IguanaBowtie
No bio...
User ID: 946
IguanaBowtie
1mo ago
Blue Ape together strong
IguanaBowtie
1mo ago
Real question, why do construction bosses prefer Jose to Bubba? Common non-class-associated Hispanic name vs highly lower-class associated white name?
IguanaBowtie
1mo ago
Such men must not be seen as losers and washouts, crawling in shame away from a life of failure and grasping tightly a pathetic consolation prize. It must be seen as a noble and important life path, every bit as valid as the warrior’s role, and genuinely rewarding in and of itself rather than simply an escape from suffering.
Could you elaborate on why you feel this is the case? IMO it would be nice, but people who are looking at dropping out of society are likely already low-status, becoming marginally more contemptible isn't a deal-breaker if, as part of the bargain, going forward you get to largely disregard outside social pressure.
The only danger I can think of is irritating the majority enough that they destroy you. In the west, violent pogroms against 'incel cults' are concievable but not very likely. Some form of lawfare might be more practical, but I'm not really seeing a big risk, people walk away all the time and mainstream society is largely indifferent unless they start causing a ruckus.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
Agreed, except to note that there's no need for aliens to be hiding in the Oort cloud - mobile and under the ocean somewhere would likely do just fine, along with a number of other close-to-home alternatives. And that the absence of observed radio signals can be explained as well by 'there are superior options for interstellar communication and aliens use those' as 'there are no aliens sending signals'.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
Even though I lately try hard to believe people when they make claims about their motivations & internal experience, I think you're definitely onto something. Though perhaps a more charitable (if banal) take might be less 'you dont really believe that' and more ' "I believe X" captures a really wide range of intuitions, mental states and devotional intensity'. And we probably preserve some of that ambiguity more or less intentionally - I imagine piety-measuring contests are some of the least productive uses of human effort yet discovered.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
I would like to suggest an alternate theme here - that instead of a monolithic antiwhite hostility being the driving force behind these tropes, there's a great-replacement-adjacent but ultimately pro-western eregore flexing its wings. The idea is indeed that whites are on their way out, but instead of relishing their fall, that western institutions should be reformed and redeemed in order to be inherited by new generations of nonwhite successors. The inheritence bit being the crucial point - don't burn it all down! Dont cut off your civilizational nose to spite its current white face! And most importantly, leave the institutions standing so that the current owners (with their newly minted diversity credentials) are not displaced.
The undisputed champion of this trope must be Lin Manuel Miranda. Within 30 seconds of learning about Hamilton, I thought 'damn, they really want young nonwhites to buy into this America thing, guess they're getting spooked about who's going to fund their pensions'.
Elsewhere, Moana has the hypermasculine but clownish Maui revealed to be the direct cause of all the world's problems; his atonement is a footnote to the story of the female protagonist mastering all of his skills, using them (along with her innate goodness and wisdom) to repair the damage he foolishly caused, and then passing those skills on to her people so they can reclaim their rightful place in the world.
Encanto, meanwhile, deals with class conflict and the divine right of aristocracy. After some central-american revolutionary-types (for no reason at all) purge their village, a mysterious gift is granted to the family matriarch that separates her family from the common people, both in terms of giving them exceptional abilities* and also a really nice house where they don't have to do most of the chores. But that's ok, because they will selflessly devote their abilities to the good of the people, who will be loyal and devoted in return - which is only fair, as 'they have no gifts but they are many'. And ultimately, the matriarch's gift is be passed down to her granddaughter so the system may be perpetuated.
Naraburns has a good post downthread about Gran Turino having a similar arc. I think a lot of the "The Future is Female/lgbt/nonwhite' media can be taken in this light, not exactly as a condemnation of western culture but as a plea to preserve it, in spite of the flaws of its creators.
*There's a whole cast of east-coast upper-class tropes: the motherly doctor, the beautiful socialite, the perceptive journalist, the workaholic who carries donkeys around (not too much of a stretch to be a business executive)... and how could we forget, the brilliant but tormented visionary who really always wanted to be an actor. Oh Lin Manuel, you scamp.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
I don't really see it as a 'better minimum deal', just greater male variability plus society reacting reasonably to that reality. If by 'minimum deal' you mean something like 'average outcomes of the worst 10% by outcome' then yeah, men get a super raw deal. But the top 10% of men blow the top 10% of women out of the water (biggest thing driving the culture war bar none imo) and the average man is probably right about parity with the average woman, and possibly married to her.
IMO, the big factor that makes this notably worse for men is that the disutility of very bad outcomes greatly outweighs the utility of very good ones, at least at the individual level. While society probably derives greater benefits from great geniuses than it suffers harm from killers and predators, if I were to live at the 50th percentile of American outcomes and you presented me with a coin flip to move either to the 40th or 60th percentiles, I might consider it, but wouldnt go near any proposition involving a coin flip between the 10th and 90th percentiles, or worse, between the 1st and 99th percentiles. Evolutionary pressure forces men broadly to make that tradeoff, since 'maximizing evolutionary fitness' and 'maximizing individual utility' are only passing acquaintances. But, in modern society, with fairly high utility payoffs available from middling outcomes, the tradeoff seems like a really bad one.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
I'll happily admit that my two suggestions are awful, but I know they would work and I'm not sure that's the case with your proposals.
Test either two parents and a kid, or two kids and a parent.
Assuming we know we're creamskimming from a population with significantly worse outcomes on average than our own, this sample size isn't big enough to be relevant in figuring out if the family is from a good-outcomes subgroup (assuming such groups meaningfully exist) or if they're outliers who got lucky and had a kid that didn't regress to the mean too much. If it's the latter, you're going to be having problems in 5-15 years and not 60-90, as France is finding out right now.
That said, it does hint at an interesting solution where immigration authorites could do careful geneological work and data analysis on potential immigrants, to connect the relevant educational attainment and available testing results across large populations, to try to identify these high-performance subgroups. But again, though less horrible than my original suggestions, it still smacks far too much of eugenics ('racial credit scores'?) to be seriously considered. As opposed to quietly raising barriers to immigration from certain countries while easing them from others.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
Perhaps not Harvard material, but are you really feeling that there are 'lots' ( 5? 50? a double-digit percentage?) of highschools where the year's most academically successful graduate is not among the approximately 50% of Americans able to eventually navigate some form of post-secondary education? I know some districts are pretty rough but 'their top 1% is worse than our median' is a heck of a claim.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
Sure, depending on how you define the subgroup, but if you can figure out a good category-marker that isolates a population with consistent differences in outcomes or measurable cognitive ability, go for it. You might end up cleaving along cultural lines rather than genetic, but if it reproduces in the new environment it's all good.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
I don't know the answer to this, but suspect that it's something horribly short-termist, like goosing projected GDP numbers to placate the analysts & keep interest rates low until the next election.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
I think the relevant pro-HBD point here is reversion to the mean; you really should care about what the 'pool' of people you're drawing from looks like, because you'll soon have a new generation that looks as much like them as the parents you cherry-picked.
I guess you can get around this if you're willing to make sterilization a condition of immigration, or deport that portion of the 2nd+ generations who fail to meet your standards, either way committing to perpetually top up your country's population by cream-skimming the developing world. (holy dysgenics, Batman!) But I think either would be generally considered far worse than just prioritizing high-performing immigrant groups along racial lines.
Also not a problem if you reject group intelligence differences, of course, which is the official and default stance.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
I know this forum is more focused on a specific cohort (intelligent, financially successful, often romantically not so much) but I'm approaching this issue from a different angle - a family member who is a classic disabled NEET in his early 30s. Near the bottom of the desirability totem pole, the question of 'fold' vs 'improve' has to contend with the latter having a very significant chance of being very costly in rime & effort and bearing absolutely zero fruit. This is where a lot of 'resent' cases come from, (though not all) but luckily that doesnt seem to be a major factor for now.
The question in these cases is, at what point is it rational to cut one's losses?
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
If I were the university, I'd be most worried about whistleblower complaints leading to embarrassing discovery reveals. That new admissions hire with sterling SJ credentials, who talks the lingo fluently? How sure are you that she/they aren't a plant from some right-wing org looking for a big payday? What about the handful of white men still working in those roles, can they be trusted? Progressive ideology plus institutional inertia will definitely incline schools towards noncompliance with the new regime, but Ivies sitting on multibillion endowments are a big fat target, and a single lawsuit can change the tune of the board of trustees in a hurry, even if their school wasn't in the crosshairs this time.
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
One hopes, but the ability of existing interests to simply fund them as propaganda organs means they'll probably persist quite a while past their natural expiry date, even if their readership drops away to basically nil.
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard. The school itself does, in partnership with its prospective students and their potential future employers. They all follow their local incentives
Students: go to the school that impresses the most employers, and at higher levels allows for the best networking opportunities, which in both cases is usually the highest status school that will have you (gaining some skills is a nice bonus)
Employers: hire students from the schools that filter for the cream of the crop (having them get a general education is a nice bonus)
School: keep your audience happy by being selective in admissions, scrubbing out fakers, and statusmaxxing in other ways to pull ahead of your competitors
If there were an Education Tsar (a real one) then maximizing social utility from the process might be a priority. As it is, we have an elaborate workaround to the fact that hiring based on IQ tests is illegal.
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
That's about a 4% annualized return, only 'good' because the stock market tanked that year. But it's still not terribly exciting given the built-in risk of losing your shirt running any sort of entertainment company, even a tbtf one like Disney, and given their relative box-office dominance it seems beyond underwhelming. If I was a major shareholder in a the titan of the industry, I'd want to know why they weren't crushing it!
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
My working definition is that ambition is basically neuroticism plus competitiveness, with the former defined as something like 'inability to accept one's self and one's situation uncritically' and the latter as simply 'desire to win'. At the extremes the 2x2 would be
(Low neuroticism)(low competitiveness)- Laid-back people, contented housewives, 'it's not much but it's honest work'. Eg. The Dude.
(High neuroticism)(low competitiveness)- chronic anhedonics, complainers & worrywarts. Eg. Every Woody Allen character.
(Low neuroticism)(high competitiveness)- Typical 'winners' who compete until satisfied & then relax. Eg. Chad Thundercock.
(Hugh neuroticism)(high competitiveness)- People for whom every setback is a challenge & no victory is ever sufficient. Eg. Every conqueror, usurper, visionary and notably 'driven' person.
As a low/low, I kind of feel bad for highly ambitious people. Only a few of them actually get to be legends, most burn out or get crushed (being hypercompetitive doesn't neccessarily make you hypercompetent) and being highly neurotic doesn't sound like much fun even for the billionaires. But I can definitely appreciate the benefits of their existence, preferably far away from me.
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
It's possible that the original point still stands even if nerds are a small minority of all rapists, if being raped by a nerd is percieved as much worse than being raped by a non-nerd.
I don't know how much this corresponds with reality, but there is definitely at least some extra 'yuck' factor associated with sexual violence when perpetrated by very-low value males.
Alternately, if 'tolerating male proximity' is a tradeoff between various social goods & risk of sexual violence, tolerating males who are low-risk but have low (or zero) social capital to trade can easily become a worse tradeoff than chumming around with high-risk high-reward men.
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
I hoped to become closer to him, but he was always so distant. What was up with that?
This smacks of post-hoc rationization.
oh yeah, I bullied the shit out of that kid
in retrospect I was way out of line, and I'd likely earn some sort of social punishment even now if I were to be honest about it
luckily no-one is digging too deep here, just deflect with some noncommital BS and move on
(alternately, ego-defense mechanisms step in and the last two parts happen subconsciously)
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
And yet, letting American memes (and the prosperity that they seem to breed) naturally & nonviolently melting-pot away the newcomers' less endearing traits seems to have a pretty good track record. You still end up with a disproportionately immigrant underclass, but that's also part of the plan, isn't it? 'Immigrants get the job (that natives dont want to do) done?'
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
Baldur's Gate 2 - IMO the jewel of Bioware's golden age, Dragon Age and Mass Effect might have surpassed it if not for the EA buyout, it holds up great to this day. I keep meaning to try Wrath of the Righteous which seems like as close as I'll likely ever get to a spiritual successor.
Path of Exile - More of a character-optimization simulator than a 'role playing' experience, it's still the best there is at what it does. (and the worldbuilding and lore is surprisingly tight for an ARPG, at least in acts 1-4) And there's nothing wrong with some roll-playing, some of my favorite tabletop campaigns have been filled with nigh-silly theoretical charop bullshit. Once you get to maps Chris Wilson owns your soul.
A few recent indie favorites: AstLibra (a weird Japanese JRPG/beat-em-up hybrid 1-man passion project), Phoenotopia Awakening (a zelda2-like with gorgeous sprite graphics), Crosscode (closest might be Secret of Mana, set inside a MMO world)
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
I take this, among countless other examples of woke values being shoehorned into popular geekdom and fandom subcultural iconography, as textbook syncretism.
The trick is, while syncretic content is often extremely transparent and obnoxious to adherents of the old faith, there's nothing keeping it from being perfectly good on its own merits. (beyond 'being based on something good' seeming to not help with Sturgeon's law in the slightest) Often you get a 'Last Jedi' that takes off like a lead balloon, but sometimes you get a 'Santa Claus' that wildly eclipses the cultural impact of the original inspirations.
For better or for worse, Woke really wants to absorb and convert Fandom, and is going to keep trying until it sticks or they lose the cultural dominance neccessary to credibly continue. As annoying as it is, it could be worse, and the harder fandom holds out for reasonable quality syncretism, the more their values get baked into Woke rather than vice versa. (As it's necessarily a two-way street)
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
A quick peek confirmed my suspicious: Chinese movie posters (and probably much of the advertsing) show Miles prominently mostly while masked.
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2Bu6z6asFL.SL500_AC_SS350.jpg
The film also has a big cast, including some Asian spider-people iirc.
Without reading other comments: It's mostly just a snarl word like 'sheeple' that gets thrown at people with a high degree of social conformity, specifically conformity to the rules a tribe that the snarl-er doesn't particularly like. 'Our partisans are loyal and incorruptible, their partisans are brainwashed and radicalized', etc. If there's something useful to the term, its that some tribes and ideologies really do put outsized importance on loyalty and ideological purity, with cults being at the far end of the spectrum and generally recognized as a bad thing. But calling someone an NPC (or a cultist) only turns up the heat, which is seldom useful but particularly bad here as everyone's close-minded and defensive while participating in a flame war, which gives the actual zealots cover.
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