Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
I don't think anyone is fooled enough to believe this is WotC's real motivation. They don't care about progressive issues, or (their other scape goat) NFT's.
Idk. I nope'd out of WOTC products when they started stuffing homosexual characters into the Magic cards hand-over-fist in the Theros set ten years ago. Can't remember whether that was before or after they memory-holed cards like Crusade and Invoke Prejudice; it was certainly before they started firing their own artists for making anodyne pro-Trump statements on their own social media.
There's a pattern of behaviour. Maybe WOTC is un-woke itself but desperately seeking validation from its woke customers; or maybe it's putting on the political commissar jacket with full gusto. But I feel at this point it's a distinction without a difference as to how pleased I should be that the revolution is eating its own.
The movie literally has an entire subplot about the MC dating a white woman to clearly indicate that 'not all white people are bad'. Hard to miss honestly.
The fact that racism often carves out an """exception""" for hot babes you might be able to sexually conquer is usually considered to make it worse, not better.
No-one ever exculpated an alleged white nationalist on account of his Asian girlfriend.
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
Not to mention the fact they even bothered to bring up her being Yoruba as though white nationalists would care in the slightest what variety of black person she is, as others have mentioned.
This was the smoking gun for me, yeah. It has the distinct whiff of someone fishing for the upvotes / collective immune response of her ingroup ("defend me fellow Yoruba-sisters!") and having done so at the expense of the complete collapse of a credible impression of the outgroup.
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.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Rowling, and women, have power. If they are choosing to not lend it to trans women they are doing harm to them.
I can't tell whether you're saying this as an articulation of what anti-JK-ists believe, or saying it unironically yourself, but either way, it's inaccurate in the same way that "You have money, by not giving it to me you are impoverishing me" is. Not helping != harming.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Credentialism doesn't mean companies are refusing to employ competent people because "who knows", it means that companies are refusing to employ competent people for the very specific reason that the lawyers of the Administrative State dreamt up a Byzantine tangle of regulations that says your company can be sued for $1 trillion if your e-mail senders don't have a piece of paper from e-mail sending school which indicates that they are properly versed in e-mail safety.
Also, if all people mean by saying 'bullshit jobs' is 'jobs that maybe aren't quite as hard as people think'
A bullshit job is a job which would have zero or positive net impact on the world if it didn't get done.
If the government is truly dedicated to putting down a rebellion, then a well regulated militia isn't going to stop them. You might have guns, but military has more guns, and their guns are bigger.
"The government has jet fighters you can't fight them with handguns" is a favoured rhetorical flourish of gun-grabbers anywhere, and it is factually incorrect. AK-47s beat thermonuclear weapons. Because you don't have to kill their army to make occupation untenable, you just have to kill their tax collectors.
I accept that in the post-AGI world this is less clear though, simply because everything is less clear in the post-AGI world. I'm sure the AGI knows that the best way to clear out freedom fighters is with biological weapons, but the government should beware of Principal-Agent problems here: is the government's AGI really trying to help the government put down an insurgency, or is it trying to Kill All Humans?
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
In fact, I would guess that intelligence and socialist beliefs are positively correlated. Why is socialist worldview so appealing
The idea that society should be scientifically managed is very appealing to those who believe themselves to be very intelligent but yet find themselves not managing society.
It's the class of people who see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed central planners".
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
...what the hell do you think it's going to happen once economic conditions worsen even more ?
Nothing. I think nothing will happen.
The frog will boil a little more, but as long as the crime rate keeps creeping up 1% per month instead of 5000% per day, people will just... get robbed more. As long as the electrical brownouts keep extending 1% per month instead of 5000% per day, people will just... adapt to doing their cooking in advance rather than on demand.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
It's part of the ontology of what makes you British, like fish and chips or poor dental health. Rejecting monarchism causes an existential crisis in the British psyche - which would be bad enough on its own, but when one starts to think "OK, I'm No True Scotsman because I don't like the monarchy" then as a Western European this puts you dangerously close to being French, which the British (or post-British) psyche also recoils from.
If you don't yell God Save The King, are you really British? Or are you just some guy with a lame piece of paper signed by (chortle) Rishi Sunak that confers upon you legal citizenship on a rainy island?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
even though protest (yes, even that of people I consider to be performative idiots) surely is more important to society than parties.
Not a chance?
Banning dissent against the government is far less a totalitarian overreach than banning fun.
Wasn't this exactly the society depicted by Asimov in 1957 for his Solarians?
The Solarians (d?)evolve into refusing to interact with anyone except robots out of giga-anarcho-libertarian FREEEEEDOM rather than safetyism - it's not out of concern that they'll be harmed, more out of concern that anyone stepping foot on their property is anathema - but it comes out the same, no Solarian interacts with other humans, even their children are vat-grown.
Horseshoe theory strikes again!
Think about it, who would you rather spend time with: an AI who will do whatever you want and be whatever you want, anytime, or a grumpy human on her own schedule who wants to complain about someone who said "hi" to her without her consent? The choice seems obvious to me.
Personally I enjoy inflicting rhetorical suffering, so, that's one upside to real humans. If it's a robot that can't be hurt, where's the sadistic thrill?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I cant point to any character defects, but I agree that there must be something there
Maybe you should be looking for character defects in the women of their cohort.
If the men aren't married, but the defect doesn't lie in them, then by process of elimination...
Oh cool, this is the second time I've had interpersonal experience of a discussion topic. Last one was my Eskimo brother on two degrees of separation, and now I'm down to one degree of separation. I've never been on the EA forums or kept up with their membership, but I knew Owen IRL decades ago. We were in the same ieado club, lol.
Suffice to say, I'm a lot more convinced of the "Autistic nerd thinks he's being friendly and helpful by offering his guest room, proceeds to get lied about by clout-chasers" narrative than the "Sex-pest" narrative.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
And by and large he is known for being a genuine and empathetic guy rather than loudly spouting any particular ideological viewpoint.
Ah, but is he known as that by Rian and his class buddies?
I am perfectly willing to believe that they genuinely believe that Rogan is a roided out misogynist manosphere dudebro, because it's very easy to believe unflattering things about the people you perceive as enemies.
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
11mo ago
You're all fucked, some just about to be fucked before the others.
Aren't you Indian?
Don't you have a ridiculous civil service which people kill to get into because once you're there, some quirk of iron rice bowls and pork barrels and constituency building has basically made Indian civil service jobs a sinecure where you never have to do any work but also you can't be fired, and this situation has persisted for 70 years despite the grinding poverty of all other sections of the Indian economy, because it's politically impossible to untangle this snarl?
And you think people are going to lose their jobs... because new labour saving tools become available?
Most jobs don't exist to fulfil tasks. Most jobs exist to fulfil government kayfabe. That an AI can perform a task is therefore completely irrelevant to the question of who has a job.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo 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
Hillary Clinton should have been jailed and she should still be in jail. ... I mean is there anyone out there who didn't understand why Democrats were in shrill hysterics about fascism?
You can't say that Hillary should have been jailed and then straight away imply that the Dems were right to think that trying to jail her was fascist. Do you not see your own contradiction here?
But the Dermocrats didn't make him give that speech on January 6th.
You mean the speech where he didn't say anything objectionable, and certainly didn't instruct anyone to storm Congress?
I regret my support for former president Trump
How do you feel about his time spent in charge of the nuclear codes?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Sam Brinton is a proclaimed non-binary person (NB, or enby)
I've been coming across the term "enby" for months without knowing what it means (or, given context, daring to look it up). So thanks, this hard-hitting reporting justifies my continued doomscrolling!
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
how much social criticism does a masculine man who lifts, is heterosexual, has masculine hobbies like fishing and woodworking, has a few kids, a stay-at-home-wife, is the breadwinner etc but who kowtows to the dominant ideology in public (like many ‘masculine’ men throughout history) actually face?
With a grand total of 7 stipulations put on his behaviour, how is that not exactly the "controlled and neutered male energy" that was being described?
"Just make sure all your hobbies are prosocial and you support all these hangers-on and you vote the right way and never think anything wrong and don't have any oddities..."
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Iirc this is exactly the source of Bullshit Jobs that David Graeber suggested: managers bolstering their own egos (or one might less charitably say bolstering their own megalomania) by incrementing the "how many underlings do I have" counter. Whether or not those underlings actually do anything is (apparently) not relevant to the modal human sense of self-aggrandizement: this type of people just wants Number Goes Up.
If you can assert it one way, I can assert it the other. "No it isn't, sex and gender are synonyms".
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.
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