MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
Being polite doesn’t mean accepting every idea that comes along. It simply means that you express your disagreement in ways that, to paraphrase the rules of this place “give light rather than heat.” That’s entirely possible even in cases like pedophilia where the acceptance of such a bad idea would be a disaster. Saying there are only two genders is perfectly within the bounds of free expression and I don’t think you should be harassed or fired for that. Saying something like “there are only two genders and those who disagree should be considered dangerous to society,” that is over the line. Saying “Trump should not be sending the National Guard to American cities” is fine, saying “Trump is doing an authoritarian power grab by sending the National Guard to American cities” is too far because words like authoritarian, fascist, Nazi, and related are incendiary and dangerously lead to the acceptance of violence against anyone smeared with those terms.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
You can’t even get to the place of agreeing on values if you’re constantly telling yourself and your allies that those other guys are to be destroyed and kept away from power at all costs. I think in the case of the USA the red and blue tribes share quite a lot, but having that conversation is difficult because of the filter bubbles and the attention economy made worse by the rhetoric that the other tribe wants to destroy the country.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
If you gave a speech in the liquor isle about the dangers of alcohol, you’d be removed. You’ll also be removed for causing a disturbance. It happens all the time. Homeless people yelling at the voices in their head get kicked out quite often.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
I think there’s a very big problem in people not understanding the difference between sharing an opinion and being an asshole about said opinion. I don’t object to free expression of ideas even in contentious situations on controversial topics. You think abortion is baby murder, you are perfectly free to say that. But I think the very concept of politeness and tact and decorum is pretty lost at this point. It’s just devolved from “I don’t agree with you” to “I don’t agree with you and you are subhuman for even entertaining a different idea, and in fact should not be allowed to speak.” And now we have people celebrating a murder with TikTok dances.
I keep thinking back to reading old etiquette books. There was a sense that you really should strive to think of the other person, or others around you as at least as important if not more than you. A society that frowned on being late to a show because walking in late would inconvenience other theater goers would absolutely have something very politely negative to say about the absolute shit show of political and social discourse— even if they do agree that all opinions are protected by free speech. There are lines of decency that just have to be protected and we just can’t seem to separate the idea of an opinion from the expression of that opinion.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
Let the arms race begin…
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
13d ago
I think the models is less that those chatbots will be the face of the profit making for AI companies. Not true, I think the people using the bots now are unpaid trainers, not the future end users. Every issue that comes up now can be fixed once the bot gets a correction from the freeware users. But that’s not a very useful user base anyway. The best use case for such bots is actually business to business. Maybe Walmart wants to use it with its app to help customers find a product that fixes a problem they have, or can tell you where something is. They’d probably want to buy a license for incorporation of the bot into their app. Maybe Apple wants to replace their social media team with Open AI based solutions. Or the CEO of Tesla wants to use AI to suggest improvements to their car line. In those cases, getting a good useful bot would get them an effective and efficient solution probably worth a good deal of money to them (if for no other reason than it reduces headcount), and they will pay for it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
13d ago
Short term I agree, it won’t work, but keep in mind that ATM, Theres a monopoly on university level job training. The old university system was all there was, and so they never faced much competition for post graduation job placement. If the new academic system can produce higher quality education and therefore better graduates, eventually it will be noticed that graduates of these institutions do better in the workforce than traditional college graduates. Depending on the school and major the new academy doesn’t need to be that good to outpace the current university system. Most people coming out of the university today are probably less educated than high school graduates of the 1960s. They are not well-read, they don’t understand the scientific method (unless they happen to graduate in STEM) and don’t know how to do serious academic research or write logically coherent papers. Heck, even the professors seem to be less able to do serious academic work.
Does anyone actually want to hire a humanities degree holder? I can’t imagine anyone looking at the current crop and wanting them in any part of the business. They’ve mostly majored in being liberal, campus protesting, and becoming a litigation nightmare. If there were alternatives, they’d be completely unemployable simply because even minimal job-related competence (doing dispassionate research, doing the work assigned, staying on topic, and knowing better than to be a walking, talking bag of grievances all of which are based on something the company could be sued for) those people would be snapped up. Why hire a blue hair when Hillsdale grads can do better work and act like professional workers?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
13d ago
I tend to agree with one of the replies to @MonkeyWithAMachinegun ‘s post. I find the most damning thing about the discourse on political violence to be the enablement and incitement and lack of contrition by the left to be far more concerning than the actual numbers for a couple of reasons.
First of all. Because it does absolutely nothing to slow tge growth of such violence. If mainstream media sources are talking night after night about how conservatives are a threat to democracy, fascist, violent, and so on, this creates the radicalized people necessary (not necessarily sufficient, but necessary) to produce attacks. It also creates the environment that enables those attacks by normalization of the idea that certain parts of the political spectrum are too radical to be dealt with through the normal process. The modern cosmology of Fascism is that it occupies the place where Satan lives in the Christian world: a vile creature to be shunned and defeated by any means at your disposal.
Second because it reveals just how much support there is on the left for this sort of thing. Right wing rhetoric is sufficient to get advertisements pulled, people cancelled, and leave actors or other entertainers blackballed out of the industry. Left wing incitement and victim blaming doesn’t have the same effect. Kimmel basically victim-blamed the right. His “punishment” was a week of leave and a ton of media attention and the full support of the rest of Hollywood. Places like Bluesky are not losing advertisers, there are no calls for Facebook, Threads, TikTok, Bluesky, or Reddit to remove posts that victim blame or celebrate the Kirk assassination. Radical left podcasts are still widely available, and to my knowledge none of them carry a content warning.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
13d ago
I think it depends on the flavor of Protestant. If you’re talking about low church Bible thumping evangelicals, I get it, but I think most high church Protestants respect the councils and the dogmas of the early church. The Anglo Catholic movement actually accepts the dogmas and canons of the first seven councils so they’d be pretty in line with the Roman Church and the various Orthodox Churches. Lutherans still informally accept quite a bit of that dogma through the Augustine Confessions and Book of Concord.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14d ago
The reason I see it as pretty central is that basically the Trinity goes back pretty far in the historical record, and was dogmatically declared around the same time the New Testament was canonized. It’s really hard to claim one without the other. If you’re calling the New Testament without reservations The Canon as opposed to other writings, it’s really hard to consistently also say “but they are wrong about these other things.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14d ago
I don’t think it would work unless you can seriously curtail the democracy and liberalism involved. The general conceit of democracy is that people can and should be making all of these decisions themselves. But it also means that those people will almost always vote for things that make them feel good rather than what is actually good for society. The People, it seems tend to think like teenagers when the votes are aggregated, and thus you really can’t say no to allowing stupid people to ruin their lives or no to allowing whatever dangerous, destructive, or socially harmful thing that the public has decided it really wants to do.
In the past, limitations of technology and communication prevented things from getting too out of control. In the past, you might not find out about an important bill until it had already passed. You thus couldn’t weigh in on it. If you did, you were limited to telephone calls (and you’d have to know the name of your congressman and how to find the switchboard number) or mail (which took longer and again required you to know who to address the letter to and to know the specific bill you want to pass or fail). Now you have instant access to the information and you have access to those government officials in your social media, and thus weighing in is easy.
In everyday life as well, I think limited options because of technology were a benefit. When you could only gamble in Vegas, in an actual casino, there were natural limits to how much gambling you could actually do. Unless you live there, you can only afford to go there a few times a year, for a week or two at a time, and then you had to leave. Now that the casino is in your pocket, blowing all of your money is easy. You don’t need pants, let alone to fly to another city. Anywhere you happen to be, if you have a phone with the app installed, that place is a casino. And it’s the same with other things like shopping. It’s much easier to overspend when everything on the planet is offered for sale in your pocket, any time and place you want to open Amazon.
I feel like really the biggest problem of modernity is the degree to which it allows people to engage in their Id with very few restraints and how good it is in removing both physical and social barriers that held those Id impulses in check. I think this is the thing most people have a hard time dealing with. Not that they cannot cognitively understand that some Vice is a bad idea. People know gambling, porn, overspending, overeating, and overuse of screens are bad. They just need a bit more of a natural limitation on getting access to those things. Personally I think even for high functioning people, having natural friction around doing those kinds of things is helpful. For lower functioning people, it’s a losing battle as they keep indulging in bad habits because it’s just so easy to do.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14d ago
I don’t think it’s bad, it’s just that we’re used to it and it’s been run through the commercial food chain much more so than other foods. If I want Mongolian cuisine, chances are im looking for a mom a pop restaurant, or buying the ingredients to make it myself. If I want American food, I can go get McDonald’s hamburgers and fries that are made at an industrial scale out of cheap, shitty ingredients and made with indifference by a teenager with an attitude. That’s not a fair comparison, you’d have to actually compare a top quality hamburger made in a mom and pop restaurant from high quality ingredients to the same in a Mongolian restaurant. I think other than the familiar flavor profile from the burger, they’re probably about the same.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15d ago
Problem one: Italy does not believe it exists to spread Italian influence and culture. There are no Italian missionaries spreading the message of Al dente pasta. Islam is a missionary religion with a strong cultural belief in forcing others to adapt to their religion.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15d ago
I think honestly it’s because it wasn’t authentic in a sense. They didn’t embrace the happy clappy because they thought it would make better Catholics, they kinda did it to appeal to outsiders.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15d ago
I’m generally in favor of controlled legal immigration, but I just don’t understand the food and music angle. Those things frankly don’t matter at all. Like, okay, suppose I transport you to his nightmare alternative universe in which Americans have never tasted lasagna. Okay, so is it that bad? Is America truly worse off if we don’t have pasta?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15d ago
No model is perfect, and im not aware of any uncontacted tribes that would answer for the control group. Maybe isolated villages in Bhutan or Nepal or something. Even then, they know modern civilization exists. Even going back to early psychology is difficult because psychology itself is a modern concept— it started as a field in 1900 Or thereabouts, and we don’t have much before then except maybe someone occasionally notices people acting weird and records it or reports on it. There’s not any clean data to be had, but I don’t think that means you can’t find hints by comparing different subcultures and the pathologies they tend to have or not have.
If “modern approaches to community” are causing unhappiness or causing relationships to break up, cultures that do otherwise are less likely to have those issues. If the concept of “love marriages” breed narcissism and divorces, then there are other cultures that have arranged marriages (Orthdox Jews do, so do Hindus). If there’s a positive effect in arranged marriages, it should show up. If TV and screens cause short attention spans, we have plenty of places on earth that don’t have them. Comparing those differences correcting for other confounding variables should give us hints about this kind of thing.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
16d ago
Couldn’t you answer the question by looking at communities that didn’t go down those roads. Off the top of my head, any form of Anabaptist community, Orthodox Judaism, Hasidic Jews, or similar groups that chose not to go modern.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
16d ago
Underwater hockey has a difficulty with the underwater part, which requires special equipment and access to a pool. I think 7s rugby is a good game, or maybe Aussie football.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
16d ago
I don’t think civics courses by themselves are a good answer here. Turning down the temperature on this stuff requires that the discourse changes as well. Civics and required volunteering are good ideas, as I think is the habit in some Asian countries to require kids to join clubs in school to kinda force proper socialization. But having a kid learn civics and join the chess club isn’t going to do much as long as he’s immersed in an online world in which it’s common to see content dehumanizing people who disagree with you and an algorithm that rewards him for participating in that dehumanization of his supposed political or social enemies.
The best thing we could do to stop this is to bring back and enforce minimum standards of decorum in media or at least mainstream media including social media. It’s unacceptable in a civilized society to be calling the sitting president and his party “fascist”, “Nazi” and “authoritarian”, and you should not be equating winning the next election to “saving democracy”. You should not be celebrating the death of a political opponent. You should not be allowed to dehumanize other people online. What we have right now is a bifurcated hate box that pushes people to radicalize and rewards them for doing so. Then we’re wondering why people participating in the hate box are popping off and shooting each other. And unless we deal with this directly, it’s just going to get worse as the algorithms push people farther and further down these pipelines with more sophisticated algorithms that know exactly how to keep people scrolling through millions of messages highlighting all the bad stuff the “enemy” is doing while hiding his answers or anything positive about him.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
18d ago
How about it causing actual real life shootings? We’ve had 9 months of crying about Nazis, Fascists, White Christian Nationalists, and Gestapo, and we’ve now had within that same time frame dozens of incidents of Teslas being destroyed, several incident of people showing up to the homes of government officials, an assassination, two incidents where ICE officers are shot at (and detainees died), and several riots in Los Angeles. Exactly how many incidents need to be tied to the “MAGA = White Christian Nationalist = Nazi” do we need before anyone that isn’t on the right can say “yeah maybe calling everyone who doesn’t agree with us fascist and calling ICE tge Gestapo is a bridge too far?” Like are we waiting for something bigger? As I see it, if the words are causing actual violence, then it’s not all that hard to make a case for those words being “fighting words”. And this is where we are — stochastic terrorism inspired by claims that MAGA is fascism and therefore must be stopped at all costs.
I don’t see any other option. Either the Nazi and Fascist talk is banned from social media and media figures or influencers lose their jobs because they’re comparing MAGA to Fascists and Trump to Hitler, or we simply allow the current media atmosphere to remain until the next assassination. But I can’t understand how people cannot make that connection and I hope it doesn’t mean that those spreading these messages want more terrorism.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
I see little problem with censoring content creators to not use fighting words (which due to mass media propaganda, terms like Nazi and Fascism and similar are) that basically dehumanize those you oppose. There’s a shift in context simply because of the March of technology that enables people to marinate in content like that, and creates vortexes that people fall into and come out ready to commit violence against their “enemies”. This isn’t 1980 where exposure to political content was time and space limited by technology and people had to in the famous words of William Shatner “get a life”. The content is ever present and available every time you open your phone. And if the person on that end sees “X is a [fighting word]” especially heavily upvoted, liked, and shared, with the filterbubble hiding contrary opinions, it’s seen as social proof that this person or group of people are profoundly wrong and evil, and deserve to be destroyed. That’s how you get people to be okay with killing, and a nonzero number of people actually willing to kill.
This is how propaganda works. OG Nazis wanted radios in homes so they could send audio of speeches and the sound of wild applause at the threats against political enemies or in that case Jews could be heard by every German who would see this as social proof that most Germans are on board with those ideas. The reason to have video of thousands of ordinary people cheering to show before every movie is again to create the illusion of social proof so that Germans seeing those newsreels believe that this is what Germans want. We have much tge same thing in our media especially social media, where lots of people are being given tge impression that most Americans think that they live under a fascist dictatorship with ICE as the Gestapo rounding up Jews immigrants. And that’s breeding violence.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
Probably for average people. But political leaders tend to know where the public is. If there were a large offline contingent of democratic voters who are shocked, angered, and horrified by political violence, you would have seen democratic leaders in Congress, in state and local politics, or who are political influencers taking a rather large step back, issuing actual condemnations of the acts (now plural btw) of violence against political opponents. So where is that? Where are people for whom politics and political science are their profession, whose job depends on getting it right with the public, or whose rating depend on not alienating the public who get the message of “normal people absolutely do not want political violence.?”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
That would also tend to mean that not many on the left are liking and sharing such content, which is to me a signal as well.
I don’t see many unequivocal comments that say the targeting of ICE or Charlie Kirk are wrong, I don’t see a ratcheting down of rhetoric, or even calls for such. That’s pretty darn bad. The only rhetorical blowback was the two-day cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel and a couple of stations still not wanting to air the show. Most of the left including mainstream professional broadcasters on the left seem to view any calls to tone it down, or to maybe just maybe not publish things that call Kirk evil White Christian Nationalist before he even gets a funeral (thus justifying the homicide) are widely seen as “censorship” and any company that does so is to expect liberals canceling their subscription (which is why Disney folded). That’s not “we don’t want anything like this to happen again.” That’s not even “we feel bad for our part of creating this environment.” It’s basically “we at best don’t care if people get shot.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
You mean they’re generally sedentary and eat ultra processed junk food? It’s not much of a mystery that the generation of my parents in 1960 were healthier and lacked man-boobs — they went outside and played sports in real life using their real muscles. Mom cooked at home using such exotic ingredients as chicken, beef, pork, flour, milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables. Amazing how eating real food and playing sports outside with real people made them healthy.
Definitely the spooks.
I did a detox fairly recently and I think the key is to find some other activities that you replace scrolling with to help ease the cravings. I found if I had things like books, puzzles and art supplies or writing supplies close at hand you can choose to scratch the itch in more useful ways.
It’s rough because I’m discovering that the screen itself is a hyperstimulous and therefore when you use a screen for an activity it creates a sort of craving for more screen time. Even switching to a soduku app instead of a paper book makes a difference— I’d crave my iPad to play soduku where I could take or leave a soduku book or crossword book. Realizing this is valuable to me, and really kind of scary. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s hard to get away from the idea that screens are generally the worst way to handle anything, and that they really need to be treated like any other potentially addictive stuff.
I’m personally skeptical of time blocking because of this addiction aspect. Making rules around how you use an addictive substance not only isn’t recovery, but is often used as a way to say “I don’t really have a problem.” If you have a drinking problem that you’re pretending to control because you only drink after 5pm or only on weekends, not only are you still addicted, but you’re impeding your recovery. TBH I’ve often used such things as a quick test of addiction— if you are saying something like “not me im in control because I …” that’s a huge red flag.
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