BinaryHobo
22d ago
meritocratic systems common in the modern world should churn out a reliable stream of competent generals
Most countries spend most of their time at peace. Meritocratic systems tend to produce generals that are really good at politics.
That's why countries spend the first couple years of a war (if they're lucky) fighting the war they prepared for.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
You're modeling the entire right here as a completely cynical enterprise with no goals beyond hurting their outgroup. I think perhaps you could make some sort of case for an individual, such as Elon himself, but to model the entire right that way is missing the point. And worse, it is inaccurate.
I think you're underestimating the sincerity of the believe that the right has, that ruin and destruction will come from the left gaining unchecked power. Be it the economic conservatives who think a command economy will result in famines and shortages, or the religious factions that tend to believe in literal divine retribution, the beliefs held are sincere.
Now, are there cynical and petty people on the right? Absolutely. There are. But, taking the most cynical interpretation of the right, and comparing it to the left's most noble intentions is not a fair starting point.
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
Ever since the computer first arrived, keyboard and mouse has been the standard. You have a flat surface with raised little squares that you smack with your fingers. You have another little rounded shape with a flat bottom you move around, and click with.
I mean... no? The first computer was the ENIAC, and it didn't even have programmable memory, it has to be hard-wired and manually changed every time you want it to do something different. You didn't interact via keyboard, you interacted via pulling wires.
And the mouse isn't until ~20 years later in the mid 60s. So far as I'm aware, it's first demo'd publicly during the mother of all demos
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
I think people are using support for the death penalty as a proxy for various "tough on crime" measures.
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
We have a list of declining book sales for Disney in a medium overwhelmingly known for movies.
Star Wars is the epitome of nerd franchise. Nerds buy books. Now, if the books had broken into the mainstream (say, like Harry Potter), it would have blown all of the previous entries away. But even if they didn't, nerds still buy books. If these books were appealing to the traditional Star Wars demographic, 6 figure sales wouldn't be a problem.
It's not necessarily irrational for Disney to blow some money on a gamble like that, but that they keep putting them out does imply something about Disney's internal politics.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
Is it actually productive to try and understand Russian motivations?
Incredibly so. Understanding your opponent is insanely useful in defeating them, generally by allowing you to predict them better. For example, an actor in a war of resources behaves much different than an actor in a war of national honor. The former may be more likely to move troops into sparsely populated and natural resource rich areas, while the latter would be more likely to strike at a capital or some other area of symbolic importance.
Or, to quote Sun Tzu:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
There's just hopping to the other side of the old schism.
With the pope losing legitimacy in the eyes of the conservative catholics, presumably papal primacy is out the window, what's separating them still?
The teachings on original sin are a little bit different?
filioque? I would be surprised if the average catholic was aware of that particular controversy.
There's precedent for western-rite orthodoxy, albeit limited.
Edit: And how much are those disagreements worth against direct apostolic succession connecting you to your savior? You really only have two options for that, and if you've already ruled out catholicism, you're kinda down to one.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
It's also possible that the nature of the job may result in different baseline levels of suspicion.
If you've put your life in someone's hands (successfully), it might just be harder to see them in a negative light. As opposed to another job where you might have normal office politics, or even be competing.
A brotherhood, instead of co-workers, as it were.
They could also all be corrupt enough to not want IA snooping around. There's several options for a difference in reporting rates viewed from the outside.
BinaryHobo
7mo ago
My marketing instinct suggests WD-41.
It's 1 more than before, so people will assume it is better, also the original WD-40 is because it was the 40th attempt to create something that displaces water (or so legend goes, I can't be arsed to go track down the veracity), but you can play on that.
BinaryHobo
5mo ago
Biology might be inescapable, but when you introduce testosterone into a system that may not have been designed to handle it, it's not that surprising that something like this happens a certain percentage of the time (no claims on what percentage).
But, like, testosterone is rough to deal with even for people who were introduced to it in the way nature intended.
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
What's notable is that there seem to have been no decision maker (with enough power, anyway) who was enough of a cynical profit maximizer to actually properly analyze the ideology's claims of profitability and to put a stop to this kind of ideology-prioritizing behavior.
Anyone that's much of a profit maximizer is maximizing their own profit. And it may very well be that defecting from the woke pattern would be detrimental to their own pay, rather than the corporation itself. It really depends on the internal politics of the organization, and if political rivals can use that defection against them.
BinaryHobo
3mo ago
And they and their followers will always vote for the Democrat.
Yes, but what that means is changeable. I know the "democrats were the party of slavery" line is a little played out, but they were. And a fairly big shift happened within the party without the party ever having a clean break.
The parties in the US are more like coalitions elsewhere, the coalition building just happens before the election rather than after, as would happen in a parliamentary system. There's a ton of factionalism inside them. Democrats holding these views aren't useless to one who isn't a democrat. It means, eventually, democrats with those views running for office. And, at worst, a whole bunch of extra in-fighting happening before things that non-democrats don't like being voted on.
If you're not a progressive democrat, you should probably like what you've described. Control of a few senators and representatives is probably what's going to prevent really strong legislation you don't like from passing next time the democrats have the trifecta.
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
I've made the joke since I joined Reddit an embarrassingly long time ago that nobody hates Reddit more than Redditors.
I feel like that was more of a post ~2012ish stance, maybe post 2010 in certain places (I was also on reddit for an embarrassingly long time).
Around the time of the Great Digg migration, I remember the site being really proud of itself (I'll let others decide if that was deserved or not).
Thinks like this were emblematic of the time. Reddit just really seemed like it was a better place to be than everywhere else. This is also the era when I heard it described as "4chan with a condom", so take that for what you will.
But that was a long time ago. If you'll excuse me, I need to go be nostalgic for a while.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
Certainly, a liberal might counter with FDR, JFK, or MLK
That would be a terrible counter. The youngest of those (MLK) was 12 when WWII started, and had shown significant oratory prowess before the end of WWII (winning an oratory contest in 1944). It would be hard for the intentional de-prioritization of oratory in the aftermath of WWII to impact any of them.
BinaryHobo
6mo ago
If you do (e.g. the way DeSantis is trying with New College) , they will be cut out of the art world as a whole.
I might be missing something here, but wouldn't that be the point? To create a completely separate status hierarchy?
I mean, yeah, the existing artistic elite isn't going to jump ship. Do you want them to? That sounds like you're asking for your new institution to be marched through all over again. Plus, these aren't the natural members you're looking for in your new institution. This is a high risk/high reward venture and you don't want a bunch of established people with baggage from the old institution. But do you know who totally goes for high risk/high reward strategies with a very high chance of death (social in this case) in exchange for a chance at status?
Young men with no prospects. In every age, in every nation, there are young, low status men looking for a way to take big risks to jump up the status hierarchy. Whether it be a colonial expedition, the rap scene in the Bronx, or a Somalian pirate joint-stock venture, there's always takers. As a bonus, this is a decent chunk of the art world's demographic, this lets you sap your opponent of the natural energy that comes with an influx of youth.
BinaryHobo
7mo ago
You're ignoring the quoted part that this comment is, obviously a response to.
And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent.
That's the same language we, as a society, use for minors. That seems arguing for making consensual sex with a mentally unwell person count as statutory rape, or at least I feel this is a valid interpretation.
BinaryHobo
7mo ago
Is this using a system like the census where they define urban as an arbitrary density cutoff that includes things like small farming towns that are ruby red? That kinda undermines everything people mean when they say urban.
I mean, it's kinda justifiable for the census. Their data presumably have some hand in planning things like plumbing infrastructure, but it's really not helpful for a thread on the culture war where urban tends to imply blue tribe.
BinaryHobo
8mo ago
The supreme court nominees.
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing
Best guess I've got is that it will last exactly until a deal is signed with some big AI company for access to the dataset.
BinaryHobo
11mo ago
I took "unique atomic arrangements" to mean a novel molecular structure (y'know, because the atoms are in a different arrangement). Possibly some sort of polymer or alloy we're not aware of (or don't know how to mass produce).
Which is exactly what I'd expect on an extra-terrestrial space probe. Mostly because our space probes are kinda shitty and I expect them to get quite a bit better before someone else finds one of them.
Don't get me wrong, I still don't buy it, but this wasn't the weird part for me.
BinaryHobo
19d ago
I think you're ignoring that video games are big business these days, with large staffs. You're going to have a lot of people just phoning it in, along with a general regression to the mean. It's possible for a single person operation to knock it out of the park (or completely bomb, but you're probably not going to hear about that game). It's really hard for a 1000 person operation do do anything that far above average (average for a professional).
BinaryHobo
19d ago
Both of those games are over a decade old. It could be a symptom of the drop-off that he's talking about that you aren't listing newer ones.
BinaryHobo
19d ago
Either way I think the most important development in all of this is that post-internet, nationalism cannot really be a thing. It's hard to convince the youth to die for your government after years of telling them that the people who just arrived have as much of a claim to the country as they do.
That seems more like an argument that nationalism is incompatible with a modern, liberal, cosmopolitan society. Which, honestly, I don't think anyone on either side would argue with you on that.
That doesn't mean it can't necessarily be a thing in modern times, it just means that nationalists have to be willing to jettison at least one or more of of [modern|liberal|cosmopolitan]. And in the circles where nationalism flourishes online even jettisoning all three of them is quite popular.
BinaryHobo
6mo ago
I believe HBD is a worse explanation for persistent black underachievement than the lingering effect of centuries of cultural disruption under slavery combined with decades of further disruption under racist post-Civil-War legislation
I know this wasn't the point of your post, but the way you sorta phrased this as a binary made something click in my mind. I'm gonna be honest, I can't buy either of these explanations. And both, oddly enough, for the same reason, the Greenwood District in Tulsa (site of the famous race riot). Ok, so not just Greenwood, but there's plenty of examples of functioning black communities from that era.
Modern society is just straight up not as racist as 1920s Oklahoma. And black people were able to build functioning communities within 60 years of gaining their freedom. And by all accounts, communities that worked quite well. I'm aware of the highway system disrupting black communities, but it's been 60 years since that happened, and that can't be as big of a disruption as being enslaved. There has to be, at the very least, a confounding factor.
At the same HBD makes no sense. The argument is generally that black people have too low of an average IQ to succeed, but we have examples of functioning communities. Even if it were true, the most extreme claims of the HBD groups tend to put the average IQ at around 70, and that's roughly where the US as a whole was circa 1900, and there's plenty of examples from that time of people with this average IQ forming perfectly functional communities. That can't be the entire explanation either.
I'm less familiar with the UK than the US, but my understanding of the comment was that after 50-60 years of destruction of national cohesion/sentiment/what have you turning what would have been a calling that a citizen takes up to preform their duty into a mere job that an atomized individual takes, this could be the trigger for said atomized individual to lose the last of their belief in the system and finally try to maximize market value.
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