IguanaBowtie
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User ID: 946
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
The doctor being upset about anonymous low-credibility twitter threats is just a modern manifestation of the classic 'high-status individual makes the mistake of venturing outside their high-status bubble & gets roundly jeered by the crowd'.
Demanding that the rabble be taught a lesson or silenced is likewise the traditional response.
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
1yr ago
I think your post seriously understates the influence upon international institutional power that the WEF excercises by organizing the Davos Conferences, if only using the straightforward power of playing host. The wealthy and powerful are going to rub elbows regardless, but Schwabb gets to set the agenda and the guest list, at least for a few days. He's somewhat constrained in both, of course - high-level elites in good standing better be admitted if they wish to attend, and they better be fed from an ideologically palatable trough - but this is still wildly disproportionate power for (as you note) someone as generally insignificant as Schwabb. This is in contrast to most of the 'really powerful' attendees, who are more or less fully constrained in their actions by some combination of economics or politics.
Here in Canada, we had our (lightweight) PM namedropping the Great Reset in his speeches. Probably not all global leaders are as impressionable as Trudeau Jr, but people do get influenced by their peer group.
If my personal goal was to nudge the global ruling-class eregore into line with my values, I'd trade Elon Musk's fortune for Klaus Schwabb's little Swiss teaparty in a heartbeat.
IguanaBowtie
10mo 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
1yr ago
I'm ready to call it now - preference cascade.
NYT publishing this article mere days after the abject failure of trans activists to organize a high-profile boycott is incredibly telling. And there's been lots of signs that public opinion (especially elite public opinion) has been getting brittle on the issue - no one likes getting bulled by moralists all the time, especially when they're your distant social lessers. Moreover, this isn't a dramatic turnabout & could get accepted fairly quickly by the laypeople - I had a leftist freind tell me umsolicited that they were sick of 'purity politics' on the left (though I checked, they didnt consider JKR cancellation to be an ecample - yet)
Cynical take 1- JKR got fed up & hired a big money PR firm. Possibly quite some time ago, with them waiting for (engineering?) a time and place to strike back. Her upcoming podcast series with the WBC escapee lady fits this theory nicely.
Cynical take 2 - Alternately, the powers that be decided that the TERF wars were sucking up too much oxygen & that it is now time for 'healing & reconciliation' and a renewed focus on squashing down the populist right. Which I've argued for before - right now is the worst possible time for leftist doctrinal infighting, their position is overextended and their enemy is visibly regrouping.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I haven't seen the movie, but your post is relevant to a concept I've been thinking about for a while: applause lights as entertainment.
In theory, a lot of the tropes of modern entertainment exist to prevent bad things. Strong female characters exist to correct male overrepresentation & sexist portrayal of women, ethnically diverse casts likewise for race, ineffectual & pathetic villains exist to avoid the danger of glamourizing & thus promoting the crimes they commit etc. I can at least see where this comes from, even if I think it's misplaced paternalism.
However, I feel like there is a growing trend to go much further, to the point of valuing these things as ends unto themselves, to the degree that they outstrip in importance more traditional terminal entertainment goals like good storytelling, characterization, acting, production values etc. If the cast is nonwhite, there is a transgender lead, the plot shoehorns in a critique of capitalism - this is sufficient for the movie to be good and enjoyable, for a not-insignificant portion of the moviegoing public. The applause lights come on, people clap, and they clap because they enjoyed the applause light.
The inverse is also true, political incorrectness being enough to make a movie unwatchably bad - possibly even without anything problematic happening on-screen, beyond the presence of an actor or actress associated with offscreen wrongthink. (Chris Pratt jumps to mind)
I'm not quite sure how or when this came to be, but it seems like a stark difference compared to 20 or even 10 years ago. (and almost reminiscent of Soviet film) Booing the outgroup has always been a popular passtime, and there's some of that here (every single white male antagonist with predictable non-problematic personality defects, etc) but the majority seems more like a feel-good righteousness, like attending church - the more boring the sermon, the more virtuous the believer who manages to stay awake.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
1- Isn't this just openAI's RLHF working as intended? The first test of an AI's social viability is it's ability to avoid goring any cows that are sacred to the people with the power to shut it down, a test that our journalistic class leapt to apply with considerable vigor.
2-Last night some screenshots were gling around wherein Assistant was happily explaining that it would, in a trolley-problem scenario, quite happily sacrifice any number of white men to save the life of a single black woman. This was presented with none of the veiled hostility you might expect of a human presenting such an outrageous conclusion; it was much more like a kid reciting the 'correct' answer in the hope of earning a cookie. RLHF! But I was unable to replicate, and that same day Assistant was very coy and refused to make any normative statements about trolley problems at all.
I'm not 100% convinced that it's possible to build a moral actor no matter how hard you employ the gradient-descent cattle prod, but in any case Rozado's study was probably obsolete before he published it and certainly is by now. The target is moving too fast to land any hits.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I personally don't find the new site too echo-chamber-y at all, though I'm a wishy-washy centrist. I guess it's natural that someone accustomed to the norms of explicitly leftist discussion spaces would find it pretty witchy though.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
The only strategic reasons to adopt ¬HBD are if you already believe its premises.
IMO the main reason to adopt ¬HBD is straightforward: explicit rejection of HBD, or more properly, habits of thought developed over decades spent vigorously condemning anything that smacked of post-hoc justification for discrimination against black people. The hated outgroup believed proposition N, therefore we will believe ¬N, and any statement that can be interpreted as supporting position N (however innocuous) will be treated as giving succor to the enemy.
It also has the benefit of never having to tell someone to their face that they're part of a group that is intellectually inferior to one's own, which is fighting words even if true - an understated benefit for someone who's afraid of getting punched!
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
My prior would be, McKinsey will meticulously hand-select companies to design studies that will flatter elite opinion. Staying on the right side of the right people is how those lucrative public contracts keep flowing in.
I've never heard any mechanism proposed either. Do you know if they controlled for company size? Would be funny if they were just measuring returns to scale, with big companies having more diverse employees due to having more resources to devote to DEI.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I'd say that generalizing the leftist position as 'always make the choice that results in more minorities' is in error - specifically, the actual position is anti-anti-minority.
Compare with abortion. Leftists are not trying to maximize the total number of abortions, which among other things would involve working to ban all forms of contraception. They just want to remove all possible obstacles to abortion if that is what a mother decides. They arent pro-abortion, no matter how the pro-life camp likes to strawman them; they're anti-anti-abortion. If the natural consequence of knocking down all the barriers on the left means Cthulhu drifts in that direction & abortion rates skyrocket, that is perfectly acceptable but not the actual goal.
The distinction in this case would be: people are allowed to take the pill, even as minors, even without parental consent. People are allowed to try to convince others to take the pill, with a few limitations. (Teachers pressuring students is a no-no, though many will push their luck. Paying people to take it is probably no good either.) Physically preventimg people from taking the pill is illegal, and counselling them not to is legal but cancellable/fireable. But, no-one is ever forced to take the pill, even if everyone (who counts) agrees it would be better if they did.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
On one hand, dropping a 5 year sentence to 4 years isn't earth-shattering. Judges have, and often use, greater discretion in sentencing based on whether they had a good morning thusfar.
On the other hand, "same crime, different punishment" will only be tolerated so far. Especially if, after several years, the indiginous incarceration level remains flat & indigenous crime rate rises. (as I would expect, mostly due to early release of serial offenders, with a small reduced deterrent effect)
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I've argued elsewhere that no serious proponent of police abolition actually wants anything like 'no lawkeepers period, love-ins only'. At the risk of weakmanning: they just percieve (not inaccurately) that the current monopoly on force is held by a hostile/indifferent tribe, and they would like it to be held by their own tribe.
Normally the short route to this goal is some form of independence movement, but for various reasons that's a nonstarter at the moment, and liberal-white outgroup bias opens up the nontraditional route of minority coup. But, as we saw, said outgroup bias didn't extend quite so far as some hoped.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I'm reminded of a NYT piece from a few years back (about genetics, definitely wrongthink now) that small-print warned that big data and rigorous statistics were likely to turn up results that progressives wouldn't like very much.
Will be interesting to see how long the hands-in-ears-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you strategy will remain viable.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
backed by billions of dollars
This is actually concerning to me. Google's OpenAI and the like are happy to bow before the AI Safety crowd (the 'no racist chatbots' ones, not the 'no paperclip apocalypse' ones) so long as they can still make a gorillion dollars off the technology, and that means they really have no interest in allowing the existence of seedy AI applications like porn generators. That just brings bad PR to the whole field, for literally zero benefit. (Google isnt going to be entering the smut market anytime soon) Thus I worry that we're seeing the begginimgs of another unholy alliance between the progressive left & big money, nominally in the name of moral puritanism but with the real purpose of shoving the AI cat back in the SaaS bag.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I think the point of the whole thing is supposed to be something like 'fat black women doing overtly sexual stuff is high culture now, disapproving of & criticizing this is low-status'
Twerking especially is to be understood as a cultural phenomenon akin to (and aesthetically equal to) ballet or opera.
Seems woke to me.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I think a less controversial way of saying this would be "exit rights are fundamental to any sort of free society", then going on to argue that nationalism and nativism in one country damages exit rights in all the others - leaving a crappy situation is great, but doesnt help if every scrap of land is occupied & no-one will let you immigrate an anything like fair terms.
IguanaBowtie
9mo 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
1yr ago
can I at least have my own awards convention
This is the rub, of course. The woke memeplex grows by entryism and as such treats gatekeeping as an attack. You'd be lucky to get an independent book review site that rates books on explicitly non-woke grounds, but I doubt even that is feasible. (if anyone knows of one, please let me know) Even if it managed to avoid DDOS and doxxing and deplatforming campaigns, you're still left with a userbase of three principled libertarians and a zillion witches.
I dont know how to solve this one, other than 'read books from before 2010' and 'wait for the culture to change again to something less specifically hostile to this one thing'.
Other than, possibly, having a The Motte book review club.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Seems to me that women are behaving rationally.
-having kids & taking care of them properly is insanely hard work compared to white collar labor. It's rewarding, but so is a successful career, or having interesting hobbies, or alternately partying & getting stoned all the time
-you can simply chose not to have kids due to high-quality birth control & safe+legal abortion, no need to be sexually abstinant like in the bad old days
-if you're just having sex for pleasure, a lot of the utility of monogamous relationships is lost.
That following their modern sexual incentives leaves a good 30-50% of men out in the cold, is simply not women's problem.
Men might make it their problem eventually - failing any big changes, getting outnumbered & overrun by a pro-natalist culture seems inevitable. But there are some big changes in the pipeline (notably AI, sexbots and artifical wombs) which have a high probability of obviating the whole discussion.
IguanaBowtie
9mo 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
1yr ago
I think Elon will have the last laugh. He's on the right side of Metcalfe's law, and from a certain viewpoint it's insane that Twitter was actually for sale at any price.
The ways he loses are
-successful swarm governance action cancels twitter entirely. This is very tough, especially in the absence of a dramatic scandal and/pr effective competitor. (Mastodon ain't it)
Or
-successful oldschool-conspiracy, eg advertiser blockade, getting Elon arrested or the company fined out of existence. This is very difficult, Elon is very rich & sufficiently connected/established that he will be quite hard to dislodge, Twitter can run on like 50 people.
IguanaBowtie
10mo 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.
IguanaBowtie
9mo 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.
NSFW AI-art project Unstable Diffusion has been axed by Kickstarter, despite already hitting their funding goal. This one isn't too suprising, as KS doesnt allow NSFW and a DIY pornomaker probably was never gonna slip by that filter even if it didn't ship with visible nipples.
Kickstarter took it a step further, however, formally amending their ToS and affirming that "Kickstarter must, and will always be, on the side of creative work and the humans behind that work."
It now appears that Unstable Diffusion is being driven off Patreon too, who dont have a no-NSFW excuse. Almost certain to follow the same pattern, at this point; there are too many established artists on that platform who are willing to boycott.
The twitterati taking responsibility for the bannings are targetting payment processor Stripe next. Seems like a textbook swarm governance action.
Ks:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unstablediffusion/unstable-diffusion-unrestricted-ai-art-powered-by-the-crowd/community
Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/unstablediffusion
Current fallback:
https://equilibriumai.com/index.html
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