IguanaBowtie
No bio...
User ID: 946
IguanaBowtie
8mo ago
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.
IguanaBowtie
9mo 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
11mo ago
I mean, there is another option - take simple steps to anonymize yourself before intervening, and if things go wrong flee the scene. A motivated modern police force can absolutely catch you if they decide to pursue the case, but they have a lot of similarly sad cases on their plates. A single extra "mentally ill vagrant dies in a scuffle he likely started, suspect disappears" isn't going to attract undue law-enforcement resources, and it's going to be suppressed in the media rather than being shouted on the street corners. "Blue-voting city fails its most vulnerable, again" isn't a narrative that pays the bills like "Outgroup member murders innocent in broad daylight", and the boys in blue have even less motivation to track you down in the absence of public outcry.
The downsides I can think of are that if you do get caught you'll be punished more severely, and that certain anonymizing tactics might make you seem like the aggressor and be on the wrong side of further bystander intervention. For the former, I'm not familiar enough with US/NYC law to know how badly, but since it seems probable that Penny is going to jail for a long time, a few more years doesn't seem like a good tradeoff against something like a 90% chance of a clean getaway. For the latter - well, this seems to come up rarely enough that two separate people in a train car being willing to get their hands dirty seems unlikely, and a brawl between unrelated belligerents is less likely to inspire heroics than one-sided harassment.
IguanaBowtie
10mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
4mo ago
The problem with this is that The Mellowing that comes from constructive interaction with capitalism is dependent on actually being able to interact with capitalism. The average banlieue resident doesnt have much to offer in the French marketplace, and even their unskilled labor is mostly devalued and surplus. I dont see this situation improving, either.
IguanaBowtie
8mo 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
11mo ago
Don't have time for an effortpost, but you lost me at the prologue. Risk-taking behaviors can be meaningful, but I don't at all agree that risk-taking is a prerequisite for psychological fulfillment, and I think the crisis of meaning has a lot more to do with a decline in meaning gleaned from community, spirituality and introspection than that derived from constructively overcoming adversity. (which I'd summarize as 'glory')
Far be it for me to disagree with Conan about what is best in life, and I wouldn't object to plenty of work-culture reforms in the proposed direction, but I don't think they'd cure the disease that's being discussed.
IguanaBowtie
2mo ago
Jared and Ivanka shouldn't hold their breath, but the progressive left is far from safe. There aren't just two choices here, and the most likely outcome IMO is 'Zionist American Jews use their (non-unique but considerable) political influence to get the loudly antizionist faction expelled from the Dem coalition'.
Now, this is a harder proposition today than it was 20 years ago. It risks splitting the party along age lines, while Republicans laugh from the sidelines - but it doesn't guarantee electoral irrelevance like some worry. Plenty of democratic states have a split left and the far left is almost always the smaller group, has nowhere to go politically, and ends up as the mostly irrelevant junior partner. (here in Canada we have had a united right and split left for decades, the Libs just treat the NDP like their annoying kid brother and it mostly works) An increasingly large and motivated far left makes the proposition more dicey, but the far left's critical weakness has and continues to be lack of strategy - they depend a lot on 'being on the right side of history' carrying them across the finish line - so I expect them to continue to punch below their weight in internecine disputes.
IguanaBowtie
8mo ago
Blue Ape together strong
IguanaBowtie
10mo 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
9mo 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
11mo ago
There's an underappreciated element here IMO: the instinctive refusal to utter fighting words while not being a fighter. The brain is capable of marvelous feats of self-deception & motivated reasoning not only in order to protect its self-image, but also to physically protect itself from harm, ie. by preventing the adoption of beliefs that will get its owner's ass kicked.
How often do we straightforwardly tell another person "I'm smarter than you"? I've never done it; I imagine most people haven't. With good reason: it's a challenge, 'fighting words', as it fairly directly implies 'so we should do things my way if we come to a disagreement' AKA 'I'm in charge now.' This isn't something any social structure can let stand, but modern white America even less than most, with its reliance upon poorly-defined social hierarchy for avoiding conflict. (See: VKR's Gametalk) If you're middle class, went to university or worked for a corporation, chances are very good that you've been extensively trained to subconciously avoid conflicts of precisely this type, and it may well be that this taboo is load-bearing. Scaled up, saying 'my group is smarter than your group' has even more serious social ramifications, again independent of the statement's truth value. Pretending it isn't so may be the best alternative.
IguanaBowtie
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
4mo ago
AFACIT the monoculture is unaware of the existence of the Black Hebrew Israelites & puts them down to some sort of right-wing psyop when and if they sneak into the national conciousness. It's sinful to notice them, so people don't.
IguanaBowtie
9mo 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
10mo 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
9mo 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
10mo 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
11mo ago
I do recall liberals being pretty upset by Ted 'the Zodiac' Cruz. And Rubio, and Christie, and the rest of the republican slate, even Jeb Bush. At first they were worried about Trump the least of all of them.
IguanaBowtie
10mo 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.
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!
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