HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
No bio...
User ID: 179
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
What do you do when the adherents talk to you and inquire about something theological, to which you'd either have to lie or admit your atheism?
I'm an atheist and I've often contemplated going to church with my Christian fiance, but I'm always halted by the thought of what the hell I'm supposed to do when people start with the Jesus-speak one-on-one.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
I want to hear the steelman for qualified immunity, because the most salient times it comes up are when it’s being abused. In other words, I have the urge to play devil’s advocate, but I’m underqualified.
I'm not well-acquainted enough with the facts and arguments to feel comfortable engaging someone who is, but in case no one else steps up the plate: I think the idea is that you don't want civil servants like police officers to face the possibility of ruinous civil lawsuits for just doing their job and making some sort of honest mistake. I think (although I'm not as confident about this) that you can instead civilly sue the department as opposed to the individual officer. That spreads out the risk and costs of litigating.
It's also extremely important to point out that qualified immunity has absolutely nothing to do with protecting anyone from CRIMINAL culpability. Officers who commit crimes are routinely brought to justice and qualified immunity has no bearing whatsoever on any of it.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
It seems you're suggesting that women attending domestic violence shelters are concerned that the men there (who would themselves be victims of domestic violence) are going to attack them. Am I understanding you correctly? If so, I don't think that concern is something the shelter should indulge at the exclusion of male victims. I see no reason to suppose women at domestic violence shelters are at an elevated risk of being attacked by strangers compared to walking on the sidewalk.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
I haven't thought about this before, so this may be a dumb question, but why wouldn't men go to the same domestic violence shelters women do? I can't think of any sex-specific services that would be required, or any reason people would be more uncomfortable around the opposite sex than the same sex.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
n=1, but I pretty much only eat pizza and other take-out food, and have for the majority of my life (I'm in my 30s now). I'm not fat and haven't been since I was a kid. It's not my metabolism or genetics, either - I quickly gain pounds if I let myself indulge snacks too much for a few weeks. In that eventuality, I just eat slightly less for a few weeks and go back down. I know the CICO observation is trite at this point, but it's true. It's trivially true. You simply won't get fat if you just don't eat excessively.
I suspect the sort of disdainful attitude you're describing/exhibiting (e.g., "plastic food") is just class signaling and virtue signaling, frankly. Pizza and burgers, for example, are just wheat, tomatoes, cheese, and meat. But combine them into the form of pizza or burgers and all the sudden it evokes an image of a lower class person who's perhaps not that bright, not that health-conscious, doesn't really understand nutrition, doesn't really want to put in the effort to be "healthy" (unlike you, dear observer, of course), and probably also has Coors Light instead of craft beer in his fridge.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
Well, there's certainly no denying that urban areas experience fewer fatal car accidents per capita. I don't know why the author decided to combine them, but it's trivial to disaggregate them. Here, using his same methodology. But yeah, it's obviously a separate issue from crime, which was what the poster he was responding to was talking about.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
The person you were responding to is talking about crime, not overall safety. Additionally, they claimed that people want to move to a place where criminals would realistically require a car to reach, and that is satisfied with suburbs, not rural areas. Suburbs, as the link you gave agrees, are far less hazardous than rural areas.
And when it comes to crime, the second graph in that link indeed shows that the most urban geographies (light blue line) have by far the highest homicide rate of all the geographies. If you want to talk about "the specific urban area with the lowest urban homicide rate in the country" (NYC) rather than "urban" in general, you can certainly do that, but I don't think "just move to NYC if you care about crime in your St. Louis neighborhood" is going to get much traction.
And if you want to argue that people should include other hazards (e.g., car accidents) in their decision about where to live, you can certainly do that, too. But I would respond by saying that violent crime is pretty unique in how it affects our sense of safety and quality of life. I suspect people will tolerate quite a lot of risk of death by car accidents, lightning, and farm machinery if it means not having to be worried about crime.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
Then this would imply rural areas are safer than urban. the evidence suggests otherwise.
Can you elaborate on the evidence you believe supports this assertion? The stats overwhelmingly show the opposite, and it's one of increasingly fewer things that are still pretty easy to Google.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
I think your mistake is characterizing it as "wasteful" for people to pay to price out undesirable people from their neighborhoods. People pay that premium for a reason: they think it's worth spending a lot of extra money to not have to live around those people.
In other words, the nimbies you're responding to are essentially saying "we'd rather give up a lot of money than live around those people" and your response is essentially "but that's a lot of money that could be used otherwise". Which... well, yes, of course, but people derive value from that money.
Your musical chairs point - that someone has to live near these people - is trivially true. But a basic principle of living in a free market liberal society is that people get to selfishly make themselves better off if they're able to afford it. Perhaps we'd be better off if people donated more of their wealth to alleviate the burdens of the less fortunate, but human nature is what it is. Why single out housing as the one domain where people shouldn't be able to use their wealth to obtain things they want at the expense of others?
I'll attempt to respond to the article's claims, mostly in order:
White liberals, the Americans whose expressed views shifted most radically over the last decade, have begun to moderate their responses to questions, for instance, about the causes and ideal remedies to racial inequalities. There have been shifts in the ways people identify themselves, too. For instance, polling and surveys suggest that “feminist” and related labels seem to have lost some of their luster in recent years
The article doesn't cite or link anything here, but I pay close attention to everything that comes out of Pew and Gallup and I have not noticed this supposed reversal. In fact, I've noticed the opposite. For example, the data in this thread, among others, by Zach Goldberg, which shows white liberals becoming more woke over time on several measures.
As for the feminist label, even if that's true I suspect it has more to do with the TERF wars.
Data on media outputs and “cancel-culture” incidents also suggest that a corner may have been turned. Across a range of datasets, we see apparent declines in “grassroots” attempts to censor uncomfortable speech on campus (even as there are growing attempts to suppress political scholarship from external stakeholders).
This would also be expected if wokeness were still ascendant or peaked, as people realize just how dangerous it is to dissent from the orthodoxy.
Media discussion of various forms of prejudice and discrimination also seem to have declined significantly over the last year.
I'd have to see the data to say more (he doesn't link anything). I'm doubtful it's significant if true.
Within the Democratic Party, following anemic 2020 results and recalls of progressive politicians in blue states, there have been efforts to “course correct,” to avoid further alienating normie voters.
This is among the better evidence, but I don't think it means much. First, the recalls were few and far between, and they happened more in places that had simply gotten so bad that it was not sustainable even for Blue normies. But regardless, I don't think wokeness has ever been that popular with normies, at least beyond costlessly nodding approvingly to right-thinking platitudes to demonstrate they're good people. The problem has never been that wokeness is popular; the problem is that wokeness has implacable and mutually reinforcing power in important institutions.
The Democratic base has moved in a similar direction, broadly rejecting progressive candidates during the 2022 primaries. These countermeasures likely helped the party stave off the anticipated “red wave,” preventing extreme Republican candidates from facing Democratic challengers who were also perceived to be far out of step with mainstream America. Running moderate Democratic candidates against GOP extremists proved to be a winning move throughout the country in 2022.
I don't get the impression that Democratic candidates in 2022 were less woke than in the last few election cycles. I think the results in 2022 were less about any sort of Democratic moderation and more about people being sick of Trump and Trumpy candidates.
According to some accounts, there is a growing appetite among Generation Z for humor and subversion, for a slackening of constraints and an expansion of horizons. The heavy moralizing around identity issues, the constant and intense surveillance and management of self and others, the incessant calls for revolution and reform—these elements of woke culture are running up against a growing sense of nihilism and ironic detachment among young adults.
There is growing discussion of a “vibe shift” among Millennials as well. Many are coming to find the culture wars both unsatisfying and rote. They are exhausted by the relentless cynicism, fear, doomsaying, and impression management that have governed much of their lives—and for what? They recognize the revolution isn’t coming anytime soon. So they are looking instead to have fun, relax, and cut loose a bit. Or, at the very least, to stop having to be so neurotic, guarded, and paranoid.
Admittedly, I don't hang out around anyone from Gen Z, but I don't buy this. I'm open to data (he didn't cite any), but almost all polling I see on any woke-adjacent topic shows younger cohorts identifying more with the woke viewpoint than older cohorts.
Companies are slackening their enforcement of post-2010 norms and expectations on identity issues. For instance, they are growing less likely to rapidly terminate or suspend employees accused of sexual misconduct based purely on the word of accusers.
That's plausible. I do think #MeToo probably peaked and is heading back down from orbit. I don't think it'll land anywhere near the status quo ante, though, for better or worse. But I think #MeToo is at best a subcomponent or offshoot of wokeism and doesn't generalize to the rest.
At the same time, they are walking back their aggressive symbolic commitments to social justice and quietly defunding the financial pledges they made to various activist groups and causes. Many are also making aggressive cuts to the DEI-related positions that ballooned in recent years.
Rather than rapidly caving to employee “social-justice” demands, as they had for much of the last decade, managers at knowledge-economy institutions are increasingly trying to reassert their authority, firing employees who attempt smear campaigns against colleagues and the companies they work for, and imposing new rules on how internal workplace channels are used.
One of the links given refers to the Washington Post firing Felicia Sonmez - a person whose petty Mean Girls-worthy feuding with coworkers spilled out into the public to great embarrassment and popcorn. I don't believe for a second that the Washington Post is becoming less woke, sorry.
A second link is about internal conflict in the New York Times between the old guard and the new woke employees. But the linked article essentially admits that the woke are winning: "On the progressive side of the ledger, the Times has installed a new administrative layer in the newsroom aimed at implementing a modern workplace culture. The new roles are neither reporters nor editors, but university-style administrators, focused variously on culture, careers, trust, strategy and DEI. Their roles amount, as one told me, to trying to enact radical cultural change at the institution — from an old, white conservative institution to a progressive, inclusive one — as slowly as possible." (emphasis mine)
Next linked is Netflix's handling of its employees protesting Dave Chappelle. Netflix essentially said they're keeping him on and employees who don't like it can quit. Admittedly, this was a nice win. But Netflix, like the tech companies the quoted paragraph alludes to more broadly, are facing increasing financial pressure in recent times. Netflix's stock, for example, was cratering for months before the Chappelle controversy came to a head. I don't think it's much consolation to the anti-woke, or much indication of wokeness waning, that companies - who exist to make profit - eventually, might, somewhat, on the margins, cull some of their more useless and obnoxious employees when the company's finances look grim.
And actually, according to another link in the quoted section, it's not clear DEI-culling is as ubiquitous as the author seems to think. The link he gives cites a study which claims that 80% of tech firms "displayed a pattern of very minimal increases in diversity" (read: increased diversity) between 2008-2016, and the remainder were a roughly even split between increased diversity and decreased. Wokeness definitely didn't peak in that timeframe, so I don't know how this supports the argument that wokeness has peaked sometime since then.
He does cite a claim that "listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year [2022]", but later on that cited article claims that DEI job postings jumped 123% after the 2020 protests. You do the math. But, hey, I guess that's consistent with peaking, technically.
[Running out of comment space for full quotes, but he spends a couple paragraphs talking about how Disney changed CEOs after getting into trouble with DeSantis in Florida, and Twitter and Facebook have reinstated Trump.]
I don't know the details of whether or how much Disney has actually changed. But if it has, it was in response to state pressure. That doesn't strike me as evidence of an organic peaking of wokeness (unless you want to cite DeSantis' efforts themselves as evidence of it, which you could). Similarly, I suspect social media companies are afraid that Republicans are going get fed up with the progressive bias and censorship on social media, so I wouldn't read too much into whatever capitulations and bone-throwing they may engage in here.
And Twitter is a terrible example for his case. It only changed because a guy with more money than God was so fucking sick of its bias that he decided to just buy it and try to fix it.
I actually don't fault the author for being unpersuasive. It's really hard to measure something abstract and amorphous like wokeness, especially over time. And the few methods that exist are easy to nitpick, as I've done. A lot of it comes down to anecdotes here and there. But there's no way the author would win a competition where one side of the ledger is anecdotes of wokeness waning and the other side is anecdotes of wokeness run amok. Granted, his claim is that wokeness is merely waning, not that it has lost. But as that aforementioned New York Times admission alludes to with its plan of slow and steady death by progressive transformation, ideologies can remain insidiously dominant in institutions and cultures longer than you or your society as you know it can remain alive, to paraphrase Keynes.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
What is the basis for this belief? Doesn't the current war prove that they would have been right to have a strategic fear of NATO proximity, considering that right now NATO is using its proximity to successfully stop Russia from attaining its interests in a third country?
I've never understood this argument. Switzerland (a non-NATO country) is surrounded by NATO on almost all of its borders and doesn't seem the slightest bit concerned. Is the argument that Russia is different than Switzerland because Russia might do things like invade its neighbors and Switzerland has no such intentions? I don't think Russia can then expect anyone to take seriously the argument that their fear of NATO is morally justified.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
They released footage of the break-in, too. I agree that Pelosi's behavior in the body cam footage is baffling, but I also can't reconcile it with footage that clearly shows the guy was smashing Pelosi's window with a hammer to get in.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
Are people who conduct more ratings given higher weight than those who conduct fewer? There are some days when I don't get around to checking The Motte, and I'm wondering if my "score" suffers as a result.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
If I understand you correctly, are you basically saying that a huge source of labor in a city (like an Amazon warehouse) has cascading effects on the local economy in a way that's very favorable to a prospective worker moving in? That seems intuitive, but how far do you think that extends? Would you expect low-paying entry-level white collar work, like an administrative assistant, to benefit from an Amazon warehouse in town?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
I'm curious what the preference here is specifically. Suburbs of large cities function quite a bit like their own small city but with lots of benefits from being attached to a major hub like access to well connected airports and niche but useful amenities. It's a very popular choice for a reason.
I'm wary of suburbs for a few reasons, not all of which I'm super confident about.
-
I'm concerned that most of the jobs are in the large city itself, which would be unacceptable to me. Like, let's say the suburbs have 50,000 people. I'm concerned that the number of jobs in those suburbs are vastly fewer than the jobs that would be available in another city of 50,000 that's far away from a large city and thus whose jobs can only be in the 50,000 city itself. I hope that makes sense.
-
I'm concerned that the large city's growth will, in years or decades, envelop the suburbs in ways I don't want (zoning, culture, traffic, demographics).
-
I'm concerned that the suburbs of a large city attract highly educated blue tribe people, many of whom probably commute to the large city and were priced out of it or wanted to raise a family.
-
Precisely because suburbs are popular, I'm concerned about the price of homes. Me and my significant other may very well end up with a household income of like mid-five-figures or something.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
The whole reason I ask is because I'm moving to the US from Canada later this year to be with my significant other, who is American. She currently works in Buffalo so she can drive to be with me weekly when not working. We want to move to a Red state, but neither of us have job offers or family (at least not family that we'd want to move to be near). I have no work history besides my BA degree and no idea what I want to do; she has a BA in biology and a work history as a lab tech.
It's easy enough to find a decent state (pretty much any red Midwest state, in our case). The real daunting task is finding a place within a state. Ruling out large cities because of personal preference, that still leaves dozens of cities per state. I'm having trouble figuring out how to systematically filter these hundreds of possibilities. The options that come to mind (e.g., income per capita, growth rate, and other things I've mentioned) don't seem obviously important to me, but I could be wrong. I have no experience in this area.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
When people move long distances in the US, their primary consideration seems to be "jobs". But what does that actually operationalize to for people who aren't professionals or otherwise in some extremely niche industry? Let's say you don't hope for much more than working at Costco or maybe as an administrative assistant at some small business, or as some random entry-level lab technician. What sort of metrics are you even supposed to look at when deciding on a destination?
-
Something like income per capita or unemployment rate seem too crude to be useful. Perhaps Region A has higher income per capita than Region B because of a thriving industry (e.g., diesel engine manufacturing) that has no relevance to your skills.
-
A random snapshot of job listings on indeed.com seems too unrepresentative. Job openings come and go all the time, and it seems unwise to write off a whole area because the current job openings don't suit you.
-
A region's level of educational attainment seems meaningless, except perhaps for some highly skilled professions, because a less-educated region has fewer workers who might compete for the white collar job you want. And it doesn't seem obvious to me that less-education regions would have fewer white collar jobs relative to the population of qualified candidates.
-
A region's rate of growth seems irrelevant. What's the difference between a region that has grown 30% in the last decade from 100,000 to 130,000 to a region that has grown only 10% in the last decade from 118,000 to 130,000? If it's because there's something more desirable or economically healthy about the former, then look at that metric and skip the middleman. (And what is that metric, and why does it matter for the prospective mover?)
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
I think perhaps you're conflating the uncommonness/offensiveness of a belief with how disruptive the belief is to sharing a common understanding of the world with other interlocutors who don't share the belief.
Believing in a flat earth makes it difficult to have conversations that rely on the shared assumptions about air travel, time zones, gravity, the scientific community, and probably dozens of other things.
Believing the Holocaust killed an order of magnitude fewer people and/or wasn't a top-down intentional extermination makes it difficult to have conversations about... what, exactly, besides the Holocaust itself?
I'm not seeing much to convince me that your lamentations are much beyond the outrage that people like SecureSignals believe something false and perhaps even reprehensible and are "getting away with it" more than you'd like. Which isn't nothing! I have to step away from The Motte when I see people getting away with bad arguments I don't have the patience to deal with, too. But let's not pretend that the other party is some sort of alien you can't have other conversations with just fine.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
There are exactly zero practical reasons to use a revolver over a semi-auto as a general duty weapon.
There's just no upside to revolvers . . .
Nitpick: pistols can't be fired out of battery, but revolvers can. Extremely rarely an issue for police, though, and there's no way it's worth the other tradeoffs. A backup revolved could be kept under the external vest if anyone really cared enough about this contingency.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
Again, the entity extracting more money and surprise fucking over the patient isn't the hospital or the healthcare provider it's the insurance company.
But if, hypothetically, the OP didn't have insurance and just wanted to pay cash, do you think the bill would have been any lower? My impression is that paying cash for healthcare in the US is strangely difficult, expensive, and prices just as (if not more) opaque.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
The biggest problem with Google search - and indeed almost all search engines, even intrasite searches - relative to how little it's complained about is by far the insistence on showing results even when very little actually matched the query. If my query gives me little to no results, then please just fucking tell me that and I'll adjust my query. Stop wasting my time showing me something that matched only 2 out of my 3 keywords. I put that third term there for a reason. It's as if the search engine assumes I'm in the habit of searching things like 2022 senate election results parfait, where it can safely disregard one of my terms because I'm just stupid or something. My query was written how it was written for a reason, damnit.
Google is actually vastly ahead of most other search engines in this regard, since it actually lets you enclose a term in quotation marks* to ensure it shows up in the results. This is still annoying, however, because sometimes I want the search engine to permit some amount of fuzziness in a term (e.g., include synonyms).
* And yes, before the naysayers appear, this does work - the only reason you think it doesn't is because your quoted term appears somewhere not visible on the page, like a dropdown menu, or has been removed from the page since it was cached.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
The biggest problem with searching YouTube is that it's not incentivized to show you the results most relevant to your query; rather, it's incentivized to show you the most popular content that happens to have the flimsiest of relevance to your query.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
I don't go to tech websites much - can someone explain how politics ever really intersects with what these websites report on? Don't they just, like, do benchmarks on GPUs and review new tech products? How is it that we even know what these websites' writers and editors think about politics?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
2yr ago
I would suggest reposting this in the newer culture war roundup thread. Virtually no one will visit this older thread anymore.
It's exactly this. I'm an atheist and was obnoxious about it in the New Atheist days. I'm now in the process of moving to one of the most evangelical states in the country, solely to insulate myself and my future children from progressivism. My self from 15 years ago would be baffled.
More options
Context Copy link