BahRamYou
2mo 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.
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
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
1mo 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
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
3mo 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
2mo ago
A quick aside: Oregon is a sea of under-populated red surrounding a couple of blue cities, mainly Portland. The Portland metro area has about half the population of the whole state, and therefore Portland mostly controls state-level politics. Where goes Portland, so goes Oregon.
This is basically every state in the US, except the exact balance differs. Every single city is blue, every single rural area is red. Only the population balance determines the "red-state/blue-state"
BahRamYou
4mo ago
Because I'm out of the house more for work, as is typical for men, I could also just do another common thing men do and just...stop coming home after work. I'd be perfectly happy eating three dollar egg sandwiches from the local store, spending my time out drinking with friends, showing up back at ten or eleven at night and going to sleep before leaving in the morning.
I feel that.
I used to live in Japan, where what you describe is pretty much the stereotypical "salaryman" lifestyle. it's often held up to show how men are so miserable in modern society. But I always thought... it's not that bad. It gives them a lot of freedom and independence to do guy stuff, while also heavily focusing on their career. Guys don't necessarily want to come home at 5PM sharp so that we can cook an elaborate meal, clean the house, and have "family time" watching Disney movies on the couch for 4 hours. Once in a while, sure, but doing that every single day sounds like a nightmare to me.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
his reminded me of my own experience at a high school that hyper-optimized for college admission, where I quickly became jaded by classmates openly-performative "activism."
I went to the opposite: good, solid, public high school in the Midwest where everyone was clueless about how admission for the elite colleges worked. There were lots of us who were smart, hard-working, good grades, good test scores, etc. And we just got our asses kicked in admissions to the elite schools, because none of us had the right kind of extracurriculars or the right essays, and the teachers didn't know how to write recommendation letters for us. In retrospect I can see the mistakes I made, but how was I supposed to know that as a naive quakka-like 16-yr-old? I'm still a little bitter about that, and I do think it results in a society that rewards machiavellian sociopaths.
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
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.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I'm slightly worried that this sort of thing will become more common now that Richard Stahlman is cancelled/dying, and Linus is no longer programming Linux directly or cussing people out like he used to. For good or ill, so much of the FOSS world was really a labor by those two guys, as both chief contributor and dictator. I don't know how the FOSS world can evolve to a more egalitarian, democratic world.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I've never heard of this guy before so I can't say much. but I'm laughing my head off at his description of the Midwest:
To be sure, the Midwest met my expectations of being safer, more affordable, and less degenerate than the coastal Sun Belt. But it turns out this was a bad thing for my temperament!
It turns out safety is mostly achieved by cultivating a boring and risk-averse culture optimized to meet the needs of smallminded and gossipy people who get don’t get excited about much other than college sports and weddings. If you’re a contrarian novelty-seeker you will quickly get ostracized in an environment like this because people like you are a genuine threat to the social order. You can make friends with 95th percentile openness people who see you as a curiosity, but when push comes to shove they will never choose you over the Shire.
As someone who grew up in the Midwest, moved away, but occasionally still visits.. yes. yes to all of this. The main risk to your safety in the Midwest is suicidal levels of boredom. It's amazingly hard to get people to open up about any conversation that isn't college sports or local gossip.
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
4mo ago
Men are more competitive, so many smart men try to always show off how smart they are and compete over who's the smartest in their respective areas. Women don't do that as much, in my opinions, which makes them a lot easier to get along with but you might miss that "super genius!" feeling.
They're way better at expression emotion. Or just talking, in general. Your "lawyer" might be good at spitting facts and logical arguments, but how good is he at just talking for the same of bonding?
A stereotypical example. I was at a work party once, with a bunch of male engineers. The organizer of the party (a woman) had helpfully set up games and activities for us as icebreakers. The woman of the company used them as such, playing just a little before stopping to chat. The men went through the activities as if they were work tasks, completing them all quickly and efficiently, then sitting around awkwardly with nothing to talk about.
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.
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.
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
5d ago
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:
- advanced enough to handle 3d graphics easily
- still small enough to be done with a reasonably small team
- broadband internet available, but not required
- enough time to learn from past video games, but not locked in on DLC and other marketing addiction crap
- big-budget games were still willing to experiment and try new stuff
- mostly not concerned about wokeness
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Man, every single part of that sounds crazy today. Imagine running a flophouse where you rent out rooms to random drifters for 50 cents a night? Or the other side, being a drifter who just wanders around knowing he can pick up manual labor anywhere, and just a few hours of work to get paid instantly in cash? Or a business owner who's like "man I've got so much work to do, and no one to do it... that's ok, i'll just pay the next drifter who comes by to sweep the floors."
I know it must have been a super hard life, with no luxuries or safety net, but I do envy that level of freedom.
BahRamYou
14d ago
Are we allowed to do anything alone or do we need adult supervision at all times no matter what?
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I don't know man, a lot of this just seems like middle-class bourgeois disgust at how gross an overpopulated 3rd world country is. But give them time. Their income is rising rapidly, their birth rates are falling, and they're developing new infrastructure. It takes time to develop the state capacity to build public sewers and landfills. For now, it's still a lot better than it was a few decades ago when those poor people would have simply died.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
My baseline assumption is that whatever you choose to call this weird woke, centralized, authoritarian, elite/bureaucratic corporatist conglomerate, they want control. All of it. Over things that you would think have nothing to do with them. They want your wood ovens, your gas stoves, your gamer PCs, they really don't view anything as beyond their purview to "regulate" and make your life infinitely worse by slow degrees.
I don't think they're particularly evil. But I do believe in two things: The Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
And Upton Sinclair's law:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
So when you take anyone and put them in a bureaucracy, they will naturally start to believe that it is right and proper to expand the scope and power of the bureaucracy.
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.
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.
...
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."
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