Fruck
Lacks all conviction
Fruck is just this guy, you know?
User ID: 889
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
Nasim Najafi Aghdam. A youtube... dancer? Avant garde performance artist? Whatever she was, her videos have a real alien and hypnotic quality about them. You get the impression she would have had a completely different life trajectory if David Byrne or John Waters had ever seen her work. That's if you can find any of her videos of course.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
The greatest influence on other people is other people. Do you really give a shit if some guy you don't know shows up to a black tie function in shorts and a t-shirt? If it's your black tie function, or someone you care about maybe, but otherwise generally no. But you know other people expect you to dislike it - it isn't proper - and so you are outraged. All that is required to change it is someone ostentatiously doing otherwise.
Someone with power and influence making a big show of refusing to play ball makes it more acceptable overnight. It starts a chain reaction, people follow suit and soon a critical mass of people refuse to play ball, and the rule gets abolished.
Kanye is powerful, influential and, most importantly in modern America, of the caste which is allowed to talk about race. I don't think this will change any minds, but it has already had an impact - the way he went about it made it practically impossible to talk around - although note how hard the media is trying.
That was the most ridiculous thing I have ever read, and that should mean a lot, because I have read many books, papers, articles, comics, and pamphlets - and some of them were ridiculous on purpose. That was so ridiculous I actually needed to put down my phone and take a walk after reading it, so I didn't pop a blood vessel in rage.
According to the great moral leader Sam Bankman-Fried,
I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that…If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.
Ideally, one would like to think that if someone is quoting SBF and calling him a great moral leader they would be doing so ironically and would dismiss his foolishness. In fact I assumed at first this was some Straussian mockery of people with strange judgements about reading, like when I say shit like "I don't read non-fiction because I am not a child". If that turns out to be the case then well done Hanania, you got me good. It has been interpreted as legit though, and I really need to work out my anger, I haven't been this triggered in ages.
The vast majority of books are like this in some way. Any Substack essay I have written could’ve been a book if I had the time or inclination to make it into one.
This is the catchphrase of mediocrity in denial. Great authors/artists/musicians aren't great, they just aren't as time conscious as me. It takes a thousand hours to master anything my man, which is why I can say without irony that Michaelangelo is lucky he didn't have to deal with all the drama I do, and that drama is the only reason I am not a world class painter too.
Now you might say that wasn't his point, that he is pointing out that a lot of books out there are repetitive garbage or full of cours that weren't in the manga or deceptively written to shoehorn in an agenda, to which I would say that a) he still said it, and b) no argument there, but it brings us to the second point - sturgeon's law.
According to Google in 2010 129,864,880 books had been published - yes, this is before the self publishing boom. Of course that means over a hundred million complete duds, because that's how humans operate. But it also means millions of works of genius. His first example of a shitty book is David Sinclair’s Lifespan, published in 2019. Sinclair apparently pads it out with:
he addresses issues that are ancillary to conquering aging like what’s going to happen to social security and the impact of a growing population on global warming. He also comes out for universal healthcare, legalized euthanasia, and more income equality
But, uh, that doesn't sound like padding to me? That sounds like a bunch of issues everyone always brings up any time people talk about lengthening life expectancy? "What will happen to pensions and hospitals and infrastructure if nobody dies?" is a pretty good question to ask imo. Hanania seems more upset that Sinclair's resolutions are left wing.
I haven't read the book though, so maybe it is just padding. It doesn't matter, no one who would call himself a genius should be allowed to fall to such obvious recency bias. Since the self publishing boom sturgeon's law has gained at least 9 percentage points, and yes that affects traditionally published books, they all share the same market. Books are getting stupider because we are getting stupider - but that's not on the books! And it certainly doesn't affect the most upsetting part of his argument - his dismissal of old books.
To be fair, he does acknowledge that there are more quality old books than new books, and he does seem to read a lot more non fiction than fiction - and non fiction is much more susceptible to perverse outside incentives because we built an industry around employing liberal arts majors called academia and it's very good at tricking otherwise intelligent people. But he's still fucking wrong!
Side note -
But we should take opportunity costs seriously. Given all the other things you could be reading like scientific papers and news magazines, not to mention other things you could be doing with your time, which non-fiction books are worth reading cover-to-cover?
"You take up my time,
Like some cheap magazine,
When I coulda been learning something,
Oh well, you know what I mean,"
What an economical use of language! Hanania doesn't go far enough, he is too enamoured with his words - I say no books, no papers, no articles - if you can't work your message into a pop song you are an onanist waffling about nothing.
Moving on, Hanania has 3 categories of books he thinks are worth reading, and I am annoyed with him about all of them.
Category 1: History books
When learning history, one can always decide at how granular of a level to investigate an era, topic, or important figure. Most social science or political science books are padded with filler because there are only so many interesting things you can say about most ideas. But history is different; you can always go into more detail about World War II, or the life stories of Ottoman sultans, or the fall of Rome. Even a thousand-page book on a historical topic can only capture a small slice of reality. The returns to reading history are somewhat linear — five hundred pages on World War II give you more insight than a 5-page summary, which gives you more than 5 paragraphs. If you were inclined to read 5,000 pages, you’d get more still, but we generally don’t have the time for that. Most things are not like this. I can’t say the same for, say, Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. I think it can be explained in a few paragraphs, plus some charts. I loved David Reich’s Who We Are, which used the tools of paleoanthropology to go into the history of various major regions of the world. Unlike with Sinclair’s book, it didn’t feel that much of my time was wasted.
When learning history, one can always decide at how granular of a level to investigate an era, topic, or important figure.
Absolutely true, for approximately 1% of human history. What a ridiculous thing to say. Like everyone on the planet, Hanania doesn't know what he knows or even what he doesn't. Which period of history do we know the most about? The current one obviously, followed by the previous, then the one before that and so on all the way back to Gutenberg. Why? Because that's what has been written about. Not in history books, there are no history books about the Tennies or Noughties, but in the very social science and political science books he derides, not to mention the self help books, the memoirs, the business guides, the diy books, the cookbooks, the magazines. Those books are our history. When Hanania is declaring the tweet the ultimate information delivery system he says:
It’s just that reading the book is a large commitment, and puts you at the mercy of one author, who probably took way too long to make his points for reasons of ego and career interest.
And then recommends you filter your understanding of history through whoever chose to write about it. Because authors of histories have no egos or careers?
Side note 2: Side noter - He also says:
Substacks and Tweets are actually efficient methods of transferring information because you cut out so much of the useless fluff people include when they’re trying to build a CV.
"Read substacks and Twitter!" says the guy who has made it big on substack and Twitter. But rest assured it is definitely not for reasons of ego and career interest.
Category 2: Books of Historical Interest
You may want to read Kant, Plato, and the Bible, because many people have been reading them for a very long time, and you want to be a participant in the wider culture. I don’t believe in the “wisdom” to be found in Great Books (see below). But I want to understand my fellow man. A large portion of people who live under the same polity as I do think that the Bible is the literal word of God, so it’s useful to get a glimpse into their reality. Similar things could be said about the Koran or the writings of Confucius. It’s like how one reason to read the NYT is that everyone else is reading it. So not only do you get the value of the news itself, but also insights into what’s considered culturally and socially important.
I don’t believe in the “wisdom” to be found in Great Books (see below). But I want to understand my fellow man.
Now it's all coming together, he's appealing to the old rationalist canard: "Everyone is a fucking idiot except me. So I only have to put 10% effort into something they have to give their all to to extract all the value." I think every motter has made that mistake before, I certainly have. But the overwhelming majority of Christians have never read the whole bible, and never will. You won't understand them better if you know which fabrics the bible says you shouldn't mix, because they have nfi what you are talking about.
The other examples are illustrative however. We have the Koran, the writings of Confucius, and the New York Times. Hanania is telling us who his fellows are - the educated middle class. Not necessarily people who read the Koran and Confucius and the NYT, but people who want to have read those things. If he wanted to understand the majority of people in his polity he'd be promoting watching football and tiktok compilations. This is not meant as a dig, like tlp used to say behaviour informs identity, and educated middle class people are often fantastic people by all metrics. But like tlp also probably said (actually, looking back I feel like you could put this preamble before every sentence I've written so far, but we're in too deep now) your preferences are not your stated preferences. Or in other words.
Category 3: Genius Takes You on a Journey
This final category covers works where you have some combination of a brilliant author who is a great storyteller and an important topic. I check out all of Steven Pinker’s books, because he’s a pleasure to read, he addresses fascinating issues, and I have trust in his judgment and intellect. One of the most valuable books I’ve ever read is Judith Rich Harris’ The Nurture Assumption, as I think the question of nature versus nurture is one that individuals should dig deep into before they even begin forming political opinions.
Some books fall into more than one of the categories above. I’d put On the Origin of Species in categories 2 and 3. The Federalist Papers are worth checking out for insights into the thinking of the men who founded this country, and they might even have some useful things to tell us since we’re still living under the system they designed.
I’ve published one book and have another on the way. I like to think that they’re both combinations of 1 and 3. My book on American foreign policy had two chapters devoted to international relations theory, and the rest gives you my take on topics like the US-Soviet relationship in the 1920s and 1930s and the war on terror, making it useful as a history of American foreign policy. If it was an entire book on IR theory detached from any kind of deep historical analysis, and those have been written, reading it all would probably be a waste of your time. My next book serves as a history of where wokeness came from, and provides practical political advice on what to do about it.
I check out all of Steven Pinker’s books, because he’s a pleasure to read, he addresses fascinating issues, and I have trust in his judgment and intellect.
You probably expected me to target the advert paragraph at the end there in my breakdown, but this line is saying the quiet part out loud. Obviously the whole article is essentially a promo for his new book in a fairly typical format - "Has this ever happened to you? Woman reading book slowly turns pages until her eyes fall out of her head from banality There's got to be a better way! And now there is, History of Woke by Richard Hanania, in all good bookstores." So it seems to me like a mistake to pair it with an explanation that Hanania likes to read Pinker for the same reasons everyone likes to read anything - interest, understanding and entertainment.
Moving on again we get to the part that made me put my phone down and go for a walk: Against Great Books
When I wrote my piece on Enlightened Centrism, some took issue with me saying that I don’t believe in Great Books. After thinking about the topic a bit, I’m more certain that I’m correct. One might read old books for historical interest (Category 2), but the idea that someone writing more than say four hundred years ago could have deep insights into modern issues strikes me as farcical. If old thinkers do have insights, the same points have likely been made more recently and better by others who have had the advantage of coming after them.
See, if we move the goalposts enough I was totally right about great books! Sure they might provide valuable insight into history, and the mindset of great people, they might be a pleasure to read, a good way to pass time, provide lessons applicable outside the scope of their interest, give me a shared language of references and symbols and even act as props to signal my identity to others, but they tell us nothing about trans ideology! Aristotle hasn't even heard of inflation, never mind hyper-inflation! Besides, someone else has probably tweeted about the book, just read the tweet! Something something shadows on the wall amirite?
This isn’t an issue of thinking every previous generation was dumb. Imagine hearing that we just discovered a tribe in the Amazon that previously had no contact with other humans. Nonetheless, this group developed a writing system. Living among them is an individual who they consider the world’s greatest philosopher. Being part of an isolated tribe, this philosopher has had no formal education or exposure to any modern ideas. He doesn’t know about evolution, has never logged on to the internet, has learned nothing of human history outside of the oral tradition of his tribe, and doesn’t even know whether the world is round or why the seasons change. Would it be plausible to believe that this Amazon philosopher had something to teach us about the way our government should be organized or whether the US should adopt protectionist trade policies?
Hey how's this for irony? Not only is this entire paragraph poorly reasoned, it would have been useless even if it wasn't. What information can we pull from this that hasn't been presented already? I've even already mentioned the fatal flaw in this paragraph's argument - it's goalpost moving. Why, Richard, would you ask an indigenous Amazonian philosopher about trade policies or government? If we hit you over the back of the head, stripped you naked and dropped you in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, can we conclude you definitely aren't a Journeying Genius when you inevitably die in agony? Or would it be bizarre to expect a member of the chattering class to have the knowledge and insight necessary to survive such an alien experience?
Most people I think would say no, regardless of how smart he is. We might be fascinated by the Amazon philosopher, but wisdom one can learn from requires some baseline level of knowledge. If you reject the possibility that the Amazon philosopher has great insights into the modern world, on what basis would you trust Ancient Greece?
This is the paragraph where I returned to my earlier conclusion that this was all very sharp satire. Hanania is not an idiot, that is clear, so I do not for one second buy that he doesn't see the disconnect between the insights of a previously uncontacted indigenous Amazonian philosopher and the insights of the primogenitor of Western fucking civilization.
Side note 3: Season of the Witch - I’m about to get to my point, I promise, but one final aside:
A few months ago, I picked up Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, after Ross Douthat said I subscribe to pagan morality, which I took as a compliment (…) You might want to read the Stoics out of historical curiosity. I’ll claim them as part of my intellectual tribe to signal that I reject the moral underpinnings of both Christianity and wokeness, the two most powerful faiths in our society.
Starfucking aside, I don’t think Richard has read Meditations. Either that or he really has no idea whatsoever what Christian morality is. Edit: Because Meditations in particular is surely the most Christian work of Pagan philosophy in existence.
It’s not simply that the ancients had less information and access to empirical data, but ways of thinking have improved over time. Bertrand Russell once quipped that Aristotle believed that men had more teeth than women, but it never occurred to him to open his wife’s mouth and start counting.1 One of the best essays I’ve read in a long time is “You live in a world that philosophy built,” by Trevor Klee. We take the basics of the scientific method for granted today, but only after generations of newer scholars throwing off the shackles of official dogma.
And here we reach my favourite paragraph in the piece, and where I will end my pedantic nitpicking, because it essentially dismantles itself. The footnote reads thus:
Reading the link I provided, it seems like Aristotle might have actually been relying on the observations of others, who he thinks counted male and female teeth. The quote is
Males have more teeth than females, in the cases of humans, sheep, goats, and pigs. In other species an observation has not yet been made.
So it sounds like he may have been using proper scientific procedures, and we can only fault him for at worst not double checking. Then again, it’s unclear what he meant by “observation” here, it could’ve been something like “some other guy said it,” in which case Russell’s point would stand. And why would the ancients have gotten the number of teeth wrong across multiple species? It makes sense if they were just making things up, but not if they were actually checking their work. (Updated 5/11/23)
If you are just joining us, Hanania just successfully demonstrated the value in reading the actual words old assholes wrote instead of relying on quips about their writing by other old assholes. I'm not sure if Hanania read the link he provided before writing his piece - it kind of seems like he didn't - the link itself does a great job of explaining the problem, which is called memetic drift.
See Bertrand Russell hated Aristotle, because Bertrand Russell was a contrarian asshole (most of my heroes are.) Ok, maybe that's not why, but it's true. And that's the point. As any fan of the scientific method should know, the ONLY source you can fully trust is a primary source. The only way you will ever know exactly what was written in The Nicomachean Ethics is if you read The Nicomachean Ethics.
I am not saying Aristotle was a primary source and therefore we can believe his History of Animals about women's teeth. What I am saying is that it is unscientific to believe Bertrand Russell's description of Aristotle's beliefs, because Russell had his own agenda and point he was making. Russell wasn't just shitting on Aristotle for no reason - The Impact of Science on Society is a brilliant book I hope everyone on the motte has read, even if I disagree with some of the conclusions - Russell was making a point about the difference between being guided by authority and being guided by evidence, and for that it works excellently. But it's not a good way to learn about Aristotle, because it isn't about Aristotle.
The last point I will bring up is prosody. Words don't just mean their definition, they are always contextual. Last week someone was saying they didn't understand Moldbug's appeal, and it's the same thing. I don't care for him either, but for the people who do, the excessive way he writes is a fundamental component. It speaks to them on a level deeper than definitions, and as a result they get much more out of it. That's the real appeal of Great Books - they are read and promoted and reread and repromoted over centuries because they speak to people in a way that provides more insight than a couple of tweets.
And that's why fiction will always provide more insight than non-fiction. The story is the natural way humans understand things and it communicates beyond the words on the page. Just always keep in mind that the map is not the territory, because it can be easy to forget and when you start thinking life works like a story everything goes to shit.
Edit: clarity
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
10mo ago
I have nothing to add on the object level, but I have to say I think it's pretty cowardly to directly quote another motter's post from earlier in this week's thread without tagging them or even naming them. It would be fine if you did it in the same chain, but when you made a new thread you abstracted it away from the op, and it can't have been mere laziness - you quoted them and it would have been trivial to copy their name too, so the only justification for not tagging them I can see is cowardice.
Although to be honest I would still have had a problem with this post if you had tagged them, because you made a top level comment to air your grievances with another user and I think that is petty attention seeking behaviour. But I wouldn't have thought you were being a coward.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
I don't think that happens enough to matter, in the specific case of hate crime laws.
Lol that is literally the only thing that happens with hate crime laws. Take that littering one for example - how many stories have you heard of where some bigot dumped a bunch of racist flyers on someone's lawn to intimidate them? Never, because that's a dumb way to intimidate someone. But still! It could be used to intimidate someone! We need a law in place! Cut to 6 months later and some guy is getting arrested for passing out flyers calling George Soros an asshole. Every piece of hate speech legislation gets used this way, to add ambiguity to the system, because that is precisely what they are designed for.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
11mo ago
You have my sympathy for your experiences with the mentally ill homeless, but you are still being played by the media. The media are calling him schizophrenic as part of their campaign to paint him as innocent, not just because he is out of his mind and might not be cognizant of right and wrong, but also because schizophrenia is a mental illness characterised by a break between the mental model of reality and the factual model of reality and by slowed thinking and lowered motivation. However you can find a doctor who will diagnose just about any man with disordered thinking as schizophrenic, even if they have taken drugs known for causing psychosis, like Neely. Bam, instant sympathy. You would be better off using words like psychotic, or just the usual crazy, lunatic, nuts, bonkers etc
Tldr: schizophrenics are often losers yes, but they are rarely if ever violent and you should not be afraid of them or angry at them, or lump them in with other insane people riding the subway, aka New Yorkers.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
Don't worry guys! Nobody pulled out of twitter advertising due to pressure from activists who don't like free speech. They pulled out due to pressure from democrats who don't like free speech.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
So DeSantis' agents lied to the migrants about where they were going and what would be available to them when they got to their destination.
Or they told the truth, and the non English speaking migrants didn't understand, so they said something like "you're going to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. You know, near Boston?" and the immigrants only got 'Boston' out of it.
You should learn from the other side's mistakes here - when you are so upset you try to find a way to sue someone without any suspects or statutes in mind, just the burning desire to sue, you need to take a step back, because you are going to make mistakes.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3mo ago
No dude, literal white jocks and cheerleaders are both. They are democrats and republicans. The denizens of Madison Ave aren't geeks right? Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansen aren't dorks are they? But they are all democrats! I realise now my last two sentences in my previous post might have appeared to be a slam on you, but I meant it the opposite way - you were a nerdy theatre guy right? And you are a Trump voter! Are you the only freak?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
9mo ago
Men should understand that their madonna/whore complexes, their simplistic notions of saintly mothers, and their "women are wonderful" psychological delusions are just that, delusions. Women, just like men, are complex monkeys with their own desires. When a man becomes a father or a woman becomes a mother, they do not stop being complex monkeys with their own desires. Humans are biologically programmed to devote some degree of attention to their children, but it only goes so far.
I don't know why you are so focused on the child rearing aspect of this, but this statement seems bizarrely anachronistic in the year of our lord twenty twenty three. The song I am woman (Hear me roar) came out fifty years ago. The men who don't understand that women are complex monkeys are never going to understand it at this point. Not that I think this Darius guy or Jonah Hill can't understand that women have their own desires - they do, but like everyone else on the planet they value their own desires higher, and attempted to negotiate with their partner over the specifics, only to discover that their partner can summon a fricking army to her side of the table with an emotionally loaded tweet.
Also Madonna/whore complexes and the women are wonderful effect are propagated and enforced at least as much by other women as they are men, if not more so.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
Finally, the first frontal assault on our new fort! I'm surprised it took this long actually.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
Littlefeather had no interested in the non-romanced Mexican identity. Indians, however, had the connotation of being cool, one with nature, wise, and good.
I don't think that's fair actually. Elizabeth Warren very clearly only did it to advance her own career, but Littlefeather didn't. If anything it hindered her career in Hollywood. She kept fighting for Native Americans her whole life, and while it was in do doubt at least partly about her ego and prestige and all that, I don't think anyone would deny she had a positive impact on the treatment of Native Americans, especially in entertainment.
I'm not saying she did the right thing, but I would bet she deluded herself into believing it, and wasn't merely wearing it as a costume. Warren seems much more contemptible to me, because for her it was an obvious grift.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
Woke stuff isn't just jamming minorities into things or ostentatiously displaying your acceptance though. It's the blank slate philosophy which says that everyone is the same inside with only cosmetic differences on the surface. It's pretending a black guy could be nobility in a white majority place and nobody would even bat an eye, let alone raise objections. It is assuming a 5"4 girl can beat up half a dozen 7" monster men without breaking a sweat. And it's going out of your way to ensure only white men are villains, while treating women and minorities as flawless angels who are in the right even when they do monstrous shit for terrible reasons. It is privileging ideology over storytelling, and the woke seem incapable of doing otherwise. Removing woke from the equation would have a huge impact on the quality of current year entertainment.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
I don't want to reveal all my research, because I already have enough competition for the national treasure from Nic Cage, but it goes all the way back. I'll give you a hint where to start looking though - the Washington monument? It was originally a fountain. And what happens if you pee on the inside walls? I think you will be surprised when you find out!
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
I remember gematria from reddit, they have never been a prolific poster, but they always read as honest to me.
That said, this post could definitely have used a link to the briefing in question.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
No offence mate, but your username is unfamiliar. I don't remember seeing you getting bogged down arguing with anyone, and you don't have any links to evidence of your issue. Without a reason to believe that you know what you are talking about, people won't be able to empathise with you and they won't believe you know what you are talking about. Maybe you could link your reddit history? If it won't make you too easy to identify.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
Maybe he's hoping that people will look at this and go 'boy wouldn't it be great if instead of this banana republic bullshit where you can get arrested for doing what a government official told you to do we had a system in place that determines all this shit before the election and sends me something I can use to say "yes this is me and yes I can vote" like we do with plane tickets and driving and buying cough medicine?'
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
I think it is perverse to suggest that obfuscating language is optimising for light.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
Yeah I expect within two years we will see news articles cataloguing white supremacist rhetoric and imagery in ai generated art, which will necessitate handing over all access of them to the elites. And if somehow there is no white supremacist rhetoric or imagery to be found, it will be created.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5mo ago
Not me. The only thing I hate more than shapes is the idea of rotating them. It's unnatural. If God wanted shapes rotated he would have oriented them differently in the first place. I'll start trusting shapes when someone makes a hexagonal barbecue.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
Why are you treating this person like an ordinary average normie? They were vp of marketing. A vp of marketing who tried to do something controversial to bring in a new customer base, but their map of the region was off, and so they scuttled their ship. Scuttled it so bad apparently anheuser are restructuring their whole marketing department 'to bring them closer to the brand', aka because it's far too obvious how much they all despise bud's customer base. It was a high risk high reward gambit, and you are ignoring the risk so you can claim right wingers are unprincipled cancel culturers.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
I don't think you guys realise the effect it would have on engagement. Because everything is crammed in together, you end up reading and participating in conversations you might not have even clicked on as a separate thread - I know I wouldn't click on a thread about golf, or the current political status of California, if they were separate threads, but because they were crammed in here I read them both and learned a lot. And note that the golf talk was a tangent from another conversation, that would be nipped in the bud as off topic in a standard forum structure.
But that's just first order effects, it gets worse from there. Now when you come to the motte you see one thread and, depending on the time of day, between 20 and 100+ new comments on the thread, indicating a decent amount of activity. Separate threads would see between 1 and 10+ comments per thread - to start. But the psychological effect of seeing only one or two replies is quite different to seeing 10 to 20. Maybe instead of posting now you will check out another thread and when you come back there will be more replies.
Except everyone else thought the same thing, so the slightly obscure thread just dies, and everyone just posts in the llm thread or the trans thread. Except by numbers it's more accurate to say that 'everyone' just left because it's depressing posting in a forum where threads get one or two replies and just looking at the board is demoralising.
At least that's what I expect would happen.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
Some of us were raised in a time when a regular girl would never escort, and never ever do polls on twitter.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1yr ago
And to steelman the rebuttal to that, something like 80,000 prisoners are raped per year in the United States. Huge proportions of female inmates report being raped or harassed, correctional officers have storied histories of raping female inmates. Trans inmates are raped at much higher rates. When's the last time Tucker Carlson ran a segment about prison rape in general? When's the last time anyone here wanted to discuss anything other than the hyped-up rounding error that is men faking being trans to rape female inmates? It's easily possible that a policy allowing trans folks to transfer prisons would result in a net negative number of prison rapes given how often they're victimized in men's prisons.
Small comfort to the victims, I know, I do care and you are correct that those were fairly predictable mistakes, but to say that the sudden concern for the safety of inmates rings hollow would be the understatement of the year. Maybe I'll start to take your argument seriously when conservative politicians/electorates are interested in prisoner welfare more generally.
No. Men wearing wigs so they can enter women's prisons was not an issue 20 years ago. You try to shift the blame around, but conservatives didn't 'suddenly' get concerned about prisoner safety, they are concerned because progressives did something which everyone knew would end up with men putting on wigs to enter women's prisons. It was ignored however, because of progressive ideology - those who said anything were threatened into silence.
So there is no sudden concern for the safety of inmates, there is just the long historied concern about putting a convicted sex criminal in a building with a bunch of women and whistling nonchalantly as you lock the door behind you. It is the fact that the outcome was 'fairly predictable' which outrages people, because you are basically saying that you see those rapes as an acceptable price to pay for advancing your dogma. You do care but you won't take those rapes seriously until conservatives care about other prisoners, or trans rights. How is that different from not caring?
As the old saying goes, you get used to anything eventually. That's what I think he's saying, yeah they were brutally dominated and subjugated into passively accepting their fates, but as any student of the time will tell you, they weren't whipped into submission every day for hundreds of years. They were treated 'decently' if they behaved, and so eventually they all behaved. To the point that yes, there were black people who supported the confederates, there were slaves who believed it was the best they could get.
That is the mental slavery. And yes it absolutely continues to this day, and yes you are one of the slaves, so am I, so is everyone here. But we have never been free - truly free - and so we accept this crude facsimile we are given by the government and corporations and all those who profit from our misery. At least that's what I think he's saying. Maybe it is banal, but so is calling fire hot. People don't lose their shit when you tell them fire is hot though.
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