Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
This, right here, is exactly the thing I was talking about.
Ah. Was I 'gaslighting you while celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?' Slamming the Overton window leftwards on you? Or something else you edited out of your post?
I don't think my post was particularly celebratory, nor do I think I made any comment on the object level issues you raised in your post. But whatever, the one leftish leaning person who bothered to reply to your post managed to perfectly demonstrate all the problems you were complaining about. Bravo.
My friend is feeding his new daughter on the free expired baby food he gets from his grocery store job, while this instagram play-farmer writes grants for more money than he makes in a year.
Alright. Forget about the black person who got taxpayer money for a moment (we can go back to it later if you like). Imagine that I'm an actual human being and I want to help your friend and people like them - what should I do? What set of policies do you think would be most helpful to your friend? Was he significantly better off when he was stocking shelves five or ten years ago? And do you think grocery store workers had it better in 1990, 2005, or 2020ish?
I don't believe your motivation for engaging is to discuss the culture war. I think you're waging it by manipulating people into passive acceptance.
Hello, pot. Kettle here. You're black.
But then, give me some advice. How could I reply to your post in a way that wouldn't be 1) denying these are problems or 2) manipulating people into passive acceptance, short of agreeing with you on every point and accepting that leftists are evil? I'd invite you to sketch out a very brief outline of what such a post might look like such that you think you could have a productive conversation.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
Economy aside, Joe Biden aside, whatever personal animosity you might have for me aside - my man, what are you doing spending 6.75$/lb for chicken at Costco as 'cheap meat?' Just checked and I spend 1.79$/lb on chicken thighs, something like 2.99$/lb for the organic/ethical stuff at the cheapest supermarket nearby. Chicken breast is still something like 4$/lb for the cheap stuff. For 6.75$ I'm pretty sure I could get a rotisserie chicken. I don't live in Manhattan but I am in a probably top 5 or top 10 CoL area. Costco isn't cheap anymore, it's only good if you want the brand name stuff for slightly less than elsewhere. Local discount chains with store brands or Chinese/ethnic markets are cheaper.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
Interesting, thanks for the writeup on a world i think most of us would otherwise never be exposed to. Based on the comment about the tip of the spear being very fine indeed, do you think it abnormally so for the post-korean and/or Vietnam war era? And is the implication that you think the US military is particularly impotent at the moment?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Advice seems highly contextual based on the type of person you and she are, so it seems like a bit of a fool's game to try and give you specific tips. I personally wouldn't worry about 'things' like the cooler, etc - I think you're already ahead of the game if you're at that level of detail. It's probably going to be more about the conversation and who you are - be self-confident without being domineering, try and ask questions until she's talking about something she's passionate about and be interested in it, don't come on too strongly. The classical FORD (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams) don't RAPE (Religion, Abortion, Politics, Economics) worked well for me once upon a time.
Just relax and enjoy yourself, you got this :)
Does anyone know who this user is
Nope, and hopefully it stays that way.
what their current priors are?
There is good evidence that early in the pandemic when COVID was less contagious and our vaccines actually targeted the circulating strain that spread was significantly (though not completely) reduced in vaccinated populations. Here I wrote a brief summary of some of the evidence available in August 2021. I still believe the COVID-19 vaccines are very safe as written here, and reiterated in this space more recently. Overall I stand by most of what I've written, although I was too slow to update on how low-risk COVID was for younger folks and the implications that should have had on our public health response.
The other interesting angle to this that doesn't seem to come up very often is the idea that COVID actually was similar in severity to a cold/flu, but this is just what that looks like for a virus we've never been exposed to before. Namely, if you had somehow avoided exposure to influenza/rhinovirus/other coronaviruses before being exposed at the age of 70-80, would you have the same CFR as COVID-19 circa 2020-2021? Or did the evolution of COVID from 'less-transmissible, more-deadly' to increased contagiousness and decreased pathogenicity just happen on much faster timescales that we expected? My money is on mostly (1) with a small degree of (2), but I'm not an expert and I stopped caring about the literature over a year ago.
As for the vaccines, if they don't update them I'm not planning to bother unless forced to by my employer. Even if they do update them, I'd probably treat it the way I do the flu vaccine: If they run a clinic at my workplace and I just have to walk downstairs and wait for a few minutes I'll do it, otherwise not going out of my way.
Since @desolation asked: I still think Fauci is fine and well-intentioned. The public health response was bad at first due to obstructionists/defectors and bad later on in service of either stupidity or the gerontocracy - i.e. a fairly accurate reflection of the political factions with power in our system, and I likely made a mistake carrying water in support of it at least in some cases. Lab leak still seems like a toss-up, but China has acted fairly sus the whole time.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Violent nutjobs have gone after whoever they hated most - not infrequently, gays among others - since long before groomer discourse was a thing. You trying to hang this on anyone who ever complained about Drag Queen Story Hour is honestly kind of repulsive. As is trying to spin something out of "His grandfather is a Republican."
And you're not engaging with anything near a steelman of the argument he made. Painting relatively benign opponents as fascist white supremacists is not particularly productive, nor is it particularly controversial in these spaces that this kind of speech is dangerous. People don't like Arthur Chu talking about putting bullets in tumorous nazi Republican flesh or whatever that quote was. Seems fair to me that PM doesn't appreciate being called a groomer pedophile out to rape your kids, no?
Let's assume Aldrich was persuaded by LibsOfTikTok that we must stop the gays from grooming our children by any means necessary. It's still very unlikely that this otherwise stable and non-violent individual was just going to live a peaceful life until Twitter and grandpa told him about the "groomers."
Bad things happen. Bad people do bad things. We will always have bad people doing bad things. Therefore, why bother?
I hear this logic hasn't worked so well with defunding the police, and that actually, there are people who respond to incentives and the environment they live in. Seems pretty reasonable to me that there people out there who may not have been stable, peaceful individuals that nevertheless wouldn't have become mass shooters if it weren't for the toxic political waters we swim in.
I expect to see "If you say (fairly mainstream thing) you are Literally Killing People" on Twitter, but you offering it unironically here is crap argumentation.
It probably wasn't framed in an ideal way, nor does putting it in the context of his previous posts paint a very flattering picture, but...I think his point about not calling your fellow citizens pedophile groomers is valid? If you don't want to engage with it, you don't need to try and reduce it to puerile twitter one-liners.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You could run Twitter with 1500 people instead of 7000 (as I’ve argued many times, tech hiring sprees have bloated every big tech business), but you want those 1500 people to be the good ones, you want them to be able to take over for their fired coworkers, and you want them to be distributed so that at least some of the survivors are in all the critical teams you need with the accumulated knowledge to keep the ship moving.
The problem is that in the rocket and electric car businesses, you can 'exploit' highly motivated talent because some huge proportion of aerospace engineers was raised on a steady diet of science fiction and October Sky. People are willing to do the crushing work weeks if they believe that their work is lifting humanity to the stars and enabling the first interplanetary colony in ways that they just won't to make sure MAGA/progressives can snipe at each other with meaningless, puerile gotchas. People at twitter are there for the paycheck, people at SpaceX are there for the dream.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11d ago
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.
This is a feature, not a bug. The problem was that we tried to occupy Afghanistan in the first place.
The strength of our system is it's inherent antipathy towards totalitarian control or abuse of human rights in the service of some end, however well-intentioned we think that end may be. The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world. The fact that the American people doesn't have the stomach for re-education camps, massive censorship and generational occupations of foreign countries is again a strength rather than a weakness. We shouldn't try, and we should actively prevent other nations from trying where the realities on the ground allow.
The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.
What you're describing seems unlikely to work without resorting to heavy-handed authoritarian policies like forced labor - what will you do when you offer subsidies to Amazon to hire people from low-income households, and nobody takes you up on the deal? Not to mention in some ways your program already exists considering that many low-wage workers are already heavily subsidized by the government.
I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty, but sacrificing the ideals the West was built on to become China-lite is not worth it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
17d ago
I freely profess my ignorance of Russian politics. To clarify, do you think if Putin had not wanted to invade Ukraine in 2022, it would have happened regardless? Or if Putin had wanted to invade and his advisors had not, it would not have happened? Or is your position some bailey that Strelkov's actions set in motion a series of events that made Putin's decision to invade inevitable?
Because option 3 still sounds like Putin had plenty of agency to me.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Do you think you're better than him?
Nope.
The point in your favor for suggesting moderation is balanced by your politely-phrased smug tone.
As someone who supports some of the causes he decries to varying degrees, how do you think I'm supposed to participate in this conversation exactly? I could respond in kind and we could fling feces at each other while you tut tut and enjoy the show. Or more realistically I'm buried in feces by the largely right-leaning commentariat.
I could craft a thoughtful response to some of his individual points, but what kind of conversation do you think he and I will have?
I could be the apologetic, liberal whipping boy who takes his lumps for That Bad Thing The People I Don't Like Did This Week.
I've done enough of all three. At a certain point a spade is a spade, and a bad post is a bad post. I can link you to massive exchanges I've had extending weeks and tens of thousands of words with FcfromSSC, gattsuru, professorgerm (now desolation, I believe?) and others so clearly I'm capable of having a decent conversation with people who hold very different beliefs. The process certainly changed my worldview.
That hasn't happened in...upwards of a year, I don't think? I'm sure you could make the argument that I changed rather than the space, but then I'd challenge you to show me any interesting and civil back-and-forth between a real liberal and conservative here that's happened recently. At a certain point, what exactly am I supposed to do with OP?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
No, there is a code of conduct. A conservative judge could have an absolutely egregious conflict of interest and fox news, conservative talk radio and boomer facebook would carry water for them.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Sure, and how many articles have CNN, MSNBC, Et Al written about Trump?
That might be relevant if I had been complaining about the latest Hunter Biden hearing being planned to distract from a damaging Trump story. Moreover, Trump was a sitting president while Hunter Biden is the son of one, so a better analogy would be Jared Kushner.
The crux of the issue is that the DNC has explicitly rejected the principle of equality before the law in favor of "rules for thee and not for me" and I don't think they realize just how dangerous a game they are playing.
The crux of the issue is that Trump pushed the envelope on all of those issues farther than any of the examples you gave. Clinton conceded the election peacefully the morning after:
“Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country,” Clinton said. “I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. This is not the outcome that we wanted or worked so hard for, and I’m sorry that we did not win this election…. But I feel pride and gratitude for this wonderful campaign that we built together. This vast, diverse, creative, unruly and energized campaign. You represent the best of America, and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life.” Fighting back tears at times, Clinton acknowledged the crowd’s disappointment, saying she — “and tens of millions of Americans” — felt it, too. “This is painful, and it will be for a long time,” Clinton said. “We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America, and I always will.”
I'm still unaware of any concrete evidence that Joe pushed policy X or Y as a party to foreign influence either to enrich his family or otherwise. The closest I've seen has been pushing for the resignation of the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma, but a Republican-controlled senate investigation apparently turned up nothing years ago. While Hunter apparently illegally bought a gun, smoked a lot of crack, fucked a lot of hookers and enriched himself on his father's name it's still not clear to me how Biden harmed the interests of the United States to rake in the corruption money.
There's probably no point rehashing similar arguments from the other side; Jared Kushner receiving 2 billion from the Saudis after being staunchly pro-Saudi Arabia while directly serving in Trump's white house, Trump delaying hundreds of millions of aid to Ukraine while pressuring Zelenskyy to investigate the Biden's, so on and so forth.
I'm out of time, so you'll undoubtedly be devastated that we don't get to rehash the Clinton email saga again although I'll admit you're maybe closest to the mark here given that, if I remember correctly, she instructed her lawyer to destroy evidence.
I've got a number of ideas bouncing around in my head that I just never have the time to try and make the case for convincingly. Headline followed by tl;dr.
A) Oryx and Crake was an instruction manual for biological research - not the cyperpunk zaibatsu dystopia species-level cuckoldry, but the bioengineering. We'll never understand biological systems until we start trying to build them. Preferably with the help of AI.
B) The Bayh-Dole act gave us a sugar high but led to us eating our seed corn. The startup ecosystem and private industry are dependent on uncommercialized, foundational basic research carried out by underpaid and overworked scientists motivated by furthering humanity and/or ego, not profit.
C) Are we witnessing the birth of two transnational ethnicities? Also, the case for globalization.
D) What I tentatively call 'pregnancy autism,' or maybe an autistic attempt to analyze relationships and relationship conflict. Hard to do a tl;dr, but maybe it's an existential crisis inspired by this quote from 'What to expect when you're expecting':
Don’t take her outbursts personally. And don’t hold them against her. They are, after all, completely out of her control. Remember, it’s the hormones talking - and crying for no apparent reason. Avoid pointing out her moods, too. Though she’s powerless to control them, she’s probably also all too aware of them. And chances are, she’s no happier about them than you are. It’s no picnic being pregnant.
E) Whatever the fuck this bullshit spam is from Nancy Pelosi/DNC that I get daily:
Subject: Trump MORTIFYING loss
This is incredible:
Since Donald Trump announced another hateful, divisive campaign for President…
THOUSANDS of Democrats have stepped up and chipped in to our Defeat Trumpism Fund to ensure he NEVER returns to power.
For that, I’m so grateful.
But my team just alerted me that we’re still 2,403 gifts short of our goal before the End of Week Deadline.
I don’t want to beg, but this couldn’t be more important. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a statement Monday morning. If we CRUSH our goal before this deadline, we’ll show Trump, Republicans, and the ENTIRE country that our Democrats have what it takes to defeat him and his MAGA allies once again. So I’m asking you to be one of the final 2,403 Democrats I need to chip in so we can start organizing to DEFEAT Trump and every last one of his extremist allies. Please, will you chip in $15?
Complete with 2005 html-era formatting highlighting text in red and blue.
F) Healthy at more weights than you thought. IMO, people overstate the health risks of being overweight and don't sufficiently differentiate between overweight/obese and active/inactive.
G) Criticism is valuable, but easy - standing for something is hard but much more valuable. Tied to my distaste for reactionary thought and experience with pitching scientific ideas.
Numbered lists apparently reset after quotes, unfortunately. Apologies for having to use letters instead.
edit: for my own records, the consciousness blackpill.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Does anyone have any rigorous, evidence-based resources or knowledge about early childhood development? For example, reading a lot of things like 'more tummy time helps babies learn to crawl/walk sooner' or 'x is correlated with earlier speech development.' Is there any actual evidence to show that any of these things matter for outcomes later in life?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Does the left care about solving these problems?
That's distinct from ideology, but I would hope so. Also a question that's impossible to answer without further defining 'solving' or 'trying to solve.'
The most progressive cities in the country have no solution to homelessness (maybe you'd say "at least they're trying," but SF's efforts do not look like they're trying to solve it so much as a bureaucracy trying to make sure everyone is able to skim a few dollars from the effort, in perpetuity
There are a large number of programs, which, as you've pointed out, don't seem particularly effective. And as you expected: at least they're trying.
The stories, though: Ruthless Shkreli wannabes jacking up meds prices, leading to mental breakdown and eviction! White supremacist patriarchy refuses to employ trans women of color, of course they have to work the streets! These people just need a helping hand to be productive members of society #latestagecapitalism
I don't profess to be an expert on homelessness, but I assume it won't be that easy.
The answer to drug use appears to be legalization and "freedom."
Legalization of less addictive substances. Probably methadone clinics, heavy investment in therapy/support groups for addicts, nationalized healthcare, etc for the heavy drugs. The ideology feels a bit lighter on this issue, but I'm not sure what people would say if you asked them.
The answer for social alienation? Crickets.
Probably true. I'm curious what people would answer if I asked them.
Assimilation is racism. Speaking of racism, is the left trying to fix that one or reinvent it?
Fix, by their definitions.
Spreading democracy is colonialism.
Depends. A righteous crusade to rescue trans, gay, women and people of color from the privileged classes probably wouldn't register as colonialism.
Frankly, yeah, "the right" sucks right now.
I'm not even trying to make a value judgment. I'm trying to make an argument that they need to think bigger, stop being reactionary and provide ideological explanations/solutions to problems in society.
When I think visions of the future, I think people like Dryden Brown and Justin Murphy. They have visions for the future; they are also, basically, nobodies.
Thanks for the recommendations!
"Believe in the righteousness of your cause, regardless of actual effects" is not exactly a glowing endorsement.
Well, of course they should do better at trying to actually trying to track down the effects of their policies. In their defense, a lot of these problems are fairly complex and intractable even for people who study it full-time.
What is their vision of the future? Does it make any sense? I have no clue what their vision for the future is. Maybe the Democrats have a vision for the next five minutes, they have a vision for the resistance or the revolution, but that's not comes to my mind when I think of a vision for the future.
Perhaps 'the future' is the wrong concept to use. It's fairly rooted in and focused on the problems of the present, more so than the utopians dreaming of metropolises on Mars.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
He discusses the calls on Hockey Night in Canada Broadcasts as though they were the definitive icons of the game, even if the game involved two American teams.
They were though. Don Cherry is a legend and the announcers were an order of magnitude better than any of the American ones who knew (and still to this day know) absolutely nothing about hockey. Like, lacking basic terminology about the game and substituting generic folksy expressions for their ignorant viewers. Then there was the FoxTrax glow puck debacle, because American sports fans were apparently incapable of keeping up with a game that wasn't 75% advertisements and breaks in play a la NFL/MLB.
Anyways, then Hockey Night in Canada they sold the trademark music to RDS and Don Cherry's dementia progressed to a point where Ron Mclean couldn't drag him through the weekly programs. RIP.
I hope Canadian teams lose and lose early for every year here on out because the Canadian media deserves it. I'd like to talk about how Canadian hockey fans suck and most Americans parrot the same bullshit because they assume the Canadians know better, but that's a rant for another day.
This is the year. McJesus is bringing Lord Stanley's cup home.
But yeah, fuck the Leafs.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Fair enough, but the point still stands. They're putting out 3-10 per day on the dates I can check.
Do you know of a more accurate way to quantify?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Fair enough. Although to a large extent, it's just bad luck that HIV is so difficult to vaccinate against/treat paired with much easier anal/i.v. transmission versus vaginal. In a world where HIV was cured with a round of antibiotics similarly to syphilis or gonorrhea I suspect CD would nevertheless hate the gays.
Speaking of self-inflicted diseases necessitating medical intervention, I hope he isn't obese. You could level his argument at more or less the entite developed world and diseases of affluence.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Prelude: The Nashville school shooting is definitely peak toxoplasma, a day later: people cheering everyone who entered that school with a gun, both the shooter and the police. Aidan/Audrey’s acts are a near-perfect scissor statement.
On the contrary; spaces that are typically rabidly pro-trans are livid about the school shooting. Most media sources are geared towards stirring up outrage and are actively searching for the most inflammatory tweets and soundbytes to score points. The right will try to stir up outrage about mentally ill trans shooters/rapists, the left will make noises about assault weapons bans, normies will be disgusted by another school shooting and update diametrically away from everything the shooter claimed to stand for.
Like just about every other school shooting, this is a massive own-goal. Trans people look bad, Catholics and other religious folks are innocent victims and the cops undeniably come out looking like heroes.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
But essentially all aspects of our personality, including our religious and political beliefs, are heritable.
You know, I've written and erased about a dozen half-formed comments on the topic, but...here we go. It's not clear to me whether you mean heritable in the scientific or colloquial sense; if the former, then literally any trait is heritable because you'll get a number for a trait, even if it's 0.1% heritable versus 99.9% environmental influence. If you meant it colloquially, in that our religious beliefs are inherited from our parents genetically, then so far as I can tell this is emphatically false.
Lewis and Bates (2013) describe a heritability of 26% for religiosity, in line with what they claim as a previously described range of 30-45%. Note that this study was done in a US population that is >90% white and 85% Christian. Majority of participants were aged 25-74 in 1995, so boomers and older which explains how their sample population was 85% Christian in a country that is currently only 70% Christian; I'm impressed by how fertile atheist and agnostic people have been over the last thirty years, but I digress.
Here are another pair of studies, one describing a heritability of 27%, the other 60%. The latter seems to be the outlier that is the source of the higher heritability claims, but critiquing the methods of either to potentially explain the difference is beyond me. If anyone is more familiar with the math/methods involved, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
Many other papers cite a paywalled textbook chapter by a certain Thomas Bouchard; however, I did find this review he wrote where he claims the heritability of religiosity is 30-45% while the heritability of a specific religion is near zero. Anecdotally, this makes sense from the old Dawkins argument that the God you believe in is arbitrarily determined by the country you're born into, as well as the dozens of children of devout Muslim/Hindu immigrants I've met whose religious beliefs are nothing like their parents.
In other words, no, your religious beliefs are absolutely not genetically heritable in the way that (I think) you are claiming. Depending on the study, environmental influences range from being as important to 2-3 times more important than genetics. And the idea that if you ran the Lord of the Flies experiment version 2.0 but provided the children with a Quran, Bible, Torah and other religious texts they would unerringly choose the religion of their parents is ludicrous on it's face.
Like many, I've been highly critical of Effective Altruism's implementation of longtermism, primarily due to the fact that if you are a longtermist then your top priority shouldn't be altruism, it should be race formation. What would a longtermist, civilization-building-focused care about that isn't downstream from the gene pool?
I disagree. I think the community has overcorrected far too much towards inflating the importance of complex trait genetics which remain very poorly understood. That's not to say genetics don't matter, but what you call 'race formation' is very far from the only viable option for civilization building. If humans in antiquity had decided to invent eugenics rather than writing, we never would have made as much progress as we have now. Improvements in AI, synthetic augmentation (neuralink, etc) and social organization could very well eclipse anything you could accomplish with assortative mating given ~25-35 year generation times even if you managed to get everyone on board and biology works as well as you think it will. Genetics matters, what people refer to as blank slatism is false, but a myopic obsession with bloodlines is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
To some extent, De gustibus non est disputandum and all that. I grant that you can have different tastes that are valid, or that you can relate to characters that I find disinteresting. That being said:
I feel like you expected the story to be "And that's how we decided to do "Big important heroic thing" and advance "the good" and this is the story of our noble sacrifice..." no the point of edgerunners is they're just trying to achieve their personal ambitions, make it out alive, not be crushed by the world around them... and everything escalates because the intense friction and pressure they're under just achieving that.
Writing a quality story is orthogonal to whether the story is uplifting or has a happy ending. You can have a story whose message is ultimately nihilist or tragic, even one where every main character dies, and do it poorly or do it very well. In your mind, what differentiates Edgerunners from a lower quality tragedy or film/novel with similar themes? Or what changes could have been made to the plot that would make it better or worse?
For example, since you highlight it: David's relationship with his mother is never really examined. She knew he was talented, had big dreams for his future and made significant sacrifices to give him those opportunities. He completely rejects everything she wanted and turns to a life of a crime. That's fine, maybe he was even forced into it, but...doesn't he have any feelings whatsoever about betraying his mother's dreams and throwing away her sacrifices? Shouldn't he at least grapple with this a little bit? The closest we get is him laughing about being on top of Arasaka tower like his mom always wanted in the last episode.
You want to keep it grimdark and nihilist, but still have some emotional valence? Alright. His mom (who supposedly dies offscreen) was instead sold to human traffickers by the doctors to cover the unpaid medical bills. She ends up the pet of an Arasaka exec. David sees his mother one last time and her disappointment with what he's become just before being smashed by Mr. Smasher. Roll credits.
Or how about the fact that Pilar's death, while shocking, is utterly inconsequential to the story and other characters with deep connections to him? Rebecca is mad for that scene, they kill the nutjob, great...then nobody ever mentions him again beyond Maine suggesting that David take his cybernetic hands? The loss of her brother seems utterly inconsequential to Rebecca. If I'm remembering correctly, the next scene after Pilar dying is Lucy and David being intimate with neither of them seeming to care that their friend just died.
Contrast that to Ned Stark's imprisonment and death, which had huge consequences for the show and the characters. Rob has an emotional breakdown and needs to be comforted by his mother, highlighting the fact that he's a 16 year old boy in over his head. It marks the beginning of Arya's quest for revenge. Tywin and Tyrion bemoan Joffrey's excesses and realize the North will never sue for peace now. Jon nearly breaks his vows to ride south.
the rest we get to gleen so much of their personalities, their values, what little part of life they're holding onto, just from how they behave an interact.
no the point of edgerunners is they're just trying to achieve their personal ambitions
Really? How would you describe Kiwi's personality, besides mercenary, and why is she the way she is? How about Dorio? Why is Maine an edgerunner, what's his endgame, why is he addicted to cybernetics at the expense of his sanity? I don't even know the personal ambitions for...well, any of the characters besides Lucy wanting to go to the moon. David wanted to be an edgerunner, but he gets that in the first few episodes. What does anyone else want?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I wouldn't say you aren't a liberal on ethnicity however. My impression is that you seem to oppose ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them, but oppose the liberal tribe for supporting it. So you are more consistent than them on that, but still take an ideologically more left wing perspective.
If I understand you correctly, your claim is that:
- Progressives support 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them.' I assume, specifically minorities.
- Liberals oppose 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them'
- Inferring from the fact that you don't think FC is 'right-wing' on this issue but rather liberal, true conservatives/'right-wing' people also support 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them.' I assume for white people?
Is this accurate, or would you like to correct my interpretation?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You sure about that? I'm obviously not in a position to offer anything more than hearsay or anecdote, but there are plenty (possibly a majority) of modern models with tiny waists rather than child-bearing hips. Ditto with variation in preference for ass size.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Trans identity reifies the gender binary, so I'm not sure how it's a kludge in response to it, exactly.
In a world where none of these behaviors were coded as male or female, one could choose to land anywhere on the spectrum without being forced to identify as x, y or z. In my mind, the trans label is necessary insofar as we live in a society that does have the binary. I doubt this is a widely held view, although I also doubt that many people think that deeply on it without being pushed.
To, sigh, steelman that point of view: it was incredibly predictable, "we" were told that'll never happen, and then when it did it's just Shocked Pikachu.jpg. It's not (merely) trying to Chinese Cardiologist away the problem; it's "what are you going to do about this failure mode" and then being shocked and having no answer when that failure mode comes up again and again.
And to steelman the rebuttal to that, something like 80,000 prisoners are raped per year in the United States. Huge proportions of female inmates report being raped or harassed, correctional officers have storied histories of raping female inmates. Trans inmates are raped at much higher rates. When's the last time Tucker Carlson ran a segment about prison rape in general? When's the last time anyone here wanted to discuss anything other than the hyped-up rounding error that is men faking being trans to rape female inmates? It's easily possible that a policy allowing trans folks to transfer prisons would result in a net negative number of prison rapes given how often they're victimized in men's prisons.
Small comfort to the victims, I know, I do care and you are correct that those were fairly predictable mistakes, but to say that the sudden concern for the safety of inmates rings hollow would be the understatement of the year. Maybe I'll start to take your argument seriously when conservative politicians/electorates are interested in prisoner welfare more generally.
But there's this big strain in progressivism and liberalism that has this fantastic lack of curiosity, full of weirdness and contradictions, #trustscience (except when it touches on this one topic in a way we don't like), and that's... really concerning.
Fair enough.
Hinges a lot on the details. What does "no stigma and disgust" mean, exactly? What does that mean for gender-segregated spaces? Or sex-segregated? Or genitalia-at-birth segregated spaces, or however you want to define it? Would none of those exist?
A fair question, but a difficult one to answer. 'No stigma and disgust' at least is independent of gender-segregated spaces, as it's easy to campaign on simply being more open-minded and affirming to people who want to dress/act/present themselves in ways that society frowns upon. I don't personally think I have a good answer to your second question and to the extent possible would defer to what women wanted.
Dropped a thought there, hoss.
I knew it was you, with a blackpilled name and slightly different writing style.
Many people view MtF trans the same way, as self-advancement or Munchausen-like trying to enter the "women are wonderful" effect (or trying to escape the "men are guilty until proven innocent" effect).
This doesn't answer why FtM are now considerably more common, but I think MtF and FtM are explained by mostly different mechanisms and it's practically accidental they're treated as one umbrella.
Frankly? I seriously wonder if you're right, particularly given the eye-popping numbers of trans teens right now. But I also wonder if trans acceptance becomes widespread and normalized we wouldn't see a decrease in the number of trans people as being trans lost it's luster of rebellion/counter-culture/righteousness and was treated like being a cis-gay guy in 2023.
It starts off snarky, but I think the point in your quoted section is that Freddie does think anyone that disagrees is only motivated by dishonesty and bigotry, so he's not extending the same consideration that you will.
Fair enough.
Somewhere, quite a while ago, de Boer said his position basically boiled down to always supporting the underdog no matter what.
There are worse heuristics.
Don't mistake eloquence and verbosity for truth and just roll over and abandon your point because people posted 15 links to their extensive post histories from the last three years. There's a steelman to be had for things aren't as bad as the terminally online make them out to be, that liberalism has been remarkably successful and is worth fighting for, and that this is still the best time and place to be alive bar none.
It's easy to paint a grim picture of liberalism and the West when it's failures are trumpeted to the heavens while it's successes are the water we swim in.
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