Corvos
17hr ago
Certainly. I was under the impression a low/mid level true believer going rogue could change the data, maybe with another couple of people turning a blind eye, which is why I put the likelihood of it being true at say 10%, but I haven't worked somewhere like google and I'd be interested if you think that's wrong.
Corvos
19hr ago
To be fair, people are primed to be skeptical of this stuff because of all the incidents when definitions in online dictionaries and wikipedia would quietly change overnight to back up what had been said by some presidental candidate or politician.
I agree with much of this. Sacrifice is necessary for any important endeavour - in a strike, for example, an employee forfeits pay because they hope to get more later, or even out of pure spite to send the message that they aren't willing to put up with intolerable conditions simply because it's technically still better then the alternative.
I've sacrificed to some degree for politics. I had a very hard time for a year or so, and put myself into some very difficult positions, trying to stop my local part of the university falling to wokeness. I held out for a decent while, and perhaps I blunted the worst of it, but I mostly failed. I failed in part because I ignored the advice of my working class formerly-leftist co-conspirator to go after the people in question for having pretty unsavoury associations with local left wing movements. There was a pretty good chance we could have caught them between being disloyal to the cause and affirming anti-semitism in front of the university. I said, "we don't do that, even though they do", and my friend respected my judgement, but I'm still a little haunted by that failure and the consequences of my desire to do the right thing.
In general, my belief is that political power is based on having both a popular element and a machine. A popular element alone is powerless: they can vote, but they can't choose the options on offer, they can't force the power structures of their country into giving them more than token gestures, and authority figures will be punished for appealing to them. A well-funded, well-oiled machine alone is weak: they can push, they can lobby, they can have quiet conversations, but if politicians are forced to (or want to) disclaim them and their desires in public, they will be limited in what they can achieve. So you need both.
I think this is what @Soteriologian refers to as Zerglings and the Overmind, respectively, and that's what I mean by 'organising'.
The main problem of politics is that maintaining both of those things requires you to do stuff that is icky. So for building a big popular movement, you often want someone like a Trump, whose achievements and gumption I genuinely respect but who I also consider dishonest, venal, and rather thick. You need to be able to cut through by exaggerating, you need to be able to fudge and distract when an issue is going to split your coalition, you need to be able to push your sins and failures onto a loyal follower so that you can be the beloved figurehead, etc.
For maintaining your machine, you need money, power, favours. You have to be able to work with some rather grim people. You have to give up stuff you feel strongly about in exchange for stuff you feel more strongly about. You have to enforce negative consequences on some people who are perfectly nice and probably decent in their way, because they are fighting on the other side and you need to signal that people should be careful before they try that or you simply need to get allies into their seats.
Look at Trump's 1.8 billion fund: it was clumsily executed, but it was the beginnings of being able to fund a machine that could give aid and comfort to Right wingers who fall in battle, the same way that the Democrats gave aid and comfort to all those people who ended up with Yale tenure. And it was scuppered because older senators' revulsion at the graft involved surpassed their desire not to have the country by run by Leftists.
Being a politician means being a sin-eater, for a cause worth it. That's their sacrifice. And it's why I have very little patience for the "do what's right and die free" brigade, because they're actively undermining these efforts and the wellbeing of their countrymen to maintain their own personal feelings of virtue. I don't mean that anything goes of course - when all's said and done, you still do have to be better than the other lot and not just axiomatically so, or what was the whole thing for?
Within the constraints of my own sense of self-preservation and a somewhat conflict-averse personality, I believe in pragmatism. That means you don't affirm pretty things that are no use and don't help, and it means you don't martyr yourself (or others) for nothing because that doesn't help either. Sometimes it might be time to die on that hill, but pick the hill carefully and remember that living on the hill in a pretty hobbit-hole is better.
"Be ye wise as serpents, and innocent as doves" is closer to what I try to aim at, though admittedly with a ratio of 2:1.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be a dick, although I know it's coming out that way, I'm just wearied of the endless conversations on the Right which run approximately:
A: we need to actually organise and compromise on our principles to get results.
B: not organising and not compromising is my principle. How about a fruitless gesture instead?
A: will it help? it never has before
B: the willingness to make a fruitless gesture even if it won't help is the most important thing in the world
A: that sounds like no. do you actually care about making any real change in circumstances?
B: not if it would require me to do anything I'm not already doing
It's very frustrating when half the people who agree with me on concrete things that are going wrong would literally rather eat a bullet than help me try to fix them, or even rather than admit that what they've been doing hasn't got anywhere.
Corvos
21hr ago
Because the former makes you fight well in war (a la Iran), or because the former by itself will grant you the latter?
And I think that's very beautifully polished bullshit. "Free to die" is a very different kind of freedom from "Free to live a happy and prosperous life doing all the stuff you (plural) think I shouldn't do" and people are overwhelmingly interested in the latter. Presenting the former using the same word as the latter is somewhere between a category error and slippery rhetoric, depending on the speaker's motive.
If you are prepared to eat a bullet rather than obey, all you're doing is saving your killer time and potential future complications while they take your stuff, pour the ashes of your fathers in the river, and deface the temples of your Gods. As we see from the statue of Robert E Lee.
Personally I want to die fat and happy, surrounded by friends, disciples and twelve loving grandchildren who will further my beliefs and family story.
"(We) Live Free or (You Will) Die" works great, I don't think anybody doubts that. The problem is that it's mythologised until people believe that standing up and declaring your willingness to die for freedom makes you free, rather than being able to back up that declaration with overwhelming and coordinated force.
This is why conservatives are constantly trying to do what the Left does (protests, pointing out hypocrisy, public mourning of horrible murders) and are baffled when they don't get the results the Left gets.
EDIT: Whatever power those men might have thought they had was on sufferance from the British until they were able to fight off the British, if you prefer to put it that way. If the British had put down the American Mutiny (as it might have been dubbed) then things would have been very different, and we would now agree post hoc that those wealthy and influential men in the colonies had been standing on unstable ground.
People often find themselves buying products they don't like because there's no equal-quality option that doesn't have the same fundamental issues.
Companies are engaged in a race to the bottom as profit generators, and consumer sentiment is one aspect of what generates profit. If people really want, say, games with DRM but every seller has decided that allowing easy copying of their games will devastate profits compared to the alternatives, then all of them are going to refuse to sell to you under those conditions. Up-and-comers could appeal to the market by removing DRM, but they don't because they know that if their game is any good it will devastate profits, and because being excessively consumer friendly is almost a sign that it's not good. Even when companies start-out being consumer friendly, they become less consumer friendly as they get more brand recognition and IP loyalty. Sometimes consumer sentiment matters, if a company goes out on a limb like e.g. the XBone, but in general they're smarter than that and test the waters and move broadly in concert.
(Note: this is just an example, I'm not debating DRM specifically.)
A private owner who says, "nah, I could do that but I really hate that" is generally the only defence against enshittification that actually works. In my experience it's very hard to stand up in a committee and say, "yes, we could do that and it would make money but I don't think we should".
Corvos
1d ago
Yes, but the point is that leftists grift to help The Movement whereas rightists grift for a new car.
Corvos
2d ago
Since experience seems to be solidly backing him up - as I never tire of reminding people, blacks in London are 8x as likely to commit murder as whites according to statistics quoted by the former chief of London police - this is less an assumption and more of an observation.
Corvos
2d ago
Sure, but then it would be quite nice to have some support as we do what we can to actually take power back instead of "lol, stupid brits, no balls".
Corvos
2d ago
Who's 'they'? This is like 10% of the population max. They've just got a stranglehold on the organs of power.
Corvos
2d ago
Nigel Farage has demanded 'white hot rage'
Quick correction: he demanded 'pure cold rage' and the BBC misreported it, for which they have now formally apologised.
Corvos
2d ago
Note that Brits will never see an armed man in the course of ordinary life. What Digwa was carrying was highly illegal... for anyone except a member of his I'm-so-special religious group.
Maybe brits are just stupid and coddled to the point that they can't survive in a world filled with non-coddled, tribal savages. Maybe its an American thing to have at least some danger sense and self awareness. Assume everyone is carrying and be nice to them.
Until the turn of the century Britain had, mostly, successfully made the country a reasonably gentle society for decent people. It was not designed for tribal savages. This was a good thing and its unraveling is a tragedy.
They should have known he was dying. They should certainly have managed to notice his injuries while they were handcuffing him for doing a racism. And they need to be extensively and explicitly re-trained that:
- if somebody is on the ground, you look to them and you check them for injuries first, as you say
- you disregard any accusations of racism from an ethnic minority until there is time to do a proper investigation; you do not allow it to prejudice you when you approach a scene, you do not allow yourself to be influenced by thoughts of racial activists on Twitter, and you do recognise it as a tactic very commonly deployed by ethnic minorities to avoid guilt and gain sympathy
- you know and remain aware of the fact that an ethnic minority is far more likely to murder or assault a white man than the opposite, and you act accordingly
And that's just lessons for individual policemen to learn. The police force and the government is a whole other story.
His face had been slashed, according to the closing judicial remarks. Even if we assume it wasn't obvious, they can't have looked even slightly closely.
The fact that their base behaviours seem to be to trust the brown guy levelling accusations of racism over the white guy who's dying on the ground is basically what people are upset about.
The culture war aspects are:
- Digwa immediately knew that the best way to get the police on his side was to accuse his victim of saying something racist.
- Digwa was permitted to carry a huge weapon openly in public, despite having been banned from his temple for stealing knives.
- Digwa was in the country in the first place.
- Digwa's family openly conspired to pervert justice, and clearly considered Nowak to be a foreign devil not a human being deserving of care and treatment or even just calling an ambulance.
- The Prime Minister and other major officials are clearly incapable of summoning up even a fraction of the outrage they assure us they felt over Floyd.
- This is the third atrocity where fears of racism have resulted in white people suffering or dying whilst ignored by authority figures, and something like the tenth where white people have been victimised at the hand of imported ethnics.
- Just like always, the response of the government has been to deny, obfuscate and delay.
And that's just for starters.
Corvos
2d ago
Not knowingly. I thought that's where you seemed to be pointing, and I'm relieved to find I'm wrong.
I agree to a) with caveats.
With reference to b) I don't think people consider acting child labour, rightly or wrongly. I am personally somewhat in favour of child labour - I think the current system has basically turned into "we (society) will love and support you and do anything for you right up until age 18/21, at which point you're on your own". The looming withdrawal of support and the transition to an entirely unknown form of society is a huge source of stress for children. I remember myself and my peers absolutely dreading 'employment' which we had built up in our minds as a sort of left-wing caricature of abuse and exploitation. If we could end school days a few hours early and have children work with their parents for free or for a nominal amount of money, continuing school for a couple of extra years if necessary to make up the time, I would consider that a cool proposal.
None of these seem remotely similar to the specific example I gave of eight-year-olds requesting skincare products for Christmas.
I don't see why not. I think you're blowing it massively out of proportion. Eight year old girls, just like my mother's generation, are aware that people treat pretty girls better, that cosmetics are products meant to make you prettier, and that they're exciting and adult. They don't need social media to know that, (though yes I'm sure social media hammers it home) just eyes and ears. The reason my mother's generation weren't asking for skincare products for Christmas was nothing to do with the purity of youth and everything to do with the fact that their parents would have blown a gasket at them 'painting themselves' too soon (or in the case of my grandmother, at all). Given the reality that people do care about looks, even at that age, a quiet conversation and a provision of age-appropriate cosmetic products seems potentially a far kinder thing to do than lying about how real beauty is on the inside. My mother's school like most girls' schools had deliberately drab uniforms and all the girls hated being forcibly uglified.
Both, and that social media facilitates child grooming and sexual exploitation, and may induce assorted mental health difficulties such as depression, anxiety and body dysmorphia, and facilitate bullying. You know, all of the things I've already expounded on in this thread at great length.
You've been bouncing around between quite a lot of things. And you can care about any and all of them, it's a free country, but when you're throwing out bans all over the place (no broadcast media starring children, no social media, no smartphones, no uploaded home videos (does that extend to no uploaded photos?)) then it kind of helps if you're specific. If you're really worried about the mental health of child actors, okay, there's maybe stuff the industry could do, and indeed they already do it. The Potter actors turned out basically fine. If you're worried about children being sexually groomed, then there's also things you can do (whilst bearing in mind that AFAIK that kind of stuff mostly happens in the home or at school, in the in-person community). If you're worried about depression and body anxiety, then let's see if we can isolate slightly more where that's coming from (and personally I do think it has a lot to do with academic pressure) and how large the effect size is. Those graphs are interesting but they are relative measures - the first covers only standard deviations, the second is about percentages of people who already report depression. To take a deliberately absurd example, I would not be willing to make sweeping changes to society because the average number of self-poisonings have moved from 2 to 4.
I am totally open to large RCTs with banning/controlling use of smartphones to see the effect on these metrics, and I support banning or heavily restricting smartphones in schools, at least for now.
With regards to spiritual commitments, then we are much closer to 'moral panic' territory and I get increasingly wary. I'm as keen as anyone not to foist sexual topics on children too soon, that's not quite the same as 'protecting their purity' and I can tell you from experience that endeavors to impose purity in an impure world can be both stressful and harmful. Even to the extent that I care about this, I care about lots of things and there is only a certain level to which I am happy to trade them off against the sanctity of childhood. "Think of the children!" became a punchline precisely because it allowed so many busybodies to make nuisances of themselves, which was because childhood can be plausibly made to touch so many things. I do not want to live in a world primarily optimised for the health and purity of children.
At the age of eight?
Yes? Young girls talk to older girls, older girls tease them for being ignorant and drip-feed knowledge of the adult world. That’s why lots of women recall being terrified of menarche, because older girls think it’s funny to torment them. The boys in my all-boys school were making pussy jokes at 10, not because they understood them but because that’s what the older boys did.
I am, however, very invested in protecting the purity of girls, especially young girls. That's kind of the whole point of this discussion.
Okay, with what end? Are we, in fact, talking about icky brainwaves after all? Are we positing that making young girls aware that people do/will soon care about their looks harms them? Are you saying that competition for looksmaxxing is harmful because stressful, and the earlier it begins the worse it is? Is it a spiritual commitment to defend the innocence of childhood, and is that for both boys and girls or just girls? If you made your metaphysical commitments a bit clearer then it would be easier to discuss them.
What "pressure" are you referring to? And why do we observe a major discontinuity in teen suicide and depression in 2014?
How major? And are we talking about a generalised effect over the whole cohort specifically in that time, or specifically worsening of the most anxious 1% from quite suicidal to very suicidal, or what? Like I say, I welcome serious attempts to get to grips with this and characterise it and disentangle different factors. I would prefer solutions to be more focused than ‘let’s ban smartphones and prevent children uploading home videos to the internet’. Thus my proposal to restrict displaying like-based feedback to the underage.
FWIW that was a genuine 'if'. I didn't know where you were coming from, and there are certainly many people who do think like that. That's why I put two 'if's: if you are concerned about A which I think is sensible, here is my proposal, if you are concerned primarily about A as it pertains to B which I think is less sensible, I think you should let it go. I apologise if you found my reply obnoxious.
Before TikTok, did you ever hear of an eight-year-old being asked what she wanted for Christmas and her replying "skincare"? No eight-year-old should want skincare products for Christmas, and it's obscene that social media has made her think she needs them.
Honestly, it's my strong impression that young girls have always been obsessed over the things that women do, including cosmetics. My mother went to an all-girl's school and they discussed this kind of thing constantly. The difference was that it was hidden from adults to protect their idea of childhood (and feminine) innocence.
I do not believe that our world, in which most teenagers in the West own smartphones and use social media, is healthier overall than the counterfactual world in which most teenagers do not own smartphones and use social media.
That wasn't my counterfactual. My counterfactual was (in response to a potential position you don't in fact possess) that I don't think it's healthy for society to obsess over protecting the purity of women or the spread of images of women.
To go to your point, though, I am very skeptical of movements that take away something people like and do because they ought not to like and do it*. I'm all for giving people tools to control smartphone usage, and for attempting to cut down on network effects that drive people to smartphones whether they wish so or nay. But the fact is that text can be a lighter, easier way of communicating with people more like oneself (viz, this forum) and I'm reluctant to say "no! only in-person communications!". The real world can be harsh in many ways, and some of those ways are needful, but 'go and suffer' isn't necessarily always the right response. I can't say I remember my pre-smartphone childhood to be much happier or less anxious making - playground cliques are just as isolating as social media ones, and playground bullying is worse than cyberbullying. People treat smartphones as a refuge for a reason.
* Yes, I know there are surveys showing that lots of teens don’t like social media and smartphones. I look forward to more work on this being done, and would prefer to address those teens and their needs specifically rather than reach first for the ban hammer.
With regards to anxiety and depression, I don't think it's the phones, although the phones don't help. I think it's the pressure and the constantly raised standards, which is mostly downstream of globalisation.
do they know that pederasts are watching these videos and masturbating to them?
If you are concerned about young people unwittingly being lured into (willingly) making increasingly sexual videos for likes, that seems a reasonable concern that can be addressed by hiding the likes on social media for kids. This has the handy benefit of removing lots of other incentives to present a false face to the world.
If you are concerned about the existence of people who might watch these videos and think unsavoury thoughts, thus defiling innocents with their nasty brain-waves, then that sounds like a classic moral panic. The haunting fear that somewhere a nonce is happy. If there is a depiction of a pretty girl in the world, someone has masturbated to it, that’s simply a fact of life, and getting upset about it is the kind of impulse that ends up leading to the removal of all images of the female form and hiding girls in burkas. Look at the vast online collections of images that happen to show women’s feet. There is no point troubling yourself (or everyone else) over such things, it’s almost certainly healthier overall than the alternative.
There were other cases. The most obvious one is perhaps the case where the dictionary swiftly ‘updated’ its definition of recession to include a non-standard but not totally made up one that didn’t embarrass Joe Biden as he campaigned for reelection.
Plus the Wikipedia edit wars around whether or not Kamala Harris was “border czar” when it would embarrass her (though that’s more two-sided) and the redefinitions of “Cultural Marxism” from part of the Wikipedia series on Marxism to “Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory”.
Meriam-Webster’s dictionary definitions veer left and include left-wing extemporising: https://archive.vn/FI0tu
Wikipedia notably excludes most right-wing publications from being neutral sources while keeping lots of left-wing ones.
It’s a common pattern: the activists rush forward, then the respectable “we just report the world” orgs immediately provide cover by recognising activist claims and laundering them into respectability. So Joe Public thinks “I don’t remember that word meaning that”, goes to the dictionary, see it does mean that (as of 10 seconds ago), and goes, “ah, guess I must have been wrong and the Republicans are making a big fuss over nothing”.
Do all of these individual actions have plausible explanations? Yes. Would they rush to change the definition of certain words to help Trump in the same way, or consider right-wing usages and mores valid in the way they do left-wing ones? Not a chance in Hell.
More options
Context Copy link