ago
The one thing that unites everyone I know, ranging from the most hardcore SJWs to alt-right RETVRN types, is that nobody cares about children at all, especially not more than our respective political convictions, and especially not the abstract children of others. If you come from a genuinely more old-fashioned or natalist bubble, you may underestimate just how insignificant children have become in younger elite circles; on a gut-feeling level it is genuinely difficult for me to imagine how someone would pretend to care about children for any reason other than as a mysterious ancestral ritual that may score points against the outgroup.
(It may not be surprising that birthrates in my mid-30s cohort are very low, and the few people who did reproduce have largely dropped out socially - not, as far as I can tell, to socialise with other people, but to be alone.)
"We have Roko's Basilisk at home"
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