FiveHourMarathon's profile

FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 15hr ago

Of course many founding fathers believed that slavery was wrong but that there was still a clear intellectual hierarchy of races... many abolitionists did believe in the 1820s and 1830s that black and white were equally capable,

These aren't necessarily contradictions in terms. There was widespread belief in a much more nuanced and fine-grained set of racial distinctions, the idea of a "white" race as opposed to a German/English/French race, or a white race as opposed to a "race of labourers" and a race of aristocrats, is developing throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Many at different times have said that the black and white races contain, in due proportion, the capable and the incapable. Or one could believe that blacks are dumber than the English and less organized than the Germans, but smarter than the Irish and more moral than the Jews.

Gross white racial superiority is largely a modern innovation.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 6d ago

Fast forward a few years, and it becomes normal for leftist women and their male ‘allies’ to dismiss anyone and everyone as ‘incel’, even married men with children as long as they come across as sufficiently deplorable to the average feminist.

The kernel of truth at the center of this is that even men who are objectively, even wildly, sexually successful can still harbor the sexual resentment that sits at the core of the incel label.

Incel, properly understood, is more like "unemployed" than it is like "disabled" or "nerd." Most men are involuntarily celibate (they would like to have sex but can't find a partner) for periods of their life. I've expanded the metaphor elsewhere:

We could distinguish [] between the "unemployed" incel and the "disabled" incel. Almost every man goes through periods when he is looking for sex and can't get it, very few young men are permanently physically incapable of getting laid. We could further distinguish among the unemployed incels the three general types of unemployment in Econ 101: Frictional, Cyclical, Structural. Virtually every man has periods of Frictional celibacy, between girlfriends or hook ups or busy at work or on a long term sojourn somewhere not amenable to casual sex. Obviously there's not a "business cycle" to sex, but we could substitute that for the lifecycle of the man himself, almost all men are ready and willing to have sex long before they are able to obtain it, and most are willing to have sex long after they are too old to interest most women. Those two categories are unimportant to us, they may participate in incel discourse for a time but ultimately they'll get their "fair share" of sex over a lifetime. It's the third group, Structural Incels, we should worry about. The Structurally Unemployed are those whose skills have been made redundant by industrial changes and reorganizations. Your coal miners or carriage makers. People who will never get laid with the skills they have. The solution to that is always training and help changing careers. Some people don't want to train and they don't want to change careers, well tough luck then. Sitting around whining you should have a bigger paycheck because you are the best carriage maker in ten counties, and failing to acknowledge that no one buys carriages!, is a bridge to nowhere.

What we see is a lot of guys retain the incel talking points and resentments, that they formed when they couldn't get laid, even after they are getting laid. A lot of guys continue to hate women for withholding pussy even after some women stop withholding it! A lot of guys who came into themselves are still mad about rejections in high school. Which I understand, there was a period between 16-18 when it seemed like I had somehow already missed the boat: every girl I hit on who didn't reject me immediately eventually told me she had lost her virginity some time ago to her [asshole] ex bf, and that now she wasn't really interested in that kind of thing anymore. And it's easy for those kinds of rejections to fester, even after one goes to college and none of it matters anymore. Or, a lot of guys who came into their own after college, once they got a good job, feel like they missed the boat in that ok fine I can date women now, but half of them got fat after college, and i can never get that back, they're always going to resent not getting it back then.

That's the dynamic I think you're seeing!

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 3d ago

The whole book just felt like a thesis length version of "But I have already drawn you as the Soyjak and me as the Chad..."

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 6d ago

Contra Nate Silver on Political IQ Tests OR On the Limits of Moneyball Philosophy

Nate Silver, on his new Substack argues that Sonia Sotomayor should retire, and that if you don't want her to retire you're a moron. Some pull quotes:

However, I’m going to be more blunt than any of them. If you’re someone who even vaguely cares about progressive political outcomes — someone who would rather not see a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court even if you don’t agree with liberals on every issue— you should want Sotomayor to retire and be replaced by a younger liberal justice. And — here’s the mean part — if you don’t want that, you deserve what you get.

...

In my forthcoming book, I go into a lot of detail about why the sorts of people who become interested in politics often have the opposite mentality of the world of high-stakes gamblers and risk-takers that the book describes. Both literal gambling like poker and professions that involve monetary risks like finance involve committing yourself to a probabilistic view of the world and seeking to maximize expected value. People who become interested in politics are usually interested for other reasons, by contrast. They think their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day. And sure, they care about winning. But winning competes against a lot of other considerations like maintaining group cohesion or one’s stature within the group.

Silver's core argument is that Sotomayor, at 70, is old; and according to models the Democrats are unlikely to control both of the Senate and Presidency in the near future, and that therefore Sotomayor should step down now when it might be possible for Biden, Schumer and co to replace her with another Democratic justice.

I find this take to be indicative of the flaws in Nate's own mindset, the Moneyball/Analytics/Sabermetrics venue that Nate comes from applied to politics, and to a certain extent to Rationalism more broadly, so I'd like to dig into why this is so wrong point by point. For the purposes of this argument, I am viewing this from the position of, as Silver defines it, a progressive or a "person interested in progressive outcomes" who would prefer liberal outcomes to SCOTUS cases. We will also assume that Sotomayor is a decent judge. It's not a particularly interesting argument if we argue that Sotomayor sucks, and anyway there's a point about that further down. I've loved Nate since his PECOTA days, I'm not reflexively anti-analytics, but it has to be balanced with humanity.

Much like the Moneyball Oakland As famously put together talented regular season teams that failed in the playoffs, Silver's approach to politics is about grabbing tactical victories, but will never deliver a championship. Sabermetrics types have long derided concepts like veteran leadership, man-management, The Will to Win, clutch play; we can't measure them on the numbers then they don't exist. Yet while analytics have value, so does traditional strategy, team variance isn't entirely random. Let's examine how some of this applies to politics here:

Flaw 1) What Gets Measured Gets Managed Silver builds a toy model, demonstrates that within his toy model SCOTUS seats are really valuable, then assesses possession of SCOTUS seats based on raw-count of votes by partisan appointment. This is an extremely limited view of what impact SCOTUS justices can have. Sotomayor is 70 years old. Going by most projections, she has about 16 years to go. There's some indications of poor health outcomes, balanced by the fact that she'll get top-tier medical care. For reference, Scalia would have been 70 in 2006. Scalia was very important between 2006 and his death. His impact in general has been almost immeasurably huge on American jurisprudence, even the court's liberals owe a lot to Scalia in their opinions. He achieved this mostly by sheer force of will and intellect, and a long stint on the court. Clarence Thomas is another example of a justice who slowly came into his own, and in the last ten years (his age 65-75 seasons) has gone from punchline to influential intellectual force. SCOTUS justices take time to develop, both in terms of their intellectual impact and in terms of their relationships on the court. Replacing Sotomayor early may buy you a few extra years of a nominal democrat on the court, but it may cost you a more influential judge in the meantime. Silver, because his toy model can't account for jurisprudential influence, ignores all this. It's impossible to model, so it is ignored, or worse derided as fake and gay.

Flaw 2) Defeatism Silver derides politicians as irrational, for foolishly believing "their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day." This is accurate, but also ignores the point: if you don't think your party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers, then you shouldn't be doing this. The only reason to get into politics is because you think you can win. If you can only lose, you need to change strategies. Silver's models predict that Democrats won't control the Senate for some time; that is within the power of the Democrats to change! Replacing Sotomayor because you likely won't control the Senate for another 16(!) years is like signing a high-priced closer to get a .500 baseball team an extra win, you still aren't making the playoffs. It also ignores history: the Senate has changed hands repeatedly, 8 times since 1980, or roughly once ever six years. If you start from the assumption that the Democratic message is basically unpopular in much of the country, such that they will never hold a Senate majority, then the Democratic party needs to rebuild from the ground up. Don't waste energy lobbying for Sotomayor to retire, lobby for Ds to pull their heads out of their asses in the heartland. If Democrats don't think they can win majorities, they shouldn't be Democrats, and shouldn't care about the SCOTUS majority. If you don't see a path to victory for your project, you need a new project. There's even a sort of "tanking" argument to be made that strategically, 6-3 and 7-2 aren't that different, so it doesn't matter if Sotomayor is replaced by an originalist, and it's politically better for Ds to face a brutally conservative SCOTUS, which might allow them to pass laws to bypass SCOTUS altogether, rather than a mildly less conservative SCOTUS. The only path to a liberal Majority on the SCOTUS is for Ds to win the Senate and the Presidency, repeatedly, they need to be working towards that goal, not maintaining their minority.

Flaw 3) Eliminating the Individual Silver assumes that any D is as good as any other D. That any D Senate is as good as any other D Senate, and any D justice is as good as any other D justice. This is misguided. The D justice that would get past this D Senate is probably going to be a milquetoast, below average, moderate. Sinema and Manchin wouldn't have it any other way, and no Rs have the guts to cross the aisle. If Sotomayor had the opportunity to retire with a 55 or 60 vote D majority, she could be assured of being replaced by a successor with a brilliant career ahead of him. If Sotomayor retires now, she's quite likely to be replaced by a third-rate non-entity. This is the Trump problem that made the original FiveThirtyEight blog unreadable since 2016: Trump didn't just accept the numbers, he changed them. That's what political leaders do: they don't accept facts on the ground, they alter them. Sabermetrics treats the ballplayers like numbers, probabilities of outcomes at the plate, but in order for every MLB player to get to the bigs, to become those numbers, that player had to believe in himself. He had to work hard, thinking he could get better, thinking he could win, even if statistically he wasn't likely to. Nobody ever made it to The Show surrendering to the numbers.

This kind of short-sighted, analytical approach to politics, slicing and dicing demographics to achieve tactical victories, is the noise before defeat. We saw the flaws in this strategy in the Clinton campaign, and to a large extent in the Biden '20 campaign where Trump vastly over-performed his underlying numbers. We're watching Biden '24 sleepwalk towards a possible November defeat, relying on demographic numbers that seem increasingly out of date. And while it's not all Nate Silver's fault, this kind of sneering bullshit is what drives people away from politics. It drives away exactly the people you need: people who irrationally believe in your political project, and will sacrifice for its success. It points away from leadership and towards management. It undermines coalitions by making it obvious they are only ever conveniences. It is bad politics.

TLDR: Nate Silver thinks 70 is a good retirement age for Sotomayor because we might not see a Democratic Senate Majority again for a while, but if we can't get a D Senate for 16 more years, what's the point anyway?

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 3d ago

He was absolutely correct and the hip bookstore employee who recommended it to my wife should get the other half of her hair shaved off in public for this.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 3d ago

I'm still working my way through War and Peace, notating it as I go. It's such a tremendous work.

In between I listened to some graphic novel recommendations and read From Hell on my tablet. Really fun work, and fascinating that it is based on a pseudo-legitimate Ripper conspiracy.

I took a beach trip and grabbed a book my wife had bought and had been well reviewed, R.F. Kuang's Yellowface. The best thing I can say about it is that it was shorter than I thought it was going to be, it was a 200 page book with extra large margins and line spacing to make it 300 pages, so that it seems like a real book but is really an overgrown novella. Even in 200 pages, it runs out of ideas midway through. A blank space and a power fantasy where I was told a literary work would be.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 2d ago

The Democrats are fumbling the ball, but Republicans still need to recover it, and as of yet they show few signs of being willing or able to do so. Jews moving away from the Democrats need to go somewhere. And the GOP is not offering a welcoming environment at this time. Some Jews who come to the conclusion that Right Wing Antisemites are merely harmless morons while Left Wing Antisemites are powerful and dangerous will make the switch, but I doubt it will be a mass exodus.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 2d ago

It's absolutely brilliant. One of the most uncomfortable reads I've ever had. Resonates so completely through the ages.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 6d ago

I think this analysis has a fatal flaw in it. Sotomayor is an affirmative action appointment

@ThenElection

This is why I brought up the example of Clarence Thomas, the single most obvious Affirmative Action appointment in the history of the Court, who has developed significantly over the course of his career. Conservatives are much more likely to cite Thomas' concurrences today than they were in 2002, when even Originalists joked that he was Scalia's sidekick.

I spent most of law school hearing obnoxious liberals (mostly white) talking about how dumb Thomas was; the fact is that he is probably smarter than most. Even the AA SCOTUS appointments are really smart people! ((One of the things that's so offensive about open AA is that it undermines the credentials of what are, factually, very accomplished people)) Maybe they're top 1% lawyers rather than top 50 lawyers, but they're smarter than the vast majority of the people criticizing them for being dumb. She might not be putting out top tier stuff at any given time, but she could grow into the role, like Thomas did.

I'm reminded of the Twitter discourse after the Oakland v Kentucky game this March, when a million people made jokes about Jack Gohlke being white and a future car salesman. And it just struck me as so distasteful for black twitter users who are probably fat and out of shape to mock a guy for being merely a top 3000 basketball player in the world instead of a top 200 player who belongs in the NBA.

I happen to like Sotomayor on a personal basis, in that I think it's hilarious that she'll go to Yankees games and sit in the Judge's Chambers. She's far from my least favorite justice, coming in above Kavanaugh, KBJ, and I still hate Kennedy enough to make up for the fact that he isn't actually on the court anymore.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 10d ago

Something really interesting to me, in a casual way, is that we don't see extremely different cultural and historical trajectories between countries that were involved in WWI and WWII in Europe and countries that weren't.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 6d ago

The core emotion is inward, it’s self hatred not because they never did, but because they never could have. If they went back to being 16 now with their current personality, they’d end in the same place in the social stack. “I regret not partying in high school” should actually be “I regret not being the kind of person who would have partied in high school”.

Absolutely. Only boring people are bored. Endorse all of what you said.

I'd add that I don't regret in any way leading a dull and chaste high school life, in that I am happy where I am. Amor Fati. It's fun, occasionally, to daydream of how I could have acted with more agency at the time, but if I had the power to change anything I'm not sure I would. I might have ended up married to someone else, which I wouldn't trade for anything.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 9d ago

I've lived and worked around Amish and Mennonite communities my entire life. I admire their lifestyle, their community, and their philosophy. I think the world has a lot to learn from the Amish, especially in terms of the communal decision to adopt technological standards. I buy my produce from Amish farms whenever possible, I have worked alongside Mennonite contractors, I grew up around scoutmasters and farmers and distant uncles with PA dutch accents, I would guess that my interactions with Amish-and-adjacent folks is probably top-5 on this forum at the very least. I know and admire the hell out of the Amish, I highly recommend Knock's essay Utopia in Pennsylvania. That said, the refutation to the Amish question is pretty thorough and not particularly difficult:

They're essentially parasitic on the USA. The Amish have no defense policy, they don't even really have a police force or a court system. They rely on the English for any of those things when they become necessary. Their safety from external threats is entirely dependent on the broader American nation. It's not really a scalable solution. Somebody needs to do all the things that allow the systems to exist by which Amish communities are protected, allowed to function.
As a comparison they suffer from the Private School problem: private schools can expel students more or less at will for behavioral problems, while public schools have to educate every student. Amish communities don't have lots of drug use because if you start using drugs, you're cruisin' for a shunning. Assuming that the kind of person who wants to do drugs wouldn't simply leave the Amish community of his own accord. If you allowed any town to simply exile anyone who refuses to obey social rules, the statistical outcomes for the remaining residents would improve.
The whole theological concept of Anabaptism is built on the core idea of informed adult choice, they reject infant baptism because they believe that people should choose to enter the faith in a fully informed way. All Amish have total free choice to stay or leave at any time, the only thing holding them there is social pressure. Statistics show that between 90-97% of Amish kids return from Rumspringa and join the church. ((I haven't dug into the statistics deeply, but I'm told that the stricter the community the more kids tend to leave permanently)) Imagine what NYC or SF or Seattle or your nightmare modern progressive hell-hole of choice would look like, if the bottom 3-10% of worst-behaved least socially adapted kids just left town at age 18 and never came back. Short of a federal prison, if you took the 3-10% of people who were most prone to choose something other than a peaceful happy life, whether in a slothful or a Faustian fashion, and removed them from the population, you would see massive improvements. Being Amish isn't just a status one is born into, it is also a set of choices one has made. If you narrowed the subset of the population in your statistics to people who have chosen to remain in the religion of their forebears, chosen to remain in their hometown, gotten married and had kids, had solid employment, I would bet the statistical gap narrows significantly.
@f3zinker 's frank The Grand Inquisitor style elitism is probably not all that uncommon. Yes, all these things might be bad for the population but not for me. This is visible in the fact that there are very few converts. While it would be difficult to enter some of the more strictly closed communities, there are Mennonite churches where outsiders are welcome to worship, and over time if one bought a nearby farm converts are welcomed to join the community over time if they show good faith. We don't see that happening at scale. People, who have the option to live this way, mostly don't.
From a progressive perspective: what about the oppressed within Amish communities? I've never met a gay affirming Amish community, though they'll deign to sell a gay couple some pies or quilts they're not about that kind of life. So what's a gay amish kid to do? The Amish are a community founded on religious dissent, but how does the religious dissenter fare? Where does the beaten Amish wife flee? Amish life is a mold by which most people who fit can be made happy, but some people by bad luck will not fit. What do they do? Where do they go? Well the answer in a world where the Amish community is parasitic upon the English community is: they leave the Amish. In an Amish world, that question may be more difficult to answer.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 3d ago

What do you mean by this?

Trump had the courage to engage and lead on the issues. Discourse on free trade agreements has changed completely from 2015 to today. Discourse on Russia and the support for Forever Wars has all but flipped partisan valence. Polling of the public, and the positions publicly espoused by Republican political candidates, have changed as a result of Trump's leadership on the issues.

Are you saying a calculating politician couldn't have appealed the way Trump did, he needed to be a true believer? I don't think Trump believes in anything apart from Trump...

I think it is incumbent to pretend to be a true believer in public. Trump's supporters believe that he is a believer, that is enough. If a leader is perceived as cynical, think Mitch McConnell, it is difficult to push public opinion.

We can debate what kind of costly signals are sufficient to reach a point where True Believer vs Extra Savvy Counterfeit become indistinguishable. When the young aristocracy physically fight and die in Flanders, it sort of doesn't matter if they're doing it "cynically" for credibility or honestly for patriotism. There's a broad perception among Trump's supporters that he has suffered for his beliefs, that he could have had an easier time of it personally if he had changed his view, and I do think that is important in terms of his ability to move public opinion.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 20d ago

Is it reasonable of me to assume that any straight man who describes himself as "demisexual" is pulling exactly the same kind of long con, but more subtle?

I would say that the vast majority of people who describe themselves as Asexual but have sex/relationships have simply found an identity-based way to navigate chastity in a sexual world that frightens them (largely based on media). All personal boundaries must be identity based in liberal society, or else they are very difficult to defend. A woman who says she doesn't want to have sex right away is a prude, a woman who says she is asexual is valid. A man who says he doesn't want to have sex all the time is a lying loser, a man who says he is asexual is valid.

I'd compare it in my own life to the years I spent between 13 and 17 listening to a ton of Minor Threat and Youth of Today and Earth Crisis and claiming to be super into Straight Edge punk philosophy. I had an Out of Step poster, and scribbled "I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't fuck, at least I can fucking think!" on things in Sharpie. I think I even put X's on the back of my hands when I went to concerts a few times.

Not to invalidate anyone who really was Straight Edge, I met some of them, but as a loser teenager it was cowardice. I was afraid of girls, and couldn't get a date anyway; I was afraid of booze and drugs and breaking laws around them, and didn't get invited to parties anyway. Straight Edge was a way to claim I was making a principled stand. I doubt it achieved much, I was an apparent loser, it was mostly something I said to make myself feel better.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 3d ago

Kavanaugh: I hate that he has literally never had a job. In his bio he has no job he's ever had that wasn't either judicial or political. He's never argued a case in court or had a client. Judicial jobs, even as clerks, are rarefied air: everyone treats you with deference. He worked briefly in an "of counsel" position at a law firm, and it's not clear he ever did anything there, literally he couldn't give a good answer when asked. I also find him to be a bit of a government stooge, in regret over his role with Starr he finds the President to be immune from just about everything.

KBJ: I don't like how she was nominated, and haven't seen anything to change my mind as of yet.

Kennedy: Absolute nightmare of a Justice. Obergefell will go down with Dred Scott on the list of universally reviled precedents, if the current structure of the Court even survives the results of Obergefell. The number of ways the fake-test he created in Obergefell can and will be twisted by future Justices has the potential to undermine the constitution completely. The only positive way I can skew his opinion is that he wanted so badly to protect Gay Rights that he ensconced them into a framework that will allow a conservative court to protect other rights that they care about more than they care about gay marriage.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 22d ago

How familiar with his work are you? Did you ever read Kitchen Confidential?

I ask because when you read the book that made Bourdain famous, it rapidly becomes obvious that he was troubled long before he was famous. He was the Samurai Sword kid at a liberal arts college before he dropped out and headed into the world of cooking. Much of the charm of the work comes from Bourdain's hard partying, booze and drug soaked world. He dropped in and out of cooking jobs and drugs over the years. His personality before fame was self-destructive.

The problem with finding causes for suicide is that you can always find someone who suffered something as bad or worse who didn't kill themselves. Some people kill themselves over seemingly minor slights, others suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune well past the point at which I would have cut bait.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 10d ago

Automated voices on self-checkout gas pumps and cashier stations must be muted by a single clearly marked button press. If this makes it harder for you to run self-checkout, hire cashiers. Any time a store implements self-checkout, they must have a CostCo style cart-checker on the way out. It is unacceptable to me how easy it is to steal from Grocery stores, and that the grocers have decided that they'll just let dishonest people steal rather than hire someone. It makes me want to steal.
On a related note, create a process by which jobs can be certified as "easy" by OSHA and thus eligible for lower-than-minimum wage. Such as the aforementioned cart checkers. It should be possible to hire someone for a job that isn't worth minimum wage.
Abolish almost all police enforcement personnel. Police should function purely in investigative and administrative roles. Instead, a 2% flat income tax on all citizens will fund both detectives and a public militia consisting of all able-bodied individuals. Every male citizen will be expected to serve 20 hours of militia service per month, patrolling local neighborhoods on call for emergencies. Completing your service hours will entitle you to avoid paying the tax, if you don't serve you do pay the tax. Citizen militias will be on hand at all times, day and night, to respond to crime calls and other emergencies.
Abolish DA and PD offices. Rather, the roles will be combined as State's Lawyers, and the same lawyers will be assigned randomly to prosecute or defend any given defendant. This will mean that defense attorneys and prosecutors will have the same experience, relationships, and access to investigative, police, and judges.
All fitness and sport equipment will be tax-free.
Significant encouragement towards mixed-income and mixed-use housing developments. The ideal layout is the classic American small town, where a series of small row-homes and apartment buildings border large corner homes where the local Doctor/Lawyer/Banker lived. There is significant value in having poor and rich Americans interact and form social bonds.
No product can be marketed using any kind of patriotic or "American" theme unless it is owned, headquartered, and predominantly assembled in America.
Strong encouragement for alternatives to graveyards. Graveyards are becoming increasingly sprawling, depressing eyesores of identikit headstones, poorly maintained because of bad finances, too large because of a system built for a much smaller population. A bitch and a half to move if development becomes necessary. Cremation, mausoleums, Tibetan Sky Funerals, go wild. But graveyards are a problem.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 1mo ago

The TikTok Ban, Male Role Models, the New Punk, and the Right to be Cool in American Society

TLDR: We're increasingly seeing an urge to regulate media consumption, social media moderation, and public speech along the lines of an ersatz "equal time" doctrine, in which users must both view and affirm one's viewpoints. People don't just want the right to free speech, they want the right to be cool, to speak and be heard and enjoyed and honored.

A theme running through a few different recent threads on here is an urge by different societal movements to seize the mantle of “cool,” to be hip, to be fun, to be interesting.

The people trying to ban TikTok have cited over and over the differential between Israeli and Palestinian content.

Now, critics allege that TikTok is using its influence to push content that is pro-Palestinian and contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. The claims about TikTok’s promotion of pro-Palestinian content are anecdotal, and they have been bubbling up on the social media platform X, in statements to the media and on conservative media outlet. TikTok said the allegations of bias are baseless.

The underlying assumption by Pro-Israeli voices is that it is impossible for Pro-Israeli content to simply be unpopular. It is impossible that the Israelis are simply bad at memes. There is no actual evidence of bias produced, no evidence of suppression of Israeli creators or boosting of Hamas hashtags, the assumption is that this bias must exist in order for consumers to make the choices they made.

Meanwhile the primary effort I see in the Anti-Anti-Semitism space is the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign, which is so confusingly bad I literally think it is its opposite every time I see it. I see the ads, and I read it naturally as Stand Up to Hatred (by) Jews rather than Stand Up To Hatred (of) Jews. ADL content is lame, bad, boring. Pro-Palestinian content is simply better and put together by better creators.

Just accept not being cool! Did you know: what only number one hit in the 1960s was explicitly about the Vietnam war? Ballad of the Green Berets. Go figure. You want to compete with better memes, produce your own. While we associate the 1960s music scene with the antiwar movement, there were significant patriotic songs produced too. Fighting Side of Me, Okie from Muskogee, the patriotic hits of the era were huge. You compete with memes with better memes. Banning tiktok will not save Israel.

We see the same dynamic with astroturfed “Positive” male role models. Male role models who are nothing interesting, simply because TPTB don’t like the ones that are actually current and good. We see the same dynamic with everyone claiming to be the new punk. This poem circulated on twitter as the worst poem ever written and I tend to agree, but the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater and taking antidepressants just floors me. Everyone wants to be cool and rebellious and also in power and also secretly the choice of the grill pilled normies and the proletariat and the artists and the one true source of loving families that produce children. They want to be James Dean and Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. They want to be both the enemies in the culture war at the same time.

This comes back to the debate about freedom of speech vs freedom of reach, right? How do you create the right to equal time in a world where people are picking among free choices with their eyeballs? How far does this go? If people buy books that are on one end of a conflict, must publishers and libraries fart out books for the other side? It was possible in a more centralized era for governments to force limited broadcast stations to cover sides evenly, but in the era of consumer choice, even if you force content creators to put out pro-Israel movies Netflix and Youtube customers don’t have to click on them. You can’t force eyeballs onto content anymore. To what extent is the effort to force advertising into these platforms in part an effort to force content consumers to get exposed to these messages whether they like it or not? Once people can choose their own content, they might not pick your content, and that can’t be allowed.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 23d ago

Freddie De Boer and the Limits of Anti-Classificationist Discourse

Typically in my life my views on racial law have tended towards the Anti-Classificationist rather than the Anti-Subordinationist school, or I suppose to represent all sides on the Motte to the Hierarchical or Purity schools of thought. In my mind, discrimination and group conflict follow naturally once you define groups, and therefore the best thing to do if your goal is to avoid discrimination is to avoid formally classifying groups. Religious denomination used to be a very heavily classified, tracked, and studied American demographic. We used to have a Catholic Seat, and then a Jewish Seat on the SCOTUS; now we have only a single Protestant on the Court, with seven Catholics and one Jew. And forget anyone being able to tell the difference between a Presbyterian and a Babtist; I once completely tanked a job interview lunch by asking a woman who had just told me she was on the board of her local Methodist church what exactly the "method" was and she couldn't tell me. Ketanji Brown Jackson was widely celebrated for increasing the Diversity of the court, but almost no mainstream news outlet mentioned that her appointment was striking a blow against Hebrew and Papist over-representation, nor has the decline of the Jewish justices from three seats to just one sparked a series of hand-wringing op-eds about rising antisemitism. Other contrasting examples include Hutus and Tutsis, where the colonial creation of the categories cemented existing divisions and created conflict. Or how people with Norman surnames still out-earn other Englishmen. While the Norman descendants have faced group conflict on terms of social class, modern Britain did not face a large racial clash, because it was not a classification used by English law, and so you don’t have the congealing of the identity groups that creates conflict.

However, reading Freddie’s latest has me noticin’ a little. The core of the piece is asking why the liberal media tolerates Tyson while continuously reviling somebody like Woody Allen:

The question is, to whom do those rules not apply? For the record, I don’t have any particular beef with the hosts keeping Woody Allen at arm’s length. If they have moral objections to a filmmaker and want to express them when talking about his movie, that’s fine. The trouble is that this sort of moral work needs to be undertaken with the most basic requirement of morality, consistency, the understanding that moral rules must apply to everyone equally. And it’s not just the Ringer podcast network that has a problem with achieving that consistency but media writ large.

Well, I can still complain. We’re living in a landscape where Mike Tyson has not only been credibly accused of domestic violence and rape but made statements that seem clearly to admit to them, has become a folk celebrity with a jolly reputation, and nobody cares.

There will be, I hope, at least some effort to apply the old rules to him. Still, many who spent the 2010s hanging every apostate they could find will simply nod along. You can’t really call it a redemption story because people have largely avoided acknowledging that Tyson has done things which would require him to be redeemed. And I’d love to be able to ask some central authority of Yelling Social Justice why people discussing Annie Hall on a podcast feel that they have to fill painful minutes of airtime with awkward throat-clearing about Woody Allen, while Mike Tyson gets to rest comfortably in kitsch.

And the difference seems so blindingly obvious that it’s punching me in the face, and that’s sort of ruining my anti-classicationist plan. Ctrl-F-ing the article: zero hits for White, zero hits for Black, zero hits for Religion, zero hits for Jew, zero hits for Ethnic-, zero hits for African. Freddie doesn’t mention the possible role that race would seem to play, even to refute it. And in my mind this would be perceived as a failure by either side of the political spectrum.

If one views the media as broadly anti-White, one would say that Allen is still in trouble because he is white, while Tyson is forgiven because Tyson is Black, and PC society demands that we forgive the Black criminal and celebrate Black Excellence. Or, at the very least, that weenie turbolibs at TheRinger are uncomfortable criticizing Black celebrities in ways that might code as racist if taken out of context and uncharitably, and that in an abundance of caution the hosts at TheRinger choose to criticize white rather than Black celebs, softer targets.

If one views society as broadly anti-Black, one would say that Allen is still in trouble because Allen’s victims are white, while Tyson is easily forgiven because Tyson only committed violence against Black women. That the act of forgiving Black men for violence against Black women is itself Anti-Black, it is the failure to provision public goods for Black communities; the protection provided by legal and social sanction against those who commit crimes against Black Women, who if only for reasons of proximity will always be primarily Black men. Hence Bill Cosby eventually got his, he drugged and sodomized white women in between as well.

But neither side will see much logic in DeBoer’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge the obviously relevant facts around the cases he is comparing.

Personally, I find it definitely relevant. Tyson is forgiven thanks to a particularly grim version of the soft bigotry of low expectations, combined with racism against his victims by race and by class. Black celebrities are allowed to act in ways that turbolibs won’t tolerate in white men. White feminists love to start panics around college campus rape or similar problems, while ignoring that women in the college age-range who don’t attend college are more likely to be victimized. The prime targets of Feminism are men like Brett Kavanaugh, while they ignore the much more numerous and more violent men like Chris Brown, because for your average Wesleyan Critical Theorist she is under very little threat from men like Chris Brown and much more from men she actually interacts with. Your media or academia or twitterati feminist will never hang out with anyone who looks or acts like Mike Tyson, she does hang out with people who look and act like Woody Allen or Brett Kavanaugh.

It's all making me question some of my anti-classification bona fides.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 22d ago

Napoleon wanted to become Alexander, so he lived and breathed strategy. He constantly read, and in conversation he'd ask people to rank generals all the time and compare their merits, memorizing all the famous battles.

We actually have copies of homework assignments from the Roman Republic, including the answers of some Great Men of History, where a standard essay question was "Could Alexander have Conquered Rome?" Which was generally analyzed along the same lines that we see historical comparisons of sports teams or boxers today:

-- Competition analysis. Alexander beat up on Tomato Cans, but was overrated for going undefeated against nobodies. Rome beat real tough guys, over and over. Alexander never faced a Hannibal, or even a Vercingetorix.

-- Stars and Scrubs vs Depth. Roman Republic produced more and better generals, it was a factory for Great Men, where Alexander was a once in a century first draft pick superstar. After Alexander died the Macedonian conquests stopped, after the Romans lost a general, or even an army, it was next man up all the way.

-- Common foes and styles. Rome beat Pyrrhus and other Macedonians who used similar styles and modeled their generalship after Alexander.

All of which is to support your point. Rome got good at this, became a Great Man Factory, by focusing on this. They went out there and built the prospects they needed to keep going out and conquering, until the gravitational pull of the Capital became such that further expansion was too difficult relative to civil war.

So many times in the NBA or MLB draft, there's a story of a player just being obsessed with the game from a young age. Bijan Robinson carried a football around like a security blanket from age 4 or some bullshit. I recall reading about a basketball phenom who walked on his tiptoes from second to fourth grades. Arnold Palmer was the son of a groundskeeper who just played golf obsessively in Latrobe, hitting balls long into the night every night.

Obsession has value.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 1mo ago

I agree with your points, and also with @2rafa about the course of the sexual revolution. But also:

-- If you're interested in the topic, I recommend the podcast You Must Remember This which did a long series on erotic films of the 80s and 90s, placing them in context and talking about the social movements around them. Karina Longworth always does a good job with the material, trigger warning for occasional performative woke acknowledgement if that kind of thing bothers you overly much. One of the things she highlights is the way that rating systems, censorship, the rise of home video, and pornography interacted to place different meanings on ratings. There was a time when X and NC-17 were legitimate ratings that indicated a real film intended for adults, both slowly succumbed to being viewed as porn. It used to be that a film (often a sexual thriller from overseas) marketed as NC17 would be a hit, all the adults would go see it. Now that is hard to imagine.

-- I theorize the rise of internet pornography has made viewing sexually arousing material outside of privately hunched over a laptop seem perverted, even homosexual, to a modern audience. Even as barely-pubescent teen I caught the tail end of the "finding a foreign movie my parent's didn't know had tits on video" cultural moment. I remember watching stuff like Y Tu Mama Tambien with my buddies because there were naked girls in it, I don't think we understood anything about the movie. Once internet porn became practical with DSL, I don't think anyone did that, watching something became a purely private endeavor. Decades earlier, porn theatres existed, where men would congregate to watch porn. The idea of going to a theater to see a movie with a heavily arousing tilt strikes me as strange, if I went to the movies without my wife it might even feel kind of gay to be in a theater full of other dudes also getting aroused. Everyone is a goon-er now, but everyone hides it, that's for your home, not for the big screen, or even for watching with family.

-- Don't underestimate the degree to which one work can ruin an entire genre convention. Don Quixote killed the chivalrous romance. The Daniel Craig Bond Films were so dark and serious because Austin Powers was absolutely huge right before they were made, and everyone on set was conscious of the fact that they couldn't do a sex scene without the entire audience giggling and someone shouting "Do I make you horny baby? Yeah! Shag now or shag later?" at the screen. Today Austin Powers is almost forgotten, but in 2006 it was totally unavoidable if you were making a spy film. An effective parody can kill a genre. So can self-parody. Game of Thrones did the whole obligatory sex-scene thing to death, and then completely self-immolated in the final season. The final season was so bad that, like the Three Eyed Raven traveling back to make things seem retarded, it actually retrospectively killed the rest of the series, people talked about GoT constantly up until the finale, and after it aired the show disappeared from popular discourse. Some of the pullback from obligatory breasts and "here's a scene of sexual perversion explaining what's wrong with [character]" likely stems from a desire to avoid being seen as derivative of GoT or a revulsion at GoT's aesthetic after the fiasco that was the finale. RE: Dune upthread; GRRM ripped Herbert off pretty directly in using scenes like "bring me a child prostitute to torture" as establishing bad guy credentials, but GRRM abused it and HBO beat it to death on camera, so while in the novel having Vlad torture-fuck-murder child slaves seemed edgy, in the film it would seem derivative (of the thing that was itself Derivative from the book). As with how the Bond films are still working in the shadow of Austin Powers long after we've forgotten Austin Powers, GoT has now been lame for five years, we forget just how bad the Finale was, and just how much prestige and power was lent to the show leading into the finale, how excited everyone was for what the Extended Universe would produce next, and what a complete fucking letdown the whole thing was. But in 2020 when the first Dune film came out, they had to avoid all association with GoT it was overplayed and toxic. That kind of influence can really carry, and can make a scene unshootable for decades at a time.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 18d ago

Hence, a person's motivations cannot ever concern themselves alone, unless you have the strength to withstand spending large parts of your life alone in very bad places. What good is prefixing self to worth if, for a healthy, adjusted human being, worth comes from places other than the self?

The way I see it, having a strong self-worth is a matter of remembering the variety of audiences that provide worth to you, rather than allowing your self-assessment to be constantly buffeted by the last person you talk to or the room you are in.

My major objection to the way a lot of TRPers talk about the concept of someone being "Alpha" or "Beta" is that they fail to talk about context, Alpha and Beta are inherently ordinal rather than absolute concept. Within a closed space, like a wolfpack or a high school, the alpha male is the biggest and toughest male present. He isn't in any absolute sense Big or Tough, he is the biggest and the toughest. The beta is defined by being smaller, and less tough, not absolutely Small or absolute Cowardly. If the Alpha dies, a Beta moves up.

Using the classic fictional stereotype of an American high school as our pet model, the Alpha male is the star quarterback on the high school football team, right? He's the best athlete, the leader, the chosen one. But if the QB dies in a DUI accident, or transfers schools, or breaks his leg, somebody else becomes the QB. A guy who didn't used to be the best athlete on the team, who used to be second best, becomes the best. That's the nature of an ordinal system of worth.

The problem with the modern world is that very few of us live in a closed system, and so it become scrambled, hard to understand. We live in systems way beyond our Dunbar Number, we live in anonymized urban societies where we feel judged by strangers, or in fake online worlds where we never even see our interlocutors.

People with weak self worth are constantly buffeted by the opinions of strangers, by the ordinal rankings in each room they find themselves in, by a vague sense that an indistinct group of people are better than them. They walk into a room with people better than them, they become servile; while if they are around people worse than them they become tyrannical. They rate themselves around the last interaction they had, forgetting all the good things they've done or all the bad things they've done.

A person with a firm sense of self worth remembers, regardless of what room they find themselves in, the people who love and respect them. Yes there are people better than you, but there are also people worse than you, the fact that you are now in a room with someone better than you doesn't mean you are the worst person in the world. The fact that the last thing you did was wrong doesn't erase all the things you've done right. They rate themselves not on the opinion of the audience in front of them, but on the broader audience, all the world, all the universe, and how they should respond.

Realistic self worth is about steadiness, humility, and honor. As Tony Montana told us, "All I've got in this world is my word and my balls, I don't break them for nobody."

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 6d ago

Funnily enough, inasmuch as my preference is originalism, I'd expect the Dems to fumble this one and end up with a mediocre judge on the court at best. But looking at that pseudo-majority they're running out there, if I were a Dem I'd be certain that we'd end up handing Trump another pick.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 14d ago

The burgeoning tradcath revolt among the Gen Z dissident right smacks of insincerity; they pantomime the words and rituals, but there’s no genuine belief.

I don't remember where I first heard it, but something that stuck with me about a lot of the LARPer wing of TradCaths who are making "endeavoring to be more Catholic than the Pope" a byword instead of a gag, was the observation: if your God hates all the same people you do, you aren't really religious, you just have an imaginary friend.

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FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink 17d ago · Edited 17d ago

Taking Communism on its own terms, historical materialism is refuted by the Soviet Union's failure even if it experienced a period of success. One of Communism's primary doctrines and promises has been the historical inevitability of the Communist form, that Capitalism's contradictions mean that it must inevitably fail, and be supplanted by Communism. This was the official belief of the Soviet Union, and remains afaik the official position of Red China. The failure of the Eastern Bloc and its reversion to Capitalism contradicts the core tenets of Communism as the right side of history. The promise of Communism was never that it could deliver a period of relatively decent development relative to expectations, it was always that it would deliver a permanent world of equality. It had such persuasive power to so many intellectuals in the 20th century because they genuinely found Marx's arguments persuasive, and believed that Communism was inevitable. The failure of the Soviet Union was strong evidence against that belief. It should be noted that the continued existence of Red China should be a riposte, but that still doesn't really fit into a simplistic view of Marx, and few on any side are very pro-China.
Few people are Utilitarians, such that they'll accept any amount of abridged Human Rights for a % improvement in development. The Soviets had a bad reputation for human rights abuses. There is a point at which many of us would "most respectfully return [our] ticket" for utopia.

That being said, I largely accept that argument as regards, particularly, Castro in Cuba. Mostly because the rest of the Caribbean doesn't offer much else in the way of developmental and human rights success stories compared to Cuba, while Poland and Germany are a pretty clear demonstration that Capitalism delivered better results than Communism. If anything, economic results in the Caribbean seem to show that they should have just stayed colonized.

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