JulianRota
9mo ago
I don't have anything great on the trans depiction thing. But a looked-over aspect I did want to note. So Uhura is black in Star Trek Original. (I haven't seen much of it to be honest, so I'm going on a few assumptions, but I could be completely wrong about her depiction). This is shown as a neutral thing in 2 ways. 1 is the obvious, that nobody treats her differently or as less than equal because they see that she is black, or female. The equally important IMO but more subtle way is 2, that she doesn't have a chip on her shoulder about it, i.e. constantly (mis)interpreting every minor mistake or social faux-paus as somebody being racist against her, every bureaucratic snafu as the system being systematically racist, being automatically more trusting of any other black person she encounters no matter what their official position is, etc.
Both of these serve as a social message, to non-blacks that blacks are perfectly fine ordinary people who deserve equal treatment, and to blacks to get over obsessing about historical injustices and just be a regular part of the team.
On a grand strategy decades-long view, our society has done an excellent job at drilling point 1 into the majority of white people. We don't seem to have done so great and are arguably regressing on point 2.
I suppose this does also apply to all other maybe-political minority depictions, including trans-ness - it says something whether or not that person correctly or incorrectly interprets bad things that happen to them as being done due to their minority status.
JulianRota
4mo ago
I'm actually not sure that's the important point here. There was infact sufficient WMD materials to make the claim that, yep, we did in fact find WMDs (links: 550 metric tons of Yellowcake Uranium, thousands of US troops injured from chemical weapon cleanup, weapons captured by ISIS, as referenced in this Reddit comment). Granted, it wasn't a pile of shiny, new, ready to fire gas shells and bombs, but it seems to me it was enough to support a claim. So the question becomes, why did the media narrative become "definitely totally no WMDs whatsoever"? Perhaps the CIA etc could have faked more evidence, but exactly what evidence could they have faked that would plausibly change the narrative? It would certainly have to be at least better than what they actually did find. Or did the Mainstream Media decide in advance on the "definitely totally no WMDs whatsoever" narrative and interpret all evidence in favor of reporting that line.
I also think the lack of enthusiasm for future such adventures are more down to how totally bungled the aftermath was. The administration narrative pre-war was that the Iraqis all couldn't wait to be a peaceful stable Democracy, all we had to do was bump off Saddam's regime. If that had turned out to be actually true and Iraq was a nice stable democracy in 2004, I don't think anybody would care much to what extent the WMDs claim was actually true or reasonable believable at the time. The reluctance now is IMO more due to the fact that Saddam was actually keeping a lid on a bunch of millennia-old religious and tribal beefs that promptly blew up in our faces and we didn't have the slightest clue how to handle, and it took a decade and tremendous amounts of blood and treasure to get things sort of kind of stable. Who wants to repeat that?
JulianRota
4mo ago
I've found the "official" conspiracy to be rather unlikely. I don't discount the possibility that they might be trafficking kidnapped children out of hand, but I don't see any rational way for any of this stuff to be involved in such an operation.
Presuming some operation along those lines is actually taking place, what's the point of posting an ad for such a thing, however disguised, on any public site? Surely you wouldn't dare make a delivery of such a thing, however that actually works, to just any random internet buyer. Buyers would have to be highly vetted and trusted. And any such buyers would probably want a lot more information about what they're buying and who they're buying it from than just a name that may or may not match up with a particular reported kidnapping victim and a semi-anonymous eBay or Etsy seller.
So there would have to be some other "real" marketplace where highly vetted buyers and sellers meet, with some way of inspecting the goods, reputations, etc and some way to arrange for deliveries. But if you have such a marketplace in place, what's the point of setting up these weird Wayfair, eBay, Etsy, etc items? Especially in public where any random yahoo can discover them and wonder what the heck is going on. Which gets us back to the old and strange point of it seeming far too much like a conspiracy to actually be one because any real conspiracy wouldn't be that obvious.
Possibly money laundering is the idea, possibly for such a scheme, but if you can manage to kidnap children in bulk, transport them around, and sell them to a market of buyers as an ongoing business without getting busted, surely you can figure out better ways to launder your money. If they have some kind of special juice with the Feds to get away with such a thing, why such a mickey-mouse level money laundering scheme?
JulianRota
7mo ago
I started reading and thinking about Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society And It's Future around the time that he died and everyone was talking about it. I think everyone was talking about it in rather generous terms, mining it for the most truthful and insightful things and only talking about that. I think that's excesively generous, considering it came to be known to us thanks to a homicidal terroristic bombing campaign. I think it deserves to be cut to the core of it's true arguments that he believed justified his bombing campaign. And I also think that if you actually do so, it's pretty low quality. Here is the original text of it if you care to verify or make a counter-argument.
The core of, and most important thing to remember about Industrial Society and it's Future is the Power Process argument, as written starting in paragraph 33. TK's argument is that in order to be truly happy and satisfied with life, a person must need to exert substantial effort, labor, and creativity towards satisfying the most basic physical needs of food, water, shelter, and security. Exerting their creative efforts towards other pursuits, including art, science, engineering, etc. isn't good enough, it's got to be for core survival. Exerting substantial effort in a conventional job, earning money, and using that money to purchase the elements of survival is also not good enough, it has to be direct. This is his definition of "freedom" - one is "free" in his opinion if they need to exert substantial effort directly towards basic survival. Thus, industrial society is fundamentally destructive to "freedom" in this definition in that it enables the majority of humanity to satisfy their needs of survival very easily and reliably, usually by doing things that have no direct relation to those needs. See him doubling down on this in paragraph 94.
I believe this argument is fundamentally nonsensical. Perhaps our society is lost and missing something, but I'm doubtful that large-scale hunter-gatherer societies (or at least as large scale as such societies can be) are overall substantially happier and more satisfied with life. It may be true that some individuals who are disaffected from mainstream society for various reasons are happier in such a situation, but I don't think society as a whole is. I frankly doubt it for individuals too - how many such people ever truly disconnect fully from industrial society and stay that way? I don't think TK is has any experience in anthropology, or has spent any significant amount of time with societies that currently do live in ways similar to what he advocates. Maybe he should have spent a few years living with the Amish or something before going on a bombing campaign, or visited some primitive tribes that are still around in various parts of Africa and South America.
He has some other interesting observations, but that's the core of it and why I wholly reject the philosophy.
One of his other points is around how society tends to bend people to fit it, rather than adjusting to fit people. Maybe there's a little point in how hard it sometimes tries to bend people. But there are plenty of options out there already for other ways to live, if you are willing to go looking for them and actually adopt them. In fact, it's not really "society" trying to bend people in my opinion, it's usually the people themselves or their close family members trying to fit in. Are "we" supposed to go find the guy who thinks he should try anti-depressants to fit in better and tell him he really ought to try joining a sailboat crew first instead? Maybe it's your job to realize you don't like your place in society and change it. And however you decide to deal with your disaffection with society, what gives you the right to claim you know what's best for everyone? Doesn't the fact that you are disaffected from society fundamentally mean that you don't understand it and aren't by any measure qualified to speak for it?
Speaking of people not fitting into society, what happens when it goes the other way? If we actually adopt his supposed preferred lifestyle and it goes exactly the way he hopes it does, I'd bet anything at least a few people would think that running water, grocery stores full of food, and antibiotics are actually pretty nice, can I please go back to that? Will the result of that just be, tough shit, this is all there is, starve and die if you don't like it? Has he done any sort of research or experiment at all to determine that 100% of humanity will actually be happer living like this, even when some of them starve to death because a harvest or hunt went bad for some reason and there's no such thing as long-distance trade, or they watch their loved ones die of things that are fixable in industrial society but pre-industrial hunter-gatherers are helpless against?
I think the bigger point though is - what do you want for the future of the Human Race?
If we go TK's way, we will be hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo around and picking berries forever. Your kids and their kids as far into the future as you want to go will never live any better than you. Some day, the rising output of the sun will destroy the Earth's biosphere, or maybe we get hit by an asteroid or gamma ray burst or something, and the entire human race goes extinct. We won't have a prayer of even knowing it's coming, much less doing anything about it, because being too busy working on basic survival to notice or think about such things is apparently the correct way to live. We were given this tremendous gift of intelligence, by evolution or God or whatever you believe, and we're supposed to just throw it in the trash because some guy was sad?
Or we go our own way and take industrial society as far as it can go. Maybe we build awesome spaceships and colonize the stars. Maybe we conduct diplomacy as equals with alien civilizations. Maybe we turn ourselves into a global hive mind somehow. Or maybe we blow ourselves up with antimatter bombs or get turned into paperclips by our superintelligent AIs or get enslaved by hostile aliens. Who knows what the future holds, but it sounds a lot better than being hunter-gatherers forever.
JulianRota
3mo ago
I'd agree that it's political. The political situation is either A) You know the Feds will stop you, so you be a good boy and do nothing. Your meek compliance gets you zero enthusiasm from the right, and whispers start that you're an open-borders sympathizer, or B) You do something like this, stick to it as long as possible, make the Feds physically stop you. It'll help for a little while with the actual situation, and being seen to try to do something is good for his political support. Forcing the Feds to actually physically stop it and showing video of them doing that will help his political situation, making the case that he's on their side and is a fighter, and it's the Feds' fault that it isn't working.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Is it just me, or is Substack's UI incredibly annoying?
Apparently Substack desperately wants me to read every post in my email inbox. I do not want to read posts in my email inbox. I want to read them on the website. Nevertheless, every time I open a post in Substack, it does the thing where it starts dimming the page as soon as I scroll down to try and read something, which I find distracting, so I have to scroll down further to get to the box where they try to get my email, then click to dismiss it. Doesn't seem to matter if I've logged in or do give the email address, it still prompts me every time. Naturally, every search result about this on every search engine I've tried is about blocking the emails or users.
What I'd like it to do is, let me log in to an account on their site, then see an RSS-reader-like list of recent posts by every writer I follow in time order. Then, if I'm logged in, let me read a post with no popups or distractions, and if I open a post from somewhere else from a writer I don't follow, give me a button or something to click to follow them too. It actually appears that it's supposed to work like that, but it doesn't.
Instead, when I log in by email, as it seems to want you to do, and follow several writers, there doesn't seem to be a way to see things they've recently written. There's a page for that, called "inbox" for some reason, but it only shows content from one writer. "Home" mostly shows recent short posts by people I don't follow and don't care about, and I have no idea by what criteria it selects them. There's also a "reads" section in "profile" but it claims I'm not subscribed to anything. I can't find anything that even lists what I've subscribed to, but there's like 3 places where it tries to get me to read random content by people I haven't subscribed to. How is it this terrible? Has Substack also been taken over by the enshittification trend before it even really got going? I just want to read interesting effortposts in peace.
JulianRota
9mo ago
Manhattan has an awful lot of $500/month+ parking spaces for a place nobody wants to drive to. And an awful lot of $2k/month and up (way, way up) apartments for a place nobody wants to live in. The oddball hoops you have to jump through to get a rental there suggest that the number of people who very badly want to live there and are willing to pay out the nose for the privilege remain quite high.
I don't think it's that controversial of a statement to say that people who like urban spaces really like them and are willing to pay and make other sacrifices to live there (small spaces and lots of possibly annoying neighbors nearby), and people who like rural spaces also really like them and are willing to make different sacrifices to live there (nothing close by, moderate drive to get to 1 or 2 small grocery stores, hardware stores, bars, etc and maybe very long drive to get to any more or bigger of the above).
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'm not sure entirely, but I do find it amusing that the catchphrase for blue-collar workers put out of work to "learn to code". Now it seems more likely that the laptop class are the ones whos jobs will be rendered obsolete. Should we run around telling programmers (like me), project managers, lawyers, salesmen, etc to "learn to plumb"? Making an AI bot that can do plumbing work seems a lot further off than replacing or at least greatly reducing the value of those white-collar professions.
JulianRota
1yr ago
It is kind of ironic that for a community of programmers, TM settled for a fork of rDrama. This might be a passion issue but raises some questions nonetheless. TM isn't hackernews but TM isn't /r/redscarepod either. This point is probably not worth thinking much about, I am sure the alternatives/tradeoffs were considered. Ultimately it's an optics thing.
I was around the development group more when the choice was made to settle on rDrama. There are indeed a lot of other forum systems out there, some of which are using more sophisticated technology. But if you really dig into them, virtually all of them are one-person projects that have never had any significant contributions from anyone other than the original creator, have never been proven on a high-traffic site, particularly with mega-threads like we do and probably at least a few active attackers, and have basically no thought put into proper moderator tools or anti-spam. At least a few of them are also actively hostile to anything non-woke - see the Lemmy slur filter scandal.
rDrama may not be the best designed system out there, but it's at least okay, is open-source in the form that actually serves production traffic, is reasonably well-supported, has some decent mod tools that were straightforward to expand, and has been cooperative with us.
Let's kick this CW thread off with a discussion of the KiwiFarms attacks. Broad strokes include:
CloudFlare posted just yesterday on how they were turning off KiwiFarms use of their DDOS protection. This was 4 days after their post attempting to explain their "abuse policies" and how they would respond to such things, a casual reading of which would suggest that they would not do this. Their claimed justification for this was "potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site". They did not detail exactly what acts and threats were posted and the nature of the site moderator's response.
KiwiFarms is back up at https://kiwifarms.ru/ (note that this is somewhat spotty, they are still actively under attack) (https://archive.ph/2tS7Y should work if their site is not responding at the moment). The site admin has created a post here in which he lists the user and post that he suspects was the trigger for this, the reasons why he thinks the post was suspicious, and the actions the admins took in response, which included banning the user in about half an hour.
To me this looks like a flop on CloudFlare's part. KiwiFarms may or may not be honest in their explanation post, but it's a lot more detail than anyone's posted on the "ban it" side on exactly what were the posts of concern.
JulianRota
1mo ago
It does sound like a textbook case of I Can Tolerate...'s saying that if you think you're criticizing your ingroup, and it was fun and pleasant to write and people read it for entertainment, consider the possibility that whoever you're criticizing isn't really your ingroup.
JulianRota
2mo ago
That would be You Are Still Crying Wolf, section 17 near the end. Which, curiously for this thread, is exactly about refuting the crazy theory that Trump is racist.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I had been pretty default pro-choice, having been basically a 90s libertarian. I feel like I've moved a little bit in the pro-life direction. Reasons:
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This article detailing how abortion access actually works across the first world. It seems to be significantly less accessible than the seeming American / Feminist default position of on-demand all the way up to birth across the rest of the first world.
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Among left-wing activists, they seemed to have moved from the previous default of "safe legal and rare" to being proud of abortions, shouting them from the rooftops, and openly advocating for as many of them as possible. This seems sick to me.
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A thought I had that doesn't seem to want to go away: If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously? What would you expect them to think of that? Children can be really annoying and inconvenient at the best of times. Virtually all of them will be imperfect in some way. The reason why we give children unconditional love is because they are so extraordinarily dependent on their parents and they know it, so they're naturally terrified at the idea of being abandoned. How can a child expect that from you once they realize that you basically killed your previous child because it was inconvenient? Oh, we didn't have a good job and weren't sure how we would support ourselves - does that mean that once you actually have a kid, if you lose your job or get in an accident or things get tough some other way, it's bye bye kiddo? Okay so you don't tell them. Unless they manage to find out some other way. Or maybe just don't do something that you'll never be able to tell your kid?
JulianRota
10mo ago
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What are you trying to say?
I'm sure the case of "nerd" is perceived as (whether or not he actually did) making a pass at "jock"'s girl so jock beats up nerd, has happened. I am also sure that this couldn't possibly explain more than a small percentage of bullying. So what exactly is the point here?
JulianRota
10mo ago
Short notice is going to be a big factor. Imagine having less than 3 weeks to calculate out exactly how much you need to charge your users to be able to make the payments, accounting for the Apple/Google tax, implement and test all of the required functionality in the app, including however many new screens around creating and managing subscriptions, submit the updated app through app review, hope there aren't any major bugs, and get your accounting set up to collect these massive amounts of money and send most of it to Reddit, hopefully the payment and billing timelines line up well enough that you don't end up needing to float 8-figure sums for a month or two, hopefully you did the price calculations right too and don't end up owing Reddit an 8-figure sum more than you're collecting, by the way this is 10x to 100x more money flowing through your company than you ever had, do you have the right accountants for this, what are the tax implications, oh by the way these are mostly one-man operations so that's a hell of a lot to handle with no accountants or lawyers already on your payroll.
And if Reddit imposed all of this on you with such short notice, and doesn't seem to care much what effect it has on you, what might they do next week, next month? You're not a well-capitalized operation, can you handle the next time Reddit makes a snap decision changing your whole accounting structure by 2 orders of magnitude with less than a month to respond?
JulianRota
10mo ago
This is probably the best place to discuss the latest in the ongoing drama of the Reddit API changes. Short version is that Reddit's APIs used to be free, but they are rolling out a new scheme where they charge pretty substantially for them. The prices are high enough to make pretty much all of the third-party Reddit phone apps non-viable. This has made a lot of people quite upset, as the "official" app is reportedly significantly worse and is lacking a lot of moderator tools that many mods use to run their subreddits. There's a big "blackout" planned for June 12-14th in protest, where the mods of a bunch of subs will turn them private and users are encouraged to not use Reddit at all.
So lots of users are mad and claim that they're going to delete their accounts and/or stop using Reddit at all. It's not clear how many people overall are actually prepared to follow through on this long term. Personally I'm doubtful that it's enough to significantly hurt Reddit.
The developers of all the major independent mobile apps (Apollo, RedditIsFun, Sync, Relay, etc) say they're going to delete their API keys the day before charges start accruing, which will disable all of their installed apps at once. Apparently if they don't, they'll get a pretty hefty bill at the end of next month for everything all of the current users have been doing. Ouch. The Apollo link has a pretty long writeup of the dev's experience where he makes a good case that Reddit doesn't seem to have much interest in working with third-party app developers.
Probably the most significant part is the mod objections. Apparently a lot of mods of big subs do most of their modding on mobile using one of the third-party apps, and they say the mod tooling on the official app is so much worse that they won't be able to do their work. Every reddit sub relies on volunteer mods to keep them free of spam and abuse, and none of them are paid anything, so making their work more difficult will be very noticeable. If many mods follow through on this, it could be very significant indeed.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've listened to him for a while off and on, IMO this is his usual schtick, to find a news item of interest and discuss it from a perspective of taking it maximally seriously. This leads to him frequently seeming to take contradictory positions. He's previously said things like, if Confederate statues make black people uncomfortable than we should indeed take them down, and take words they find offensive, i.e. the N word, out of our vocabulary, etc. I've never seen him approach things from a perspective of, my true worldview overall is X, is event Y a good enough reason to update it?
The weird part IMO is he must have known something like this would happen if he applied his usual MO to this story in this way. I wonder why he chose to do it now. Maybe he just doesn't care much?
I'd also say, if you don't already know that a very substantial number of black people (not all, but definitely more than a few percent) really truly do hate white people, where've you been, and have you ever really talked to black people?
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think we have to draw a distinction between raw intelligence and application. Lots of people are really smart, but only apply their intelligence to one or two specific things. Think of a PhD particle physicist or something who understands super-complex topics and makes contributions to the field. I'd bet a lot of people in those types of positions never apply their intelligence outside their fields and their opinions on CW-adjacent topics are pretty much whatever the media they view tells them. Maybe they just never cared to, maybe they're shying away from anything that'll create conflict, who knows.
I don't think there's any real communities out there that are genuinely smarter than us and open for anyone to join and contribute. Maybe there's sort of a community in the sense of bloggers who read and respond to each other, but that doesn't form as tight-knit as a single forum or group on some app.
There may also be a thing where some of the really smart people have realized that you don't really move societal needles by writing effort-posts on nerdy subjects to people like us. It seems much more effective to use that intelligence to learn and practice the arts of persuasion and propaganda. How many people have chosen to do that instead and how smart are they really? We may never know.
JulianRota
6mo ago
There are 2 basic theories for how to win elections. One is that you win by convincing moderates who might plausibly vote either way to vote for your guy. The other is that you win by convincing your supporters to actually turn out and vote. Given the state of partisanship and the participation rate in even highly contentious elections with massive media attention, it seems likely that the second is the dominating factor in most elections. If something drains the enthusiasm of people who would have voted for you such that they fail to actually show up and vote, you can very much still lose, even if the other side is (in your opinion) objectively further from the point of view of the people who are sitting out.
JulianRota
8mo ago
I've wanted to remark for a while on the "tan suit" thing. I've been a pretty conventional conservative all through the Obama era. I'm not exactly glued to the media or anything, but I think I was following right wing media and forums around then pretty regularly. I still have no recollection of ever hearing about this tan suit thing from any conservative source at the time. I couldn't for the life of me name the year in which it happened.
I'm pretty sure I've only heard of it after the Obama era from Liberals trying to dunk on how lame criticism of Obama was. I tend to think they thought it sounded bad to claim Obama had no scandals, so they cherry picked the most ridiculous thing he was ever criticized on to make red team look bad, even though it was so tiny and insignificant in that world that nobody remembers it. Pretty good rhetorical tactic, I'll give them that.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I haven't seen anything yet to adjust my priors that it's some combination of 1. Room-temperature IQ people who were UFO nerds back in the 90s or so who have now become military officers, congresspeople, etc nerding out, seeing what they want to see, misinterpreting ambiguous evidence, etc, and 2. Manipulation and leaks by some shadowy Government/elite group trying to misdirect attention from whatever is really going on. As others have said, nobody is acting like there's an actual secret being leaked here.
I don't put a lot of faith in, well we still don't have a shred of actual evidence, but this guy who supposedly saw some actual evidence is totally more believable than the last guy who made some outlandish claims with no evidence.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I think they effectively don't exist. There aren't literally zero, but they're smaller and less significant than alien abduction believers, flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and any other ultra-fringe ideologies.
The actual Nazi party was very much a creature of 1920s Germany. Their full ideology and goals are pretty much about that time and situation. Pretty much nobody pays much attention to all the details of it now.
There are some fools who like to fly Nazi flags and basically LARP as them. You can look around at their channels. They never seem to manage to gather more than 3-5 people in any place at once. They don't seem to have much interest in actual Nazi ideology, they more seem to just want to wave the symbols around because it really pisses off liberals. They don't really seem to do much except post stickers around their towns and drop banners on highway overpasses once in a while.
The paths to actual political power in the US are pretty clear and well-known. Participate in local party politics, volunteer for stuff, work hard, try to climb the ladder, buddy up with other up-and-comers who are further ahead, etc. It's by no means easy to make it past the entry-level, but it's all pretty clear and mostly above-board. Nobody who flies Nazi symbols is making it past the front door of any actual political organization. Even if the ideas and behavior weren't rejected entirely, the people who do it are mostly trying to declare that they're "too good" for actual politics and have no interest in or ability to work within any particular system, which mostly involves a lot of compromise and sucking up to people before anyone will even listen to any wild out-there ideas you might have.
Of course, revolutionary politics tries to bypass that sort of thing. But very rarely with any success. To have even a chance of success, you have to be a lot bigger and a lot more organized, and you need to have a crisis of faith in the current institutions. Okay, we might be in shouting distance of a crisis of faith, but nobody outside the mainstream political parties is organized anywhere near well enough to have the slightest hint of a chance of taking advantage of that, certainly not any Nazi flag-fliers.
An aspect of this whole thing I haven't seen touched on yet is that TK mostly did his thing in the pre-internet age. It seems that he started his bombing campaign before he actually wrote his manifesto, but he did indicate that he was willing to stop it entirely if a sufficiently "respectable" publication was to publish it. So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that he basically carried out a mail bombing campaign to get his manifesto published.
Doesn't it seem at least a little bit crazy that in the modern but pre-internet age, if you have a viewpoint that's severely heterodox but not inherently dangerous, you basically have to carry out a terrorist bombing campaign to actually get it distributed. (Or at least a pretty smart guy could come to think that this was the only practical thing to do.) Yet nowadays, you can post every conceivable variety of batshit insane stuff on the internet for the whole world to see, basically for free. We get some pretty damn heterodox stuff posted on this very forum every day. I can go pull up his manifesto right now, for free, and it doesn't actually matter whether it was published on the Washington Post's website or some random free blog somewhere.
On the other hand, maybe it was fame and readership he was really after, which still doesn't come for free. Sure you can post anything you want on a random blog somewhere, but you won't necessarily get any more readership or engagement than you would if you made a few hundred photocopies and started handing them out at public events in the 80s. I guess if you were doing it now, you could post a URL in your bombs and presumably you'd get a lot more readers, along with an aggressive FBI investigation of where you posted it and who had been posting things there etc.
Anyways, there's gotta be something to the fact that anyone can post anything for the whole world to see now, whether it's strictly conventional, heterodox but reasonable, or completely bonkers.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think that the distinction between beliefs and identity is a lot more arbitrary than you are trying to say. Is there any objective way of saying any particular thing is one or the other, aside from motivated reasoning?
If you "identify as trans", then that means you were born as a normal biological man or woman, and at some point, you decided you would feel better if you were the opposite sex. So maybe you decide to dress and adopt the style and mannerisms of the sex you believe you should be. Maybe you decide to do some more drastic things such as take hormone treatments or get surgical alterations. Maybe you decide to change your name and get people to call you the new name and pronouns. Maybe you decide to try to live life as your desired gender, including such otherwise ordinary things as using bathrooms and playing sports. Exactly what makes any of those choices/decisions an "identity", and anything a red tribe / conservative decides to do to express themselves a "belief"?
It also sounds disingenuous to me to blame all violence against conservative speakers and activists on college campuses on them "trying to be as deliberately offensive as possible". College is ostensibly a place for exploring many different possible belief types, yet on many occasions it seems the mere existence of any conservative who doesn't care to spend 3/4 of their time apologizing for supposed wrongs that they haven't actually done is considered "offensive".
And since when is wearing a police uniform a political act? The police are ostensibly there to preserve law and order. Blue Team desires to see them as the bad guys due to cherry-picking a relatively modest number of bad acts that they think were not punished decisively enough. In what other contexts is it legitimate to tar a large group of people and an entire profession due to accused bad acts of a small percentage of them?
I want to double-down / confirm the comment about working conditions and the ability to do things. I've worked at some Large Bureaucratic Organizations. I've seen too many times as an Individual Contributor where I or a colleague of mine comes up with a nice idea to make something work better or be cheaper or something, tried to get it done, and it gets stonewalled at the management level because the real decisions are made 5 layers up from you and there's no way to get any idea up to them through all the layers of middle management in a way they'll actually care about.
Instead, most of the project proposals that come down from on high are for stuff that people at the ground level can see is clearly unworkable, but it gets pushed anyways. When it proceeds to go nowhere, as predicted, whoever pushed it can dummy up a powerpoint that makes it look like it went great, which never actually gets checked, so they get bonuses and promotions anyways.
After a while working in a place like that, it can feel like a huge deal where a good idea at your level gets a quick "Okay, do it, here's the money", and the really dumb ideas get ruthlessly shut down. You might put up with and excuse a lot to be allowed to work at your full potential on something that's actually awesome instead of being a bureaucratic drone putting forth 10% on something completely pointless.
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