HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
No bio...
User ID: 179
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Huh. The first few stock images that come to mind are a mixed bag. Harold, old white guy. “Why can’t I hold all these limes,” young black guy. “Distracted boyfriend,” three white people, one of whom is male. Maybe those are just dated?
Googling “stock photo” and looking at the first page of results gives a bunch of white people, mostly solo. The first black guy is playing a saxophone—does that count as stereotyping? There are a few Middle Eastern men, a couple Indians, and a single dog.
So I’m not really seeing it.
If you had to search for it, perhaps it's because you're not paying attention when you come across it organically.
Let's try this. I'll go one-by-one to websites from Fortune 500 companies in descending order and see how white or nonwhite the photos of people on their home page are. Sound pretty objective? Alright, let's play.
- Walmart. Black guy.
- Amazon. Bunch of product images. I don't really feel like revealing to the world what Amazon wants me to buy again.
- ExxonMobile. First guy is poorly lit but the face look kind of black to me when zooming in. Either way, the next person is a black woman too, followed by a white man.
- Apple. Black woman (on the watch).
- UnitedHealth Group. Asians.
- CVSHealth. Female is ambiguous, but the guy is nonwhite.
- Berkshire Hathaway. No photos of people.
- Alphabet. No photos of people.
- McKesson. Black woman.
- Chevron. White woman.
- Cencora. White woman. Nonwhites are nonetheless 3 out of 5 of the people whose races are visible on the home page.
- Costco. Two black people.
- Microsoft. Black person. 4 out of 5 of those with visible faces on the home page are nonwhite.
- Cardinal Health. Ambiguous, but I'd say multiracial.
- Cigna. A white male!
- Marathon Petroleum. 2 out of 3 white.
- Phillips 66. 2 out of 3 nonwhite.
- Valero Energy. Some of the people on the boat seem white, but they're distant and backs are turned. First face is black.
- Ford. White guy, followed by ambiguous woman and 4/6 of the remainder being black
- Home Depot. Two black guys, ambiguous woman, white guy
- General Motors. 8 out of 10 nonwhite
- Elevance Health. Black.
- JPMorgan Chase. Hispanic? A majority of the remainder of the homepage are nonwhites.
- Kroger. No photos, but 3 out of 4 of the cartoon characters are nonwhite.
- Centene. Black.
- Verizon. Nonwhite.
- Walgreens Boots Alliance. Well, not exactly a stock photo: they're announcing their new Chief Information Officer, a white guy. The next slide in the auto-rotating display is 5 nonwhite out of 7.
- Fannie Mae. Nonwhite.
- Comcast. 2 out of 3 nonwhite.
- AT&T. Asian, I think?
You get the idea.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Thankfully my diligent use of ad-block prevents such visual and auditory pollution from entering my sensoria, most of the time.
It's not just ads though, but also stock images, staged photographs for college admission pamphlets, product pictures on Amazon, etc. (you can always quickly identify cheap Chinese imports on Amazon: they're the only ones with product pictures showing white people using the product).
I'm sure you can probably find white people in ads for euthanasia in Canada, at least.
It's increasingly difficult to find any refuge from the daily barrage of reminders that your society is signaling it hates you and is excited for you and your kind to die off.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
What I find most depressing about this problem is how irreversible it is. Unlike almost all other policy - monetary, taxation, spending, the criminal code, school curricula, you name it - this can't be undone. These immigrants are never, ever going away.
I don't understand how people who are in favor of mass-immigration can just so completely throw caution to the wind. Even with high confidence that mass immigration won't be a problem, if you're wrong, it's game over. The multiculturalism mind virus is unlike any other policy fad in history I can think of in how dangerous it is. Even fucking communism can, in principle, be reversed and healed from. The fact that a policy so potentially suicidal as mass immigration just sails through without meaningful resistance just blows my fucking mind.
I was lucky enough to get out of Canada and move to a decent sized American city, near a major metro, that is 97% native-born. But so many millions of Canadians are stuck and helplessly watching their country and communities decay into a sort of rootless cosmopolitan economic zone - an unimportant physical space that is meaningless but for its capacity to facilitate the existence and economic productivity of equally meaningless and mutually-unintelligible people-tokens like yourself.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Only if you believe there's a finite supply of "racial purity" (when did it appear, by the way? The Neanderthals?) and brown immigrants permanently dilute it. Otherwise, it's just cultural change. That is no less reversible than communism.
I do happen to think that races differ on average. But even if they didn't, cultural change is absolutely irreversible. For example, American culture irreversibly changed with the introduction of Irish, German, Italian, and Latin American immigrants. And even if cultural change could be reversed, real people have to live real lives over decades while enduring this change.
It is little consolation to those experiencing the soul-crushing pain of watching their communities deteriorate to be told, "It's okay, you only have to put up with this every single day for a few more decades, because then you'll die. Oh, you have descendants who will outlast you and you care about what your country and community is bequeathing them? Don't worry, the Multicultural New Economic Zone is all they'll ever know. They won't know what could have been. (We'll make sure of it.)"
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
One issue with your thesis is stated succinctly in the "first they came for..." adage. A problem doesn't need to affect you now for you to be justified in being concerned about it and for it to be prudent to fight back against it.
A second issue is that a lot of problems are indirectly caused by a problem further up the chain that might have gone unchallenged when it mattered. Did it affect me that seemingly every institution and corporation in the country decided to get on board with DEI/diversity hires? Probably not at the time and not in any given instance, no. But the downstream effects of that phenomenon certainly affect me now in many ways. But perhaps a lot of the Left's institutional capture would have been mitigated if people cared enough to put a stop to it before these people were hired into prominent positions in the first place.
In other words, you can't just ask "Does this affect me right now? If not, I don't care." You have to ask whether the what's happening now will have predictable consequences that, perhaps after some more iterations, will affect you later.
The advice to get off the internet and touch grass or grill is so utterly risible to me. It is the motto of the unprincipled and the cowardly, as far as I'm concerned. Evil (and problems resulting from good intentions) prevail when good people do nothing, and all that. (Now, if someone is of a certain temperament and simply finds himself too emotionally crippled by the problems of the world to handle hearing about them, I actually have no problem with that person getting off the internet and grilling. We don't literally all have to be engaged with these problems to conquer them. I also don't expect amputees to be conscripted into the armed forces.)
Whatever the outward facade, my position was crumbling behind it. Almost seven years ago I started working as a public defender and was inundated with hundreds of hours of police encounter footage that were completely uneventful; if anyone, it was usually my client who acted like an idiot. I've seen bodycam footage that starts with officers dropping their lunch in the precinct breakroom in order to full-on sprint toward a "shots fired" dispatch call. I've seen dipshits like the woman who attempted to flee a traffic stop while the trooper was desperately reaching for the ignition with his legs dangling out of the open car door. Despite this, the trooper treated her with impeccable professionalism once the situation was stabilized.
I really think people like your former self who have a bit of a cop problem could really stand to do a few ride-alongs and watch a few dozen hours of police footage. As you say, it's really illuminating. American police are overwhelmingly incredibly well-trained, professional, and cordial, even when dealing with jaw-droppingly disrespectful citizens.
Indeed, it's always astonished me just how ill-informed and prejudiced so many otherwise intelligent people seem to be about police. I suspect it's for a few reasons:
- Ideological expedience. The Left is primed to hate police because of the race angle, and libertarians are primed to hate police because of a general distrust of state power. Both of these groups are very disproportionately likely to be in a position to influence public perceptions (e.g., academia, journalism, opinion magazines, blogs, etc.)
- The availability heuristic. People see the most egregious police abuses/mistakes and have no sense of how astronomically rare those events are. For every iffy police shooting that crosses your radar, tens of thousands of police interactions occur without any violence transpiring whatsoever. The occasional douchebag officer encounter makes the rounds on social media, but the vast majority of officer encounters that are professional and courteous - even in the face of obscenely disrespectful and obnoxious civilians - never get shared.
- Osmosis from the general anti-police zeitgeist. Even without ideological bias, it's easy to find oneself assuming that there's a problem if so many people seem to think there is.
- Lacking domain-specific knowledge. If you don't understand that police don't have quotas, or that civil asset forfeitures aren't as simple as police being bandits, or that qualified immunity only applies to civil lawsuits and doesn't permit police to engage in criminal acts without being prosecutable, or that police don't "investigate themselves" for wrongdoing, or that they do indeed get more training than hairstylists... well, then you simply don't know. And combined with some of the other numbered items on this list, it's easy for people to lazily round these things off to "yeah, I guess they are probably just rotten about this and that thing".
- On a related note: most jobs aren't exposed to the public like policing is (and not heightened in exposure for reasons of #1 and #7). Programmers, lab analysts, manufacturers, logisticians, consultants, actuaries, etc., etc. aren't jobs people are in any position to notice or think about or care about. I suspect most people would have similar groan-worthy misunderstandings about most jobs if those jobs were similarly criticized by clueless (and/or dishonest) ideologically motivated actors and trotted out for viral outrage bait.
- The sort of people who hang out in the greater rationalist sphere or in highbrow publications probably know fewer police officers in their personal lives and so have few opportunities to ask basic questions, correct misunderstandings, or even just harbor a modicum of charity (especially given the class difference between them and police officers).
- Relying on faulty intuitions about how policing ought to be done, especially the use of force. Violence is actually not something most people understand very well. For example:
- People don't seem to understand that the presence of a gun on an officer's hip completely changes the dynamic of a physical altercation between an officer and a citizen - the officer must interpret active resistance as ultimately a fight for the officer's gun. And the officer absolutely cannot afford to lose that fight, ever.
- Your hands justifiably scare the shit out of a police officer, because your hands are what is going to kill him. Fishing around for something in your car or your pockets is a potentially life-threatening situation for the officer, and you're doing yourself no favors by raising his alarm like that.
- An unarmed person does not mean a non-dangerous person. See bullet point #1 above. Also, cars are deadly weapons.
- Tasers are not a substitute for shooting. Where deadly force is justified, a taser is never an appropriate tool (unless there are other officers providing lethal cover). They are simply not reliable enough.
- The use of stern language and/or sudden violent physical control (e.g., grappling, tackling) is de-escalation. Failure to rapidly put a belligerent person into handcuffs only increases the likelihood that that that person will obtain a weapon or get into a vehicle and cause further harm to themselves, officers, or others.
- There is no such thing a shooting someone's legs. First of all, leg shots are often fatal anyway because of the femoral artery. But more importantly, if a situation justifies deadly force, it is imperative to maximize likelihood of neutralizing the threat. That means rapidly putting shots center-mass until the threat ceases.
- It is just kinda seen as "cool" and "righteous" to try to notice and stand up to supposed abuses of power. There's no esteem to be had in being perceived as a bootlicker.
Anyway, it truly did make my day to hear that how you (and @Amadan) changed your minds about policing. There are few topics that makes me despair quite like the topic of policing when I see it come up in spaces like this.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Again, really curious what percentage of your "native-born" city is composed of European immigrants who came in the late 18th and early 19th century. Because if that's the case, their ancestors engaged in all the behaviour you decry.
People who are pro-immigration keep using this bizarre line of argument that essentially amounts to "You think this bad thing is happening now, but it happened in the past, too!" ...As if we must think it was a good thing when it happened in the past? No, it was bad then and it's bad now. Do you get it yet?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
If the human race is to survive thousands of more years, there will almost certainly be a tremendous amount of racial mixing anyway.
Why?
Or you speaking strictly cultural terms? Because I can assure you, culturally, that 97% native-born city is very different than it was 100 years ago.
I'm also curious how you're defining "native-born". Are these descendants of revolution-era Americans, or are they mostly late 19/early 20th immigrants? By 1890, 80% (!) of NYC was either foreign-born or children of foreign-born parents. That's at least as dramatic as anything that is happening in modern day Canada.
Yes, American culture was irreversibly changed by mass immigration from continental Europe and Latin America. I just can't do anything about that. Just like our descendants won't be able to do anything about the cultural change caused by immigration over the rest of this century. So let's maybe... not... do that?
And I'm not asking you to reveal where you live, but I don't know of any decently-sized city near a major metro area that is 97% white, but maybe you're also including African Americans in that percentage.
Well, I didn't say white. I said native-born. i.e., not born outside of the United States. But yeah, believe me, it's depressingly hard to find. When I moved to the US this year, I had the entire country to choose from, since I was not moving for a specific job offer or to be with any family. There are literally only 2 cities in the entire country that are >50k population and >90% white (Ankeny, IA and... The Villages, FL). There were countless to choose from just a couple decades ago.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
4mo ago
But many regular posters insist that it's absolutely groundbreaking and will have serious CW implications
Except those supposed implications weren't mentioned in the OP.
I guess that's what it comes down to, though. When you think AI is going to be some godlike superdisruptor of everything, it's CW all the way down. I see it as just another technology and am pretty sick of how half of the output from places like ACX are devoted to this technology. But then I also see it in a non-CW context in the CW thread and it's defended on the highly disputable grounds that anything super important is CW or something.
I'll be honest, it rings similarly to the progressive trope of "I'm bringing up this political topic in this nonpolitical forum because everything is political, don't you people get it?!" No, trans issues are politics, no matter how important you think they are. Justice for Palestine isn't reproductive justice, no matter how important you think the two are. And new versions of LLMs aren't CW no matter how important you think they are. Everything isn't everything, and words have meaning.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
The most anti immigrant people seem to have had no interactions with immigrants as far as I can tell.
I am anti-immigrant and have had ample interactions with them. They are not just like you and me. If they were, why do they insist on speaking their native language in public? Why do I have to press 1 for English? Why do they wear their old culture's clothing? Why do they congregate in communities with their own instead of assimilating?
I can't imagine immigrating to another country and refusing to speak their language and wear their clothing. I'd be overcome with embarrassment and shame at such a flagrant display of disrespect and hostility to the country that was gracious enough to accept me in.
There are certainly many immigrants that assimilate, but it doesn't take many defectors to change the character of a community.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
4mo ago
I'll probably get hate for being a buzzkill with this, but, what's the culture war angle for AI posts like this? I get that the broad rationalist community is interested in AI, and certainly there are times when AI and culture war intersect. But I don't see how this is in principle different than posting a top-level CW roundup comment about a new operating system, phone model, GPU line, medical technology innovation, or crypto scandal.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
How do you bring yourself to stay employed at a place like that? I'd rather work at a gas station than feel like I'm selling my soul by helping my enemies run roughshod over a hobby I love and doing my small part to assist them in their complete takeover of our civilization. I'm especially surprised to hear this coming from you, since one of your common refrains is advocating Reds resist Blues, refuse to compromise, reject the system, deny their institutions legitimacy, etc.
When it comes to politics, it's all,
Then you attempt to primary those Republicans, hammer them mercilessly, make their lives a living hell and drive them from office in disgrace, if possible. If you manage to replace them with an actual Red Tribe champion, that's a win. If the democrats win the seat instead, well, you've replaced someone who was willing to vote with the democrats when it counted with someone who votes with the democrats all the time, but on the other hand you've also shown that efforts to work within the system result in losing to the democrats, which encourages the Red Tribe public to reject the system.
and
Intransigence reduces the likelihood of achieving things through the existing system from a nullity to a nullity, while increasing the likelihood of achieving solutions outside the existing system. That is a positive trade.
and
The game is rigged. There is no benefit to pretending otherwise, and there is no benefit to continue playing. The proper response is to play the actual game according to the actual rules: secure your values at any cost.
But in the tiny sliver of overlap where the culture war actually intersects with your personal life in a way where you finally could conceivably stand up and actually sacrifice something, you're all talk (and not even in person to your coworkers' faces)? Can you forgive an admirer of yours for seeing this as weak, disappointing, and hypocritical?
"Well, my small contribution wouldn't make a difference - they'd just fire me and hire someone who'd acquiesce", you might say. But everyone could say that in every situation where resisting is a possibility. Everyone does say that, which is why Blues keep winning. It's a classic collective action problem.
I'm not trying to shame you. Well, okay, maybe a little. But I am actually genuinely curious whether you conceive of a grander justification for your small participation in the Blues' battle. Are you biding your time? Are you under the impression that the solution is going to be political and thus our personal actions in non-political life aren't actually making things worse?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Apparently it's been verified as legit.
The National Desk has verified the authenticity of the leaked images through its Nashville affiliate, FOX 17 News.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Obviously some change is inevitable. That doesn't mean that we should favor any and all change that we have the power to mitigate. Unless you think immigration as it currently exists produces precisely zero additional cultural change compared to a world with no/little immigration, then we have the power (through curtailing immigration) to mitigate some of the inevitable cultural change.
I'm so perplexed by this line of argument that keeps popping up in immigration debates which is essentially "This thing [cultural change or immigration specifically] happened in the past, therefore it's a good thing, or therefore we can't/shouldn't do anything about it".
The reason we're speaking a language without gendered nouns is because Viking settlers "corrupted" English.
Do you think the communities that were ravaged by the Vikings - the men killed, the women taken as sex slaves, and the land occupied by essentially murderous rapist barbarians - would have had a thing or two to say about whether that "change" was desirable? And most important: If they could have stopped the Vikings, should they not have?
Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.
I'm going to take the opposite position and insist that schools shouldn't be wasting time on gym at all. I don't think the point of school is to provide children everything that we think is "good". Schools should not be thought of as substitute parents with a broad mandate to produce good student life outcomes in general. Schools should be narrowly focused on basic instruction in reading, writing, math, and science.
I also don't think there's any place for literature in the curricula of any non-elective classes in middle school to high school. Literature is entertainment. It can be used as a vessel to teach reading and writing, but you could just as well do that with nonfiction. So you might as well be teaching them about things that are actually true or things that actually happened. This is doubly the case for older literature (e.g., Shakespeare or anything from the ancient world), which is not something that is easy for modern readers to understand or be interested in. Frankly, I think the emphasis on it borders on snobbery in many cases.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Very few common expenses are truly nondiscretionary. One can easily live on like 8k a year.
I'm fully with you on how most people spend way more on frivolities than they think they do, and that most people living paycheck to paycheck are just spending irresponsibly. But I think you vastly underestimate how expensive nondiscretionary expenses are. Let's just take rent as an illustrative example. Typically people pay 1/3 of their income on housing. At $8k/yr, that's $222/mo. There's no way you're going to be able to spend $222/mo on rent without roommates. Indeed, an income of $8k for a family of four is 1/4 of the federal poverty level.
Your estimation of the expenses of living are so astronomically far from reality that I am a little vicariously embarrassed that you're suggesting them. You seem to act like bills practically don't exist - that a $5k expense is trivial because one can "shuffle fries around for a while, and [McDonald's] will give you the 5k". Frankly, it's like a child's imagination of where income goes ("Woah, you make $5k in a year?!?! Think of all the toys I could get for that!!")
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
3mo ago
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Because they're coming to a new country and signaling that they don't intend to integrate. They intend to change the culture to conform to their way of doing things. How do you not see that as profoundly disrespectful and hostile? It'd be like if I invited you into my home and you recognized that I do things certain ways - no shoes indoors, toilet seats stay lowered, lights stay off when not in use - and you disregard it and do what the fuck you want. Except, unlike in the analogy, I can't kick you out once you got here.
No wonder you're confused about why some people are anti-immigrant.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
4mo ago
You're new around these parts aren't you? Which isn't a crime at all, we could certainly use new arrivals, but just about anyone who has been here for more than a few weeks knows my clear stance on the CW aspects of the topic, such that I don't feel an explicit need to rehash them.
I've been around for years and have maybe ~1000 comments between here and the old subreddit. I definitely wouldn't have felt comfortable challenging a top-level post's suitability if I was new.
I know your stance on AI and why you think it's always CW (believe me, I have a very cozy relationship with the minus button to the left of your name, despite the fact that I think your non-AI contributions are very high quality), but I don't think everyone has to acquiesce to any given person's conception of what is suitable.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
I see. There is much that is understandable and defensible about all that. I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my comment asking you somewhat judgmental questions that ultimately aren't my business and probably deserved no polite response, but that I was very curious to hear elaborated!
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
4mo ago
As an aside, why do people agree to appear for adversarial Congressional hearings like this? I see this happen quite often.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
@Hoffmeister25 has written a bit about this in the past. Here's a couple conversations with him about this on the old site. He's also still here and presumably happy to talk about it.
The above data plotted, for whatever that's worth.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
I don't think you're correct. My understanding is that only speech which advocates imminent lawless action is illegal in the United States. You can absolutely advocate for genocide, say that a celebrity should be executed, and that someone should bomb this particular building, and no one will arrest you.
How does one go about finding a "Dr. House" kind of specialist for very treatment-resistant conditions? Specifically, a psychiatrist. Money is no object.
I'm having a four-month-long episode of severe anxiety and panic as a result of getting off of an SSRI I had been on for 25 years. I was totally fine before getting off of it. Getting back on the medication has not gotten me back to my prior normal. My psychiatrist has tried many different adjunctive medications and either nothing resolves it or I get intolerable side effects. My psychiatrist today described my prognosis as, quote, "poor", on account of repeated medication failures.
My ideal vision is a team of multiple experienced psychiatrists, ideally who specialize in anxiety, who can spend a few hours reading about my case and consulting with each other about what might be going on and what might help. I just have no idea how to find such a thing. I'd also be happy to see a single psychiatrist if only I had some way of knowing whether they're especially brilliant or perhaps specialized.
Any advice - even wild speculation - about how to find the care I need would be appreciated. I'm pretty desperate.
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