GuyOnInternet
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User ID: 1177
GuyOnInternet
9mo ago
The weird thing about cryptocurrency is regular currency could have the same functionality (basically) if it and the banking system were unregulated. Those regulations are what slow down transactions. It's requirements like know your customer and others like that which require banks to actually verify and have a more involved role that introduces the friction points that crypto ostensibly solves. If you take out all of the safeguards that make the current system relatively safe, it starts looking a lot like crypto - for good and bad.
GuyOnInternet
9mo ago
i wouldn't consider that standard to apply to people like Plato, Newton etc. They were just around at a different time, which just didn't have the same level of understanding of the world, so a lot of ideas and thoughts about the world were given room to be elevated. I'm not going to fault someone for not knowing space is a vacuum when they lived thousands of years before we went to space, for instance. Just like I'm not going to fault someone for believing something wrong about the spread of disease prior to the invention of germ theory.
I would agree with what you're saying about things like social justice, antiracism etc. But those are really low quality modes of thought. Exceeding that standard, which I'm not sure astrology does but it's certainly not substantially below that standard, does not lend credibility. That's not good company to be in.
Also disagree that a writer should be regarded as being capable of producing great work in one area and nonsense in another. If those areas are substantially different, that's one thing. And there are always exceptions to the rule. But in analyzing the world, if they indulge in nonsense that's a good indicator that their critical thinking abilities and abilities to discern the true nature of things are probably fairly weak.
i think feminism has largely devolved into a framework intended exclusively to generate rationalizations with maximal agility whose function is to perpetuate emotionally salient narratives of victimhood. initially, there was a grave need for feminism and the transgressions were obvious. but i suspect that as time went on and feminists racked up wins, the transgressions they were fighting against became less grave and less emotionally salient. but because emotional salience and the perception of victimhood are the key drivers of activism, there was a crisis that threatened to undermine the movement’s emotional salience. and the response was to sort of retreat into the nebulous and abstract world of academia which allowed the construction of approaches that could sustain the emotional salience of the movement by not having to be grounded in reality.
GuyOnInternet
9mo ago
i think it’s highly problematic that we don’t really see prominent figures taking a descriptive orientation and just trying to understand the world. that role as been taken over by idealogues. and even if they are not particularly ideological or they are making a genuine attempt at objectivity, they still struggle to think outside of the ideological framework - and this framework is more often than not progressive. i think what is needed is for someone to be able to compartmentalize the realities of modern life separately from the perspective of modern life, as the latter is where ideology lies. only then can this descriptive orientation be put forth. but i’m not sure the problem is that there is just no one out there with a descriptive oreintation. i think it’s probalby just not what people want. and in the modern info and ideas economy, it’s what people want to hear that rises to teh top. this has been the effect of the democratization of information and ideas. it functions like a democratic organization or a free market, where the key driver are these “market signals” that signal what people want to hear, and because anyone can be producer within this economy, anyone who is willing to meet that want is incentivized. and the legacy and more formal players know that if they don’t do it someone else will, so if they want to remain relevant they have to meet it.
GuyOnInternet
9mo ago
We have to draw the line somewhere and if that line is not at believing in astrology and practicing magic, I don't know where it is.
GuyOnInternet
9mo ago
That's a blog written by a prominent astrologer. Even if I agree with what they're saying I just can't view it with credibility.
I mean check out this line from his wiki "He is currently blogging at Ecosophia, where he has written about the intersection of magic and politics."
"He criticises the openness of liberal occultists, arguing that magical practices benefit from more obscurity and secrecy" I mean fucking christ
GuyOnInternet
9mo ago
Those are all good points. but what i get stuck on is someone will claim to be a vehement opponent of prejudice and will be woke as fuck, but then they will be just flagrantly prejudiced against the south and southerners to a degree that would make a klan member blush. and they genuinely just don't see the hypocrisy or problem when i bring it up. like someone will have lived in new york their entire lives, has never been to the south, but they are just so confident that not only do they understand it really well but are confident it's just absolute hell.
a thought i had is that this is an excellent and perhaps somewhat unique feature of how decentralized the American system is. if each state were not allowed to have the degree of latitude they have, there would be less variation between them, so different parts of the us would no longer be able to evolve and adapt to different problems and ways of thinking. the us as a whole would probably just decline, but instead a business or person can just relocate to a part of the us whose policies are more optimized for the task at hand.
If you wrote it I'd read it. I just read an article from Bloomberg that said the southeastern corridor (or something like that) just surpassed the northeast in terms of contribution to GDP, those from the northeast continue to leave for the south, as do businesses, and as a result the south's representation in congress is growing. I wasn't aware of the prejudice, which is sometimes just outright hostility, against southerners prior to moving up north recently, so I can't be sure if it's just a frustrated response to their diminishing importance or has always been there. But I do find it fascinating and odd to see a group slowly losing its prominence to another group it views itself as superior to, despite the deeply engrained nature of that superiority. Like the roots of that superiority are starting to decay but the flower doesn't realize it yet.
GuyOnInternet
9mo ago
if you re read the second paragraph I think you’ll see we agree that it’s a combo of cultural and external change
I increasingly believe that politics, rather most people's political views, is mostly just a function of culture. It's all just a function of the cultural lens. Perspective and values don't make a distinction between the political and cultural realm. Every generation is characterized by a specific dominant cultural lens that is unique in a. what it identifies to be a problem and b. the solutions it prescribes as a response to those problems (generally just meaning the ideal state of existence, which is generally just the inverse of what the state created by the problems is, so ultimately just meaning the norms that are implied and advocated for by the cultural lens). Political views are simply just the attempt at constructing the reality that culture upholds as the ideal; culture is the architect and politics is the builder. That's why when you consume entertainment, comedy in particular, from previous generations it isn't as enjoyable: because culture, which entertainment plays a key role in (in terms of its ability to convey and construct norms), is highly contextual.
But every generation thinks they have arrived at the correct perception of things, and as a corollary they have arrived at the correct view of how things should be. But when this perspective is implemented it always falls short and its shortcomings are evidenced by the fact that the implementation doesn't achieve what its supporters expect for it to achieve. That is what moves thought: the dialectic, the implementation of the counterpoint that reveals the excesses of the counterpoint which eventually necessitates a reversion to a midpoint that seeks to preserve the merit of both the status quo and the counterpoint. It's this constant movement through the dialectic that forces thought and perception to evolve, which is itself powered by shifting perspectives which are rooted in realizing the limited merit of the previously implemented perspective but also that the world which is being perceived is constantly changing (i.e. there are two types of movement: movement within the dialectic and movement of the centerpoint of the dialectic, or what substance the dialectic framework is meant to address). I often wonder if the world had just stopped changing, would we have eventually arrived at a perspective that was objectively supreme, correct, and accepted? Would thousands of years of evolution of thought, with its ability to shape the subject of evolution slowly to be a perfect response to that which it is evolving in response to, eventually have brought us to a cultural lens that is a perfect understanding of how the world is and should be, and, further, would it have eventually brought us to a world that is objectively perfect? But I guess to get back to the point the reason I think we never arrive at that perfect solution is that the focus of this dialectic movement is changing. It's like you're constructing a car optimized to drive on roads, but the roads keep changing.
It's increasingly seemed to me that progressivism is uniquely unmoored from any guiding set of principles. At the risk of sounding like a cliche, it seems unambiguously true to me that racism is bad unless it's against white people, sexism is bad unless it's against men, prejudice is bad unless it's against a group you don't like. I mean there is a strong correlation between someone identifying themselves as an ardent opponent of prejudice and racism with those who use the term 'white' as an insult to describe something they don't like. I just moved to new york, and am also from the south, and I'm astonished at the degree to which the most progressive people will talk about the south and southerners as if they're inherently inferior and will demonstrate an oddly aggressive and blatant prejudice against them, even if they've never been there. And what's crazy is it's so damn overt and explicit that you don't even need to really peel back layers of thought to identify the prejudice; they're not entirely against outright claiming that they're prejudiced against those from the south as if it's a badge of honor and will absolutely shit on it despite having never been there. And the hypocrisy is never really acknowledged. I say this not necessarily as an insult but as an observation: but progressivism genuinely does not appear to be guided by any sort of principle and intellectually the mechanics of it seem to be extremely sloppy, despite the fact that they have insinuated them into the foundations of collective thought to a unique degree.
I find progressivism, in academia in particular, to have become so consumed by ideology laid upon layers of other ideology for so long that there is such a profound and massive removal from the practical realities of things. They are so far removed from simply observing and assessing what is happening at a real level that it seems like for any discussion of any observation, the conversation must address everything except what's evidently going on. If the understanding isn't rooted in this conception of highly intellectualized frameworks and systemic structures it's considered to be invalid. There is such a consumption with systems-level thinking. The mechanism by which they seem to maintain this influence seems to be the reference of these vague and intellectualized approaches that, by their abstract nature, can't really be decisively refuted (meaning you can't really prove that a given structural characteristic doesn't exist because you can't really prove that it does exist either) and to disagree with them is to convey that you are not enlightened and missed that day in school when we learned of the these structures and frameworks with a clarity and obviousness that can only be matched by learning of the laws of physics.
I certainly don't want to spare the republican party any very well deserved condemnation, but I don't find that criticism to be particularly lacking right now, nor do I think they have the norm-setting capabilities to be as relevant to me.
If you broadly read the news you know what I mean and I don’t need to cite it. If you broadly read the news and don’t agree, you likely share the bias in referencing and that evidence citing would turn into a game of whack a mole where I’d find an article and you’d counter on semantic grounds or whether it is an outliner or the norm. Short of providing some sort of statistical evidence that somehow characterizes media reporting on this, you can find a reason to disagree.
If this is not evident to someone im inclined to believe it’s because of the same phenomenon im talking about: you share the bias im talking about so you don’t see it as bias. Or you don’t read the news much.
This sort of thing can easily turn into a endless debate of first principles, and those debates can easily turn into a black hole where every bit of evidence and every assumption is contested and you can just reject anything you don’t like on abstract grounds, and at some point just i have to be able to say if you reject this idea that’s fair but this post isn’t for you. Demonstrating the observation is important, but this comment isn't for those who need the observation illustrated for them: It’s for those who have observed what I’m talking about.
GuyOnInternet
9mo ago
I’m not sure, but a surprising amount of black people also oppose it, so I think to some degree people are evidently not just going based on whether something benefits them or not
GuyOnInternet
9mo ago
The media coverage of the affirmative action ruling has really highlighted in a unique way the degree to which journalists fundamentally are not representative of the US. Despite only a third of Americans approving of the use of race in admissions, the media overwhelmingly cover this like it's a moral wrong. I buy that most credible news outlets do try and be objective, but trying to be objective isn't enough. Bias isn't just a conscious thing. If you perceive something to be objectively wrong, you're going to cover it as such. But the trouble is what is often considered to be objectively wrong, at least at this point, is largely a function of your viewpoint, in this case meaning political orientation. The problem is fundamentally that there is no plurality of thought at credible news organizations. They are all perceiving things through the same intellectual framework.
The same thing is largely evident in the coverage of republican states restricting the use of gender affirming care in youth. The credible scholarship overwhelmingly appears to demonstrate that the impacts of allowing it are either adverse or there simply isn't enough research to be sure that it's a good thing. But the media overwhelmingly characterize it as a moral wrong and as basically being rights that are stripped from an oppressed group.
GuyOnInternet
11mo ago
This is not stemming from politicians. This is grass roots. There are tons of protests over Neely, for instance. You see this sentiment on the NYC subreddit as well. If you ask a progressive person, and frankly many moderate liberals as well, they echo it as well. On the contrary, politicians are just responding to what their constituents are saying on this one.
I agree with your assessment. When I've written about it I've referred to it as this perception that we are in a post-homo sapien world; that we have fully outgrown our primitive nature and have gained the ability to perfectly engineer society and human nature. It ignores that the same basic laws of nature apply; that human systems are complex to the point that they cannot be fully comprehended, so we cannot simply decide to intervene to produce x desired outcome because a. there is no way we can truly understand and respond to the ultimate and specific causal forces and b. there is no way we can truly understand the effects a given intervention can have. I mean it sort of doesn't matter whether people have the ability to choose their behavior. Whether or not the decision to murder someone is the result of genetic predispositions and a traumatic childhood, that person is a murderer; and we should be focused on ensuring they cannot murder.
I think the meta ethical fallacy you point out and the post-homo sapien world i point out observe something that is intellectually muddled and has a selective view of whether free will exists/human nature is a blank slate. This narrative suggests that free will exists to the extent that human nature is something that can be re-engineered by humans, but not to the extent that the individual can be held accountable for their actions.
I find this all especially interesting given that if you look at people who did just heinous shit throughout history, e.g. serial killers or rapists etc., they typically had a rough upbringing and they probably would not have done their heinous acts if not for some traumatic and formative experience. But no one jumps in and says Jeffrey Dahmer shouldn't be held accountable because he had a fucked up childhood. But even if they did, you have to ask, who gives a fuck? He did what he did. You can't go back in time and change his childhood.
I view many progressive prerogatives like this as being this rebellion against the notion that the laws of nature apply to humans and reign supreme (in that they cannot be refuted or changed). It's this notion of the helicopter mom and the administrative state; that we can overcome our environment, pad its walls to eliminate everything bad, and that we are not subject to the imperceptible interdependencies that characterize complex systems. That there are inevitable and organic consequences to actions which serve to deincentivize bad behaviors. Complex human systems function in the same way as a free market; the free market functions the way it does because it is a complex web of organic nodes, just like any system of humans.
Alternatively, I think it may be the result of modern existence becoming very complex --> complexity is uncertainty --> humans fear uncertainty most of all --> humans gravitate to these notions that the environment and the uncertainty it creates can be conquered/that there is a bad guy (e.g. the system, elites, whatever) that can be blamed and defeated. I truly think that in 10 years people are going to be shocked and find absurd notions like these.
I think this rejection of the laws of nature and natural way of things also manifests in the popular view that someone's wage should be a reflection of the standard of living that wage affords them, and not a reflection of their market value/contribution to the company. It's a rejection of the idea that the life someone ends up with is largely a function of the decisions they've made.
GuyOnInternet
11mo ago
I think the facts haven’t come out to discern whether he should be charged.
But I’m less talking about whether Neely deserved to be killed, and more talking about the public response to his actions - irrespective of his death. This same outcry happens when there are other random acts of violence that catch the headlines. Michelle Go, for instance.
GuyOnInternet
11mo ago
The tendency that's emerged to view random acts of violence as indicative of 'a mental health emergency that is the result of government shortcomings' is concerning and just weird. The current example is Jordan Neely.
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People are getting lost in this speculative 'why' behind these actions and losing sight of the 'what'. in other words, that someone has a mental disorder that may have contributed to their decision to commit a random and violent crime is a very distant second to the fact that they committed a random and violent crime. it seems like many of the perpetrators who receive this sort of public treatment are people who have committed a laundry list of crimes in the past and for whom this sort of behavior was entirely predictable. And it's this 'they have a mental disorder it doesn't count' mentality that seems to be at the root cause of these people not being held accountable and put behind bars so they can't repeat that's behind all of this. Sure, maybe treating mental health disorders will help, but they can receive those services in jail (or we should focus on ensuring they can receive them, if they can't already). And this narrative ignores that the sole purpose of a criminal justice system is not to reform criminals; it's to serve justice and reduce the amount of crime that's happening. And before anyone makes the non-intuitive claim that there is nothing to suggest that arresting people reduces crime, yes there is; and i don't even know why the assumption that arresting people doesn't reduce crime exists in the first place. It seems very obvious and logically sound that if someone has a tendency to commit crime, they cannot do so if they are in jail.
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It ignores that there are people with mental disorders who go their entire lives without committing a random act of violence. Looking for a basically exogenous (e.g. outside the realm of the self) source of blame instead of holding individuals accountable is so symptomatic of a form of thought that has begun to plague society. It is always the system's fault, it is always something else's fault. It's a cancerous way of thinking because who the hell is to say what ultimate cause led to someone doing something. It's pure speculation, so to focus on identifying and blaming this vague ultimate cause instead of focusing on holding people accountable falls victim to causal ambiguity and sets yourself up to not be able to remedy the problem
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I don't know why there is this view that if the government just dumps more money into this magical mental health pot, that random acts of violence will be solved. We can't even be sure that mental health issues are generally and primarily the cause for this sort of behavior, but even to the extent that we can, I just find it so weird that people think the government can somehow solve it. Like just throwing money at this vague notion of mental health services will somehow solve the problem
GuyOnInternet
1yr ago
My inclination is to be someone who respects science and experts, but I find this difficult to adhere to when it comes to academia. Academics have historically occupied a very important place in society as those who have devoted their lives to understanding the world around us and, as a result, were key in forming how people actually understand the world around us. They are supposed to be the trusted and truth-oriented intellectuals, but I just don’t think that is the case and I have grown increasingly skeptical of academia.
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I simply don’t think it has a descriptive orientation anymore, nor do think it is any longer the realm of truth-seeking. It seems to have either a normative orientation or a quais-descriptive orientation in which the endeavor is regarded as truth-seeking and it actually does have some descriptive value, but it’s done by people who a. Got into academia because they were passionate about one side of an issue b. Have a similar set of values and thus perspective c. Ask a question from a common and loaded perspective d. Focus on questions that are important to the structural integrity of a specific line of reasoning
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Probably intertwined with 1, academia appears to be pretty ideologically homogenous, and that homogeneity exists reasonably far to the left. Even if they are trying to be unbiased, it’s exceptionally difficult to recognize ones own bias as bias; it’s just regarded as normal. And I think a unique element of progressivism is, I’m not sure whether it’s dogmatism but I think there is a relatively unique tendency to not distinguish between values/opinions and fact. i just don’t find progressives often framing their convictions as opinions. So if someone like that is conducting academic research, if they do not regard their opinions as opinions, they do not regard their bias as bias, and thus they do not perceive themselves as having a bias to control for. As a result academic research which is normative in nature is being presented and absorbed as if it is descriptive in nature. I think an example of this relates to the DEI space, in which I think most people would agree that that issue does not appear to allow much room for disagreement, despite the fact that it is exceptionally complex, deals with ambiguous and nebulous structures (not saying they don’t exist, but they aren’t exactly things you can reach out and touch and describe in unambiguous terms)
GuyOnInternet
1yr ago
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in that article but it reminds me of the idea that the issue with historians is that they only look backward. They see the future inevitably being just a different iteration of the past.
I’m also skeptical of narratives of decline. I think it reveals a nation that’s a little unconfident right now. A nation that, in living memory, has been immune to the ups and downs that characterize the evolution of the state. But we have had times of domestic tumult before. Just go back to the 60s. People who lived through that would surely be forgiven for making the assumption that what lies in front of us is necessarily part of a longer term trend. I imagine that times of change are, more often than not, accompanied by feelings of existential dread.
Comparisons of the US to empires have never really made much sense to me either. Empires do fail because they are held together by force, so anything that threatens the power base necessary to exert that force is necessarily an existential threat. But that doesn’t describe our country. People speak of neo-imperialism as if having influential companies and culture is the same thing as having vassals, but it simply is not true.
I think the biggest issue we have today is that we are facing uncertainty, we are facing change, and we don’t know what to make of it so everyone sort makes that same mistake of assuming that what lies in front of us is necessarily a trend. But sometimes you’re just trying to judge the outcome of a race as it’s being run.
GuyOnInternet
1yr ago
Elections are a good gauge because, if sufficiently democratic, power is popularity.
If what you mean is ‘disproportionately powerful relative to its popularity’ powerful is not the word that characterizes your view of it. Something can have marginal influence but that influence is still greater than its actual popularity.
GuyOnInternet
1yr ago
It’s worth asking if that’s only because blue tribe split off, as I don’t think that would have been the case 20 years ago.
progressives have become more ideological, and ideology often takes the place of nationalism. In practice it seems that you can only have a commitment to one. As ideology does not tolerate what does not conform to its standards.
GuyOnInternet
1yr ago
Evidence to the contrary
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Eric Adams winning in New York on a tough on crime, skeptical of progressives message
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Youngkin winning in VA
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NJ gov race
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the DA and progressive members of the SF city council being sweeped in elections
These are all examples of more moderate candidates beating progressive candidates in historically blue areas. and just in general social dialogue simply is not as militantly progressive as it was in 2020 and 2021. really the number of truly progressive people seems to be smaller. Things are more complicated than it's won or it hasn't.
GuyOnInternet
1yr ago
wokeness is definitely losing influence. the trouble is in 2020 and 2021 the craziness sort of made institutions vulnerable and everyone rabid to the point that it was like our institutions were lying on the operating table with their chest ripped open and before it was sutured up radicals sort of added a bunch of shit they wanted changed. and it's hard to take that stuff out because you'd need to open the chest up again.
in other words, it seems clear that popular support for progressivism is waning. but the issue is all of these DEI and other progressive initiatives were forced into institutions along with the expectation that they be able to pass the purity tests that activists are known for. so they're now embedded in institutions even though the pressure to implement those policies is far weaker than it was. But they just sort of have this momentum; they were embedded into the institutional logic to the point that it's just a first principle that they must adhere to progressive priorities.
at some point, in some way, these things will be expunged from institutions to some degree. i just don't know how. I've heard someone say 'it's easy to be woke in a bull market' - and that suggests to me that if a recession comes businesses and other institutions will face enough difficulty in delivering on their core mission that they will need to strip out the extraneous stuff and the distractions.
the other mechanism i see at play is things like Desantis' response to the don't say gay bill. that introduced a cost to businesses becoming politicized; it conveyed that if you are going to enter partisan politics and pick a side you are going to face the wrath of the other side. and i think that at some point businesses are going to have this 'hey let's just focus on the basics. lets just focus on our core mission. i know there are costs associated with failing to support progressive initiatives, but there are also costs to becoming politicized. so let's just not enter the arena'
the greatest pressure keeping these progressive policies instituted is this sort of common knowledge among everyone who isn't progressive that if you don't support those initiatives or speak out against them there will be hell to pay so you just need to do it. it's the fear of the enforcement mechanism that keeps these policies instituted and not the enforcement mechanism itself, as the enforcement mechanism has largely become rusted out and no one actually knows if it works anymore because anytime its threats are heeded it's because of that same 'you're going to get us cancelled if you don't support these initiatives so i'm going to pressure you to support these initiatives. it's brilliant, in a way.
what i mean by emotional salience is something that stands out and resonates emotionally. like going from abortion is no longer federally protected to the rights of women are being attacked is transforming that into something more emotionally salient.
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