JulianRota
11mo ago
What I wonder - have we done this sort of check for any years well into the past? Yes, Star Wars was a classic, but what other movies were released that year, and how many were original? I recall hearing about music, many say older music is better because they only remember the smash hits from some particular year 3 or 5 decades ago, but that was one hit, when there were maybe 500 released that year, and 90% of the rest were relatively mediocre pop. Is the same true for movies?
JulianRota
11mo ago
I do own a good suit along with a modest number of ties and dress shirts. I definitely don't wear them 4 times a year. Maybe single-digit number of times in the last 5 years.
I work in tech, so nobody dresses that formally, including in job interviews. I don't really do any regular activities that would involve or benefit from dressing that well. Only the occasional wedding or other similar event.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I think your thought is kind of true. To illustrate, consider Blue-team friendly pseudoscience, such as crystal healing, homeopathy, chiropractics, obsession with "chemicals" and "radiation" - not the real kind, like what supposedly comes from power lines and cell phones and such. That sort of thing.
IME, these kinds of pseudoscience get a moderately serious disapproval from the hard science types, and the mainstream culture attitude seems to be somewhere between, they might kind of have a point and it seems cool and interesting, and they're harmless nutters that we'll stick in a corner somewhere and ignore.
Meanwhile, pseudoscience that is perceived as friendly to Red team such as Intelligent Design gets the oh-my-god-terrifying-fascist-threat-to-our-democracy-kill-it-with-fire reaction from the Blue mainstream culture. More mainstream Reds seem to have the same reaction to it as the Blue team does to their pseudoscience - they're harmless nutters that we'll let do their own thing and basically ignore.
CRT in this view occupies an odd position as Blue-coded sociological pseudoscience that mainstream Blue is crazy obsessed with pushing. The Blues that aren't that into it take the position that it's all imaginary and nobody is really pushing it. HBD is even weirder as probably at least sort of real science that Blue doesn't dare to acknowledge the existence of, and even Red mainstream shies away from.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Oh I know, I just didn't feel like typing up 3 more paragraphs on the difference between ionizing radiation and non-ionizing and the sources and effects of both etc.
JulianRota
11mo ago
To be more exact, I wouldn't bet that there's much daylight between the overall approval rates of most types of alternative medicine between registered Republicans and registered Democrats. But I would bet that the great majority of people enthusiastic about most types of alternative medicine (possibly aside from things Covid-related) would code as highly Blue team based on their overall interests and values etc. They might not necessarily bother to actually register and vote for various reasons, or may claim to support one of the third parties more Blue/"crunchy" than the Democrat party.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I guess I would mostly code as one of those Reds that's modestly adverse to HBD. I don't quite agree with any of my siblings here. If I had to characterize my actual beliefs briefly, I'd say:
I think that color-blindness is the right way to run a society of fixed population size (immigration being a separate discussion). Even if HBD is strongly true, what of it? Capitalism and individualism has already proven to be mostly adequate at slotting people of varying skill levels into appropriate jobs, and giving appropriate punishments to individuals who commit crimes. I don't think we should discriminate by race at the society level at all - either to give an artificial boost to people who some may feel have been unfairly discriminated against in the past, or to artificially suppress people who, based on their race and HBD research, may be more likely to be less intelligent than average or more inclined to short-term thinking, i.e. more likely to steal, assault, murder, etc. If one race appears to be less likely to be CEOs and more likely to be murderers, and HBD suggests that this is likely to be a perfectly legitimate outcome given genetic tendencies, then I'd say society is working correctly and no intervention is needed.
I don't necessarily think HBD is wrong, but shouting it from the rooftops too loudly IMO tends to encourage policies I don't agree with, and increase racial tensions. In case you haven't noticed, racial tensions are already kind of high. Some have already called for a race war, which doesn't seem like a great idea to me. Perhaps I am a fool and it's already too late. But I'd like to say we at least tried to find a way to live together before anything like that kicks off.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I'm inclined by my side of the culture war to be on Penny's side. I think in this case it's pretty strongly supported by the facts. The facts I'm aware of that make me think he acted reasonably are:
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At least 2 other people assisted him in holding Neely down
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Nobody is known to have tried to comment or intervene on Neely's behalf at the scene
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At least one other person, as quoted in the article, also says she thought Penny and the other riders' restraint of Neely was reasonable and necessary
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Neely did not die at the scene and was moving after he was released - his death happened later as the result of various complications from the incident
An important background fact is that the mainstream media and the activist/protester community is all-in hard on the pro-Neely side. Therefore, anyone who was at the scene speaking out on Penny's side is risking doxxing, social media censure, career issues, harassment, etc. Anyone speaking on Neely's side would be swooned over. Therefore, the fact that at least one other person who was at the scene has come forward on the pro-Penny side, even if anonymously, and nobody has come forward on the Neely side is telling.
I would be open to changing my mind if the facts I cited turn out to be wrong. If it turns out that Penny did infact keep him in a chokehold for multiple minutes after he stopped moving, that would be pretty significant. Or if it turns out that the people helping were Penny's buddies and there were several other bystanders telling them they should let him go.
Ultimately, none of us were on that train, and without good video of exactly what Neely was doing beforehand, it's impossible to judge whether he really did seem sufficiently dangerous to require physical restraint. If all of the people who were there judged that it was necessary, then I think it's best to go with their opinions. I live in NYC myself and take the train regularly. I've seen several people acting pretty nuts. It seems plausible to me that maybe 1 in 100 of them are actually violent enough to justify this.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I think we have to consider other things about the house. The exterior visible design is pretty pedestrian I suppose. But it looks like a freakin' huge house, (six bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 5,800 square feet) and it's reportedly on a large beachfront property in Del Mar, San Diego. I expect real estate there is pretty pricey, especially with that large of a Pacific ocean beach. And we have no idea what he did to the inside. I would think with all those other factors, $48 mil doesn't go that far in the make it look super impressive from the outside department. I don't get the impression that Bill Gates is the kind of guy who wants to impress everyone else with how awesome and rich he is. Here's another article I found about how awesome this house supposedly is.
JulianRota
11mo ago
It's not his only place. Presumably he wants at least one big place in a swanky but accessible location to throw billionaire parties at. IDK if there's any paparazzi around, presumably nobody wants pics of pasty old dudes? Or maybe he has so much freakin' money he can destroy any publication that annoys him, like Thiel did?
JulianRota
11mo ago
I've always thought that for conspiracy theories, it's best to analyze the counter-factual story rather than the official story. Lots of weird stuff happens in reality, but it's hard to tell how much weird stuff is the difference between, this obviously didn't happen that way and huh, I guess stuff is just weird sometimes.
For the moon landing, IMO any remotely plausible counter-factual is far more full of holes than the official story:
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We were in a bitter competition with the Soviets at the time, who had plenty of space, radar, and radio tech themselves. If there was anything the least bit hinky about it, why wouldn't they have called us out? I'm sure they tracked the trajectory of the rockets and modules, the transmission source and content, etc.
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Rocketry hasn't advanced all that much since then, but electronics and special effects have. Maybe we could make some nice fake videos of it now, but it probably would have been impossible to fake the video with 60s-era special effects technology. It's also a lot more plausible that, in the 60s, the government was far ahead of the private sector in rocketry, versus being far ahead of Hollywood in video special effects.
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There's a hell of a lot of people who worked on the Apollo project, and a hell of a lot of artifacts of it lying around in public view. It's pretty implausible that all of it is fake and every single person is lying and has continued to lie consistently for decades, in many cases up to their deathbeds and through various types of dementia, with no obvious signs of massive amounts of money being thrown around. It's probably cheaper and simpler to actually go to the moon than to organize all of that.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Given that we've already had our bit of Holocaust "revisionism" this early in the week, I thought I'd share some interesting, trivia, I guess that I recently learned of in that community.
I am given to understand that the most "mainstream" source of Holocaust revisionism is an organization called the Institute For Historical Review (IHR). They appear to be a pretty standard research organization in some ways, publishing papers and web articles and holding conferences and such. While they do not claim to be solely dedicated to the subject, they sure publish a good bit of material that's highly critical of Jews and their influence on the world, the history of the Holocaust, and apologetic towards the Nazi regime. I understand them to be the original source of many of the standard Holocaust denier talking points involving such things as "resettlement in the east".
It turns out that, way back in 2009, the director of the IHR, one Mark Weber, published an article titled "How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?" in which he basically admits that the mainstream historical view of the Holocaust is accurate. He hasn't really changed his mind that much - no indication of some cabal "getting to him" somehow. Rather, he now takes the position that while "Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community", the Holocaust basically happened the way it's described, but it's not really that important of a factor in "Jewish Power" and it's not a good use of their time to attack it. Here's a pull quote that I think is representative of the basic point he's making:
In short, the Holocaust assumed an important role in the social-cultural life of America and western Europe in keeping with, and as an expression of, a phenomenal increase in Jewish influence and power. The Holocaust “remembrance” campaign is not so much a source of Jewish-Zionist power as it is an expression of it. For that reason, debunking the Holocaust will not shatter that power.
Suppose The New York Times were to report tomorrow that Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum had announced that no more than one million Jews died during World War II, and that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz. The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be minimal.
There's also a 30 minute video interview with one Jim Rizoli, a considerably more enthusiastic Holocaust denier, in which he expresses basically the same view and goes on in more detail about a few points. IMO, he comes off as pretty calm and reasonable, while Rizoli comes off as rather unhinged and obsessed.
I think I agree with him in the sense that, if you wanna try and make a point about the role and influence of Jews in today's society, go ahead and make it, but quibbling over the details of exactly what happened to how many in the Holocaust is pointless.
JulianRota
11mo ago
It's popularly used IME to refer to the overall campaign of extermination against the Jews in Nazi Germany. Some were killed in concentration camps and death camps by gassing, others by mass executions, and others by starvation or over-work. I haven't heard of it used to refer to the Roma who were killed as well, or to Slavic POWs who also died in large numbers, though were never sent to death camps.
JulianRota
11mo ago
It sounds like you're trying to make a case that Weber's switch is not based on his actual analysis of the available evidence, but on some combination of believing it was a lost cause and fear of the ADL. I think if you read the whole article and the video, he seems pretty genuine in his expression that his mind was changed by the evidence that he researched. If your argument about his true motivation was correct, why would he continue to be critical of "Jewish power" and spill quite a few words to make the case that it should still be fought against, but that this tactic is counter-productive? If he wanted to "go with the flow" or take the easy way out, there's much better ways to do that than this middle position which will likely not appease the likes of the ADL much at all, but will also royally piss off the remaining hard-core revisionists.
This does not seem to be all that unusual of a path to take either - it seems to be fairly common for reasonable and diligent revisionists to come to the conclusion that it's basically correct after all, as another comment in this thread details.
Of course, if you have any other actual evidence that Weber was motivated by something other than reason and evidence, you're welcome to post it.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Being very very stupid seems to be common, but it's the combination of that and the maniacal insistence on continuing to post the same points over and over again even after they've been thoroughly debunked that's the issue. Taking that into consideration, it's not hard to see why many platforms eventually ban it. At a certain point, you're just annoying the crap out of everybody.
JulianRota
11mo ago
What's the boo and sneer? It's mostly about one particular person, who I said that I at least somewhat agree with. I don't think it's "Boo Outgroup" to acknowledge that there are some intelligent and reasonable people who find themselves in that camp for a while, and that it's pretty common for those to eventually convince themselves that the mainstream view is basically correct. We definitely do have some revisionists here, and we mostly debate them in a reasonable fashion rather than calling them names and banning them, which I believe is the proper way to do things.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I wonder if this push will have any effect at all on the increasing hostility towards Jews in Blue-team institutions, particularly towards those who wholeheartedly support Israel?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing
Or will they address the anti-semitism coming from Democrat darlings like Linda Sarsour, or from black activists? Or is this just another attempt to attack any conservatives they can paint as anti-semitic while ignoring any signs of it from their own side?
JulianRota
11mo ago
I have RedditIsFun, but never used it on mobile much myself. I guess I won't at all after this API charging thing goes out. I'm more into desktop, using old.reddit.com. If they ever turn that off, then I'll probably be gone for good.
JulianRota
10mo ago
The thing about this, we are constantly told that the tiniest hint of bias against certain races (blacks and jews in the US) is massively dangerous and a slippery slope to literal genocide. Meanwhile, individual hatred and institutional bias against whites is slowly but surely getting stronger, yet there are people (often the same people warning us about how dangerous other types of bias are) who tell us essentially, well they're not literally sending you to death camps yet so what are you whining about? Suck it up and quit being such a scaredy-cat.
Why shouldn't we assume that this type of bias is exactly as unjust and dangerous as any other type? Exactly when will it be okay to do something about it more serious than complaining on the internet?
JulianRota
10mo ago
I have a feeling that there's a reputation thing going on. If mods are active at deleting spam and maintaining automod to make it more difficult, then spammers mostly don't bother and there isn't that much work to do. But if people pick up that a sub is essentially unmoderated and highish traffic, then it'll be off to the races with constant spam.
Relatedly, I wonder how many mods do most of their work on mobile. If it's a lot, what happens if lots of them just quit when Reddit blocks all third-party apps?
JulianRota
10mo ago
Finished reading The Corner. It's, uh, interesting. It doesn't exactly leave me with a high opinion of the overall worth of these people.
JulianRota
10mo ago
What makes me highly skeptical of the "totally aliens" take is, according to all currently known physics, it's impossible to travel between stars in a remotely reasonable timeframe without an engine with such massively powerful output that it'll be obvious to everyone, especially considering it would pretty much have to be pointed directly at the Earth.
This means that either 1. There are no aliens because it would be blindingly obvious, or 2. Any existing aliens that have made it here have technology capable of bypassing this apparent requirement, which would be so far beyond anything we can conceive of that we would probably be effectively primitive apes to them. And if they're that advanced, why are they spending their time zipping around the Earth in weirdo semi-invisible craft that can only occasionally be seen but never really interact with us. They'd be perfectly capable of taking whatever they want.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I wasn't sure whether to put this as a reply to OP directly or someone like you, but I'll try here since you seem somewhat knowledgeable about these things.
I'm not at all an expert in these things, but my understanding was that natural biogenesis from soup-of-weird-chemicals to moderately complex single-cell life forms was pretty straightforward and plausible to happen naturally. I understand this was believed to have happened within a few million years of it being physically possible, i.e. soon after the Earth formed and cooled down enough to have liquid water. The things that was more of a head-scratcher in the how in the world did this happen without divine intervention was the jump to multi-cellular life.
How does a cell that evolved to be all about itself and it's direct descendants ever decide to team up with several other cells, which all abandon their individuality and dedicate themselves to the survival of a higher-order organism? Now that seems more like a touch of a higher power. While single-celled life originated (spontaneously?) fast, the first multi-celluar organisms took billions of years to appear AIUI, and it's off to the races after that.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I listened to most of this so far. Good stuff, though I'd like to see more discussion of the types and evolution of news feeds. I see two basic types, though I guess you could also call it a spectrum - the "simple" type which contains only posts by people you have explicitly followed in strictly chronological order, and the "algorithm" type where an algorithm shows you an endless series of posts based on what it thinks you'd like, which may or may not have any connection to accounts you follow, posts you react to, etc. In the beginning, everything was simple feeds, which IMO are much less likely to lead to that kind of behavior. But nowadays it seems like pretty much everything is moving to algorithmic feeds.
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.
I'm not sure if you intend this to be hyperbolic, but it seems like a rather strange point to me. If we take it seriously, this means that the primary issue by far that you care about is our foreign relations with Israel. Love them or hate them, it's a pretty small fraction of our overall GDP and total foreign aid budget, and a fairly minor factor in our overall foreign relations. Even so, that means to you, it's far more important than any of:
Abortion rights
Gun rights
Tax and economic policy
Criminal justice
Overall foreign relations
Environmental policy
And any number of other hot-button issues that have far more effect on any American's daily life than exactly what our relations with Israel are like and how much money we give to them.
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