MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think until the rhetoric ratchets down to even remotely sane levels, and people stop acting like Wolverines in Red Dawn in training or radicalized rhetoric, I don’t think it reasonable to assume that an eventual hot war (which will look like the Irish Troubles) is pretty safe as a bet. If anything, we’re moving toward more violence, not less, and those pushing the memes enabling all of this are more often celebrated than punished. Kimmel pretty much celebrated the assassination and freaking Disney is still paying for his show (on a positive note, affiliate stations are often refusing to air it). Where’s the evidence of people stepping back and saying “this is just plain unacceptable?”
I have some Moldbug sympathies, not that im completely opposed to some sort of self government, but that most people are so completely unsuited to the task that they must be told firmly to sit down and shut up so government actually works.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
How much risk is reasonable risk. This idea is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but there’s just no definitive answer to “when does the risk get bad enough that cops or ICE or political figures are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?” ICE is subject to serious doxxing and real-time tracking, they’re being shot at, their home addresses and thus their families’ locations are publicized thus meaning that a radicalized idiot with a gun could show up at their house, their kids’ school, or anywhere else they go. Police might get a guy they tried to arrest mad enough to try something, but it’s actually pretty rare and there are no databases or tracking apps telling people where law enforcement is at every moment. There are no public figures that refer to cops as Gestapo or quote Anne Frank every time the local beat officer arrests someone.
If ICE were treated like local cops and given the support given to cops, sure, I get the idea that you should accept risk, and that you should be able to be identified. In tge current circumstances, asking for that means that you want these agents and their families dead. Because in this particular environment, that’s tge clear and obvious result of demasking agents while they’re being shot at, doxxed with public databases, the rhetoric compares their work to Nazis rounding up Jews, and there are apps to real time track them still available for download.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean I think they’re already on some level suicidal and they decide to kill as a way to bring attention to their biggest grievance.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Three political attempts at violence in a decade is much lower than the current baseline which is at least 5-6 within the last 6 months. You can’t really reach absolute zero, but having those events be rare is a much better thing. The 1970s were more radical mostly because of Vietnam and the draft and mostly calmed down once the war and draft ended.
Butler I regard as at least semi political simply because I don’t think you can non-politically shoot a presidential candidate during a campaign rally. He was also disturbed as I understand it, so mental illness plays a role.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
There’s also a case to be made that the violence problem doesn’t start with your minimum number of shootings, but with what we have now — growing normalization, increased dehumanization of political opponents, and political extremism. When large portions of the population believe their opponents to be threats to democracy, and it becomes normal to refer to them as evil and subhuman, you get more shootings.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Okay, but anything short of saying “federal agents doing their job” is tacitly enabling the narrative they’re Gestapo goose stepping into Home Depot to arrest anyone who looks Mexican. At some point, leadership has to say “I don’t like it, but it’s more important to protect officers doing their job” or they bare some responsibility for acts committed against them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Being fair, it’s fairly clear that any connected with ICE who gets identified is being doxxed, and the officer as well as his family are being threatened, and now that we’re at the point of shooting at them, isolated calls for de masking ice agents may as well be stated as “please make it easier for random crazy people to identify you, find your home address and threaten or even kill you.” Theres perhaps reason for numbers, or some other unique ID to be visible, but a full face and a name in the era of the internet are enough that you may as well have them wear their name, address, phone number, and instagram account name.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think honestly the best answer is serious pressure, social and political against all political bomb throwers. The reason that political violence in 1980 was rare was that it was socially unacceptable to be a radical, mainstream media was corralled by technology (there were only 3 channels and news content was limited to a hour a day and whatever was printed in the newspaper), by social pressure (people refusing to watch entire stations who got too radical, or calling the FCC to complain), and because the screen was in a public place, there was social stigma at play to people — especially minor children— watching radical content. In the home, mom can turn off the television, especially since there’s only one and it’s in the living room.
Going on to social pressure, the only people who were radicals were either very quiet about it or were basically social pariahs. The open communist, post high school worked in the fine field of low-rent retail and fast food restaurants. He had few friends and generally only among other true-believing pariahs like himself. If you worked in an office job, you wouldn’t talk about politics because saying anything even slightly outside the fairly narrow window of things white make middle class office workers believed was a good way to end a career. All of this social conformity kept the violence down because it’s hard to justify violence if you’re not pretty radical in your ideology. And if you are pressured to not be radical, and can’t marinate in radical ideology, it’s a lot of work to become and remain a radical as you get pushback from people you know and people who have power over you.
So my suggestion is to basically leverage those kinds of ideas. Make political radicals losers again. Don’t hang around with them, don’t hire them, and don’t let them be radicals in public. Policy wise I would hope that some kind of control can be exerted such that radical content on social media, streaming services, and on cable networks can be removed. Barring that, at least in your own home, be aware of the kinds of content and social media your kids are consuming and as possible prevent them from getting into those kinds of content or influencers. If I were a parent I’d look at the people he’s into and seeing if they are dancing around because Kirk got shot or are calling MAGA or the government authoritarian or something.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
We don’t have one yet on the level of other places. The Middle East has refined political murder and calling for the blood of your enemies into an art form. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a very serious problem with political radicalism and growing acceptance of violence. Those things exist and exist quite openly on very mainstream platforms including mainstream liberal cable news and radio and podcasts. When you keep yelling Nazi, comparing the ICE Raids to Nazi deportations, quote Anne Frank talking about Nazi deportations in her era and winking that Trump is doing this, and tells you that their Democracy is at stake, you can’t help but create the kind of environment where someone unstable will decide to Save Our Democracy with real bullets aimed at real people.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think there is a strong case for canceling particularly egregious forms of political responses to the death of political figures simply because of the radicalizing effects of being on social media especially those curated by algorithms and that act as filters for content. To be blunt we are not only radicalizing people, but normalizing it, and now celebrating the deaths of political opponents. Unless we very quickly return to the norms of civility and decency that used to exist — where you could disagree with people and even fight for what you believe in, but you also respected the other side and didn’t treat it as a death-match. I find it unfortunate to have to resort to cancellation, but I can’t really think of any other effective means to force de escalation here. Letting people do happy dances on TikTok celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk and letting people normalize extreme rhetoric about political opponents is simply lightning the fuse on whoever (left or right) is going to tick off the opposite filter bubble the most. Firing people is extreme and shouldn’t be done lightly or for mere opinions, but I also think it’s perfectly reasonable and appropriate to fire people for promoting extremism or violence or celebrating violence.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
How many academic journals would even consider a well-researched trans-skeptical study? Not even publish, but get to the point of doing a serious peer review? And going down the list of other things MAGA/MAHA takes seriously, tge same question— if a journal received a paper that was well-researched but says ivermectin is an effective treatment for Covid, do they send it out for peer review, or is it simply circular filed and ignored? In order to start doing the serious alternative research you want MAGA/MAHA to do, they need access to the journals and conferences that give legitimacy to the science. Furthermore, could a secretary go back to empirical evidence if the studies are strongly biased and the journals are captured? If the medical and science establishment were radically traditional Catholic, you aren’t going to be able to roll back to “evidence backed monotheism” because anything that isn’t in line with traditional Catholic teachings hasn’t gotten through.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
My generic advice for habits is that if you want to stop, you need to put as much friction as possible between you and the stimulus. In the case of sugar and alcohol, my advice is “win at the grocery store” meaning don’t buy things that you don’t want to be consuming. If you’re quitting alcohol, then don’t have any in your home. At minimum, that means drinking requires you to get dressed and leave home. And if eating cookies requires you to bake them yourself or having ice cream means putting on pants and getting in the car, you’re not going to do it much.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think honestly, I’d distance my family especially children from these people. You can be personally nice, but don’t let your kids hang around that family as the child is likely experiencing social contagion and his parents seem unwilling or unable to question it or do anything about it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think outside of the world building, there’s not much to Sanderson. It’s interesting in a kind of D&D setting way, but it lacks a lot of cultural elements, the characters and plot aren’t that interesting, the politics is nonexistent.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
There’s a difference between comedy satire and making fun of someone’s death. And a lot of statements made by news media and regular media today would have been so horrific to someone living in 1960 that they would have whisked these people off the air as soon as they said some of the things they said. There’s no chance that Kimmel would have been able to mock the death of a political figure in 1964 probably not even 1974. Not necessarily that people had thin skin, but you weren’t going to stay on the air even to finish the monologue if you were doing things like that. More than likely you would end up seeing Kimmel escorted off the set and the producers apologize to the audience for that bit.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean the problem with incremental changes is that they’re often gamed along the way. If you make sudden drastic changes then you can’t simply keep going while your lawyer finds the loopholes. And thus you end up doing things like fudging job titles to make tge lower wages not taxable. Sure a senior developer might get 160K a year. But Pajeet is actually a junior developer (just ignore that his tasks are exactly like a senior developer). Or if it’s 180 days in country before fines or payments kick in, you just need to get the guy on a plane on day 180, wait a few days and bring him back on a fresh H1B. If you give the. Until tomorrow to cough up the money you can’t rules-lawfare your way out of it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
The problem is the format itself. It’s basically a live podcast, with a host that tells bad jokes, a ton of padding, and set dressing because for some reason it is being put on TV instead of on the radio or in a podcast. And in that vein, its competition has huge advantages— cheaper format, not being bound to a time slot, cheaper hosts, no need for sets, costumes, or live music. Any decent comedian could do exactly what Kimmel and Colbert were doing at 1/10 or less the cost, and I don’t think the format of late night comedy shows makes sense.
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.
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