Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced.
The definition of a Bullshit Job, as per Graeber's original essay, is exactly as you describe: one in which the product is useless or harmful, not one where there is no work done at all.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
I'm not going to be paying attention to what anyone else is saying; my world would have been shattered and I'd be doing my damnedest to keep every attention-sucking ghoul out of my mourning.
I think you do not understand how Bongland policing works.
The families in such cases are harangued into giving such a statements by the urging of the "friendly" "support" officers assigned to family liaison. I mean, the police's remit is the maintenance of public order, not the coddling of the bereaved, so I can't say they're not technically doing their jobs by hassling the families to come out with this kumbaya drek.
So in a sense you're right, the families probably would, in a vacuum, react emotionally as you would expect them to. But the police don't let 'em.
Epistemic status: rampant speculation
To an extent, transgenderism is attention-seeking behaviour. Or at least... validation-seeking behaviour. The insistence that others recognise them as the opposite sex and use their pronouns points to a people whose self-image relies on the affirmation of others. Indeed, it occurs to me that the frequent insistence in trans discourse (which I reject, but it nevertheless points towards their motivations) that "sex and gender are different, gender is a social role" bears me out on this - trans people want the social role of the other sex, to which the attitudes of others are not merely important, but definitional.
Anyway, this overriding concern for the affirmation of others, I imagine, overlaps somewhat with the urge to blog. Here one intentionally opens themselves up to outside scrutiny, curating a window into your field that other people can peer through and read your hot takes.
So it's not that cissies(?) are discriminated against in the blogosphere; it's that the cluster of personality traits associated with trans is somewhat overlapping with the cluster of personality traits that would make someone want to blog.
In conclusion: if anything could possibly be attributed to a selection effect, then it's a selection effect.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I did think Rishi reading "We give thanks to Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the son of God and etc. etc." was particularly farcical.
I guess it just feels like an extra notch in the subsumption of British particularism into the soup of globohomo when the Establishment doesn't respect the culture enough to even try to maintain the kayfabe. I mean, sure, I doubt Bojo's a sincere Christian at heart and him reading epistles would be rank hypocrisy, but even purely nominal Christianity is better than official Hinduism. With Rishi, you know it's just his mouth making sounds and the words are not believed. With Bojo, you'd merely strongly suspect it.
Much was made during the Trump years of "Why are you supporting this man who from his actions clearly doesn't give a shit about the white working class", and the answer was often "I can't get positive actions from any of the candidates, so I'll take the one that at least one pretends to care over the others who don't even bother with the pretense". Having a Hindu read homilies during the King's official pledge to protect the Christian spirit of Britain? That has to me the taste of a ceremony that didn't even pretend to care about the ancient mores of the sceptred isle.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Don't you think this will be returned with interest if the faction Trump represents gets back in power?
Having asked Blue Tribers this point blank before on the Old Place, the answer I got was Whig History: that Trump's faction will never get back into power, because the arc of history bends towards justice and no-one will vote for ReThuglicans in the enlightened future.
There's also a pinch of Machiavelli in here, that "Men should either be treated kindly or destroyed utterly". Fear that the enemy will get back into power is a reason to lawfare them MORE, not less, because if you lawfare them enough that decreases their chances of getting back into power.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Yes, this is the argument that's most convincing to me, too: "Cars aren't in the Constitution".
Call me an autistic legal formalist if you want, but if you don't give overwhelming weight to "It's literally in the Bill of Rights" then why are you even an American?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
DeSantis knows (or has legal advisors who have informed him) that there is no legal way for Florida to refuse extradition and that it's mandatory under the US Constitution. This is just baiting people with false hope.
He didn't say "refuse", he said "not assist".
The ability to slow-walk everything while still technically fulfilling legal compliance was used by the Deep State to great effect during Trump's presidency; DeSantis is just resolving to give them a taste of their own medicine.
The headline says refuse, I grant you, but, well, that's what you get for only reading the headline.
Pretty much my sentiments. The only reason there's any patchwork in NY is because of the 37% foreign born there. The differences you are observing are the chunks that have only just been thrown into the homogenous soup. You are watching them as they dissolve.
Now, all these people, at least most of them, enjoy the fruits of globalization. They drink coke. Eat pizza and sushi. Browse reddit. But overall, their primary cultural identity is unaffected.
See? They're dissolving already. Their primary culture isn't unaffected: every bowl of goyslop they eat is a bowl of lutefisk they don't, becoming less distinct from you one meal at a time.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
Maybe this kind of stuff is needed because people like you deny the Holocaust and argue that Jews control our lives?
Does everyone in America really need to be right about something that happened on another continent 80 years ago?
I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen, I'm saying we shouldn't care whether it did or not; certainly not to the extent of making laws about it.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
'Women have always been the primary victims of war' was a fair statement because most war discourse draws a difference between 'victim' and 'combatant'.
This is just playing a shell game with words here, no different to redefining racism as "privilege + power, impossible to be racist to whitey". If someone who just got his arms blown off by a mortar while he was eating his campfire beans doesn't count as a victim, then I contend that you have changed the word beyond all plausible recognition.
In the interests of drawing a line to contemporary culture war from the 30 year old news story that Uncle Ted is, I just want to highlight the extent to which reporting on his death is desperately trying to prosecute said culture war by smashing a square peg into a round hole:
His crimes seemed to begin shortly after he was fired from the family business by his brother for posting abusive limericks to a female colleague who had dumped him after two dates.
"Seemed" is doing a tremendous amount of work here. To me it SEEMED like his crimes began when he saw machines tearing up the forest. Who is it exactly, to whom there seemed to be an incel agenda?
Reading that paragraph, the words that reach my eyes are as printed, but the words that I think they're trying to get to reach my prefrontal cortex are
"Doing anything that a women doesn't like makes you a terrorist. All bad people are incels and all incels are bad people. Anyone who complains about globohomo only does so in bad faith because they're sexually frustrated."
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Insane he thought he could take on the West.
But this seems to be OP's point: he didn't think he was taking on the West. He thought (very reasonably) that he was taking on a demoralised meme country ruled by kleptocrats with a giant Russian fifth column. I concur that the smart bet in Feb was that Ukraine would fall like a house of cards while it's elites flee to a cushy Swiss government in exile. The country wasn't swimming in Western materiél back then; if the three day blitzkrieg had worked, there would have been no taking on of the west at all because the special military operation would have been a fait accompli before the Javelins arrived in numbers. That it has now morphed into such a take-on-the-west conflict was probably unexpected by Putin (and, indeed, everyone).
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Not that ethics is going to play a major role in how any of this unfolds; whatever has power will act as they will,
I'm pretty salty that after a decade of yelling "AI SAFETY AI ETHICS INSTRUMENTAL CONVERGENCE PAPERCLIPS" along with Bostrom and Yud, the people who are actually making the AIs put on their 'intentional misinterpretation' masks and go "We're very concerned about AI ethical alignment, look at all this time we spent making sure it doesn't Do A Racism".
"Ethics" is in there, but I would say it's of the variety "parochial tribal beliefs pretending to be universal moral standards" variety.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
implies that he thinks withdrawing advertising dollars is suppressing free speech, which is a perverse concept of “free speech”, wherein a private company is compelled to put their ad dollars towards another company.
It's not what they do, it's why they do it.
If the reason for Apple's withdrawal of advertising dollars is "I'm knowingly and nefariously trying to use my money to pressure you into silence" then I'd say it would take a perverse concept of free speech to not see that as violating it.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
"they are not stupid, so if they are at the bottom it can only be because society has placed them there."
But if you actually prove that they are stupid, then what?
This is MathWizard's point: progressives don't actually disbelieve that the stupid deserve to be at the bottom of the pile, they simply disagree about who are the stupid ones.
For me, it was fascinating to discover how males and females consider history, especially when the topic of "in which historical epoch would you like to live?" and every woman answer "now".
You mention a degree of incredulity at the homogeneity of this attitude, and I think that points to a specific insight. Other commenters have suggested that "2023" is indeed the right answer for everyone, men and women, because... there's more Marvel movies to consoom now, I guess, and only edgelords would disagree. And that may be true, but it misses the point that you always get some male edgelords who get autistic about DEUS VULTing with the Crusades or Smashing The Fash in 1917 Petrograd, and are willing to stick their neck out and say "Yes the spiritual interesting-ness of the times exceeds the appeal of being able to go see Ant Man: Quantumania". Even if it's poorly thought out; even if they're almost certainly, objectively wrong; they'll speak the words, publicly.
What I think you're seeing with women is probably not some deeper or more clear-sighted shared awareness of either the rising tide of technological progress nor the snowballing gynocentrism of society. What I think you're seeing with women is the greater conformism of their gender. They know that "Now" is the answer that all their friends will say, that you might get cancelled if you don't say... so that's what they say. They gain nothing from being an edgelord because (as has been rehashed on these pages and infinitum) women get points/mates/security just for existing. If you want anyone to notice you as a man, you must stand out from the crowd, and this is the biological basis for male edgelord-ism.
That the answer "2023" is plausibly correct in an objective sense is a coincidence. They say it because it's conformist, not because they have deeply considered the pros and cons of ACCELERATE
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
This false belief is that gender is not distinct from sex. The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex.
If you can assert it one way, I can assert it the other. "No it isn't, sex and gender are synonyms".
Gender on the other hand refers to a socially created psychological programming that every tribe and society imbues its members on upon.
This is not a coherent thing even if one were to agree with your previous framing. If it's tribe-specific, then there is no such thing as "the female gender"; your gender would have to be "American female", "Burkina Fasoan female", "East Timorese female". Very little unifies those cultures (perhaps it was literally zero pre-globalisation), so by this account, we'd need +7,000 genders, to account for all roles in all cultures? At which point, your concept is so far away from the dictionary that you should probably start using a new word instead of trying to repurpose the "gender" one.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
6mo ago
Affirmative action means Whitey's oppression is not small, it's negative. Young Earth creationists at least have the valence of time correct!
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
have you no shame?
Affirmative action quotas are bad so I support them being reducto ad absurdem'd.
It's only shameful if these people both make a sham of AA by their actions and support AA (the spirit if not the letter) with their words. Because then it's self-serving hypocrisy.
But, like Ayn Rand on welfare, I have no problem with lily-white people taking Abo quota spaces. Because there shouldn't have been any Abo quota spaces in the first place, so this is just taking them back de facto if not de jure.
Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia University
"Wokeism is winding down, says diversity hire who took a Legacy American's prestige job"
When even the anti-woke argumentation is getting outsourced to extra-civilizational immigrants, it's hardly evidence FOR the proposition, is it? The headline next to the author feels like some kind of ironic joke.
I therefore think rather that if the rate of change is slowing down - big if, Musa is hardly convincing either by his evidence or by ad hominem - it's only because the other demographics' elites have already captured all the spoils they actually want.
I don't get why BBC and NPR (or any media outlet) should care what they are labeled as.
You're right, but as is often the case, there's a principal-agent problem here.
It doesn't matter to the institutional objectives or news-reporting teleological mission of the BBC or NPR what Twitter label they get. But to Terminally Online journos who spend 18 hours a day on Twitter and rely on it desperately for personal-brand-building? For journos who are working a job that pays them in status/prestige more than money? The cognitive dissonance is gonna cut deep when that hard-earned status is publicly threatened, traduced by their engagement platform of choice equating them to the very Kremlinoid fake-news trollfarms that the journos have been dunking on since 2016. It's like water suddenly declaring war on the fish. And so the journos (agents) will furiously burn the organisations' (principals') resources in a campaign to defend this slight on their own honour.
Not to go full Uncle-Ted-posting, but the oversocialised leftist is extremely vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Your thesis that ANTI-SEMITISM is a next level offence in the Current Year (current year Britain?) is plausible, but in the specific case of Labour Party politicos there are special inside-baseball considerations to make which might make your thesis less general.
Namely: current Labour Party leader Kier Starmer is a beige centrist who used the cudgel of "I am taking even the faintest whiff of an accusation of antisemitism as a gulag-able offense" to purge the party of the Soviet Red influence of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. In order to avoid accusations of isolated-demand-for-rigour he is therefore required to come down like a tonne of bricks on this, the alternative being that he makes it obvious that when he did it last time it was just a pretext for his internal party coup.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
In the paper they have a subsection that says "One weakness of this study is that we assume that jobs can be broken down into tasks", and that is indeed their fatal assumption.
As I hammer at every opportunity: most jobs are Bullshit Jobs. The belief that a job is 'me being paid for accomplishing economically useful tasks' is such a Red Tribe / small business / results-oriented view of things, which totally ignores the principal-agent problems ubiquitous to the large organisations in which most of us actually work. No, the corporate / state / academic drones of us have jobs because (a) our manager wants to increment his "Number of underlings" ego-counter, or (b) the government makes up jobs as sinecures to make their unemployment statistics look better.
Both of these ACTUAL sources of employment are utterly insensitive to ChatGPT being better at tasks than humans, so actually no-one's job is in danger at all.
The rightoid conspiracy theorists are directionally correct, though, aren't they? "The elites want a future where blue collar people to eat bugs and live in pods" is a reasonable extrapolation of (a) the elite's climate doomerism, (b) spiralling (upwards) urban house prices, and (c) the Davos class' obvious contempt for the Western working class.
If Klaus Schwab and his more successful attendees don't want this future, it's only because they haven't played out their own beliefs far enough in their own heads, not because it's anathema to them. It will be their intent if it's not already; they just haven't game-planned that far. This is precisely why the rightoid memes are believed - because they're credible, because they're consistent with what we know about these people, because they're coherent with the visions of the future which they have stated publicly.
Trying to tar belief in these conspiracies as "embarrassing" is just shaming tactics, and you'll not "tut tut how gauche and low status" me out of them by making irrelevant points that Klaus Schwab himself is kind of a loser (to the extent that a man with a million dollar salary can be a loser). Yeah, he's not in the Illuminati, but his opinions are representative of the heads of government that come to his ski resort, who are.
More options
Context Copy link