UK. I flicked on the most popular commercial station while I wrote this which was showing reality contest dreck that's carefully produced to appeal to as many viewers as possible.
Halfway through an ad break when I switched on:
Supermarket - white man cooking Christmas dinner for his white family
Mattress - white man solo
Washing powder - multi ethnic races and genders, white man in background, black man in foreground
Whiskey - black woman solo
Toothpaste - brown woman solo
Perfume - white woman solo
Next full ad break:
Theme park - multi ethnic group of kids, white grandma
Make-up - multi ethnic women, brown and black focus, whites in background
Indigestion remedy - multi ethnic
Perfume - white woman solo celebrity
Supermarket - glimpse of white hand
Bubble bath - brown woman
Bleach - glimpse of brown hand
Flagship phone - white woman
Butter - white man, brown woman
Stock cubes - white family
The only thing I can note in support of your point is that the non-white people tend to appear more emphasised. In the white-centric adverts the emphasis leaned more towards the product, and the more non-white people there were the more the camera gazed at them.
5434a
6mo ago
Women appear more psychologically threatening than physical adversity, hence the procrastination and post-Hock rationalisation.
Mountains are static and predictable.
The "assigned at birth" is another rhetorical sleight of hand from the TRA camp. It applies to intersex babies because assigning them a gender is a pragmatic approach to an imperfect world that doesn't make accommodations for intersex individuals. Trans adults weren't assigned a gender, their sex was observed. They want to retcon the idea that sex and gender are the same thing in this instance and in this narrow interpretation because it serves their ends to conflate this aspect of intersex conditions with transgenderism. They want the right to edit their documentation. That's all. If you ask them if sex and gender are the same things in a broader interpretation of an other instance that would nullify a transgender identity they'll deny it. It's a waste of brain cells to think it through. Does editing their documentation render them the other sex, or even the other gender? No. It's just another point in their fuzzy cloud of subjective signifiers that conveniently proofs (sic) that they always were what they became (because that's what they want to be (...which they weren't (...)).
We could talk about cars the same way. There are right hand drive and left hand drive, and there are converted handed cars. Intersex are like a single-seater - they don't get to drive down the centre line and they don't compare to either handed type. Typical handed cars have no use for the handed conversion, the qualifying prefix, or the need to edit or amend their paperwork unless they're being transported to a country where they drive on the other side. Editing the paperwork doesn't mean the car has or hasn't been converted or has or hasn't come from another country. It's a fiction, and a fiction that is only worth pursuing for the convenience of the car owner. The single-seater faces no such issues. It wasn't made with mandated lanes in mind. It was assigned a lane, not a side for the steering wheel. No paperwork is going to make it more or less suited to one lane or the other or reassign something that wasn't there to be assigned. (This analogy is not great and so I won't defend it but I've spent the brain cells on writing it now and it serves the point: the mandated lane is not the steering wheel's position, some tiny number of cars don't embody those organising principles, and the documentation is not the car).
5434a
10mo ago
It might have made more sense for the mods to switch to work-to-rule instead of the 48 hour lock out. One of their main objections was that without API access via third party apps their work would be made harder, so show what the effects would be by modding using only the Reddit app. Submissions take longer to get approved, spam slips through, reports go unmodded, trolls go unchecked, duplicate posts proliferate, custom scripts stop posting whatever special features the subs use them for, admins get more tickets from mods asking for support and missing features, and the invisible janitor work begins to become more visible in its absence. If mod work is valuable and the Reddit app makes mod work less effective the result ought to be that Reddit gets worse. What's Reddit going to do, complain that they got what they wanted?
5434a
11mo ago
5000 dollars to a person of your choice
This will rapidly result in effectively paying the meanest prisoner $5000 a head to bring the life of weak prisoners to an end and making it look like suicide. It's a death penalty by proxy with cash rewards for the most ruthless serial murderer. You could try and close that loophole but they'll remain incentivised to the tune of $5000 to find new exploits, and each $5000 will give them additional capacity to find them. It's a persecution racket.
if you want prisoners to die you should assume the responsibility for killing them.
5434a
6mo ago
The same reason I said no to the guy who pulled up alongside me while I was walking down the road and offered to give me a Cartier watch: it reeks of bait.
I still don't know what the attached string was in that instance because I told him I already had a watch and walked away, but I'd guess it would get parlayed into helping him out with something that involved me handing over a sum of money on the basis that he'd already helped me and besides I'd still come out quids in so why not, fair's fair, thought you were a friendly person, is this how you treat people who want to help you, etc.
So yeah, he gives them $500. But he's still using them as a means to an end, so they're still at least half right in their scepticism.
5434a
4mo ago
There usually are other places that you can ask your questions but nowhere that offers such a broad range of topics to such a large userbase with such a low barrier to entry and all in one place. That was always a double-edged sword but it progressively swings further towards the low effort = low quality side.
In terms of content it used to be like HackerNews and now it's like Facebook. People don't go there to discuss questions, they go there to reassure each other they're in the right.
The scale of users means you get increasingly squeezed between the opposing forces of shitposters and overworked moderators. So they get a lot of idiots asking questions and a lot of replies that assume anyone asking questions is an idiot, and then the mods have to spend time cleaning it up instead of building out better tools that might help prevent those questions.
It doesn't help that Reddit's search has been shit forever. The sorting algorithm and karma system also incentivise repeating popular questions no matter how any times it's been asked before. And instead of fixing search to improve the UX for existing users Reddit prefers to chase new users by gamifying and appifying, while marginalising their smarter users (who might have contributed a lot of the better quality content but didn't represent much/any value to their revenue).
5434a
2mo ago
It's been a trend since the '70s via simple hybridisation and selective breeding but since the decrim/legalisation in America what I've seen on social media is people moving from the already strong weed to ever more potent extracts and concentrations, which they then use by eating them (which counter-intuitively gets you wrecked for hours because it's too easy to underestimate and eating it sounds more benign than smoking) or by vaporising them in elaborate "dab" rigs. I guess it's driven by the previously unavailable access to industrial tech like chemical analysis services and the removal of the need to be clandestine. Now you have people on Instagram posing for photos with their kilogram balls of lab refined 98.8% pure THC.
In the '90s you might see a variety of weed that was hyped up on claims of being analysed at ~25% THC (on an ideal sample a single time). Now, at least if you live in a decrim state and my impressions are correct, you can buy all manner of products that are regularly analysed by dedicated professional labs.
You also see more interest in the other cannibinoids now that the labs allow them to be distilled out and separated by people who know what they're doing rather than mad scientist stoners burning down their houses while playing with ether after reading a couple of articles in High Times.
With that said I think there is a separate phenomenon where people spend their youth smoking lots of weed, burning off all the neurochemical novelty and good times and being left with little more than the side effects that were probably always there but weren't very noticeable because they were having too much fun. They blame it on the weed being too strong but it's more like an alcoholic blaming the nausea and broken relationships on brewers putting diesel in their overproof rum. Yeah, the rum is too strong, but if you gave a couple of shots to a teetotaller they probably wouldn't shit their pants and start a fight with a policeman. They'd probably fall over, start laughing and tell you you're their best mate.
The stupid thing about illegal drug use is that people massively disregard dosage. There's a Scott article about Adderal vs street meth where he describes how the dose street meth users are taking is something like 100x more than the typical prescription dose. At that level it's no wonder that instead of studying harder they rip up their floorboards looking for listening devices. Instead people think that doing more = being hardcore, and people ignore that an overdose doesn't have to mean dying, it just means that you experience negative and unwanted effects from having taken too much.
5434a
6mo ago
The Lego Movie plays to the strengths of 3D CGI on account of the subject being made of countless tiny pieces of uniform rigid 3D shapes. I imagine it was a huge effort to make in CGI, never mind trying to do it freehand.
5434a
7mo ago
I think the problem is your message was so straight forward that it rushed to the objective which removed any ambiguity and plausible deniability from the interaction and explicitly cemented it into the frame of a capital D date. You were probably also too comprehensive with the if/else conditions.
"Doing anything this weekend?"
[response]
"Fancy [social activity]?"
[response]
"No big deal, maybe another time"
...and then there's nothing to have to pretend didn't happen, which is going to be challenging now because you went meta at the end.
On the plus side at least you tried, and shared it for open feedback, and now you can move past it with the benefit of hindsight and others' perspectives. Make a mistake and learn from it. That's better than passively wondering what if. Better luck next time.
5434a
1mo ago
name some role models off the top of their head, those people are going to be very famous
Those are figures, not roles. A role per the examples offered would be actor, footballer, and whatever Ted Lasso is. You can't play the role of being Marcus Rashford, but you can play the role of being a footballer and associate other pro-social behaviours like fair play, fitness, practice and respecting the rules with that role.
Influencer is a shitty role because the common behaviours are a blend of populism and commercialism by the nature of the business. Good editing and production skills aren't the basis for a society.
a lot of young men who want to be progressive without a reliable script to follow
The difficulty progressives have with promoting more general role models (train driver, doctor, policeman(!)) is the ""problematic"" nature of lauding people who work hard and take responsibility. It's too close to the small c conservative script of studying hard, working hard, following the rules, saving your money, having kids and raising them right.
The progressive role models are often more akin to radical activists of one stripe or another who rebelled against what society told them they should do... ironically like Andrew Tate.
It's like it's not enough for a plain old teacher to instill good study habits, they have to instill Critical Theories too. Just look at the flack Katharine Burbalsingh catches for being a non-white woman who opens a school in a deprived area and turns it into an academic success story through presenting high expectations for her students, or hardship afflicted single mother and feminist turned squillionaire children's author JK Rowling. In progressive's eyes Marcus Rashford isn't popular for his personal success, he's popular because he scored one for team social justice against the Conservative government. Stormzy raps about spunking on your girlfriend's face after going church but he also dropped that angry outburst for the social justice crew dem about Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May. Those are the roles they're promoting.
5434a
1mo ago
Trans women are not women, have never been women, and will never be women.
Transwomen aren't even transwomen. In their quest to deconstruct gender in order to grant themselves accommodation within that same genderscape that they disavow they have inadvertantly demonstrated that it's transgenderism itself that carries no semantic water. That is to say; there's no such thing.
Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man. Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.
Either it's real, and they're not it. Or it's not real, so there's no it to be.
[Obligatory olive branch that I don't care two iotas (iotes?) about men rendering themselves maximally feminine. Obligatory post script that this all applies vice versa too.]
5434a
8mo ago
What's always confused me is where beauty becomes subjective. I will gladly acknowledge that Margot Robie is very good looking, but she also leaves me cold.
Where it gets confusing is wondering how many other people see the women I find attractive the same way I see Margot Robie. When I look at the row of canonical "10s" (sorry, "9.5s") linked at /r/truerateme I'd swap their placing with the 7s. For example Taylor Hill (whoever she is) could be an average checkout assistant. I say that because I used to work as a checkout assistant and had half a dozen colleagues who were more attractive and I still wouldn't have rated them as "1 in 50,000 ultra attractive top tier super models". Taylor Hill looks directly comparable to Summer Glau but with a slightly lower hairline, but Summer Glau is rated as 5.5 there!
I suppose no matter which way you cut it there will always be a degree of subjectivity that can't be captured in an objective description.
The best method I can think of to begin to start getting a handle on the matter would be to have people subjectively rank the set of faces in that chart and then figure out where the results overlap and where they split into groups who prefer different "types" that still share a lot of overlapping ratings within those types. Probably somewhere like that website (amihot.com? I can't remember) would also have a reasonable dataset. Until that question has more detail the "beauty is subjective" platitudes make an important, if overstated, point.
5434a
3mo ago
Today the doom is climate change and we get... nothing.
Because we're all complicit. It's easy to protest against The Man with The Button, it's a lot harder if the enemy is our own inescapable lifestyle. Follow the logic through far enough and you're left with a choice between tech evangelism or retvrn to anti-natalism and depopulation.
The other alternative is to shrug and/or put your head in the sand, hence the "...nothing", or to argue that it's all fake, but that's limited by its reactionary nature. It doesn't advance an independent agenda.
5434a
3mo ago
The internet has diminished the cultural isolation art and culture needs to gestate and develop organically leaving us with a choice between big budget, mass market, safe investment, market-led retreads or retro nostalgia for "authenticity". The shortfall is filled up with short-lived memes that people can latch onto and share but don't engender any feelings of lasting personal investment ("I was a let's go brandoner before it was cool and I'll remain one when the casuals have moved on").
There's a whole chapter in David W Marx's Status And Culture that covers this in some depth if you want to read something longer than Motte comments.
There's also the matter of consumer technology maturing and effectively stagnating. When technology phases into affordablity there's a lot of low-hanging fruit available, plus the promise of higher-hanging fruit as the tech improves, plus a residual barrier of entry to casual participants. Now everybody has a combined office/studio/library/theatre in their pocket whether they need it or not and its workings are locked behind bootloaders and signed certificates on one hand and hot-glued security screws and millimetre scale surface mounted components on the other. You either have to be a team of specialists or a border-line autist savant to meaningfully explore beyond the walls of the heavily populated omni-garden.
5434a
6mo ago
I totally agree with the broad thrust of your post, just pointing out that The Lego Movie is the rare example that justifies its use of 3D and CGI where something like Toy Story, another genuinely good 3D CGI film, could quite conceivably have been rendered freehand in golden era 2D style without any great loss, and probably faster and for a smaller budget - it's the script, the characters and the top tier voice actors that make Toy Story good, the CGI was a technical novelty.
You can't render complex mathematically accurate physics in freehand - and I'm not saying I'm certain they did in TLM - and that's okay because 99% of the time you don't need to to tell a story. But if you want a convincing effect of a tidal wave of tiny Lego pieces crashing over a Lego city, a box full of loose pieces being exploded, or a Lego model that accurately models the qualities of the real product then CGI is going to give a "better" result, and faster. I'm not actually sure it would be cheaper though, 3D rendering is notoriously intensive and the credits for that film are vast.
A talented artist certainly could draw something that looks like a lot of Lego pieces interacting, but the emphasis is on like. CGI will be more immersive for that use even if perhaps it's less graphically expressive in its line-work and frame advances. A hand drawn Lego Movie would give you the "what if you could draw Lego coming to life" feeling where CGI is that much closer to "what if Lego could come to life". The artificial plastic-ness of Lego is an ideal match for the blandness of CGI where something like The Jungle Book or Lion King remakes will fall into the uncanny valley by trying to make singing animals look realistic (I assume, I haven't watched either of them).
In short putting aside cost, speed and effort I think The Lego Movie really would be at the very best no better if it was made without CGI.
5434a
10mo ago
Identity politics is bullshit. [...] look upon each particular thing and ask what is it's nature? IE what does it do? where does it come from? How does it behave? The answers you get are what that thing is.
As I understand it identity politics caught on as an alternative to class politics. It was a means for the left to scoop up the various previously un/under-represented minorities in an effort to gather enough extra votes to tip the scales in their favour. In the 1970s politics was class politics with labour unions playing a significant role. Then Reagan and Thatcher came along, crushed the unions and identity politics followed. It had little to nothing to do with what you "identified as" and lots to everything to do with who you voted for. It was about politics, not identity, and although the academic material and its derivatives that explore identity are 99% socially corrosive bullshit the political appeal is arguably pragmatic, albeit on a short-term and short-sighted basis.
It seems to me your point is that people from outside the left have adopted the identity lens with the difference being that they largely denigrate the minorities to flatter the majority. This has taken over from the socially synthesising MLK colour blindism and classical albeit imperfect liberalism that preceded the idpol era. Well, yeah. You can't form an ingroup without creating an outgroup. This is what has always baffled me about the identity politics of the true believers rather than the pollsters. It makes sense for the majority to adopt idpol, they're the majority. The minority are at a democratic disadvantage by definition, and the only way it worked/works is that it depended on the majority adhering to fuzzy social liberalism while the minorities rally around their flag/s. Once the idpol mindset takes root in the wider discourse, even if it's just via objection to it, you get the opposing side being drawn onto the pitch and you start to see MRAs, HBDists, trans denialists, principled free speech trolls and so on take up position. And if the idpol nonsense gets too fevered you arrive at the yeschad.jpg ethno-nationalism of white people, after having been identified as such externally, coming to a position where they may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. It ain't pretty.
In summary the idpol left promoted it, the minorities adopted it, the classical liberals and class-first left adapted to it and the majority are progressively shifting from passively accepting it to being boxed into actively adopting it in kind. It's less The Matrix's "you think that's air you're breathing" and more the fish noticing the water it's been swimming in. It's less red pill vs blue pill and more black pill vs white pill.
Identity, to the degree that it represents something meaningful and real, exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified.
Quite, and like the saying goes just because you do not take an interest in [identity] politics doesn't mean [identity] politics won't take an interest in you.
5434a
9mo ago
view 18+ youtube content
https://github.com/zerodytrash/Simple-YouTube-Age-Restriction-Bypass
5434a
10mo ago
Does your argument apply to money? If it looks close enough it will do, and try not to look too closely?
5434a
3mo ago
I looked through and downloaded IMDB's top rated original (1959-1964) TZ episodes a while ago. I ended up with 9 episodes from S1, 8 from S2, 9 from S3 and 4 from S5. There's lots of other selected Twilight Zone episodes lists out there to browse, they're all roughly in agreement. If you're not bothered about filtering the best of the best you can't go far wrong by starting at the start as that's where the benchmark that justified the additional series and reboots was created.
I don't know about the '80s and '00s reboots but I'd avoid Jordan Peele's 2019 reboot, it's more concerned with moral commentary on $current_year American culture war than it is the human condition.
Like Atelier says TZ is lacking in the sci-fi aspect compared to The Outer Limits. You could try 2017's Phillip K Dick's Electric Dreams but I haven't seen any of those. TZ is a bit dated and unsophisticated compared to modern counterparts like Black Mirror but like OG Star Trek it's classic television that stands the test of time.
5434a
3mo ago
it's way too fast for your grandparents, your parents, or even your older siblings [...] Electronic music existed well before this, but it wasn't anywhere near as belligerent, chaotic, or willing to subvert genre trends.
Moby made his 1000bpm track 30 years ago, and although he doesn't have any children at 58 he's old enough to be a grandfather. Pre electronic music there were people making experimental noise music using jackhammers.
The Camellia track sounds more developed but at base it's an iteration on the paradigm of making artificially intense music. It's not that it's too fast for the olds, it's that it's too fast full stop. There's a point of diminishing returns and there's a point beyond that of negative returns. Pushing the limits or indeed wilfully smashing them is, at this point, if not a stale idea then at least a very long way from radical and unfamiliar.
If you disagree that it's too fast you can increase the speed to 2x on YouTube, but I expect you'd agree it doesn't make it twice as good.
These days if you want to shock the olds you have to get a face tattoo and cut your dick off, and even that's just upping the ante on the kind of shit flinging, blood spilling, dick stroking, gender bending performance art that's been happening since the '60s. Radicalism just isn't radical anymore. It's been tried and where it hasn't been largely rejected the remainder has been assimilated.
5434a
5mo ago
wiki:
Schettino said he left the ship when it turned over, and that he fell into a lifeboat
[...]
the on-duty Italian Coast Guard commander told Schettino, "Vada a bordo, cazzo!" ("Get on board, for fuck's sake!"), but Schettino did not do so and was one of the first to reach land.
lmao
5434a
8mo ago
there should be some kind of more literal rite of passage that, upon completion, triggers said emancipation
Any suggestions? One of the few things I can think of that satisfies being challenging, demonstrating (limited, for the naysayers) competence and is broadly recognised as (again for the naysayers, largely) legitimate is military or some comparable form of national service. But last time that idea was floated at the old place it was dismissed as being literal slavery (beside the objection that the army and every other profession doesn't want them). Which, hyperbole aside, is admittedly a problem: How can you place demands on a populace under threat of withholding rights and still call yourselves defenders of freedom? Whichever way you look at it it boils down to a state-to-citizen quid pro quo.
The trouble is for it to hold any significance it must impart a cost, and even if the benefits outweigh the costs people will still bristle at the need for any measure of sacrifice.
Pilgrimage? Mortification? Or something altogether more milquetoast like graduating high school, which many here are just as eager to condemn as little different from slavery and imprisonment. Or how about tying it to your first point and make it necessary to have raised a child who graduates high school? Three birds with one stone!
5434a
9mo ago
We already have a category for people whose appearance and actions pattern match to women: feminine. It naturally favours women but it's very much open to men.
One problem with using "passing" as the benchmark is that it excludes women who don't possess a sufficient number of visible physical characteristics. That's regressive, exclusionary, sexist and all the things that the conflict averse people who suffer no cost in making their opinions public would disavow, it's just that they aren't invited to follow the logic through to this distasteful conclusion. Adding on the characteristics necessary to bring these (non)women back into the category is going to squeeze trans women back out of the other end. That's also regressive, exclusionary, only instead of being sexist it's transphobic. We're left with a Gordian knot of deciding whether this "woman" category should favour qualified males or unqualified females.
So I'm examining these categories and finding that trying to radically redefine them diminishes their utility, which in turn diminishes their significance. Does the examination stop at a point before trans women qualify as women, continue to a point where any human qualifies, or does it conveniently extend only up to the Goldilocks point where trans women qualify and then we should stop looking? Are we trying to describe reality with accuracy or are we trying to soothe trans women's dissatisfaction with the existing descriptions of reality?
Enough criticism, here's something constructive. Men are already free to be as maximally feminine as they can (costs notwithstanding). Under the low accuracy demands of public life they may be sufficiently feminine to pass off as women. Nobody is checking! As the justifiable demands for accuracy increase they will be progressively disqualified. At the highest demand for accuracy they are simply male. But if they can't pass the low accuracy demands of basic public life they can't do an end run around the topic by playing deconstuctionist word games to rules-lawyer their way into inclusion of a category that their presence renders meaningless.
[Parallelise the preceding to trans men as applicable]
As I said a few days ago, the transgender philosophy begins wherever they are and ends wherever they want to be. Applying it to uses outside that scope throws up unanswered questions and contradictions because it wasn't made for more general uses and so it fails in other applications. It was constructed to serve their immediate ends and no more.
Looking at it like this brings the matter into focus. It's a medical condition only as long as it needs to be to access medical resources. In scenarios where access to medical resources isn't required, guess what? It's no longer a medical condition. When it suits to be a psychological condition, or a linguistic label, or a particular aesthetic, those are the things transgenderism will be - until it no longer suits. The details aren't vague so much as they're ephemeral. The consistent quality is the self-servingness and self-justification.
You're a defence lawyer, you must be familiar with this tactic. I assume the difference is that in the legal realm you don't tie yourself in knots puzzling how to make sense of these competing claims. "I was at home that night... What I mean is that I had at some point been home that night... I mean, I didn't say whose home I was at that night... What I mean is I was batting in a baseball game... ... So, uh, can I go home now?"
They're not the other sex. They want to be the other sex. The entirity of transgenderism is the struggle to resist the unfortunate and persistent reality that they cannot be the other sex. And if in a biopunk future they somehow could, they'd still have not-been and be relegated to arriviste status. In the absence of full transexualism the very best a transgender can achieve is to be transgender. This could have been tolerable, but the more rhetoric they deployed the more holes were revealed until there's more hole than there is doughnut. There are male men and female women, and there is masculinity and femininity. Outside of the truly rare edge case congenital medical conditions I don't see which complex meanings can't be rendered legible with these simple terms. The transgender philosophy and lexicon renders these meanings less legible, and I suspect it's by design to construct a means to an otherwise impossible end.
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