HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
The anti-doomer's flowchart, courtesy of Ross Scott.
You may remember that, a while back, Ross Scott (of Civil Protection, Freeman's Mind, and Ross's Game Dungeon fame) hosted a discussion with Big Yud himself over AI risk. I couldn't finish the video, but I gathered that Ross was not impressed by Yud's arguments from the premise of AI gaining consciousness and thus wasn't really grasping what Yud saw as the problem. For the many of you who are averse to long videos, the above image lays out Ross's positions on AI risk, with reasons for why.
I suppose I'll have to point to this piece if I'm ever called to answer why I nostalgia-cize about a time I was barely aware enough to enjoy.
That being said, I acknowledge that the Internet and smartphones are two genies that can't quite be put back in the bottle, and there's also a lot of stuff I'm not sure I'd want to give up to go back to the 90's.
ETA:
Another thing that was great about the 90's, something that Freddie probably didn't talk about out of lack of experience, was the world of computers and computer games. Back then, we didn't fear technological progress quite so much (if you did, you probably were an actual honest-to-God literal Baby Boomer who probably imagined a Skynet-like AI forming from the digital ether of computers, much as how people thought flies spontaneously formed on meat pre-Pasteur), and getting new games and hardware was exciting.
The 90's saw computers go from spreadsheet machines that were mostly only good for card games and endless clones of that one Star Trek simulator to multimedia powerhouses that could run Quake. If you were a console gamer instead of a computer gamer, that was still a super exciting time, because you also had games go from 2D to 3D and improve just as rapidly.
Going to a store like CompUSA or Fry's Electronics was special, because you could shop for a new graphics card or check out the new PC games.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I think I've already heard this argument on Tumblr in more direct wording; that you really could just leave out the "TE" in "TERF," since trans-exclusion is pretty much just a logical conclusion of honest-to-God man-hating radical feminism. Now, I don't think Rowling herself is an honest-to-God man-hater, but hardcore feminism demands the expurgation of everything male, and there is generally no exemption for "was male once" under the radical wing's ideology. So, you are right in that it is technically just sexism, but flipped.
I suppose I should also use this post to reply to Folamh below and say that, while I'm not sure that normies really do use "sex" and "gender" interchangeably, I think the real reason this argument won't work is more due to the perception that you can't actually discriminate unfairly against men--normies don't necessarily grok anything beyond the simplified narrative of feminism. Granted, I suppose the mainstream is at least weakly trans-sympathetic and thus will also fail to grok what Rowling's actual beef is.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I wonder if a suit could be brought over this.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I don't think it's a good thing to try and argue this from a culture war perspective; parents of school shooting victims are perhaps simply always destined to go campaigning against guns. As someone who is pro-gun, I don't need Alex Jones on my side, I can simply try and argue from other angles why I think the Brady Campaign and so on are wrong without trying to undermine the tragedy they suffered. If anything, we are served better by people like Open Source Defense, Karl Kasarda, and so on than we are by Alex Jones. "Arguments as soldiers" is one thing, but Alex Jones's problem was taking that a bit too literally.
HalloweenSnarry
6mo ago
I hate to dogpile this, but to echo the other replies with a twist, I would say that your statement would be true if this was still the 90's/early-to-mid 2000's. 90's civics with their colorblind idealism, however, are dead and rotting.
Eh, I'm under the perception that Blue Tribe is pretty damn split on alternative medicine and pseudoscience. On the one hand, large swathes of Blue Tribe go all in on it, but on the other, the rest are kind of horrified at the harm it can cause. The Blues are lucky that the political polarization over COVID shook out the way it did, because now they can jettison anti-vax from their memeplex (where previously it was an alt-medicine mainstay that was causing Measles to resurge).
Similarly for the Red Tribe/conservatives, I have to wonder if anyone even pushes Intelligent Design anymore; am I wrong for saying that it always seemed like a way to smuggle God into the secular realm? But now that Christianity has been on the backfoot for so long, conservatives and the like don't really care for whitewashing their beliefs like that.
HalloweenSnarry
11mo ago
It's not the will of the LEOs, it's the will of the confiscators giving them orders. There will be enough LEOs who won't push back on their orders.
I don't really put much stock into this in a post-Floyd world. I imagine that, in your hypothetical scenario, by Week 3 of the Great Gun Confiscation, officers will start conveniently calling in sick.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Perhaps, to some, murder is implied by "physical removal;" even if you defend the term as referring to deportation, not every single targeted person may give up their home without a fight. Exile and deportation are inherently forms of violence, IMO: it's said that liberals look at force/violence as a continuum or "dial," where severity can be turned up or down as needed, whereas conservatives view it as a binary or "switch," where it's either basically no response or maximum force. I think it's potentially actually both: violence will start at a low setting, but the high setting is always available in prompt order. Think of how libertarians frame many laws as being enforced at gunpoint, because many laws in America and elsewhere are set and enforced with "men with guns ordered by the government to shoot you" as the ultimate backstop to resistance of laws.
This is to say that I think killing is always implicitly encapsulated in the idea of removal, however bloodlessly you might otherwise envision it. After all, if a far-right party wanted to kick out some Jews with a deportation, but those specific Jews replied with a particularly Laconic "no," then what are the far-righters gonna do? Shrug their shoulders and leave them alone?
(Side thought: I don't know where to look for it right now, but in a thread about what to do about public-transit-abusers (which has become a semi-common topic here), I think I made the elaboration that some of our disagreements about law and order come down to how much violence is permissible to do to serial defectors, and by whom (libertarians/ancaps may favor the ability to just shoot drug users who bug you without repercussion, progressives would rather just accomodate around the issue, far-righters would want state-backed executions, regular conservatives would just want to lock them up in prisons), and what I wrote above reminds me of that.)
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
That quote, to me, reminds me of all those stories of industrial disasters and the like, the kind that are fodder to a certain genre of YouTuber, and a depressingly-common thread is that the management knew about the problem/risk that led to the loss of lives, physical and monetary damage, and criminal charges, and yet they forged ahead anyways for one or more of the following reasons: too cheap to be safer; can't lose profits; we need the results; it's not that big a problem; etc.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
True, but this is not the complaint at hand--it's what is done with rapists that is at the heart of the dispute.
God, I also wanted to talk about this, but I figured it was too "rest of the Internet" for the Motte and I also figured I wouldn't have anything of substance to say.
The incredible levels of cope and blame avoidance had my mind wandering back to the discussions around the book Sadly, Porn, it's author The Last Psychiatrist, and his general fight against narcissism. Trans, cis, or whatever, there sure seem to be a lot of people in desperate need of admitting fault. The fact that people thought Silvervale's* "Twitter freaks" comment was a dogwhistle aimed at trans people and Jews was very much an "if you're reading it, it's for you"-type of thing, and if anything, I think it's only made the term "Twitter freaks" into more of a shibboleth.
The accusations of right-wing "gayops" smack so heavily of "big if true." I can believe that it may be possible, but if so, then trans activism has a bigger problem than a stupid wizard game if they can be reliably punked by 4Channers in such a way.
This and other events related to the general online trans community (and real-life stuff like Montana's recent bill) definitely seem like a string of PR hits for them, but it's hard to say if it'll actually move the needle on public opinion or just settle back down to the status quo.
*Silver is not the VTuber who is quitting streaming, for those unaware. That would be Pikamee, who was already planning on "graduating," but speculation says that the harassment may well have accelerated the plan.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
In mild fairness:
-Kanye put his weight behind Tidal, which promised a more competitive cut for artists (or at least a whole-ass stake), and exclusively released The Life of Pablo through it.
-There was that time he went a rant on Twitter about the record industry, and posted an entire PDF (of his record conract, I think) as a long thread of images (yes, seriously, but I don't think I can find it now...).
-Kanye also backed the Stem Player (a device and streaming service(?) whose whole shtick was being able to isolate instrument and vocal stems/tracks from songs, allowing you to customize your listening experience, though it works best with albums that are already broken-up into stems), releasing Donda 2 exclusively for it (which was such an album, alongside the original Donda which released around the same time as the Stem Player).
It's possible that Kanye started out being frustrated at the music industry, but Kanye being Kanye, his...unique mind probably led to him escalating his frustrations into conspiracy territory.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Surprised there isn't as much discussion of the culture war implications as I expected, though I guess if the thesis of "cheap Fed money -> highly-permissive investing environment -> tech startup explosion" is true, then it automatically explains a lot of the CW and can thus be mostly left to the reader's imagination. Question then is: what will the world look like if "cheap money" goes away? Will "soft tech" like social media take a permanent hit a la China? (Relatedly: what's going on with tech stocks right now?) Will the Culture War somehow cool down in light of a new economic reality? (Confounder: the Culture War started and grew during a time where you could say the economy was also screwed up, just in a different way.) And in light of what's going on with Twitter, will it even matter whether or not investors are happy?
My unfounded, inexpert prediction: there will probably have to be an economic correction at the expensive of financialists sometime in the medium-term future (like 10 years at most). I feel like the proverbial "other shoe" has been poised to drop for years now.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
If anything, the "newbie" accusation is probably grounds to dismiss the rest of their criticism; Aella's been in sex work since before Tumblr banned porn.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
When you talked about how the title may have put people off, I thought you were gonna say that the word "Bro" made people think the movie was about dudebro assholes. I do have to wonder how much just the title alone (i.e. no summaries or trailers or posters or whatever) influence watching decisions, though, because that might not be a good enough explanation.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Not that guy, but I've been seeing it somewhat often here, and to me, while it could still refer to Jews as it once did, it could also refer to the "globalist" class also referred to as the "anywheres:" they may be born in the first world, but they'll happily travel to wherever, so long as it's a shiny city somewhere exotic (or at least modern enough to accomodate a luxurious lifestyle); they exist just as easily in LA or NY as they do in Dubai, Paris, or Shanghai.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
Re: the Sam Kriss piece: I have to wonder if he just needs to be taken back to the Internet That Was, a time when you could make stupid Flash animations and YouTube videos that contained whatever, when you could put in a copyrighted song without it getting nuked off a platform or claimed by some anonymous person/bot/corporation, when you were free to be transgressive. Perhaps the Internet looks sterile and dying to him today because, in a sense, the managerial Powers That Be decided to smother the global citizenry's id under a blanket on pain of lawsuit.
Even before Web 2.0 tried to consume the world, the mainstream was already aware of the wacky things people got up to on the Internet.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
It depends on if Twitter under Musk will really be that bad. History suggests you have to really piss off enough people so that all of a modal user's friends on a feed will see the complaints. See Digg and Tumblr for example.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
I think the thrust of Arjin's criticism here is this: okay, suburbia sucks. Now what? What do you propose to do about suburbia sucking? All the car-centric infrastructure in the US, well, exists. It would presumably cost an astronomical amount to get rid of it, possibly more real or financial resources to rip all of it up than it did to put all of it there in the first place.
The other argument often lobbed at pro-city people (one I don't necessarily agree with, but see as an unavoidable stumbling block) is that cities suck to live in because criminals and other ne'er-do-wells will shit up the place and get away with it. Those same people will point to recent developments as evidence that the city-dwellers making cities worse places to live will never be held accountable for such.
HalloweenSnarry
5mo ago
True, but the saying goes, "there's a lot of ruin in a nation," and the USSR made for a pretty big nation at the peak of the Eastern Bloc.
HalloweenSnarry
7mo ago
Makes sense why John Riccitiello sold a bunch of shares before making this announcement!
Just seeing this man's name makes my blood boil a little, even now. I know that EA has been bad for years, no matter who the CEO is, but his tenure had some real sore spots to it (specifically, I believe he was CEO in the same era when EA killed so many beloved studios like Westwood and Bullfrog).
HalloweenSnarry
10mo ago
The Court is always and altogether--albeit willfully, like a moviegoer whose suspension of disbelief is essential to the process, like a wrestling fan whose kayfabe is the lifeblood of the art form--deceived.
Is there not a reason why we symbolise Justice with a blindfolded angel/goddess, though?
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
The dystopian take is obviously that the copyright lawyers will come for the brain next: experiencing copyrighted media without paying for it will be criminalized.
I've made this kind of observation before, how social media can mold us into becoming the online identities we wear.
I kinda don't miss the flame wars of old, personally, but I really wouldn't say that modern-age online beefs are any improvement.
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