BahRamYou
5d ago
I can't help but feel like there's a certain similarity to that, and how most European elections work. With all your different political parties, and weird cutoffs/bonuses, and backroom deal-making to make a coalition...
BahRamYou
4d ago
We do have the Miss America Pageant, but very few people really care about that anymore. I think with modern communications and moving around, there just isn't as much jingoism between US states anymore.
We might be more interested in an intra-North America competition. Doing it between countries really amps up the jingoism, like the Olympics and World Cup. It would be fun to see the US go up against Cuba in a song contest. Not sure how you'd make it fair, though...
BahRamYou
6d ago
They're also quite good at their original mission: investigating and stamping out counterfeit money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_United_States_currency
an estimated $70 million in counterfeit bills are in circulation, or approximately 1 note in counterfeits for every 10,000 in genuine currency, with an upper bound of $200 million counterfeit, or 1 counterfeit per 4,000 genuine notes
BahRamYou
11d ago
most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day. That was the issue in the 50s -- taking nicer and nicer jello casseroles and sewing unusually pretty aprons is not any more fulfilling than even quite a dull job, and husbands are not impressed by their wives chilling with their friends all day while they're at work. And then their kids grow up enough to take care of themselves, so what are they going to do?
That's true, but you could also say the same about working a job. Most jobs, even well-paying ones, just aren't that interesting as far as self-actualization and giving meaning to your life. It's an existential struggle that we all face, in this modern age of atheism and material abundance. If she's chilling with her friends, at least that might provide some real community and social circle, compared to the career woman late at night, too tired to do anything except order takeout and watch TV.
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."
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
11d ago
This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions.
It really is necessary, when we live in a society that puts so many contradictory constraints on us. I think that's why "autistic" and "creepy" have taken off so hard as insults lately- it labels a certain person who can't just "let it be," but consciously questions those unwritten social rules, which makes everyone else uncomfortable because it highlights the contradictions.
And things change in response. Like, maybe it was fine in the past to get an ".Mrs degree," as long as it wasn't made too explicit. But once you go around explicitly talking about it and make everyone aware of what's happening, they have to change their behavior to regain some plausible deniability.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Yeah it's a weird double-mission in the modern era. I guess it made more sense in the wild west days, when they were more like frontier super-policemen.
BahRamYou
14d ago
Are we allowed to do anything alone or do we need adult supervision at all times no matter what?
BahRamYou
12d ago
I'm curious, has Google or any other company ever tried recruiting directly from Africa? It seems like there are some talented people in Africa, like Igbo Nigerians, who might be overlooked by the US.
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
5d ago
Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!
How does the voting work? Are their brackets and eliminations, or is it just one giant vote and winner-takes-all? Being "polarizing" can work when you're just one choice out of many, and the haters weren't going to vote for you anyway, and they're split between many other options, but it attracts a small number of hardcore fans.
BahRamYou
28d 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
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
8d ago
300m long is more than three football fields! That is an absurd amount of space for anyone in a city, where we fight over parking spaces that are about 3 meters long. The one @ToaKraka linked sounds better, but 75m is still way too much space for most people. You also need enough space in the sky for othem to fly without running into someone else, which can happen at any angle in three dimensions. It could work for a select few, but... we already have that, with private planes and helicopters.
Besides, if we're going this route, why not bring back zeppelins? The Empire State Building was designed with a spire so zeppelins could dock on top, as were several other buildings of the time.
BahRamYou
12d ago
Japan
It appears as though the value of the Yen is currently in free fall. I can't say I know enough economics to explain the causes or potential implications of this, but it seems concerning nonetheless.
Noahpinion had a good (paywalled) article about this: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-japan-having-a-currency-crisis
The gist of it was that they're stuck in a hard spot. Nobody wants Japanese bonds because their interest rates are so low. And they can't raise interest rates because they have so much government debt and also a fragile employment situation. Still, "freefall" is an exaggeration. It's low but not that low. They have options, including if necessary, currency controls (forbidding people from selling the currency).
My contraversial opinion is they could solve this through immigration. There are a lot of weebs/retirees/weirdos who would want to move and live in Japan, but can't get a visa. Just let us buy a golden visa and go buy one of the abandoned houses there.
BahRamYou
10d ago
Yeah. And sane as you, i submitted at the last minute. Probably could hace done better with more tine, but its hard to tell how much time i should sink into this pointless online mental masturbation.
BahRamYou
14d ago
I had a crazy idea recently. What if we took LLM AI and, uh, scaled it up? Make a social media platform where you are the star of the show. Just you, or maybe you plus a handful of friends, plus hundreds, thousands, or millions of AI chatbots who all adore you and want to worship you as a celebrity. Finally, every single person on Earth can be the most popular person on the planet!
BahRamYou
4d ago
opportunity cost is a thing. also, was hoping for some more specific tips or advice instead of bland platitudes of encouragement. thanks though.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Has anyone here started a substack? I've been thinking of doing one, but having trouble getting started. I have a lot of ideas, but they're all over the place- I have no real niche where I can call myself an expert. And I don't have any following from twitter or whatever, this would be starting from scratch. I don't care about making money, but I would like people to actually read it and take me seriously.
Also my opinions are um... all over the place- both liberals and and alt-right would find something to get mad about. Is this even worth it? Or should I just write a diary?
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.
BahRamYou
16d ago
Someone told me once that Korea is a very trend-following society, perhaps more than any other country on Earth. Something comes along, it gets trendy, and then the entire nation gets crazy into it, for good or ill. Like, Kpop wasn't always a thing, it just exploded in the 2000s. They also have these weird food trends that seem to come and go like lightning (right now "salt bread" is a thing, with huge lines at popular bakeries. i have no idea why.)
This isn't a new phenomenon, and it also applies to religion. Buddhism spread to Korea in like 300 AD, and they immediately got super into it and it became the state religion in 372 and then was launched to other east Asian countries through Korea. Same with Taoism, and with Christianity in the 19th century, it just hits like a tidal wave. And, apparently, the same thing with Feminism and gender wars.
I would guess that it's just part of being a small, homogenous, tightly-knit country. Since they have their own language, they're a bit isolated from the larger Chinese and English speaking worlds. Culture just spreads and evolve really rapidly there. I guess it's sort of like how evolution happens fastest in small isolated populations, and much slower in larger populations.
BahRamYou
9d ago
As Kulak is fond of saying, the reason we don't have flying cars isn't that they haven't been invented, it's that they've been made illegal. They were commonly flown (and shot down) by teenagers in the 1910s.
what do you mean by this? A homemade airplane isn't the same as a flying car. I guess it could work if you live in a very rural, but the problem with airplanes is that you need a long runway both to takeoff and land, plus clear airspace. That makes them impractical for anyone living in a city. A flying car could theoretically fit in your garage, take off/land vertically, and fly carefully enough to avoid collisions in the sky.
BahRamYou
22d ago
Same. My gmail account at this point is probably more important to my identity than my social security number or driver's license number, at least on a day-to-day basis. It really worries me that this is in the hands of a private company, which could take it away on a whim, or get hacked.
I'm sure some of that is just "what decade did you grow up in" but yeah, 2000s had some great advantages for the artistic potential of video games:
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