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I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
I think all the discussion about an identity-based lens downthread is extremely misguided. This is more neutral life crisis, I would argue. So the guy, clearly fairly smart, graduates CalTech in 2017 with a degree in mechanical engineering. Seems like he works for a bit over a year, then I assume is laid off or maybe he absolutely hated it, in the two months after he tries to work on an indie game, publishes one crappy Flash-era looking game that got probably double-digit sales at most (2 reviews on Steam in 6 years before the shooting led to a handful more sales), goes quiet and probably lives on savings for a bit, at some point I think moves home, eventually after a year or two picks up tutoring as a part-time gig for a few years. Highly likely here, reading between the lines, he gets some FOMO and feels in a dead end career-wise, goes back to school for a CS master's degree, then doesn't get a job in the big slump right as he graduates. He's Christian, probably somewhat typical left-leaning politics, by all accounts fairly mild-mannered, and like many Californians including Christians really dislikes Trump and his movement on a moral basis. Weirdly, he seems to like Kash Patel as the one exception (didn't include on list of targets). Moral enough to not target bystanders, but morally misguided enough to still commit murder despite Christianity being pretty clear about how that's bad.
This describes a fair amount of people, including actually myself to a loose extent biographically/politically speaking (if you squint a bit, but not too too hard). More specifically to him, smart enough to realize that political assassinations do have some kind of national political impact, not smart enough to realize these impacts are almost impossible to predict and often are counterproductive, smart enough to get guns and go cross-country without getting caught, but not smart enough to actually plan almost anything meaningful (though to be fair this at least partially checks out, since as we know being too detailed in your planning raises the chances of getting caught before you go, so it's not 100% stupid). If you wanna kill administration officials, usually you would have to limit yourself to 1 official at a smaller event to have a decent chance, so I assume this is an overambitious plan here. Clearly he didn't expect to live. I assume poor tactical awareness.
To circle back briefly and reiterate, it's not that political assassinations "don't work" it's that they don't consistently work in the ways shooters want them to. Often a stupid idea.
This doesn't tell us much other than the memetic influence of copycat shootings is starting to spread to more 'normie' people who aren't extremely mentally ill ('only' depression or similar here doesn't count). If history is any guide we'll see a few more assassination attempts of various types for the next 5-8 ish years and then it will slowly fade again, again purely based on the epidemiological-like traits the spread of acts like these are well documented to have (think for example certain modes of domestic terrorism over the years). I think this also slightly re-contextualizes a few of the incidents of violence like the Kirk shooter or Luigi Mangione as potentially less identity-based than initially suspected, when viewed in context, although the sequential nature of the memetic spread of this kind of political violence makes it hard to be super sure about that. I think it's a mistake to view these through primarily identity-based lenses, because memetic spread of this kind of thing naturally travels in subgroups but doesn't inherently correspond to groups themselves. Frankly I think nearly any loose political grouping is susceptible to this kind of thing, so the recurring "the lefties do this more" or "the righties do this more" that both left and right are constantly obsessed with in the last decade in particular is just a stupid argument.
If there IS a culture war angle to this? It's more about how fulfilling men in modern society seem to find life. That is, not very fulfilling, especially when you encounter job, social, or severe mental difficulties in the 15-35 age range or so. If this guy had more to live for, this kind of thing doesn't happen. At least that's my take.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3hr ago
Nike is much better at marketing than Adidas, that's pretty much it. Also I think most people don't actually care about the nitpicky rules and so the barrier was already broken, does breaking it a second time "but actually" really say anything new? However, marketing can only get you so far and Nike should be worried overall about losing such a large part of the running market, there's a reason the stock price is in the dumpster. Arguably, however, this isn't really a technology problem so much as an execution problem; Nike's loss in market share isn't really because rivals invented something Nike didn't, but rather Nike's shoes haven't had the right mix of quality control, durability, and comfort that hobby-runners and semi-pros want.
Somewhat recently I finished the series A Practical Guide to Evil. Pretty fun. I wish I had time to put it into better detail, but the world and setup is interesting. It's a sort of fantasy-with-superpowers type world? I don't know if I've really seen a book do it quite this way, however. The core concept is that "character archetypes" called "Named" periodically form in the world and with powers to match. For example, there's a Black Knight that shows up every few decades in the Evil-aligned nations, and a Paladin or whatnot who will show up in a Good-aligned nation. Roles can and do evolve if you survive long enough and are successful (e.g. you might start as a Squire and later evolve to e.g. a Mirror Knight). They have 3 limited-use (recharging) powers that are partly personal partly role-based. Fights between them tend to loosely follow some meta-narrative type rules, like starting a 'Rule of Three' set of conflicts between two rivals, or how Parties of Five tend to naturally form and are more powerful. It's a typical fantasy world (magic, nonhuman races, vaguely medieval) but with better than average worldbuilding IMO. The Evil-aligned empire on the continent exploits Orcs and Goblins to fight in their armies. You get periodic crusades against them, and periodic bouts of world-conquering too.
The context for the books however is that the main character is born and orphan in a middle, traditionally Good-aligned kingdom that usually gets the worst end of the stick when the Good nation of city-states to their West and the Empire to their East rampage all over their land. She is recruited as an Evil Squire, at first, to the Black Knight. However, said Black Knight and the Empress have conspired to "break" the typical cycle of Good vs Evil. They carefully try to avoid narrative traps in their fighting, stamp out Good heroes before they can get enough experience to start winning, treat the conquered middle Good nation abnormally well with expanded autonomy and economic prosperity, and develop the Empire's army into a more egalitarian and deadly fighting force, with expanded rights for nonhumans. This means that the MC's home nation is slowly turning... Evil! Mostly. But "Evil" in a, well, "practical" way as the title suggests. The idea is to be juuuust not-Evil and competent enough to prevent Fate spawning too many Good heroes from ruining everything. In their eyes, Good are jerks who are overly rigid in their thinking, while Evil has the potential to be pragmatic and level-headed about the greater good, paired with a resentment that narrative usually blindly favors the Good. Throughout the series the main character slowly adopts more and more of this attitude, but also tries to look out for her home nation and eventually grows quite powerful both personally and politically.
There is some character stuff of course, starting a bit tropey but gaining depth as you go on, some inventive fights (the main character often has to resort to tricks and cunning to win against the often narratively stronger Good heroes), and a surprising amount of politics and political maneuvering. And yes, the meta-narrative impact on fights is pretty interesting to see, especially among the more-experienced Named. You might get a hero who deliberately sets up a noble sacrifice as a giant fake-out, or deliberately as part of their fight strategy sending someone to wander around and thus rely on divine providence to guide them to the exact right spot, or a villain who tries to avoid their monologuing tendencies which inevitable backfire, but sometimes leaning into As the series expands you do eventually visit most parts of the continent, other nations' politics and alliances often become highly relevant. You've got a surprisingly deep and fleshed-out history of the nations involved. Which I've always really appreciated in series, like for example Wheel of Time was great in part because you ended up actually using the map over the course of the series with a nice sense of scale. A fair amount of the series is mostly war-stuff, though, which you either love or hate.
And you've got some comedy too. There's a city-state to the south that is an exaggerated democracy, where everything is put to a vote and the bureaucracy is intense and they almost never agree to do anything, but also has secret police who are constantly trying to guard against Tyranny. We get periodic epigraphs from some of the Named former Emperors, from Emperor Irritant, the Oddly Successful (the best unexpected quotes), Emperor Traitorous (infamous for several quadruple-crosses and such), etc. that occasionally give Hitchhiker's Guide vibes. Anyways, it's originally a web serial and that shows at times but nonetheless was a very fun read if pulp fantasy is your jam.
As an aside, in the original serialization, this world does apparently have a reason that the world is stuck at a certain technological level. Apparently there is a race of "gnomes" which are implied to be super-advanced, flying or space-faring or something, that will deliver a warning if an invention happens or line of research is pursued they don't want. If the warning is ignored they basically nuke the city from orbit. Is this elaborated on anywhere else in the novel aside from a few random mentions? No. They in no way affect the plot. I guess that's one way to set up a fantasy world's tech level... (IIRC in the published, edited novelization which is in progress, the second of ~6 currently about to come out, which I do recommend as an improvement over the original, this idea was dropped in favor of some kind of Fate hand-wavy thing, but IMO the gnomes are more funny)
Haven't really tried the other two much myself, high costs kinda scare me off where I find it hard to believe the value is there for my use case, but I'm looking quite closely at Deepseek V4 Flash specifically, because the cost-to-performance seems to be pretty insane.
I mean, the official API price is $0.0028 per million input (cached), $0.14 (cache miss), $0.28 per million output. Has a 1M context window, and per OpenRouter, because their stats have above a 90% cache hit rate, this means the effective weighted price per million input is only $0.015 per million. That's really crazy. I need to test a bit more to figure out where I'd place the intelligence exactly, but...
NONE of the current frontier 'cost-efficient' models come even remotely close to that. For comparison Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite is 0.25/1.50 input/output per 1M, Gemini 3 Flash is 0.50/3.00, GPT 5.4 Nano is 0.20/1.25, GPT 5.4 Mini is 0.75/1=4.50, Claude Haiku 4.5 is 1.00/5.00. Sure, it's not as good at coding as Gemini Flash, allegedly, but also allegedly it's better at agentic workflows. Those are some pretty significant gaps, approaching an order of magnitude in some cases.
So yeah, Pro is also very cheap and that might make some waves, but contextually Flash is SUPER cheap. Like, obscenely so.
This to me is a big deal because part of what makes AI so compelling is the cost/benefit ratio. With a model like V4 Flash, especially input-heavy workflows, there are plenty of scenarios where it's literally cheaper to throw 5 different approaches at the wall and pick the best than to make a single attempt with a model that's just a hair smarter. We'll see how well it does when encountering actual codebases and such, but I find that it might potentially enable a slightly different type and set of workflows than we're used to.
It's hard to say for sure these days because especially with agentic coding the harnesses are so important (and often what works for certain setups doesn't transfer that well, including across generations of models). I'm curious if someone will figure out a good way to leverage this new cost-benefit balance, because it potentially changes e.g. how you might spin up subagents quite a bit. Although possibly as I mentioned the model is just a bit too stupid to do a large enough range of useful work. We'll see, gotta figure out how much is benchmaxxing vs inherent quality.
At the same time, the Claude shift in tokenizer probably long-term helps efficiency and intelligence, but short term you're looking at a 10-30% flat increase in costs on higher token costs alone, before you get into the token efficiency of the models themselves, at least per the numbers I was looking at initially.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
It seems to me that internships with placement opportunities not only signal "I'm aiming for a higher job" but are also harder to get relative to full-time IT support type positions. So not only is the opportunity cost higher if you were to not go with the internship, but the signals align with what you likely want for your career. I'd go with the internship unless the finances don't allow it. Sure, it sucks to then go around and job-hunt a second time, but there's nothing stopping you from job-hunting a bit again especially towards the end of the internship (plus if you find another opportunity, it also inflates your value a bit if they want to bid to keep you).
Although where exactly you are education/career-wise might matter a bit. The one caveat here is how good the reputation of the internship company is. 17 seems pretty low, so I'd wonder if that stinginess extends to the rest of their org.
Just my 2 cents, gut reaction
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
There's a small subset of commenters here that are experts in what is covert, effectively bad-faith argumentation, perfectly calibrated to the rules. You will post a substantive comment arguing/claiming/observing A B C D and they will nitpick B, and respond to D with their most full-force argument. Of course, ignoring entirely A and C. If you're interested in light and truth of course, this is a most strange way to respond, but many of these people aren't. To many of them forums are about WINNERS and LOSERS and they are determined to be 'winners'. Tragically, most people in this forum seem inclined to let them get away with it. Who cares if someone ignored A and C? Disagree = downvote, rebuttal to D was strong = upvote. "Hey you ignored my point" = crickets. Then, for bonus points a week later, a toplevel post with a gish-gallop of blue-links chosen for maximum effect. It's effectively the loophole here.
Personally I'm not interested in playing the game back, I value my own integrity too highly, so I'll begrudgingly accept reddit-hivemind downvote patterns, block a few people who are particularly egregious, and accept that I'm here purely as a mix of fun and intellectual hobbyism. I'm not here on a crusade to change minds because the personal cost is too high. I'll say my piece and maybe people will find it interesting. But if you're wondering if this community lives up to its billing the answer is no. Is that depressing? Yes, a bit. Is it ironic considering some of these bad-faith people are some of the very same lamenting the slide of society into a "low-trust" paradigm, which is, of course, allegedly the fault of progressives and minorities? Yes. It's not even really the mods' fault because a) their job is really hard and b) some of these people are just way too good at skirting the rules in just the right way.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
No, insiders are still visible even if small in number because their relative confidence is so out-of-distribution. They will be almost always betting larger amounts of money on more-rare events in a way that is noticeable. Partially due to the nature of the thing, but also due to the amount of reward necessary to outweigh the large inherent risk.
OK, sure, maybe the CIA might use this on purpose as psyop stuff, but that's a classic case of shooting yourself in the foot in a more broad sense. It's not in the US government's general interest to have tons of ammo for conspiracy theorists (mainstream or niche)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Somewhat (in)famously just recently in Utah they found guilty a woman who tried the fentanyl thing exactly. And failed. Partially because the husband literally suspected her of poisoning him and told others as much, partially because obtaining the fentanyl when you don't previously have a drug network is nontrivial (the housekeeper who the lady knew to have had a prior drug conviction was hit up for some), and partially because more broadly speaking even smart people (idk if Kouri was though) don't kill people without a motive and motives are pretty legible. That's kind of a big one.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
Good one. I'm totally capable but if there was something easy and pre-existing it could save me some tokens, you know?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
Except crypto was almost always purely in the realm of theory-applications.
With AI, right now, I can do things like generate custom flashcards for subjects I'm learning (job interview prep). I can get more in-detail answers about random questions without spending hours on Google piecing things together (just yesterday, asking for details about how stomachs process different macronutrient profiles). I can generate custom mini-apps for a wide variety of tasks (recently I made a custom task-selection spinner for my todo list that weights the important tasks more than smaller tasks, while occasionally mandating a break). It can make sure an email I send to a recruiter doesn't have obvious mistakes or commit a faux pas. I can get personal advice of at least middling quality without friction on a wide variety of topics. Obviously, it can code really well, and that touches my field very directly in a lot of ways. There are plenty of other use cases, too. These aren't "lines of code" type accomplishments, they are concrete deliverables of various scopes. Some of which were previously high-friction or even impossible.
Sure, some of these are gratuitous or busywork, but they are all real. Crypto stuff was like, "what if the government keeps track of property listings on the blockchain" which is a) something the government already does mostly just fine and b) obviously never happened and c) would have required very significant network effects. And currently, crypto is extremely useful for pretty much exactly two types of people: those who treat it like digital gold (it does OK at that) and criminals who can move money around that's difficult to track. Nothing else. So sure, in that sense it was real, but AI plainly can do more than two things and will continue to do more than two things even as hype dies out.
And sure, my IRL friend will give me better advice than Claude will, but there are some things that are so low-stakes that it would be disrespectful of their time to ask or discuss. Paradigms like that are all over, because of the speed and cost AI offers. In that sense, it's more like the Industrial Revolution, where speed and cost enable things to happen that previously were functionally impossible at scale. In fact most of the Industrial Revolution was about things that were already feasible to do, but were cost-prohibitive (or took too long). This in turn generated new industries that were previously only theory. Now, I don't think AI will have that level of impact on society, and I'm also not sold on it 'creating new industries' at all, but probably it's somewhere on the level of the impact similar to the invention of Google at least?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
Somewhat an aside, but I consider that first link to be a first-degree chart-crime. First of all radar plots are inherently iffy, since we pay close attention to the "area" and the area is highly dependent on how the categories are organized (a "spiky" radar plot has much less total area than if you sort the axes to create a "lopsided" plot, despite showing the same information). This is a little bit defensible if the adjacency of the categories is obvious and inherent, but they frequently are not. For example, "Occupational: Writing Literature and Language" is NOT next to "Text: Creative Writing" for no good reason at all. And furthermore, what is the scale of the chart? It's "Arena rank"... which is NOT equally spaced. The chart implies that the difference between #1 and #2 is the same as (or even slightly bigger than, considering how the radar chart "expands") that between #3 and #4, but this is plainly not the case. They should be using some kind of actual score instead, perhaps a scaled one. Sure, it allows consistency across axes, but if we are comparing a model to its successor, the rating scale definitely shouldn't be implicitly including other models like it does now (in one spot it drops from rank 2 to rank 5, does this mean in that category some other model class does abnormally well, or that did Claude truly degrade?). Even worse, the center of the plot, usually a natural "zero", is not a zero at all - it's rank 6. There are, as you know, dozens and dozens of models in the rankings, so rank 6 being a zero score is totally nonsensical.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
It's not about profitability, it's that they got a giant wave of users but not enough compute to fill that demand. So, it's pretty obvious what must happen next, you do some mix of increased mandatory token efficiency (adaptive reasoning) + stricter limits (across the board, free and paid, but mostly targeting the super-user hogs who theoretically will pay for extra API usage after limits run out).
I will say though this probably bodes poorly for Claude in the near-medium term, because ChatGPT had the same thing more or less happen with their 5.0 launch (forced adaptive model selection for mandatory token efficiency) and it definitely took the wind out of their sails for at least 4-5 months.
At any rate, however, I strongly, strongly disagree about this empowering the skeptics (or being evidence of a shift against AI adoption). The fact that people are whining about problems with their tools is selection bias. It's kind of like the classic armoring spots on the airplane that didn't have holes (because they didn't survive to be examined), in that people wouldn't complain so vociferously if they weren't so needy for the tool in the first place. The complaints to me are evidence of a generalized latent enthusiasm, not pessimism. In the grand scheme of things, it's far, far better for a company to have complaints that users can't get enough of their product, than it is for the product to be simply ignored. In the near term, I expect a decent chunk of users to swing back toward the OpenAI offering, Codex (which is undergoing a PR blitz of sorts right now)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
protip: the smaller bananas are almost always the most flavorful ones. Maybe the same is true of strawberries, I dunno, but I have found the banana tip to be pretty consistent.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8d ago
Is there a way to download our complete comment history from themotte? I am considering seeing what sort of results I can get from training a model to mimic my writing style and tone, and it would be helpful to add my comments here to those from reddit.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
13d ago
The bigger AI-to-AGI problem is that the monetizable market right now is pretty heavily coders and some corporate usage. The gains in general knowledge and more abstract problem solving are having a rough year, partly because there aren't good benchmarks for that kind of thing so it's hard for the labs themselves to optimize for it, much less try to prove it if they get a real improvement!
To elaborate slightly, it often takes a certain amount of personal, longitudinal usage with a model to start to explore the quirks and jagged edges they have, and when those edges do appear they are often hard to put into words. That is to say, it's not totally clear what a good benchmark for this would even look like - if I had to guess, it would be assembling a panel of users and following them for ~2 weeks and then getting somewhat subjective feedback converted to a number somehow... but even if you made this work it takes too long and costs too much money to carry out to be feasible. At least in the current environment.
At any rate, it's possible that AGI-like stuff will start to pick up again if the frontier labs start to prioritize it again, but it's hard to say. Personally, I think the big differentiator is that we need some extra technological-mathematical breakthrough (like a more holistic/realistic "memory" function, though potentially some of the so-called 'world model' approaches could bear fruit) to get us over the last little hump. It's anyone's guess when or if that will happen.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
13d ago
In the modern internet, servers are nicely scalable. Get more customers? Spin up a few more virtual AWS boxes, so to speak. However, AI compute is not like this. Claude has only so much, some of which needs to be reserved for new models to keep R&D going (and the AI sector is so rivalrous that you cannot even buy compute from a rival even if the economics would theoretically work out for both parties)... and all of the sudden a few months back they got a giant wave of sign-ups. A perfect storm of "hey Claude's actually pretty good compared to ChatGPT", Claude Code positive PR, OpenAI's ad foray, favorable PR from the Defense Department feud, etc.
So of course limits need to go down, even for paying users. Supply and Demand 101. But most users aren't used to internet-era resources being subject to supply and demand (as I mentioned server compute is usually supremely elastic for the last 15 years or so) so they see Anthropic as acting "nefarious". This is not true. They are definitely not sabotaging models just to sell the next model because they are literally incapable of accepting more customers without hurting existing ones. No company is going to outright say "sorry we don't want your money" so of course they don't, but that's the reality. They've looked at 2-year projections and feel OK about it, so for the moment they will just circle the wagons and deliver 70% of the value most customers expect, just enough not to lose too many and keep people hungry for more in a few months when (I assume) more compute comes online. No conspiracy, and really no intent to harm either I don't think.
You're correct that at least in theory there are ways around this like farming out the inference in a more traditional manner. But 1) I don't think the economics actually work out very well for this and 2) the proprietary sauce of how inference is delivered to end-users at scale is actually very valuable, any outsourcing thus endangers the golden goose there too - on top of the weights issue point you bring up. Also, inference at scale requires certain hardware, and most of the existing flexible-type compute is more CPU-bound (to oversimplify massively). You absolutely can serve inference in a more fragmented (and thus flexible) way on worse hardware but costs spike pretty substantially, from what I understand (various caching optimizations and energy usage and also all sorts of latency issues crop up).
I think reputational damage is overblown for Anthropic; it's really not so bad to have a product so good they can't make enough of it. Compared to OpenAI they are sitting pretty. They can still cannibalize other AI providers too for more headroom, they aren't maxxed out in terms of customer base like OpenAI arguably is. Their relative success at B2B sales and integration only magnifies this.
More to the "evil" point - Dario Amodei is the nerd who left OpenAI because he was the type to whine that a new model hadn't done safety testing yet before being deployed. We even see this crop up in that one Sam Altman article. And he's in charge. Business pressures are strong of course, but Amodei I'm pretty sure is one of the rare diehard true believers in alignment, so while he might be insane in a different way, it won't be an alignment issue, my sense is that it would take another order of magnitude more investor pressure for that to be a notable threat.
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14d ago
Totally orthogonal, but FYI it's "in the vein of" - it was originally a mining analogy, since ores show up in "veins", if you're in the same vein it's implied to be a thing of similar type.
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14d ago
Realistically it's somewhere in between. You have to understand that the US is literally Hitler to theocratic Iran. Not just morally, but in its "founding legend" and historical sense of self. So America is not just some foreign country, it's emblematic of their very independence. As such, chants of "Death to America" are somewhat patriotically entwined. Of course, now that we have literally been at war, the tone will probably be a bit different for the next decade.
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14d ago
Europe definitely agrees, but Trump is such a pain to work with that it's making it hard for them to actually do anything about it, because they know Trump will spin anything they do very loudly. He is simply incapable of graciously accepting quiet assistance, otherwise they would. In other words, Trump turns any action into a potential domestic political disaster, so coupled with the collective action problem Europe always has, of course no one is willing to stick their neck out even if they know that they probably should.
Plus, most of them are still pissed that Trump didn't involve them to begin with (they didn't get any sort of meaningful heads up) and in fact Trump initially bragged about not needing help, and then had the gall to turn around only a week or two later and trash them in public for not helping anyways.
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14d ago
> Poster specifically mentions factor analysis
> Blithely replies with yet another topline aggregate statistic
That's a statistical non-sequitur.
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14d ago
I don't think it has a strong moral valence either way.
Part of the modern discourse disconnect I didn't really mention is also how we mentally model feelings. I think some progressives believe (and this isn't actually all that unreasonable) that your feelings are so strongly interconnected with each other across scenarios. In that model, it would be bad, because this emotion of "danger" would inevitably bleed over to other innocuous situations (for example, maybe you then innately also feel even a Black coworker in a white collar workplace to be somehow more 'dangerous' than other colleagues, all else equal).
I disagree on two fronts with this progressive logic. First I think context is pretty strong in these situations. Second I think progressives often are very guilty of assuming all emotions are equally valid and real (and thus by implication must be sourced in some internalized attitude). Flatly speaking this is just wrong. Humans do not actually have amazing control over their emotions, and it's not uncommon for emotions to show up that aren't even all that deeply connected to the fabric of our existence and attitudes. They just show up. Rather than judge the emotion, we should judge the reaction to them, and feel free to discard them at times. Obviously we aren't like, ignorant or unaware of emotions - sometimes we do need to process them - but they shouldn't dominate our lives in every single regard, and we can generate emotions too to some extent (not just be dominated by them).
Progressives are correct that emotions can be data worthy of self-reflection (if I see a Black guy and feel uncomfortable, why might that be?), but they've messed up the scale of the matter pretty badly (it's absolutely not something automatically worthy of a moral panic).
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14d ago
Victimhood mentality requires far more than the mere allegation of inequality or oppression or whatever word you want to use (or is in vogue). "True" victimhood (the most problematic kind) is when you've over-corrected into a type of learned helplessness, and when victimhood begins to take shape as a defining and incredibly prominent trait, rather than just something you happen to experience once in a while. Merely claiming that oppression exists is not victimhood. Even claiming that oppression is near-universal is not victimhood. Victimhood is when it infects identity and behavior to an unhealthy degree.
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14d ago
I think we also paint things with a pretty broad brush. It's true there's really significant clustering geographically, but the Black community in Texas vs Alabama vs Virginia vs New Jersey seem to have some variations in how the culture presents, at least as far as I can tell. It's also in my actual experience a bit hard to disambiguate racial angles from economic angles - truth be told a lot of white women and white men who are poor also don't really seem to get along all that well. When life is hard, you have more complaints.
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14d ago
I'd say that someone's appearance and attraction is, mostly, uncontrollably subjective (and likely unchanging), so yeah it's a good instinct to be cautious of gatekeeping there. But part of the context of the conversation here is about personality and other stereotypes, so refusing to consider dating someone because you think their personality is probably a certain way is almost certainly discrimination.
Dating is a bit of a side quest though compared to most everyday interactions, since it's also not like people are entitled to a certain level of dating interest, and so I think it's reasonable to think that different aspects and phases of romance might need to be treated separately. Plus we all know opinions about 'checklists' for finding a partner are all over the place. Even with all these caveats, exempting dating entirely (as you seem to suggest?) from conversations about discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping feels fundamentally wrong.
I don't really see what you describe seeing. I see some jokes about Patel, some commentary about increasing apathy around assassination attempts on Trump, a few threads related to today's news cycle that insult Trump or call him a pedophile, a few left-wing conspiracy theories (par for the course for assassinations + people ignorant of Halon's Razor), a bit of "if so many people want to kill him there must be a reason", a fair amount of criticism about Trump using it to promote his WH ballroom project, none of which I would characterize as "celebration".
Especially given that it's hard to take the assassination attempt seriously qua assassination attempt given how obviously idiotic the attempt was.
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