Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 80
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Here’s a list of the Hugo award winners this year:
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Best Novel: Arkady Martine
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Best Novella: Becky Chambers
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Best Novelette: Suzanne Palmer
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Best Short Story: Sarah Pinsker
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Best Series: Seanan McGuire
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Best Graphic Story: N.K. Jemisin
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Best Related Work: Jane (Charlie) Anders
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Best Artist: Rovina Cai
Omitted: Best film/tv series and short/long form editors.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg may never (posthumously) see 9 female justices on the Supreme Court. Perhaps she can rest easier knowing that women more or less swept the Hugos this year. And more or less in 2021. And 2019. And 2018. And almost did in 2017. One has to wonder why modern men are so bad at writing science fiction.
I’ve read virtually all of the books on this list prior to 2019, and my recollection is that they are by and large apolitical. Characterization is often sidelined or nonexistent (I’m looking at you, Asimov), there’s some downright weird...social interactions for lack of a better word (Well, rape my lizard!) and the prose is quite often trash. But where it shines is imagining a society reformed by new technology: a space elevator, FTL travel, psychohistory, nanotech, the metaverse (back when we just called it cyberspace), cyberpunk, biopunk, cypherpunk, spice melange and precognition. The best read like instruction manuals for scientists and entrepreneurs to aspire to, the bad were unapologetically sexist and the worst, presumably, have been lost to time.
Looking at the 2022 Hugo list, I’ve only read Iron Widow (I’ve been on a China kick and a scifi adaptation of Wu Zeitian’s story sounded interesting) and the series by Becky Chambers and Ada Palmer. The former was…unpleasant. Some choice quotes:
I think this whole concept of women being docile and obedient is nothing but wishful thinking. Or why would you put so much effort into lying to us? Into crippling our bodies? Into coercing us with made-up morals you claim are sacred? You insecure men, you’re afraid. You can force us into compliance, but, deep down, you know you can’t force us to truly love and respect you.
Men wants us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds.
How do you take the fight out of half the population and render them willing slaves? You tell them they're meant to do nothing but serve from the minute they're born. You tell them they're weak. You tell them they're prey. You tell them over and over, until it's the only truth they're capable of living.
But I have no faith in love. Love cannot save me. I choose vengeance.
I could keep going, but at a certain point I’d be quoting the entire book. Literally every scene that isn’t her fighting in a mecha is more of the above. The main character getting fucked over by her father. By the men in the military. By her lovers. By her copilot. It’s just not readable unless you’re the one being pandered to. She did take her book jacket photo wearing a cow onesie though, so that was pretty cool. Not that it would ever win an award, but I had a similar reaction to The Powers of the Earth with anti-woke libertarian propaganda, and the hypercapitalist Randian rants in Terry Goodkind.
Where Iron Widow is a blasting foghorn wokening our feminist impulses, Becky Chambers is a bit more laidback. I'm still struck by the aimlessness and victimization of the protagonist who just kind of meanders her way from misadventure to misadventure and whose only (?) skill is polylingualism. There's no overarching goal, no training montage or development, no tech wiz hacker bro. The emphasis is on home, belonging, learning about other cultures and refuting the nasty intolerants who disapprove of human-AI or interspecies-lesbian-human-reptilian-nonmonogamous relationships.
I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies. I don’t think there is a principled, objective stance where William Gibson is a better writer than Octavia Butler and it’s not like we read any of these books because the prose and mechanics of the writing are top tier. Perhaps we’re fated to live in our own little cloistered media bubbles that tell us what we like to hear.
But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Among these experts are people like Thomas W. Johnson, Richard Wassersug, and Krister H. Willette, who attended several WPATH conferences, and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively) that were active for over 20 years. Johnson and Wassersug have even published research based on a survey of EA's users, and the stories posted there.
Were those accounts on the Eunuch Archive used to post erotic fanfic, or were they used to study the content/users and post surveys and whatnot? You allege that they themselves are fetishists:
As for their work in WPATH, I'm sure they are proffesional and wouldn't dream of letting their fetish affect their work.
and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence, but as far as I can tell, you haven't provided any that this is the case. This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration. The article you linked describes it as (bolding mine):
Reduxx reached out to the Anthropology Department at CSUC for comment on Johnson’s association with a forum hosting child sexual abuse fantasies
which again makes it sound like those usernames weren't actively posting erotica. I assume if they were, the news article would be pasting that front and center. I'm not personally going to make an account on that website myself to investigate (look at what happens to people who 'associate' with such websites 20 years later) but I'm curious to see the results if someone else does.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
To be clear, people aren't laughing because they think you care about poor immigrants too much, they are laughing because they think your reaction proves none of it was sincere.
And how should I react in a way that would satisfy them? Donate money or time to organizations that provide aid to illegal immigrants?
I love the idea of stopping the madness, and treating our countrymen better, but trust issues aside, what specifically are you even suggesting?
I doubt I'm knowledgeable enough to give you a list of policy prescriptions that will solve the problem overnight, nor does this seem to be the place for that. I'm too lazy to dig up my previous comments on it, but I believe there's room for compromise on immigration and most other issues. The response I got from that was angry conservatives claiming they compromised in the 70s and 80s and why should they listen to me now when they know I'll be back in 20-30 years asking for more compromises?
For lack of a better word, always this: less culture war, please. We're all humans, not moral monsters, let's not cheer the people trying to stoke partisan division for political gain. You and I aren't so different and largely want the same things, yet in some perverse reversal, we spend 80% of our time arguing about the 20% of things we disagree on rather than finding solidarity in the 80% of things we do agree on.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It's interesting; I finally met, in the wild, a woman who claimed there were no biological differences in terms of strength, agility, speed, etc. between men and women. I had thought they were just caricatures on the internet, but I guess they really exist. She was in the army and claimed to have 'outperformed' 90% of the men there before she was injured. She was about 5'6 and maybe 120 pounds, so while I'm not too familiar with the army, I'm a bit skeptical of that one. She claimed testosterone had no effect on athletic performance and that literally the only difference physically between men and women is that men have a wider pelvis. Scientific papers describing any effects of testosterone are just transphobic.
This all grew out of the casual [sport] league I played in over the summer that went out of it's way to encourage inclusion of trans players. Man/lady were replaced with 'female-matching' and 'male-matching.' Traditionally, we played co-ed and matched genders on the field, and trans players (100% trans women in this league at least) would match with the gender they identify as. The women on the field were getting absolutely wrecked. Like, every now and then someone would absolutely blast by me uncovered before I realized it was a trans woman and her defender was struggling 10-15 feet behind her before I'd peel off and try to salvage the situation.
It honestly doesn't affect me and all the most strident pro-trans commissioners in the league are female, so I don't particularly care, but this is just...a step too far. There's no way this can be covered up in smokescreens about hormones or whatever else, it's just an immediately obvious fact that this is true. You just need some video footage of trans women absolutely destroying people at [sport] and it's not really sustainable.
I tried the same argument you just brought up as it seemed the most likely to elicit sympathy from a strident feminist, i.e. that it cheapens the accomplishments of female athletes, but she would just say that those female athletes would be as good as the men if it weren't for the patriarchy. Thankfully, people with that point of view are a vanishingly small minority - on my team of very left-leaning players, it was about 13 people arguing with her and her reluctant boyfriend trying to mediate.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
Well, whatever, the rules are made up and the points don't matter.
Remarkably absent from both your post and the replies are the fact that Republicans control the Virginian house of delegates and the governorship, so this has about as much chance of passing as the Illinois bounty law. Even if Democrats had slim majorities in both houses and the governorship, I'd be shocked if something like this could pass. The far end of trans rights is generally a losing issue for democrats and, by extension, taking children out of their parents control makes the majority of people in both parties uncomfortable.
The cause is the Tribes, Blue and Red, and their manifestly incompatible values. Blues/Reds do not Like Reds/Blues. Contrary to arguments presented here for years, we do not share values, moral intuitions, a workable understanding of The Good. The Culture War is not about mistakes, and people are not going to come to their senses any minute now and realize all this was just a whole heap of silly goosery. The Culture War is a conflict. We cannot all get along, because we have lost the fundamental capacity to agree on what "getting along" consists of.
The virtuous cycle of Conflict theory:
Step 1: Find blue person doing bad thing
Step 2: Equate blue person with entire Blue tribe
Step 3: Claim entire Blue tribe wants to hurt me and mine
Step 4a: Spend a lot of time on the internet talking about igloos <- You are here
Step 4b: Hurt blue tribe
It may be difficult to believe, but some people genuinely care about the wellbeing of Trans kids and think they're happier living as their chosen gender. I would be absolutely shocked to find that Guzman is so monstrous that she's primarily motivated by a desire to cause you suffering, and even if she were, the idea that the broader Trans movement was conjured up to harm you both beggars belief and smacks of hubris. Your attraction to Conflict Theory isn't for the truth value, rather you need it to justify your own behavior and hatred:
We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.
You'll reject any arguments I make to the contrary that Blue tribe is Out To Get You while ignoring or defending any Red tribe transgression. You've surrounded yourself by yes-men who will trip over themselves to fellate you regardless of what you write, and be outraged that my reply is anything other than happy seal noises.
According to your model, half of your fellow citizens represent a serious and immediate threat to your children. So, what comes next? No more AEO excuses for hinting darkly rather than speaking clearly.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
If you want I can dig deeper and dig out the spicier posts, but I want you to put skin in the game - if I find it you admit you were wrong, and no more asserting I must be wrong because I didn't give you black-on-white "I'm a fetishist" posts.
I said I'd be curious to see the results if someone else tracks down the rest of his stories. Compared to how inflammatory your OP was, my response was fairly measured and I'm trying to engage with you in good faith.
Here's a list of potential evidence you could provide, and how it would influence my thinking. I think you might find it disappointing though:
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Spicy, blatant erotica around orchiectomy from Johnson -> Dude's fantasizing about cutting his balls off and maybe has a bit of a...conflict of interest when it comes to providing guidelines for trans teens.
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Blatant pedophilic content from Johnson -> Dude's probably a pedophile. No bueno. I assume he'll get canned if you or others circulate those stories.
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All three accounts post spicy takes along (1) or (2) -> Three out of 4,134 members of WPATH are fetishists or pedophiles. Slight update towards the broader point you're making similar to reading a news article about a Republican politician or Catholic priest doing similar things.
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Survey (or other data) of WPATH members or other academics involved in treating trans teens that X% of them are fetishists along these lines -> X% of these people are fetishists and if X is > than...I don't know, maybe 1-5% depending on how bad the fetish is, I'd probably find that disquieting?
I assume we're never going to get (4) short of some really impressive investigative journalism, so I think it'd be an interesting conversation what kinds of evidence could stand in for it. If you want to convince me that some significant fraction of people involved in the trans debate are fetishists, I need some kind of evidence that a bunch of them are fetishists. Maybe really widespread reports of children who say they are not trans who were being pressured into it? Some kind of internal slack channels being leaked? The FBI busting some kind of pedophile ring implicating a bunch of these people? Maybe something like your post implicating just a few people, but it happens again and again for months on end?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Send your kid to an all black school in Baltimore or a suburb of Paris then and then report back to me if your opinion has changed.
So what? Send a black kid from a nice family to an all white school in a trailer park in West Virginia, middle of nowhere Quebec, a shitty part of Ohio. They're going to have a bad time.
You're right: Poverty is bad. A relative lack of morality or culture or whatever you want to call it is bad. Crime is bad. Drugs are bad. African Americans don't have a monopoly on any of these things, but we have double standards for crack-dealing superpredators/innocent white victims of opioid overdoses. Unemployed whites in the midwest are innocent victims of globalization who had their jobs ripped away from them, while blacks living in deprecated inner-city slums are shiftless, lazy and sucking at the welfare teat.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Do we? Does the rap sheet of the mean or median "crack dealing superpredator" actually resemble that of the average "opioid overdose?" If it doesn't, if the behavior of these two groups is actually significantly different, why should we assess them identically?
I wouldn't ask you to assess them identically. But one is viewed as a threat to society, whereas the other is a victim. The crack-dealing superpredator was born wicked, while the opiate-addicted had wickedness thrust upon them by their opiate-happy doctors and the globalists.
There must be 'opiate dealing suprepredators' profiting from the decay of society in the white areas too, no? Overdoses from prescription drugs have been more or less flat since ~2006 (figure 4) so someone is dealing street drugs. Why don't we talk about them?
Progressives sympathize with blacks and sneer at rural whites. Conservatives...sneer? look down on? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but my impression is that they look down on poor black communities and sympathize with rural whites. I don't think their plights are identical, but I'd argue that there are significant parallels and that should be reflected in our discussions about them.
I'm pretty sure most or all the murder-capitol-area contenders are majority-black. Most of the current massive spike in the murder rate is black-on-black.
Watched this the other day and it was wild. It's remarkable how much better substack and randos on youtube have become at informing us about the world relative to the MSM. I feel better informed about the violence in Chicago after 20 minutes watching that than years reading bullshit takes from both sides of the aisle.
Suppose you had solid evidence that the former communities were once flourishing, and then decayed into hellholes, while the later communities were hell-holes from the start. Would this not, again, be valid grounds to assess them differently?
That first sentence contains multitudes. You say Appalachian whites were flourishing and had it snatched away by the globalists, progressives would say that in the era Appalachian whites were flourishing, Blacks were still overtly being discriminated against. Each of those arguments deserves an essay that I probably couldn't do justice.
That being said, there were significant numbers of black workers in the auto industry, the other big employment opportunity often brought up in the context of globalism destroying American middle-class communities. 20% of Ford's workforce between 1920 and 1950 according to this source, although it seems too high and I can't really find a corroborating one (this article cites the same number).
The Projects were a project, an intentional expenditure of vast resources and effort in an attempt to ameliorate the evident social problems of the Black community. Did Appalachia get Projects? Did the Midwest? These questions aren't purely rhetorical, but the evidence I'm aware of leans pretty heavily in one direction.
I don't know, nor would I even be sure how to answer that question. Do massive farming subsidies to the Midwest count as equivalent to the projects? What about the fact that, ironically, roughly a third of the State budgets of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are federal aid? It's not clear to me if your point was that America invests more in the rehabilitation of poor inner cities relative to the rust belt or coal mining regions or something else.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
by breaking the law. Wonder why you omitted that?
Because I expected you to be able to parse 'illegal immigrants' as...well...doing something illegal.
I've long theorised that the solution to ivory tower liberals virtue signalling about illegal immigration is to give them some actual skin in the game, instead of letting them escape all the negative consequences of their ideology inside their walled communities. It seems the governor agrees with me, and that the theory was sound. I applaud this action and hope that next time he sends 500. And then 5000. Until the message sinks in. You do not get to ruin our towns from your gated communities with no consequence.
Massachusetts has about as many illegal immigrants (250,000/7,000,000) per capita as Florida does (720,000/21,000,000). Neither share a border with Mexico. Tell me again what consequences Florida is suffering that Massachusetts isn't? Moreover, the majority of illegal immigrants settle in metropolitan areas which vote blue even in red states like Texas. The vast, vast majority of those voters obviously don't live in gated communities. Those that do, do not unilaterally decide policy; Obama and Clinton and so on respond to the desires of their voters.
The message won't sink in, because the hypocrisy that you think is there just isn't, not because you haven't shipped enough illegal immigrants to Massachusetts.
People need to be held directly responsible for the consequences of their advocacy. Foisting it off on border towns and other people far away, ensuring there's no cost to you directly, is immoral.
Our tax dollars (which I understand are still the vast majority of funding for border security) pay for federal agents and facilities in Texas, so I do indirectly bear that burden. If anything, blue states contribute more in federal taxes than reds.
I've said it's regrettable that border towns have these issues, and if there were a robust way to mitigate the effects on them I would support it. But as I've said, even under Trump there were still large numbers of illegal immigrants at the border. Your sponsorship proposal wouldn't stop illegal immigrants from illegally ignoring it any more than they do now. The only real solution I can see working is developing those nations to the point that they don't want to come here anymore; look at how the number of illegals from Mexico has dropped as conditions have improved, and those from other countries has increased as conditions there worsen.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
If you ain't complaining about woke people, you're playing on hard mode my friend.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Do you have any recommendations for getting into it later in life?
I messed around with Java, html and linux in high school, then got funneled into a pure bio track for about a decade for my career. At one point I went back to learning some R and python without having the fundamentals (I guess the academic version of a script kiddie) purely for doing genome sequencing/scRNA-seq work. Now I'm trying to learn some fundamentals; I've been working through the Harvard Edx CS50 class, with hopes of trying the machine learning class next.
Any thoughts? Keep in mind I'm probably limited to 1-2 hours per day with maybe a bit more flex on the weekend.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Interesting to see what gets downvoted. Parent comment sitting at -5 as I write this.
On the subreddit where scores were hidden, negative scores were very rare. I wonder if it's a difference in the audience or the system.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Tier 1: Some children of both genders would like to wear clothes and accessories traditionally associated with the other gender. This has been widespread for a long time, or at least I've ready many stories of parents coming home to their young boys dressed up in their mother's pearls. I dressed up as a woman for halloween in grade 6, one or two people did it most years. I'm pretty sure there's a picture floating around somewhere of me wearing my mother's heels, necklace and TMNT pyjamas, although I was too young to remember it.
Tier 2: We should tolerate such behavior. Rationally, there's nothing wrong harmful about men wearing dresses and makeup or women wearing overalls or suits. Even historically, fashion trends have been ephemeral and men wearing foppish or feminine clothes has come and gone.
Tier 3: We should provide a supportive environment for people who feel this way. People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.
Tier 4 (going to have to try and model this one): Sexual attraction is the ultimate form of acceptance/'passing.' The way we can best support/validate trans or gay children is to validate their attractiveness to the other sex...? Someone would have to explain this one to me as well.
Thing is, most events I've seen are somewhere between 1-3. It's likely that had the event happened, some children wearing makeup, wigs and dresses would have walked across a stage and been applauded and told they were beautiful, brave members of society with bright futures as the 'twerking with stripper poles and dollar bills' seems to have been the vast minority of such events. Mr. Burns immediately dialed it up to 10 the least charitable take and I respect his intelligence too much to think that he's doing anything other than culture warring, but maybe my expectations of someone living in a red bubble are unfair.
For the record, I get off the train somewhere between 3 and 4. If I had to guess I'd say that the worst excesses of #4 are driven by hyper-liberal moms thrilled that their children are brave culture revolutionaries rather than pedophile groomers, but I confess I'm not very close with people in those circles. The closest thing I've seen is parents pushing feminine toys on their boy-tots, only to be heartbroken that they want to play with monster trucks.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I was confused by that. He said it was written in 2002, but it's cited as Reader's digest 2017. Is that like...The reader's digest? Or is it some kind of internal Eunuch Archive reader's digest? That excerpt wasn't from the other article he mentioned, so is he citing it directly using his own account on the site?
What's the rest of the story? Also, what about the other two accounts?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
A sound defeat might be just the thing to correct some of the worst excesses of the morality police.
Undoubtedly there are extremist elements on the left (and right) who will be outraged regardless of the outcome. I think the better question is what comes after Republicans winning the house and senate.
Do we spend two years investigating Hunter Biden and impeaching Sleepy Joe as revenge for impeachment of Trump, or do we try to craft common sense compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era? Do we unite around democracy and liberalism in the face of Russia invading Ukraine and China doing China things, or continue to sour on our ideals and flirt with authoritarianism? I don't mean taking military action against either, but for America to lead the free world it has to believe in it, and it has to believe that is more important than what are mostly low-stakes domestic squabbles. Unilateral action from either side won't lead to de-escalation; all the stakeholders need to buy into it.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Someone is dealing opioids, and that someone elides the calls for law and order most of the time. Whether those neighborhoods are peaceful, orderly idylls where now and then someone dies quietly in a bedroom is a question that I can't answer without trying to dig into county-by-county crime statistics. I doubt it's as bad as inner cities, but I'm also skeptical of the rosy picture you're painting.
Most of them are white, and their deaths were largely ignored for, what, the better part of a decade before people started actually talking about the problem?
You frequently make unsupported arguments and force me to do the legwork for you.
I'm far from an expert, but Google trends shows that discussion about the opioid epidemic really took off around 2016 when fentanyl started flooding the market; this tracks pretty well with figures 2, 3 and 5 that I linked you previously. It seems like overdoses caused by prescription opioids don't elicit much discussion, but they also don't contribute much to the overall toll of overdoses in the US, so...maybe that makes sense?
Of course this ignores regional trends in overdoses, socially erosive drug habits that didn't end in overdoses until fentanyl hit the scene, etc etc but it seems to me that you've overfitted on 'nobody cares about white people problems.'
And since most of the victims of this violence are themselves black, people actually care when they die, and are willing to expend significant resources to try to solve the problem!
The feds spent $3.3B and $7.4B on the opioid crisis in 2017 and 2018 respectively (table 2). It disproportionately went to red states (Figure 5 and 6) outside of Vermont, NH and Maine for some reason. It's confusing to me why the south was ignored, and I'm too lazy to try and overlay it with overdoses per capita to see if it matches the funding levels. Looks like $7.6B in spending in 2019. I can't find data on how much the government spends on crack cocaine which makes me think it isn't much. The majority of federal spending seems to go towards dealing with the health consequences of drug abuse. Untangling whether there's bias in that system towards black people at the expense of rural whites is, I think, a bit beyond what I can be expected to do.
Blacks are fucked. They are fucked because, in the main, Blues fucked them. Nothing we Reds can possibly do will help them, because they'd rather blame us for the harm Blues have done them, and the harm they do themselves, than cooperate with any of the steps necessary to prevent those harms. They don't want police and prisons, which do in fact help at least a little. They want education and rehabilitation and restorative justice and equity and economic revitalization, which have all failed with absolute, flawless monotony for decades, and none of which are even slightly likely to work better in the future.
They did want police and prisons back in the 80s and 90s, no? The law and order approach didn't seem to work out that great either.
Poverty rates have more or less steadily improved since the 1960s and throughout the civil rights era. Maybe you could attribute the drop from 1994-2000 to this, but it seems like that argument would take a lot more support than anything you provided.
But what do you mean, nothing reds can do will help them? You've split control of the federal government for about as long as I've been alive. You control the governorships of places like Mississippi, Iowa and Arkansas which have some of the worst poverty rates among blacks even after normalizing for the slightly higher white poverty levels. Maryland, Washington, Virginia and New Jersey have some of the lowest (intentionally omitting states like Vermont and Utah which have negligible black populations). Your best argument is that local government is the most important for combating poverty, which is an argument of the gaps that you failed to proactively provide evidence for, and is incongruent with conventionally blue states having lower poverty rates.
This argument of Dems as neo-plantation owners is largely bullshit. There are ugly things like white elites who lecture us on multiculturalism, equity and climate change while flying their children to the Alps on private jets while on holiday from their boarding schools. I get that. But extrapolating that to the median Democrat is just as silly as assuming that you're anything like Lindsay Graham or the Koch brothers or something. If you're going to tell me that Republicans have this One Neat Trick to address poverty and social ills that the wicked Democrats don't want you to know about, tell me what that is and provide some data showing me that it works when the data I've seen largely points towards the opposite.
Perhaps the above is pessimistic. Call me when the Black Community is willing to admit that a black person going to jail for killing another black person over contested narcotics profits might perhaps not be the fault of white people neither have met or interacted with in any way, and that such a murderer being apprehended and sent to jail is a benefit to black people generally.
It's not pessimistic, but it's fundamentally an emotional argument. You're angry, because you feel like you and your tribe aren't in control but you're being blamed for problems you haven't created and you feel like you don't have much of a say in addressing. I don't think it's entirely false, but it does seem to be far from the truth in places. But I also don't think pointing out the ways in which you're wrong is the goal, nor is it likely to be productive, is it?
At some point I feel like people around here want 1) affirmation of their feelings of alienation and frustration by ingroupers with similar biases to them, 2) a free therapy session or 3) a chance to rail against what they see as their oppressor (me?). Usually I just say I'm sorry you feel that way man, I can commiserate, I think we have more in common than the media would have us believe. Indeed, that would normally be my response to your post rather than picking holes in it, but lately I've been accused of being smarmy, concern trolling and disingenuous. Asking how I'm supposed to converse with You (not you personally, the royal You) is often ignored. So tell me, how do you want me to reply to what you've written? I could easily write such a screed with the script flipped about how the Evil Republicans block all our bills that would have led to a post-scarcity utopia with equality between the races and sexes, we could both get angry at each other and move on with our lives hating the outgroup a little bit more, but that strikes me as the worst outcome.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It’s this kind of ultra-smarmy response that makes people laugh at you and dismiss you.
It's not smarmy, it's genuine. I'm genuinely sorry that my ethos, policy preferences, whatever it is, infuriate you. I'm sorry that you believe our worldviews are irreconcilable, and we're headed towards whatever conclusion you think that leads us to.
You’re openly advocating and voting for policies
I can't vote.
An uncharitable interpretation of your post is that your main goal here was to “trigger the Cons” and to push OUR buttons, using a conversational tactic that was guaranteed to provoke a hostile response that you could pre-emptively forecast to make yourself look virtuous and us look unreasonable.
Alright. How could I rewrite my post in such a way that wouldn't provoke such a response from you, while keeping the same general point intact?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%. This has been characterized by the talking heads, and many rationalists as "a crisis of sense making" but I don't really see it that way. Sounds more like healthy skepticism if you ask me.
And with that in mind I think the fact that trust in the media seems to break pretty cleanly along class and partisan lines (70% of Democrats having a fair amount of trust or greater in the media vs less than 14% of Republicans) explains a lot.
They asked the wrong question. Conservatives have just succeeded in redefining the term 'the media' to only refer to outgroup institutions, but that doesn't mean ingroup institutions don't exist. It's safe to bash 'journalists' and the 'media' because to them it categorically excludes their preferred sources of news.
Conversely, if your question was 'Do you expect Libs of Tik Tok/conservative talk radio to report facts fully, accurately and fairly' your Democrat and Republican numbers would flip.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Would it be reasonable to sue/prosecute Ruth Sent Us or MSNBC into oblivion?
Yes. If, in fact, the Supreme Court had not struck down Roe v. Wade, but MSNBC repeatedly claimed that it had for literally years. Maybe if MSNBC repeatedly showed details of the Justices personal lives (as Jones did for the children's gravesites, parents phone numbers, etc) while claiming that they were deep state crisis actors or something. If the Supreme Court Justices were nobody private citizens who suffered their children being murdered instead of public officials who to some degree have sought the spotlight. For good measure, throw in substantial amounts of evidence that MSNBC knew what they were saying was false but said it anyways to sell snake oil penis enlargement pills. And then MSNBC just refused to comply with court orders so they received a default judgment against them.
I have to say if you're using that scenario to calibrate, we took a wrong turn somewhere. There's a debate to be had around publicizing addresses and other personal information of private citizens (all publicly available information if they own property - less of a problem when it was buried in filing cabinets, more of a problem now that apps can look up addresses in seconds), but that's a separate discussion considering all the other crap Alex Jones did.
Also, Alex Jones repeatedly admitted to shooting the children in Sandy Hook himself. Checkmate, conservatives.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
No, get your local government to build adequate amount of shelter in your community, for a random, representative, and proportionally-sized group of immigrants to live with you, and go to the same school as your kids.
I'll do you one better: let's nuke the school system that ties property value/geography to school funding and mix everyone together regardless of class. Bussing but for SES rather than race. No more private schools while we're at it. Let's have the poor kids, immigrants, rich kids and my kids all in the same class and see what happens.
I'll point out that I can't vote at the local or federal level, but sure. I'd be fine with spreading them out as evenly as possible in the country and/or bussing towards that end. There are some thorny issues of consent where they may want to form their own communities but that's above my pay grade and maybe not worth arguing over for a hypothetical.
Like, what are you selling, and at what price? I go to the Breitbart comment section and tell them to chill out, and in return you try to get the FBI to not designate parents pushing against CRT as domestic terrorists?
Sure, although my pull with the FBI is more or less nonexistent so we'd be better off focusing our efforts elsewhere. You want to co-author a substack? Collaborate here? Run a presidential unity ticket?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It feels like what would happen if ChrisPrattAlphaRaptor showed up any time you mentioned COVID to disprove you or interrogate you as if you were a collegial equal.
I apologize if you feel like I held the topic hostage or stifled conversation. I can sympathize with the idea that someone might be more knowledgeable about a field but not necessarily share your values or background, and I'm sure if you had access to all the same facts you may reach different conclusions than me. With that in mind, what would you suggest I do? Just lay off the hobby horse for a while? Be less aggressive?
No need to reply if you're uncomfortable, I know this is tangential to your point.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Well, she successfully signaled her opposition to conservatives, slagged off the nation (in their view), and now she winds up in prison for a minor drug charge in Russia, our geopolitical rival.
If our standards for 'deserving time in Russian prison' were 1) signaling opposition to democrats and 2) complaining about the state of the nation, there wouldn't be any conservatives left to post in the Culture War thread. Not to mention what she said:
"I honestly feel we should not play the national anthem during our season," Griner said. "I think we should take that much of a stand.
"I don't mean that in any disrespect to our country. My dad was in Vietnam and a law officer for 30 years. I wanted to be a cop before basketball. I do have pride for my country."
As far as 'slagging off the nation' goes, it's pretty anodyne.
Why wouldn't they be gleeful?
Dunno...some shred of human decency? The same way I'm not gleeful about red triber suffering. The same way that if I were, you would be outraged and calling me out for it.
An analogy might be Ben Shapiro going to Texas and getting a harsh prison term for something that was legal in California. You could bet your bottom dollar that Twitter would be physically heavier from all the glee-tweets.
And you could bet yours that you would be rage-posting about it to thunderous applause. That doesn't mean you need to carry water for people hating on Brittany Griner or that you or twitter are behaving morally in that hypothetical.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Tucker and DeSantis are some of the early attempts to get controlled opposition out in front of this distrust, but they won't be the last.
Are you suggesting that Tucker and Desantis are intentional establishment plants meant to lead the new right astray, or am I misunderstanding the use of controlled opposition? If you believe this, who are the genuine leaders or influencers of the new right?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You... do know this is primarily a reactionary forum and is consequentially going to have a right-wing skew (thus be a bit more concerned about traditional purity, per Haidt's Moral Foundations) to it no matter the actual leaning of the participants, right?
I don't know who you are or how long you've been around, but it's pretty frustrating to hear you say that. Mere months ago we were being told (by - wonder of wonders! - Naraburns) that actually, the forum is politically balanced, and liberals were too thin-skinned and used to dominating online spaces:
I have audited moderation, AAQCs, and (using your data!) the demographics of the sub itself. I have never found any evidence of an anti-left bias. I have found copious evidence of the absence of a left-wing bias, which many left-wingers appear to interpret as an anti-left bias. Part of the problem, I assume, is that it is much easier to write polemics than it is to write constructively; even when writing constructively, we tend to respond to criticism, which is itself a sort of polemic. And part of the problem is that, as one of the few rational platforms that permit right-wing viewpoints at all, we do seem to have something like an "overrepresentation" of the right here, though it is perhaps inescapably difficult to say for certain...After all, I'd conducted multiple audits in response to users whining about anti-left biases, and simply never found any evidence.
But I happened to have a moment to check your work, and all I can say is--what? Unless the vote tallies have shifted quite a lot since you did this work, I find your tally for November 15 to be nigh incomprehensible, to the point where I am inclined to simply disregard the others without further audit.
But based on the criteria you provided, I once again find no particular anti-left bias in this space--though I do worry that claiming there is a bias, in a comment that (due to the high effort nature of gathering the data) few users are likely to challenge on the particulars, is one way to encourage anti-left bias, and discourage leftists from posting here. At minimum, you seem to think that many comments I coded as "other" are in fact comments that would discourage leftists from posting here. That seems like you indirectly claiming that leftists are simply too thin-skinned to abide even the slightest disagreement. I do not think that is true, but if or when it is true, then I think it is the foundation of the sub, rather than the users or their posts, to which such people actually object.
You're the second person I've seen this week saying something to this effect. But we've gone from a mod calling us 'users whining about anti-left biases' to 'of course this place leans right you fucking idiots' so fast I'm getting whiplash.
For the record, I think Naraburns is a good mod.
A great man once said feeble minds discuss people, mediocre minds discuss events, and great men discuss feeble and mediocre minds. As befits my station (see: flair), I will endeavor to do the first two.
Yesterday, Ron Desantis proudly shipped 50 illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. See Breitbart and Fox News’ takes as well. The individuals were supposedly offered a plane ticket to Massachusetts, without being told they were being sent to a small, isolated island unprepared to receive them as part of a political stunt. Amusingly, not sharing a border with Mexico, Desantis actually had to source his illegal immigrants from Texas. I suppose rustling up 50 of the 772,000 homegrown illegal Florida Mans was too difficult, or may have upset some core constituency, who knows. The only shelter in Martha’s Vineyard has room for 10 and is obviously not equipped in the way that Boston, New York or DC would be and the plane ticket to those places would have been much cheaper.
Also of note: see the Fox News article for the Florida legislature’s $12 million
‘immigrant relocation program’Own The Libs/Desantis for President fun.I can stomach a border wall and even see the necessity, despite disagreeing with what it represents. I can sympathize with people living near the border and dealing with crime and drug cartels. But manipulating impoverished people seeking a better future and treating them as nothing more than chattel to score political points and ‘own the libs’ absolutely turns my stomach. Which, judging by the Breitbart comments and replies I expect here, laughing at my pearl clutching is absolutely the point. You want me to be mad, you want me get up on my soapbox and bleat some self-righteous Soyjak lines about muh poor illegals so you can get mad right back and it feels good.
So I guess I won’t do that, although I never know what to say instead. I’m sorry that you hate Obama and Clinton (see: Breitbart article) so much that the thought of them having to deal with poor third worlders is amusing. I’m sorry that you’re so angry about illegal immigration and the libs that we’ve come here. Please, let’s all try to treat our countrymen better and do what we can to dial down the hate.
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