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
1mo ago
Calling them "the same country" is really oversimplifying, since both countries changed a lot over time.
Notably: Iran purged most of their military leadership after the 1979 revolution, and was struggling to rebuild when Iraq invaded in 1980. They managed to fight back pretty well, considering how lacking they were in equipment for most of that war, and came close to winning. But the US, USSR, and other countries were selling a lot of weapons to Iraq, which kept them going.
When the war finally stopped, Iraq was totally exhausted and indebted, with no one left to sell them weapons. Their soldiers and population were horribly demoralized from the years of bloody warfare. You can't generalize from that and say "oh I guess invading Iran would be a cakewalk." They've had several decades to re-arm and re-train their military. Not to mention that this is a country roughly the size of the eastern United States with a population of 90 million. Israel is 10 million and roughly the size of New Jersey, by way of comparison.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
The actions of Israel, including the impending evacuation of the Rafah ghetto, can be understood by accepting the above two points. It so happens that the above two points are identical to the position of Holocaust Revisionists, or Holocaust Deniers, regarding the Nazi policies with respect to the Jews. Those policies also resulted in the concentration and mass resettlement of the Jews, culminating most famously in the evacuations of the Warsaw Ghetto, those infamous deportation trains, which took place over many months.
In contrast with the Official Narrative- that the secret policy of the Germans was to kill all the Jews, Revisionists maintain the policy was to resettle the Jews to a territory in Russia, with a Jewish state likely being created after the war in Madagascar or Palestine. The Revisionist position is supported by documents, which all refer to "resettlement" as the policy objective of the deportations.
It's important to realize that the holocaust wasn't a single, organized event, but a gradual process which changed over time. It started off with angry, poor people looking for a scapegoat, and engaging in random acts of violence against the market-dominant minority. As the war developed, resources were in short supplly, so it became very convenient for the regime to have a group of people that they could work to death and not worry about feeding. Or simply beat up and take their stuff. The famous death camps only arose near the end of the war, and were a minority of overall deaths- they were the result of a regime gone mad in the face of inevitable defeat, and trying to find some insane way to still cling to a fantasy of victory. But that's where the revionists some times manage to "score points"- they point out correctly that the death camps didn't actually kill 6 million people, while ignoring all the more mundane deaths that were also part of the holocaust.
Perhaps there was "a plan" to resettle the Jews elsewhere. The Nazis had grandiose plans for all sorts of things. But those plans were rarely fleshed out in detail. Barbarossa was famously ill-planned, with a certain amount of wishful thinking and "this will be easy, no need to bother planning." Any "plans" they might have made for resettlement were, at the least, negligent homicide, indulging in fantasies of peaceful resettlement when any sane person would have called it ethnic cleansing.
What Israel is doing seems... somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, yes, it's not too much of a logistical stretch to imagine pushing the Gazans over the border into Egypt. That would be a relatively short walk, and then they'd be in another Arabic nation. But it would still be a violent ethnic cleansing, and the only way it would realistically happen is with extreme violence. They may get away with it, but it's not in any way morally justified.
There's a youtuber who's been showing up a lot in my feed lately. "The Healthy Gamer" aka "Dr Alok Kanojia" aka "Dr K." His actual channel is here: https://youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGG but the single clearest expression of his views is probably his interview here with another influencer, Diary of a CEO.
The reason I bring him up here is that he reminds me a lot of when Scott A used to talk about social issues. First of all, he's a psychiatrist. So at least some of the time, he has the weight of authority on his side (based on my training at Harvard medical school, there's lots of research saying... blah blah blah). But he's not afraid to go way outside the mainstream, speculating about hot-button cultural issues, particularly incels and modern dating. He's also got a hefty dose of "woo"- he spent time at some sort of Hindu monk training program in India, and his main recommendation for most people is "Yoga and meditation."
He uses a lot of clickbait thumbnails, with some wording that seems ripped straight from 4chan /r9k/. "Why therapy sucks for men," "Getting a girlfriend is NOT an achievable goal, "untake the blackpill," "why chasing red flags lead to love," and many others. Most of them are very long, so I've only skimmed through them. That's another similarity he has with Scott A- he has immense patience and goes on at great length over what most other people just hit in tweets and short videos. I hate the fact that he's using video as a medium, but I do understand that's what the young people are into these days. It also lets him sooth us with his calming voice and demeanor, instead of just focusing on the words...
Overall he comes across as both very wise and very kind. His overall perspective seems very "blue-pilled," but he seems to genuinely understand the slang that red-pillers and incels are using, which most liberal blue-pillers seem to get slightly wrong. He admits that a lot of the incels/red-pillers/black-pillers have genuine problems. He even admits that, for some of them, it's quite logical that they would want to commit suicide, given how crappy their lives are and how few solutions are available. He strikes a good balance between "here's how you can help yourself" and "this isn't really your fault, it's the fault of society." He's one of the very few men I've seen who's able to cry and camera and make me more sympathetic towards him. I can't help but like him, even when I disagree with him.
That said...
He's not content to just be a Youtube influencer. He's also selling a "coaching guide" on his website: https://www.healthygamer.gg/ for $100. Or a series of "coaching lessons" with a personal "coach" (NOT a licensed therapist), for $50/session (20 session minimum). Not with him, personally, but with some other person that he's supposedly trained. There's also a more expensive program for wanna-be Youtube creators.
I don't know how to feel about that. On the one hand... that's what psychiatrists and therapists do, right? They have to make a living, so they charge for their services. It's understandable that you can't fix all your problems from just watching Youtube videos, and maybe this sort of coaching works better than regular therapy (which I do have a pretty low opinion of). And there's a lot of alienated young men right now who really don't have anyone in their life they can reach out to for help right now.
On the other hand... this is exactly what scammers like Andrew Tate and the old PUAs do. Set himself up as this great, winning guy (he's not afraid to show off his lovely family and nice house), and offer an expensive service to teach vulnerable young men how to follow in his footsteps. Since the service is kind of vague, he can charge whatever he wants and there's no way to prove he scammed us. And he's definitely working the algorithm as hard as he can, with clickbait thumbnails and lots of Youtube shorts, plus going on interviews with other famous channels.
I can't tell whether this guy is the nicest, kindest guy who just wants to make a living from his very valuable service, or the shadiest scammer who's taking advantage of miserable people while pretending to be a saint. It's one or the other, no in-between. Thoughts?
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I vaguely remember a period in the 80s and 90s when cars were a culture war. "Assholes drive imports" was a slogan for a certain sort, who were patriotic enough to buy American cars even when the foreign imports were clearly superior. It was mostly working classs rightwing types doing that.
If we get a big wave of cheap, good-enough, electric cars made in China... how do the culture war lines break down? The right is more pro-American, but these days the left is more foreign-interventionist and might care more about opposing China. The left likes electric cars, but the right has more broke people who just want to save money. And Elon Musk doesn't fit clearly on either side.
On the other hand, does this even matter? Once upon a time the auto industry was a huge deal, both to create jobs and for the military-industrial complex. Nowadays, like you said, the big car companies are tiny compared to... gaming graphics card manufacturer. And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer. So maybe it's OK to just let China take over the car industry, just like we let them take over every other kind of manufacturing.
I've got an idea to fix social media. No, seriously.
There's a concept of social capital, where your network of human connections is roughly analogous to financial capital. Some people have more, some people have less. And it's pretty clearly better to have more- whether it's finding a job, finding a romantic partner, or just finding someone to go bowling with, social connections matter a lot.
The only problem is, it's hard to measure it. How do you quantify how popular someone is? As that wiki article says, "There is no widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, which has become a debate in itself." But now, thanks to social media, now we know! You can just look at your social media accounts and it tells you exactly how many friends/followers/subscribers/whatever you have. (of course that leaves out a lot of info, like how many of those accounts are bots vs real people, and whether they really love you or just clicked the button on a whim. But it's a start). I'm going to focus on twitter for simplicity, but this is broadly true of any social media platform.
I was wondering if anyone had calculated a "gini index" to measure inequality in social media. I couldn't find anything, maybe because there were too many results about how social media distorts income inequality. But maybe this is new ground for economists to study? What I did find about Twitter:
- the average (mean I guess) user has 703 followers
- the top 10 twitter accounts have over 100 million followers each. Elon Musk is currently on top with 170 million.
- most of his followers only follow him and no one else
- 170 million / 700 = 143,000. For wealth, the median American net worth is now almost $200,000, compared to Elon Musk's 190 billion. That's a ratio of "only" 950,000. Which I guess is larger than the first one, but that first number is still huge.
Anecdotally, that seems to be how most people now use social media. They don't use it to connect to their real-life friends and family, they use it to follow big accounts. Either real-life celebrities like Elon Musk and Taylor Swift, or just an influencer who was lucky enough to go viral. Those people have a huge audience for every single shit they post, while most of us have barely anyone reacting to us. It's a weird dynamic where the big accounts get so many replies they can't possibly read them all, and most normal people are screaming into the void. Not very "social." . They used to say that "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, " but that doesn't seem to be the case. Big celebrities just suck up all the attention.
My idea: redistribution! Put a progressive tax on followers, so that every big account loses a certain percentage each year, with the percentage going up with size. Maybe 10% per year for the top accounts. Those followers are reassigned to follow some random person at the bottom, just like how taxes take away rich people's money and give it to poor as welfare. We'd all get around 5-10 new followers randomly assigned to us each year, which isn't going to make us e-famous, but it's a lot if you think of them as real people actually becoming friends with you each year.
You might ask, what's to stop the reassigned from just going dropping their new follow and going back to Taylor Swift? Nothing. If they really want to follow her, and hate this new person they've been assigned, they're free to do that. But my sense is that most people are following a lot of accounts out of sheer inertia. I hardly ever curate my connection list, I just keep following the same people forever. I have a lot of Facebook "friends" who I went to high school with and now barely recognize. I have Youtube subs I never watch. If you took them away, I don't think I'd notice. And it would give me more of an incentive to post if I knew that someone was actually going to read it, without me having to "work the algorithm" to "build up a following."
To some extent Youtube seems to actually do this. I've noticed it randomly recommends me some very low-view videos sometimes, like double-digit views with no comments. One time I reached out to the creator, and they replied back, and they became one of my very few Twitter followers who isn't a bot. I think something like that, on a larger scale, would help Social Media become more "social" instead of mindless passive celebrity worship.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I found the latest Douthat piece on Ukraine to be quite interesting: https://archive.is/xVlg2 Basically he argues that there is a real tradeoff between helping to defend Ukraine and Taiwan. It's not a question of money, so much as physical equipment. China is doing an intensive modernization of its military, aimed to be done in 2027. That might not mean anything, but it could also be a prelude to invading Taiwan. Which, Douthat argues, would be a much bigger loss for world order than Ukraine.
It's a tough tradeoff. Lots of angles to consider:
- a real, here-and-now war, vs a potential future war
- an "emerging" democracy vs a much more stable democracy
- vague promises to both countries, but no formal treaties
- the role of Europe and Asian allies in both respective theaters (again, lots of vague promises but no formal treaties)
- would depleting the US arsenal by sending everything to Ukraine make China more likely to invade?
- or, would not supporting Ukraine make China more likely to invade?
For what it's worth, Manifold has the odds at 21% now. Not super high but much higher than I would like.
... on the other hand, in my darker moments, I can't say that I'd really hate to see the end of the US-led world cathedral of global liberal capitalism.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Ironically these UAP videos just make me have a higher respect for fighter pilots in general.
I look at them, and I can't tell what the hell I'm seeing. Is that a UFO, defying the laws of physics? Or a normal plane? Maybe a fishing boat, a bird, or just a ball of static? It all just looks like a grainy grey mess to me. Somehow these fighter pilots are able to look at it and instantly distinguish all those things, and tell me that "something ain't right with this one." But then there's the debunkers, who claim it's all perfectly normal and just gimbal effects or whatever. I have a degree in physics, and I have no idea what the hell is going on in any of them. I feel like I would need to spend a long time flying military aircraft to really know.
In the meantime, "UAP" seems like a good acronym. There's a lot of weird shit in the atmosphere. ball lightning, for example, is famously real but hard to explain. There's probably other stuff like that too. Or it could just be a pilot who's tired from flying too many hours and starting to see things, combined with a sensor glitch, I don't know.
I'm not totally a skeptic. I think the Fermi Paradox is a real, interesting problem. So maybe it is UFOs! I just don't know.
A more "medium" explanation might be classified military experiments on something like maurader a plasma gun that can shoot projectiles at 3% of the speed of light. That would certainly look "weird" on any normal sensor equipment.
BahRamYou
23d ago
You can't really talk about protests like they're a unified group with a specific plan. It's like asking "what are those people on the Motte hoping to accomplish?" There's a lot of them, and they're all different.
I think a big part of protests is to improve the cohesion of the protestors. They start out as just a mob of dissatisfied individuals who hate the current status quo, but they'll talk to each other, march together, chant slogans together, and eventually figure something out. Over time they turn into a unified, coherent political activist group. They might alienate a lot of neutrals, but those random neutrals don't have much political power either. A small, committed activist group can wield disproportionate power. See for example: AIPAC on the other side.
In a general sense, I think university leftists have done a great job convincing college students that being anti-Israel, pro-Palestine is the default "leftist" "intellectual" position. That's going to have ripple effects down the line.
All good points. But the earlier decades had their charms too (at least for me, as a white American male).
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The 40s allowed every healthy young person to sign up and be "a hero" in the greatest war the world has ever known, which for Americans mostly meant hanging around in England or the South Pacific islands, dating the local women. Then you have lifelong bragging rights as "the greatest generation."
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The 50s: ridiculously strong economy. Just walk into your local factory, shake the boss's hand, and you've got a job that lets you buy a house and support a family. "Support a family" meant being head of the household, where the wife is fully devoted to taking care of you and the kids. Or go into the cities, rent an apartment ridiculously cheaply, and live as a beatnik, making a name for yourself in all the new forms of music. Or tour the world, which was all destroyed from WW2, so your American middle-class salary made you relatively rich. Buy yourself a new car every year, because each new model year is better than the one before and you can afford it. Or become a professor, since all the universities were hiring like mad.
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The 60s: Much the same, but with better music and movies. You can also move out to California and be hippy, living in a commune for practically nothing or going surfing all day. If you were organized enough to buy a house there back then, it's probably worth millions now. Or get a regular office job, wear a suit and tie, have a secretary, and be on the golf course by 4 every day. Enjoy listening to the local news tell of amazing technological progress like "man lands on the moon" while your wife cooks you dinner and your 4 children play outside. Or if you're more adventurous, go to Vietnam, experience what it's like to kill a man, then go work off the stress by banging a dozen hookers (no worries about condoms or aids).
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The 70s: Even better music and movies. Any guy with a guitar can instantly become a "rock star," possibly getting rich, but at least having a good time playing local shows. Or hang out in disco clubs, dancing with the beautiful women who flocked there. Take one of them with you to the drive-in theater, in the back of your massive Cadillac. Complain about the middle east and gas prices, but ultimately it's not your problem. Cities, beaches, and international travel are still very affordable. Host a party and impress everyone with your stereo, record collection, and maybe some blow.
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The 80s: Get into finance and live like a king with some basic math. Or computer programming, or hardware electronics. Hang out at the local arcade, impressing people with your mad pac-man skills, or at home on the NES. Wear a crazy colored jacket. Watch "Cocktail" and then start a cocktail bar. Enjoy the feeling of your country's supreme military dominance and victory in the cold war. Watch all the classic sci-fi movies on first release, then over and over, and talk about them with your local crew. Rock out to the coolest hard rock shows of all time. Travel to Japan and see it at the height of its bubble, but while also being an exotic foreigner.
I think what all of these decades have in common was we were rich enough to have materialistic comforts and freedom, but still doing thingt in the real world instead of being all addicted to our screens. That, and relative status is also important for human happiness. I also like the aesthetics of pre-1940s architecture, clothes, and music, but there's probably too much poverty back then for me to enjoy.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
mostly I just see this as a problem with citizen's ballot initiatives, in general.
Any "citizen" can put anything they want on the ballot. All you need is signatures... a lot of signatures. 120k for a statute in Oregon, which is way more than any normal citizen can gather from their friends and family. But it's peanuts for a PAC, just pay a bunch of pros to go canvas the streets all day. They can gather that many signatures for anything, from bored/crazy people who just want to be left alone.
Once it's on the ballot... who knows? Who's got time to read that shit? Most voters are not exactly legal experts. They vote for team D/R, plus their local incumbent, and that's it. They do not weigh the fine points of "how is this thing implemented." They just take a quick look and see if it feels good.
If they vote against it... well, just reword it slightly. It'll be back on the ballot again next election. Keep trying, it will eventually pass.
Once it passes, it becomes state law. Possibly even part of the state constitution! Now the state legislature can't touch it, they have to implement it as it is. No amendments, no legal challenges. The police don't know what to do, so they just leave it be.
In this case, their was a noble idea (we should help drug addicts instead of throwing them in prison) but the ballot measure was worded in a terrible way (just let them do drugs) and that's what we got. Frankly I'm impressed Oregon was able to repeal it. We're still stuck with the fluoride ban, the arts tax, and the bottle deposit, which have also had disastrous effects, all from stupid ballot initiatives.
I'll just put this out there- I think Canada should merge with the US. And arguably should have a long time ago.
- Canada's talented engineers (who also conveniently speak English) can easily move to the US and find jobs, instead of trying to kickstart some mini Canadian engineering industry that competes with Silicon Valley
- American Oil companies can help develop Canada's massive oil deposits and other natural resources, which cost a lot to develop and would benefit from economics of scale
- Average Canadians can move south for a warmer climate, instead of trying to cram into the few livable spots of Canada like Vancouver
- Crazy Americans who want to live in the far north can do so, helping to maintain the infrastructure in what might actually become an important area of the world (the Northwest passage, and a border to Russian Airspace)
- Fewer silly disputes over things like Oil and Lumber tariffs
- Quebec would fit in nicely as yet another ethnic/language minority in the US, instead of being this one persecuted minority in Canada with a chip on its shoulder
- We're already pretty well integrated though things like NAFTA and NATO
No clue how this would shake up politically, but I would think it would make both nations more moderate. The US certainly wouldn't vote for Trudeau.
BahRamYou
20d ago
what is the right place to go to be a bum?
Normies would say "go to the homeless shelter, they'll give you the help you need." But that help usually comes at a high price, like: no alcohol, no drugs, no pets, no coed habitation, no noise, and strict hours.
Outside of the park, you can't just go and "hang out" because it's all owned by someone who will kick you out for loitering. Like I can't just go camp on some random person's lawn, even if it's otherwise empty and not being used for anything. You can maybe get away with it on a sidewalk, but you have to keep moving along constantly.
I kind of think what we need is to normalize favela's/shantytowns. Set up a space where the normal laws don't apply, and it's just a giant free-for-all. Something like Kowloon Walled City, but in every major American city. The bums get a place where they can stay for free and do whatever drugs they want. The normies can exile bums guilt free. Everybody wins.
BahRamYou
28d 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
1mo ago
not just entryists writing Codes of Conduct.
Has there ever been an attempt to write a "conservative" or "anti-woke" code of conduct? If Rust becomes the "woke" programming language, is it possible to turn C++ into the "anti-woke" language?
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Through the 20th century, the transition I'm talking about was when boys banded together for a hunt or tribal level military service. Consequences were real, people got hurt, women weren't only not "allowed" - it would've been actively detrimental to have them involved. Thus, you also had real and meaningful identification of a fundamentally male activity (hunting / war). While that no longer exists, women still absolutely have their sacred capability and activity; motherhood
I don't think it's a coincidence that the transition involved dangerous activities. The men who survived were also elevated into more prestigious roles- what feminists would call the patriarchy. But the whole point of an "elite" is that you can't have too many of them, you need some way to "thin the herd." It doesn't work to have everyone in society be part of the elite- the power structure is a pyramid.
(It didn't have to so dangerous as going to war or hunting mammoths. For a long time, just doing your job as a farmer or factory worker was somewhat dangerous, which I think gave men enough respect to enter the middle class. For women, too, giving birth was difficult and dangerous- not everyone got to be a mother, even if they wanted to)
So much of modern politics, to me, just seems like a power struggle to enter that elite. The feminists and media influencers want that power for themselves, so of course they're not going to help others take the elite roles. Instead it's this endless popularity contest of saying witty, popular things, which don't really have to make sense.
I like the term Steve Sailer came up with it: "Rule by Actresses." Instead of an aristocracy or a meritocracy, we now have a system that gives power to those who can performatively display strong emotions in an entertaining way. Mostly pretty young women crying very loudly. That's... not the best system, but I suppose it's better the anarchy of civil war.
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.
I mostly just wish people would take the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.
I agree. I find them both such an odd case. It seems like an odd case where they've both been totally repudiated by the professionals of their own fields (economics and psychology, respectively). Not even repudiated, really, it's more like "not even wrong"- they both just rambled at length with no real testable theories or experimental controls. No doubt it was shocking stuff to the victorians to talk about labor revolutions and sex but it's not that shocking today, and we have a lot of real social scientists studying this stuff.
And yet, they're still taken as this huge intellectual cornerstone to the modern humanities. It's like not even questioned, just of course marx and freud* were right, the real question is how do we go beyond their work to update and adapt it for the latest developments. So they take Marx's idea of a class struggle between an oppressive conspiracy of capitalists vs the mass of oppressed proletariats, and mad-libs that to every single other priviledged/underpriviledged group under the sun. it's really amazing. Why can't they read a different book?
Hell, there's even a term for it: Freudo-Marxism. I don't think those two have anything in common with each other, really- why did they bring together so many leftist philosophers and writers?
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Must be nice to have a family and community that actually cares about helping you with that! Spend a few years getting shot down on tinder and in clubs, then youll be more appreciative.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
So, do we go back to 19th century mercantilism? Use the government to subsidize our own, inferior industries, while the navy tries to forcibly stop them from shipping cars to us?
The alternative is to specialize in what we're best at: Pizza Delivery and MicroCode
BahRamYou
5mo ago
The way I understood it, the whole strategy was based around the IRS just being kind of a paper tiger. There were surprisingly few IRS agents, and they are mostly focused on big corporations and extremely wealthy people- it's just not worth their time to go after a regular shmuck who owes less than 100k. EG, Donald Trump seems to have gotten away with a lot of... questionable tax returns over the years, and he's not exactly poor or low-profile.
A whole lot of our life in a first-world society really just relies on cultural norms and the honor system. Like, if everyone decides to just start littering all over the place, the cops aren't going to stop that.
But it's been pointed out to me that the author of that strategy was kind of a hippy who avoids regular income, and also that the IRS has hired more agents lately and stepped up its game in automation. So it's possible that it worked for him in the past, but not for us going forward.
BahRamYou
29d ago
The capital gains tax is actually a very unfair and even absurd tax. You invest after-tax income from your salary and then when you realize a gain on those savings, even if it's just enough to keep up with inflation such that you have no real gain, you pay taxes again.
Otoh you have assholes like me who dropped out of work super early, living off capital gains, and pay almost nothing in taxes because the cap gains taxes are so low. Or the billionaires who just take out margin loans forever, then pass it all on to their heirs, who then get a stepped up basis with no capital gains.
another 90s Mac game (guess when and how I grew up)
Just to point out the obvious: Macs in the 90s were very much not the main gamer platform. It was almost a joke, how few games got ported to the mac. I mostly used macs in school, where I think it was seen as a plus that the only "games" on the mac were educational games. Instead it had its own, somewhat artsy-tartsy culture. I've never heard of those games you mentioned, but i'm not surprised the platform might have attracted some games with more sophisticated writing than the mainstream of Nintendo and MS-DOS.
Overall I'd say, "game writing was never good." Most classic games barely even had writing, either because it was pointless for an arcade-action game, or because there just wasn't enough memory or disk space then to handle a lot of text. Japanese games had an especially tough time with text.
And, aside from technical issues, a lot of games just don't need a lot of writing, and made a design decision not to include it. They tell the story in other ways. Famously John Carmack decided to put only the bare minimum of story into Doom because “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.". It's only in more recent years that it's just expected that every game must have some sort of story, with full-time writers cranking out the content. And so much of that content is just blatantly regurgitated from the limited Nerd Canon of Lord of the Rings/DnD/Star Wars/Star Trek, it's long since been exhausted, and the whole medium of "interactivity" just doesn't fit with having a fixed pre-written story.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Was kinda hoping there would be a more, um... "successful" example, instead of one guy making a brief show of resistance before getting his ass kicked. I guess GPL sorta counts, in that it's (a) not explicitly woke, (b) focused on the software itself and (c) can't easily be gotten rid of.
I'm feeling rather insane right now so I'll post a screed.
Do you ever feel like there are just... too many men on this planet? Not humans. Just men, in particular.
Humans are like 1.05 males: females at birth, so there's a natural imbalance. I can only assume this was balanced in the past because males died more: from war, or hunting animals, or just generally taking more risks.
None of that happens now, in our ultra-safe modern feminized society. So we just have a bunch of surplus males sitting around.. doing nothing... simping for women. Taking up body building, or feminism, or prostitution, or onlyfans, or whatever else will give them a drop of female attention.
Everybody knows "Ender's Game," but did you ever read the sequels? It has one (Speaker for the Dead) where they find an alien race that can only reproduce through a chemical change caused by war. That's... how I feel. Like, our species basically requires war in order to sort out our psychology. Otherwise there will be this latent male aggression caused by intra-sexual competition, and it won't end until we have some stupid fucking war over nothing, just to reduce the surplus male population.
There's too many dicks on the dance floor
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