NPR is in the news lately. First because they have a new CEO, who tweets like a parody of white liberal women. OK those were "in the past" but they were only 4-8 years ago... has she matured at all since then? So far no sign of that.
Secondly was this essay by Uri Berliner, their longtime senior business editor, creator of the popular "Planet Money" podcast, and one of the very few white males/not-super-liberals still in a position of authority at NPR. I really recommend this essay. He lays it out how, sure, NPR was always left-leaning, but it had intelligence and integrity. It's changed.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.
But it hasn’t.
...
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
He was suspended for writing that essay (edited- he has since been made to resign: https://archive.is/YR3LB). NPR claims it's not about the content, they just don't allow their workers to write for outside publications without permission. Benjamin Mullin has the story in the New York Times
(edited to remove something wrong)
For my own part, I grew up listening to NPR and I used to love it. The voices, the production value, the journalism, all of it was high-quality. It really stood out in the world of FM radio, where everything else is staticky, ad-filled garbage, and tends to play the same basic pop-classic rock-rap top 40 garbage over and over. In the world before podcasts and sattelite Radio, NPR was the only halfway intellectual content on the radio. Now it just feels like a podcast from some random student activists who have been triggered by Trump to the point that they're on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. I seriously can't stand listening to it anymore, it's just amazing how deranged and annoying it's become.
If you want more examples, Peter Boghossian has a series of podcasts about it: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYNjnJFU-62s5cNuqeB-D-7QPymF6myk_. I'm guessing that most of this won't be very shocking to the people here. But still, it's nice to feel like "I'm not alone. there really are a lot of other people who used to like NPR and now hate it."
BahRamYou
2yr ago
All I can think is that every single person in this story was terrible.
The professor, who had some vague family story about her great-grandmother being an Indian, and turned that into the core of her identity. Zero attachment to any of her other 7 great-grandparents, who were all just "white." (no indication of country or culture or anything)
Her friends and coworkers, for instantly exiling her and cutting her off. No defense of her like "well actually she's still a really good professor."
The university, for creating this spoils system of prestigious tenured professorships, reserved exclusively for those with special blood.
Society at large, for meekly going along with all this and not doing anything.
...But sure, the real problem is "blurry definitions." In the future, the prestigious Indian Studies professorships should be reserved only for those who have passed an official blood test.
BahRamYou
9mo ago
That's a fantastic article, thanks for sharing.
It really does feel like an inflection point was crossed then- there was always affirmative action and PC stuff, but suddenly a huge cohort of people in power were aggressively pushing queer women of color at the expense of white males. You might say "this won't affect you if you don't work in the liberal arts" but it does, because it then affects all culture everywhere. And yes, for a long time it was like we couldn't talk about it for fear of retribution. Hell, it's telling that all of his sources still want to stay anonymous, even when they've moved on to other industries. It must have been a huge effort to find any real data and sources for all this stuff.
It's funny. They always said that they "wanted to start a national conversation about diversity." Well, now they're getting it... I just don't think it's the one they wanted. I feel like there's a sea change where even the most clueless white guys are starting to wake up and realize that woke liberals are a danger to them. And we're all becoming hyper-conscious of our race in a way that would have been unimaginable to me as a 90s kid.
New Nick Shirley video just dropped and it's a banger: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LmIrwjKQQKc
This one is a long-form, extended interview with David, the older man from the previous video. Apparently he's been investigating this stuff for years, rather obsessively, to the point where he's lost friends and family because they just think he's some sort of crazy racist person for investigating.
It's a bit long and meandering, so it's hard to keep track of all the claims made in it. I think we'll need time to process this and investigate further. I'd like to see this written in text with sources, instead of just a long interview. But among the claims made:
- That this is all organized by Somali gangs, with the gang leaders bringing retribution on any family that doesn't go along with it. Investigators like David also get threatened with violence.
- Widespread voter fraud from families living in collective housing. One person collects the ballots, "vouches" for all the people living there with no proof, and then returns a massive ballot stack all voting the same way.
- "This is the worst fraud in human history." He estimates that a total of $80-100 billion was stolen by fraud in Minnesota
- "However bad you imagine it is, it's worse. He alledges that basically every social program in Minnesota is now heavily corrupted by fraud. Some of the biggest are schools that might have 10 students, but pretending to get 100 or more so that they can get massive amounts of state funding. Medical services do the same.
- This is all protected by the government and judicial system of Minnesota. At one point, David did the work to prove that a Somali leader did $7.2 million of fraud. He was convicted unanimously by a jury, but the judge overturned the verdict and left him free to continue collecting more money. The judges are elected, probably with the help of fraudalent Somali votes.
- This isn't just state money, it's also federal money. This increases the scale, but also increases the severity of the crimes.
- That Somalians routinely travel back to Somali, taking large amounts of cash with them (well over the TSA limit of $10,000), and for some reason the TSA grants them an exception to this when any normal American would be arrested or stopped for questioning.
So... will this lead to anything further? Tim Walz already said he won't run for reelection, but at this point I no longer think that's enough. The feds need to come purge the entire state government of Minnesota on charges of racketeering and voter fraud.
BahRamYou
2yr ago
So while I too feel that there are greater problems in the world, I get why a lot of men would like sexiness to just go away and stop taunting them
That's pretty much how I feel. At least, in environments where it's frowned upon to flirt with women, like in the office, I really wish they would stop wearing sexy clothes. It's like a constant mental tax I have to pay, "don't look at her don't look at her don't look at her," and there's no way to complain about it without sounding like either a huge pervert or an overbearing puritan.
I feel like food is maybe the gender-switch version? As a guy, I like chocolate, but I can take it or leave it. I have no trouble just eating one chocolate and ignoring the rest. But there was a holiday party at my office, and some woman sent in a complaint to HR, crying that she just couldn't stop eating the chocolate, it was making it impossible for her to work and maintain her diet with all these scrumptious chocolate lying around in front of her all day. And I was thinking... woman, you have no idea...
token discussions of "diversity" or minority rights while completely eliding any structural issues or suggestions for real leftist/progressive reform
There's nothing "token" about it, that's their central framing for basically every single story. It's relentless. I do agree that they elide any real structural issues or serious suggestions for reform, but that's because it's all so stupid that they don't think to ask those questions.
BahRamYou
1yr ago
I agree with you, it's a recurring pattern. Partly just because of the convenience of food. You don't need to learn a foreign language or study its history to understand it, hell these days you don't have to leave your house. You can get ethnic food delivered to your door, and stuff it down your throat without a thought. It's easy and fun to try different foods that way, but also considered hip and high-status to try lots of exotic ethnic foods, the more exotic the better.
It takes a lot more effort to engage with other parts of foreign culture. Listening to something like Indian sitar music or Mongolian throat singing, and it probably sounds weird and boring to most of us who didn't grow up with it. Much easier to listen to something like Kpop which is engineered to sound exactly like Western pop music, even including some English phrases and Western-style clothes. It's even harder to sit on a multi-hour foreign religious service. I've tried that (for Buddhism and Mexican catholicism) and found myself thinking "wtf am I doing here..." I imagine it would be even worse for someone who's less open-minded than me and believes strongly in their own religion.
What I enjoy the most is to actually spend time with people from foreign cultures, talking to them in depth in real life, and really getting to know them. It's fascinating! But I rarely get the chance to do that even when I'm travelling- people are busy, there's the language barrier, and many people just don't want to open up about their life that much. A lot of Westerners now have sort of learned that it's impolite to talk about certain topics, so they just kind of run away from talking about them. Once I read an interview with a student from an African country studying at an American college, and she said it threw her off how little anyone wanted to talk about her country. She was expecting all sorts of curious questions, but everyone was either not interested or afraid of being offensive, so it left her with little to talk about. That made me sad.
But there's also the darker part. When you really learn about foreign cultures, it's not all tasty food and fun dances. In fact, most of it isn't. You don't have to dig much before you encounter something that makes you think "wow, that's awful." Well, awful by my standards, but of course there's lot of stuff in my American culture that they think is awful so.... we just have to live and let live. I can tolerate their extreme religion fanatacism if they can tolerate our incessant and disgusting advertising. Different cultures will also often have views way outside the Western mainstream norm on things like feminism, democracy, human rights, education, sexuality, or even just what foods are clean enough to eat.
For example: I've spent a lot of time in Seoul, and it always makes me laugh how awkward the tourism is there for western tourists. They come in expecting this fantasy land they saw in Kdramas and Kpop videos. They want to experience "traditional Korean culture," but in a way that makes for a cute instagram story. They're not prepared for stuff like:
- using corporal punishment to teach children
- expecting kids to study 12+ hours a day (or workers to work the same amount)
- eating chicken feet, dog meat, or any kind of organ meat
- prostitution
- absolute obediance to family elders or anyone above you in the workplace heirarchy
- really blatant homophobic jokes
- casually telling women "you look fat," and encouraging them to get cosmetic surgery
- old men drinking vast quantities of hard liquor, sometimes even outside
- going deep into debt to buy designer clothes so that you look acceptable
- mandatory cash payments to any friend or family member getting married
All of that is culture too! you take the bad with the good. But that's intolerable for most western tourists. Much more comfortable to just eat some rice and grilled meat, take a picture of yourself wearing a colorful robe at the palace, buy a fan, and let the culture stop there.
BahRamYou
1yr ago
Want to read an interesting wiki bio?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Jones
I feel like you could take almost any paragraph of that and it makes an interesting story. People just don't live like that anymore!
- started his career at the age of 13, on a slave ship
- after a few years, started to feel bad about the whole slavery thing and suddenly resigned while in Jamaica
- Started a new career on a normal ship from a lower position, but instantly got promoted to captain (at age 21) because the captain and first mate died
- "This came to an end, however, when he killed a mutinous crew member with a sword in a dispute over wages." Flees to America
- Somehow makes friends with the Continental Congress and is given command of a ship
- Leads a raid on his own hometown. Raid fails because they ran out of lantern fuel, went to a pub to get more, and "the temptation to stop for a quick drink led to a further delay"
- Goes to plunder some nearby Earl instead
- Gets given a larger ship as a reward. Famous battle ensues. Probably didn't really say the quote that's famous for, but it's a good story nonetheless.
- War ends, the US can't afford a navy anymore, so Jones has nothing to do. Goes to Russia instead, and is instantly promoted to admiral despite not speaking any Russian
- Somehow defeats a larger Turkish fleet despite the crappy Russian fleet and his translation issues
- Sneaky Prince Potemkin steals all the credit from Jones. He loses his job again.
- He gets accused of raping a 10-year-old girl.
- Catherine the Great personally intervenes to make sure the trial goes forward
- Jones tries to defend himself by saying that he thought she was 12, not 10, that he had paid her but not raped her, and that the girl's mother "lived in a brothel, and was herself promiscuous." Not the best defense there by modern standards Jones...
- After that he really can't get a job, so he makes money by publishing his memoirs. James Fenimoore Cooper and Alexandre Dumas both write adventure novels based on his life.
- Died in a random French cemetary, unknown and forgotten
- But... luckily (?) some random French guy paid to have his body mummified
- In 1905 a French general spends 6 years tracking down his body and eventually finds it.
- His body is exhumed, placed in an elaborate sarcophagus, and now rests in the US Naval Academy
- FDR tries to write a screenplay about his life, but it's rejected by Hollywood. I didn't know that FDR wrote screenplays...
Just a wild life from start to finish. I liked this quote from his biography summarizing him:
"In sum, Jones was a sailor of indomitable courage, of strong will, and of great ability in his chosen career. On the other side of the coin, it must be admitted that he was also a hypocrite, a brawler, a rake, and a professional and social climber. Although these elements of his character do not detract from his feats at sea, they do, perhaps, cast in doubt his eligibility for a prominent place in the ranks of America's immortals."
BahRamYou
7mo ago
My opinion is that US schools do a really bad job of teaching the civil rights protests of the 1960s era. A lot of people unironically believe that Rosa Parks was just some random nice lady who was too tired to change seats on the bus that day, and that MLK Jr assembled a group of purely peaceful protestors who shamed the evil whites into doing the right thing. The reality is... a lot more complicated.
- Southerners had been feeling profoundly divided about segregation for a long time
- Rosa Parks was the chosen representative of the NAACP. She had a long career of activism, and carefully planned her protest to be as sympathetic as possible to the middle class whites of the area. There had been numerous failed attempts before her to do the same thing.
- MLK Jr was arrested and went to jail, something which he fully expected and was prepared for. However, he urged his supporters to act tactically and strategically, not in random mob violence. He drew a clear divide between forceful activism like the Boston Tea Party, which had a clear purpose, and random individual action, which does not. Ironically, MLK Jr is probably just too intelligent for modern political activists to understand.
There is no “true” set of races that “falls out naturally” from genetic or cultural data, but the US government’s system was especially fake and embarrassing. they declared Hispanics to be an “ethnicity” that you could have along with a different race.
I've heard stuff like this before, that Hispanic is a nonsense category. But I actually think it makes sense, at least as far as anything makes sense in the US legal/cultural system of race.
First, just to state the obvious: this wasn't ever intended to be a rigorous, comprehensive, scientific system. It's just a quick and dirty way to classify people, in a way that any average person on the street can see and more-or-less agree on. You don't want to make up dozens of separate specific categories because that quickly spirals into confusion.
Second, look at the history. Hispanics, in the US, come mostly from Latin America (not from Spain!). And Latin America was colonized long before the US, and much more brutally. One of the very first things Columbus did was to immediately start taking slaves! And on the other side, explorers such as Magellan's expedition were, um, not exactly celibate:
The crew also found they could purchase sexual favours from the local women. Historian Ian Cameron described the crew's time in Rio as "a saturnalia of feasting and lovemaking"
This quickly led to a situation where Latin America was a mix of white conquistadors, indigenous slaves, black slaves imported from Africa, and mixed-race offspring who had grown up there. Pretty soon the Spanish realized they needed some sort of classification system for who was going to be a slave, who was trustworthy enough to rule, and who was somewhere in-between. Eventually they came up with a rather byzantine system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestizo#Mestizo_as_a_colonial-era_category
- Español (fem. española), i.e. Spaniard – person of Spanish ancestry; a blanket term, subdivided into Peninsulares and Criollos
- Peninsular – a person of Spanish descent born in Spain who later settled in the Americas;
- Criollo (fem. criolla) – a person of Spanish descent born in the Americas;
- Castizo (fem. castiza) – a person with primarily Spanish and some American Indian ancestry born into a mixed family.
- Mestizo (fem. mestiza) – a person of extended mixed Spanish and American Indian ancestry;
- Indio (fem. india) – a person of pure American Indian ancestry;
- Pardo (fem. parda) – a person of mixed Spanish, Amerindian and African ancestry; sometimes a polite term for a black person;
- Mulato (fem. mulata) – a person of mixed Spanish and African ancestry;
- Zambo – a person of mixed African and American Indian ancestry;
- Negro (fem. negra) – a person of African descent, primarily former enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Which made sense for their situation, but stops making sense once you abolish slavery and royal titles and all these people start to intermix with each other. So after a few hundred years of that, you end up with modern day Hispanic people. Some are mostly white, some are mostly black, some are mostly indigenous, but a lot of them are a roughly even mix of all three, to the point where it's an obvious group of its own. You still can't exactly call it a race- it's a mix of other races, and it's hard to tell where exactly is the border between Hispanics and one of the other races. But you can't just say "mixed-race" either, for something that's been so thoroughly mixed for hundreds of years. So they made up a new word, "ethnicity", and called it a day.
Of course all this is awkward to talk about in polite society, and most Americans don't really know the history of Latin America. In Mexico they call it La Raza which makes a lot more sense, but that sounds bad in English and the term hasn't made it here yet. So they decided to classify it on language, "are you from a Spanish-speaking area?" That's... weird, since it includes white people from Spain and excludes people from Brazil or Belize. But it works well enough for the US, where most Latin-American immigrants are from Spanish-speaking areas.
It's certainly not a perfect term, and I think we're moving towards changing it with weird postmodern terms like LatinX or Chicano, but it's good enough for 99% of situations to get the idea across. It's actually a lot less confusing than African (eliding the difference between North, West-sub-Saharan, and East-Sub-Saharan African) or Asian (it's a big continent lol) or white (are Arabs white?). It's also (like all racial data in the US) mostly self-reported. But I challenge you- find a person who self reports as "Hispanic," ask the average person to draw a sketch or select a picture, and see how well it matches. Most of the time, it's pretty close.
BahRamYou
8mo ago
Seems like there's roughly 4 types of Democrats on this issue:
- is the relatively moderate, centrist opinion. They're happy to accept legal immigrants, especially to fill job vacancies or reunite families, but they still want to enforce immigration law. Obama would be the most prominent example of this.
- is the more pragmatic, squishy, vague position. They're still in principle against illegal immigration, but they don't really want to do anything to enforce it either. There seems to be a strong sense of "but how else would we get the work done without them?" here, especially in certain industries like meat processing that are pretty nasty work for low pay. I think this is how Biden thought about it.
- is the more emotional position. They just hate seeing anyone get hurt, so pictures of people who are not visibly committing a crime getting arrested really triggers them. The actual issue isn't really important, especially when it's a smaller, weaker, more photogenic person getting arrested by an armed federal agent in a black uniform. Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and most of the street protestors seem to have this position.
- is the more academic position. They see the US as being a vast chunk of unused territory, stolen from the native americans, which has no right to be nationalistic. They want to help the overall world GDP by moving as many immigrants as possible into the US, and also create a huge voting advantage for leftists. To that end, they really don't care whether immigrants are legal or illegal, and would prefer open borders. You don't see this view a lot from elected officials (at least not openly), but plenty of people express it online, especially from college students and their lefty professors.
BahRamYou
2yr ago
I do miss that old internet culture.
It sounds like this guy was, weirdly, ahead of the game in a lot of ways. He realized that the internet was important as a source of serious information, when most other people were just using it to goof around. He was willing to stand up and be a public figure, writing everything under his real name. Pretty common now on substack and celebrity twitter, but very rare back then. And he was willing to fight for all the causes that have became left-wing staples, completely avoiding the libertarian flavor of the earlier internet days.
If he hadn't wasted so much time and effort on that stupid RationalWiki site (I had no idea it was mostly all just one guy writing it), he'd probably be a famous influencer or political pundit now.
BahRamYou
10mo ago
The rich 1959 guy wouldn't necessarily be driving to a restaurant. He could also afford to keep a personal cook or housekeeper. Or, you know, just have a servant to do all the regular housework while his fancy wife did the cooking.
I think a lot of these "would you rather" comparisons across time are hard to compare, because we've basically substituted capital for labor. So would you rather have a human do stuff for you, or a machine? I've never had servants so i can't really say, it seems like it would be awesome in some ways but also really awkward in other ways
Anyway, "I Love Lucy" was a great show and driving a brand new Cadillac to the local supper club sounds awesome, so I don't know what he's talking about there.
BahRamYou
1yr ago
I think this is the inevitable result of making college the default path, where most people feel that they need a college degree for the job market even if they have no interest in being there. And the colleges are happy to serve as a diploma mill.
A long time ago I worked as a math tutor for my college, working with freshman who were struggling wtih basic math. And it was pretty clear that most of them had no interest in learning math, they just wanted me to do their homework for them so they could pass the class. I tried to teach them if I could but... it's a lot easier to just do the homework yourself than to teach someone else. So I was basically serving as a "living LLM" in that case.
BahRamYou
19d ago
To quote Sam Harris: "Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas."
Obviously every religion has its fringe elements of crazy extremists, so I won't condemn them for that. But in Islam, even the mainstream central religion just seems bad in a way I don't see in other religions.
It starts with Mohammed himself. This isn't some ancient figure who's life is shrouded in mystery, he's pretty well documented. He was a warlord who led his tribe to conquer the Arabian peninsula, by a combination of cunning tactics, charisma, and ruthlessness. He frequently executed captives and allowed his men to take sex slaves. This was brutal even by the standards of his time, so he made up his own religion to justify it.
He was also illiterate. In Islam, this is considered a miracle, for how could an illiterate man produce a book like the Quran? Except... when you read it, it's just not a very good book. It's mostly vague references to the bible, with a lot of aimless repition. It's almost like a family guy joke: "hey, remember that time when Jonah got swallowed by a whale? Huh? Wasn't that a good story?" It doesn't have any of the interesting insights or metaphors that other famous holy books have. In other words, it's exactly the kind of thing screed I'd expect from a charismatic, but illiterate leader. This is why the Quran is usually not actually read, but simply chanted, mindlessly, five times a day, as a form of brainwashing.
In older times, Europeans called Muslims "Mohammedans". That's now considered outdated, but I think they were onto something there. The real, central core of Islam is a cult of personality, centered on that one man. That's why so many of them name their kids after him, that's why there's so many fanatics who kill anyone who even draws a picture of him, and that's why the entire religion still seems weirdly stuck in the past, in a way that even the much older religions like Hindu or Buddhism are not. The modern Muslim-American clergy who are trying to whitewash or modernise are having to struggly, mightily, against the core problems.
BahRamYou
1yr ago
So, as someone who once wanted to be a professor but gave up on it because I'm a white male with some non-woke beliefs and the whole thing seemed hopelessly rigged against me... is there any chance for me to go back into academia now and get a position? or is it still just clogged with way too many grad students chasing way too few tenured positions, and the whole system rigged in favor of woke types?
BahRamYou
1yr ago
However, perhaps most of all, I think many Americans just don't realise how visceral and close and frightening the Ukraine war is for many people in Europe.
Is it? My impression is that, even for most Europeans, the Ukraine war just isn't all that important. The real hot button issue seems to be immigration, or maybe just the economy in general. No one in Europe is massively raising defense spending, activating the draft, getting nuclear weapons, or calling for a pan-Europian army. I'd expect to see all of those things if they felt they were seriously on the edge of a Russian invasion. The only countries who are really acting like they're at war are the former Warsaw Pact countries like Poland and Bulgaria.
I guess we'll see if the new German government wants to massively increase military aid to Ukraine. If they do then, I'll be proven wrong. But I think they'll basically keep it to the same level it's at now.
Is this the beginning of a popular rebellion against woke Hollywood garbage?
Like (I imagine) a lot of you, I got fed up with mainstream Hollywood movies and TV a long time ago. For various reasons, but a big part of it was how they insisted on inserting heavy-handed woke propaganda into everything, even where it made no sense. I'm hardly the first to complain about that, but it seemed to be mostly anonymous online reactionaries complaining, while mainstream critics and everyone "respectable" still lapped it up. The Star Wars sequels, Nu-Trek, and all Marvel movies made $$$$$$$ while also gathering rave critical reviews, even though it became something of a joke when the "audience score" on rotten tomatoes was always so much lower than the "critic reviews" score.
And to be clear, I'm not (just) mad at those things because I disagree with their politics. I genuinely think those are terrible movies. They have bad plots, bad characters, bad dialogue, and often even bad at basic filmmaking stuff like editing, camera angles, and sound mixing. One theory I like is that, for quite a while, Hollywood was so focused on exporting big famous brands to foreign countries that they didn't care how it sounded in English. They'd all be watching it dubbed or with subtitles anyway, and then (hopefully) buying merch. But for a long time I felt like I couldn't say these things without getting labelled as a deranged culture warrior.
But now? I dunno. I'm seeing more and more open criticism of big hollywood brands, and some of it is coming from people who are not easily dismissed. Examples:
- https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/george-r-r-martin-everything-wrong-house-of-the-dragon-1235988012/
- https://ew.com/quentin-tarantino-refuses-watch-toy-story-4-8702960
- https://old.reddit.com/r/lordoftherings/comments/1f4lzx3/i_laughed_really_hard/ (orc family lol)
- https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/19dspi4/barbie_and_the_oscars/ (personally I thought it was totally fair to only give an Oscar to Ryan Gosling, he totally stole the show in that movie)
- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/lets-not-mince-words-beauty-and-the-beast-is-a-terrible-movie/
- (https://acoup.blog/2019/12/29/miscellanea-the-latest-jedi) (note that he is usually left wing in the culture wars, but this was an excellent summary of what some of the more right-wing chuds were saying about The Last Jedi)
- star wars the acolyte was recently cancelled after terrible reviews and ratings
- https://youtube.com/watch?v=MdLHKdn0JTY
The last one was what inspired me to write this post. Lots have people have already criticized Star Trek over the years, most notably the RedLetterMedia guys who kinda got famous from it. But I associate most of them with the online right. This is a 4 hour review from someone who doesn't normally do movie reviews, and she felt compelled to keep saying how she normally loves seeing pro-diversity left wing messages in Star Trek. But it's such an amazingly bad series that even its target audience can't defend it. I'm not woke, but I used to love Star Trek as a kid. Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever. I don't care, I hate that pile of garbage so much that I'm never giving them another dollar or view unless they publically apologize for it. It felt like someone (maybe Patrick Stewart? Maybe Alex Kurtzman? Maybe all the Star Trek actors who have been stuck doing silly conventions with crazy fans for decades?) genuily hated their fanbase and wanted to give them the finger.
I don't know. Maybe I'm being too optimistic here. But I feel like we've finally crossed the threshold where everyone is fed up with Hollywood's crap. They've taken pretty much every bit of pop culture we loved as children, and burned it all down to make a quick buck. They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism. You can only keep doing that for so long before the audience gets sick of it.
And at long last, we can finally agree that the new Star Trek movies are bad, right?
BahRamYou
2yr ago
I think it's stupid when people bring up one random no-context tweet or private joke and use it as an excuse to cancel someone. That's not really what this is though. It's a whole series of tweets, stretching across years, which perfectly match her entire career and worldview. This is who she is.
Also, there's no real pressure on her yet besides people on right-wing twitter dunking on her. She's still very much in charge. It's her underling who got fired because of one essay (admittedly an essay where he publicly broadsided the entire organization).
BahRamYou
2yr ago
This feels like one of the most boring presidential elections of my lifetime. So far it's mostly about Trump's personal scandals and Biden's age, both things that we've known and discussed already for what feels like forever. And it's frustrating, because like you said there are lot of big dramatic issues that we could be talking about. But neither of the parties seems to really want to talk about them in a clear way. There's been zero discussion of things like:
- were the lockdowns were justified
- why does the birth rate keep falling
- why are we banning TikTok and not everything else
- Are we going to give Ukraine air power to actually win the air, pull out and let the Europeans handle it, or just keep drip-feeding them leftover ammo from the 70s so they can fight forever but never win?
- Are we just gonna keep supporting Israel forever, no matter what?
- Are we actually willing to fight China over Taiwan, or are just kinda giving up on that?
- Why do house, education, and healthcare prices just keep rising forever?
- What's the point of college education if technology is automating all the educated professional jobs? It seems like what we need now are blue-collar and service-sector workers, not more office drones
But this is not discussed. Both candidates seem pretty similar, honestly- they both want to more or less leave things as they are, with just minor disagreements over taxes and trade policy. Fair enough, maybe it'll be good to have a boring election for once. This reminds of Clinton vs Dole in 96, which was a match between an incumbent vs a very old senator, with most of the debate being around Clinton's personal scandals.
BahRamYou
2yr ago
As I understand it, this is already a standard tactic used by large law firms to crush individual lawyers. They don't need LLM, they just hire a ton of new lawyers to churn out vast amounts of legal documents. A single lawyer trying to fight a lawsuit against them would get buried, because he just can't physically read all of that stuff and respond in any human lifetime, and if he can't respond he loses by default.
Big corporations also do this as a defense mechanism. So you want to sue them, and they're required to turn over the relevant docs? Oh they'll do that... but the "relevant docs" are like a million pages of garbage. Again, only a giant law firm has the resources to actually read through all of it and process it effectively. DDOS via human bureaucracy.
BahRamYou
6mo ago
Bear in mind that Robert Kagan is a never-Trumper who publically endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. Since then, he's had no real government positions, so he's just an unimportant newspaper pundit now. Hes been wildly against everything Trump has ever done. Most of the other Neocons strongly support the Iran war- indeed, many have noted that they seem to have convinced Trump to get into it when he was strongly isolationist in his first term.
BahRamYou
2yr ago
Breaking news: Uri Berliner has since resigned. I have to assume that "resigned" here is the usual thing where bigshots are allowed to resign to save face and avoid the public spectacle of being fired that any normal employee would face.
One thing I should add, which I didn't know earlier: some of this is being driven by this guy: Christopher Rufo. He was apparently important in proving that former Harvard president Claudine Gay plagiarized her PHD thesis and getting her fired/resigned, and recently has been posting a lot of Katherine Maher's most ridiculous tweets to make people realize what kind of person she is. He's been getting signal boosted by Elon Musk. This gave some of his tweets, as he put it, "10 million views, compared to NPR which gets 8 million listeners per week." So it's not like this stuff just randomly came up, there seems to be an organized conservative effort now to headhunt these woke progressive leaders.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
I think he's just caught between a rock and a hard place.
If he wants to keep his position as "internet historian," it's essential that he has some genuine academic bona fides. Right now he's an adjunct professor, which is just barely enough to call himself "professor," even though everyone in academia knows he's not a "real" professor.
His specialty is an classics, specifically the military history of the Roman republic. That's a very old-school, white male coded, conservative interest. It's also been out of favor with the academy for, I don't know, at least 100 years. So if he bends too far towards his fan base, he'll get excommunicated by the academy and lose all of his professional bona fides. He'll become just another internet "roman statue guy." On the other hand, if he leans too far towards the academy, he'll spend all his time writing about the queer women of color in the roman republic, or whatever. He wrote a whole series about how women traditionally made clothing and he had to admit that primary sources were sparse because even the primary sources of the time thought that this was an incredibly boring topic which no one cared about. They basically just took a strand of wool or flax then "spun" in a circular motion, over and over and over, for approximately one million hours, until it resembled something like a modern dress. Neat.
In of his recent article, he did admit the contradiction- if he was a woman or Black person, writing about more academia-friendly topics, he'd probably be a full professor by now. Instead he's marginalized as basically a glorified grad student, despite having a huge internet following and way more funding than most full professors. And yet, he has to kind of look down on and despise his followers in order to maintain his standing. Truly a difficult position.
Actually, it's about ethics in literary journalism
Do you remember a short story called "Cat Person," which was published in 2017? It went viral and caused quite a stir at the time. It's a story that involves dating, sex, questionable consent, and an awkward age gap, so it's practically the perfect storm for inciting controversy at that time. But it's also just a well written and engaging story- I'd recommend reading it and forming your own thoughts if you haven't already.
The story is written in close third person, which gives the impression that we have a perfectly reliable narrative of what the main person is thinking and feeling, while the other characters don't matter so much. It invites us to feel sympathy and understanding for the main character as something adjacent to a rape victim. The male character starts off seeming normal but behaves worse and worse as the story goes on, leading to the ending where he sends her a string of angry text messages that end in the single word: "whore."
It's an intensely personal story, and told in a realistic style, so one can't help but wonder if it's about the author's own life. If so, is that really what happened, or is she perhaps twisting some details to make herself look better and her ex-boyfriend look worse?
The author, Kristen Roupenian, strongly denies this. They published this interview just a couple days after the story (did they already know it would blow up?) where she said among other things:
So no, it's not a true story, or at least not anyone she met in real life. It's mostly her venting at some online troll. She goes on to say that she actually felt more comfortable writing Robert's texts in the story because she's his age- she doesn't really know what it's like to be a 20 yr old college girl these days and has trouble imitating their texting style. But it's clearly meant to be a feminist story where we mostly have sympathy for the woman and very little for the man, evaporating to nothing at the end as he turns into a monster.
A year later, she published this follow-up: What It Felt Like When “Cat Person” Went Viral
This essay is auto-biographical. She explains that just getting her story published in the New Yorker was a huge break for her as a writer, and she was thoroughly unprepared for the amount of publicity it got. There was a huge response to the story, initially from feminists praising it, and then from (mostly) men criticizing it or defending the man in the story. It was taken as sort of a microcosm for all bad relationships between men and women in the modern era, particularly for short term sexual relationships. Everyone wanted to know more details about her own life and the "real" story, so that they could know more about how to judge it.
Except that, as she said... it's not real. She made it up. She's actually a 36-year-old lesbian woman with very little hetero dating experience. She spent her twenties doing the Peace Corp in Kenya, followed by a long graduate program studying African literature. Her own life is pretty much the polar opposite of the main character in the story.
I'm sympathetic to this perspective. As a writer, I would want my story to just stand on its own, without people trying to investigate and psychoanalyze every detail of my life. I strongly believe in 'Death of the Author," so it really shouldn't matter what the author did or thought when they were writing the story. It's a short story with many details missing, so you're free to imagine into it whatever you want. If you want to imagine it as a banner for why women need feminism to assert themselves more strongly, and why enthusiastic consent (not just nominal consent) is important, you can read it that way. Or you can read it the exact opposite way, for how a guy did absolutely nothing wrong except being slightly awkward and insufficiently attractive, so he then gets his feelings hurt and his reputation destroyed by the whims of a young woman who can't even say what he did wrong. All she has to do is cry, and she's got her entire friend group leaping to her defense, plus a huge outpouring of #metoo from everyone reading this story online.
So what I'd like to say is that it's just a good work of fiction, and you can leave the author out of it unless you want to buy her book.
Except... apparently it isn't a work of fiction after all
This came piece came out in 2021, 2 years after the follow-up reaction piece and almost 4 years after the original story. In this essay, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claims that "Cat Person" was actually inspired by something that happened to her. And not just "inspired" by, but with enough specific details matching that she had dozens of acquaintances contacting her to ask if she had written the story herself under a pen name.
Apparently she had been an 18-year-old in a relationship with a 33 year-old-man, living in the same town as the story and having their first date at the same movie theater, with a very similar communication style. Other than the age gap, it seems like they had a pretty typical relationship- awkward at first, dragging out over several months, then happy for a few months, then gradually breaking up. She was perfectly happy with their sex life, she was just happier living in a different city. They still kept in touch occasionally, and were amicable but not close.
She contacted him about the story, and he agreed it was very odd, an uncanny match to some of their own experiences. It also him a lot of angst and self-doubt, to see himself as the bad guy in the story. But they took it to be just some weird coincidence.
Three years later, she found out that he had suddenly died. It does not say how, just that it was "sudden." It doesn't exactly say suicide, but it also doesn't say it wasn't suicide, so I have strong suspicions.
After his death, this woman Alexis did some more investigation. She contacted a mutual acquaintenance (though apparently he wasn't close enough to know that this man had died). She asked him about the story, and he said that yes, it was true- this story was about her. Her ex-boyfriend and talked to the author of the story, and she based it on their relationship.
Some time later, this woman contacts the author of the story, and gets a response. The email says:
(apparently they also later had a phone conversation which she kept private)
When I read that, I felt outraged. I'm trying hard to be fair to the original story and author, to not give into angry-internet-male feelings of the eternal online gender war. But now by the author's own admission she:
The piece ends with some hand-wringing by the author about how "we are all unreliable narrators." So uh... maybe her own memories are all wrong, and the guy was actually was as bad as the fictional version of him? Maybe she was just too young and naive to notice that this guy she thought she liked was actually bad? Maybe some distant lesbian woman twice her age knows more about her own lived experience than she does? Despite all of her own memories, and evidence, and the testimonies of other people who all said what a genuinely good guy this man was... maybe the fictional version was more true because that's what resonated with other feminist readers' reactions?
No, screw that. I'm going back to my original gut reaction from when I first read it- this story is biased as hell, it's a feminist hit piece to smear all men, and it's just pure culture-war fodder. She started off with a true story for inspiration, but then deliberately changed all important details for maximum outrage. Sometimes things are just that simple.
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