MartianNight
No bio...
User ID: 1244
MartianNight
1yr ago
According to Wikipedia there were 52 school shootings in the US in 2022 alone, and that's not even an outlier. Seems like if you could cut if down by 50% that would be pretty noticeable, though it would be tricky to prove a causal relationship.
MartianNight
1yr ago
It was probably the same video as discussed here: https://old.reddit.com/r/TimDillon/comments/vzuhtk/vaush_is_a_sociopath/
I'll transcribe (most) of it for sake of discussion:
Vaush is commenting on a video of a group of women talking their experience with sexual assault.
Vaush: “Do you think it speaks to the fact that we have a rape culture, when we put six women in a room to talk about #MeToo and they've all been raped and they all can barely choke out a coherent sentence. Do we think this perhaps maybe slightly speaks to the fact that there is a problem? [..] Almost every female friend I have has been the recipient of sexual assault or violence or rape or whatever at some point in their lives. It's such a common thing. 1 in 4 is probably understating it significantly. I wouldn't be surprised if the rate for sexual assault on women over one's lifetime is as high as 1 in 3 or 1 in 2, we just don't know, because nobody fucking reports! Because reports aren't being taken seriously! That's what #MeToo is about.”
Woman on the video: “...but things impact you in bizarre ways. Because the perpetrator wasn't white, and because he was part of a certain religion...”
Vaush: “Wait. Are we being real?”
Woman: ”And the police were basically like, we can't, because of cultural differences, which I don't feel like is such a great...”
Vaush: “What? Bullshit! Are you fucking kidding me? Did she turn her fucking rape confession into how the rape-fugees fucking Ahmed and Mohammed raped her and the police were like, uh, we can't prosecute brown people. Bullshit! Bullshit!”
In his defense, he didn't say he thought the woman was lying, or that Muslims never rape white women, but he said that connecting her rape story to refugees/Muslims was “bullshit”. I do agree he is hypocritical, but that's because apparently he doesn't want people talking about rape at the hands of Muslim immigrants, even when it was allegedly grounds for the police to dismiss her report, but presumably he would have had no problem if she had described her abuser as a Catholic priest, or a native white man, or any other group that is deemed okay to hate, even if it's not relevant to the story.
MartianNight
1yr ago
Has anyone ever done any research on the success of these kind of dating docs? My guess would be that if you're male, it's mostly pointless, since you're just outing yourself as a person that's too socially inept to get a date the “regular” way, which is a huge turn-off to women, while if you're a woman then you can get away with it since the pool of men who this sort of thing appeals to is at least an order of magnitude larger than the number of women fishing in this pool, so the only limiting factor is whether the woman is willing to lower her standards to the point that she will accept the vaguely-autistic sort of man that this appeals to.
(I was going to link to Richard M. Stallman's Personal Ad as an early example of a male “dating doc”: it has been online since 2003. But in 2022 it was updated with “I am in a long-term relationship now and not looking for another”! So apparently this strategy can work for someone like Stallman, even if you have to wait nearly 20 years.)
MartianNight
1yr ago
She doesn't have to hit the gym or dress better. She's already attractive in her demographic because of her sex and the fact that she's not ugly or obese.
MartianNight
1yr ago
First, let me say that I appreciate you commenting, since so many posters here are conservative and/or rightist, so it's nice to also hear from people with a different perspective. That being said, I'm still going to disagree with you, since that's kind of the point of this place.
It sounds like you are a homosexual transsexual (HSTS) to use Blanchard's typology, which means you are quite different from autogynephiles like Contrapoints. I don't think your experiences are typical of trans-identified males in general.
We gender people based on secondary sexual characteristics, not biological sex.
No, we use those secondary sexual characteristics to attempt to infer biological sex, much like how you might infer that the person wearing a police uniform and driving a police car is, in fact, a police officer.
It's certainly possible to pretend to be something you're not, with various levels of success. Military imposters are virtually universally scorned for their duplicity. The same is true for race-fakers like Rachel Dolezal. I would put sex-fakers in the same category and afford them little sympathy.
If you see someone who looks like Hunter Schafer or Emma Ellingsenyour brain will go "she" and you will have to correct yourself.
Again, it's definitely possible to fake your sex, the same way I might be able to convince people that I'm a police officer or a Nigerian Prince. But of course that doesn't really prove anything more than the fact that people can be fooled.
Honestly the focus on appearance over substance sounds like a motte-and-bailey argument: the motte is that some people are so good at faking their sex they are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, and the bailey is that anyone who identifies as a woman becomes one.
Personally I don't think that transgender people are particularly good at faking their sex. Natalie Wynn still strikes me as a male despite the enormous amount of effort she puts into passing. Other people are even less succesfull.
To that point, it's funny that you mentioned Buck Angel: I like him a lot, but he vaguely passes as a male only if you limit yourself to looking at his highly-edited photos. In real life he's a 60-year-old, squeaky-voiced, 5'8" manlet. The idea that he could successfully rob anyone who couldn't be robbed by a woman is preposterous. Never mind the fact that he's just too nice to do something like that: he is, despite his gender identification, still very much female at heart. It's really weird to me that genderists champion him as the obvious example of a woman-who-has-become-a-man when, if you dive below the surface, he is not a typical male at all.
So put your cards on the table. Do you think that recognizing someone as a woman is contingent on them passing as one? If so, do you agree that it is more than fair to call obvious men like Lia Thomas, Rachel Levine, Emilia Decaudin, Jessica Yaniv, Alok Vaid Menon, etc. men?
Or do you think, according to the common leftist talking point, that a woman is everyone who says they are, regardless of how poorly they pass? If you belief the latter, it seems irrelevant that some transwomen might pass relatively well.
MartianNight
1yr ago
I'm guessing the recent Roald Dahl edits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl_revision_controversy
MartianNight
1yr ago
This is a bad comment. If you want to equate copyright infringement to theft, you should put in the effort to prove it, or at least link to another comment (which you claim exists) that does.
It's pretty obvious from the dictionary definition of theft (“the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it”) that copyright infringement is not theft. It might still be bad for other reasons, but the burden of proof is on you to support that claim.
MartianNight
1yr ago
The truth is that females just don't care about computer programming at all. Yes, there are some female engineers at woke companies like Facebook and Google, but none of them do software development in their free time: working as a software engineer is just an easy way to make a lot of money to them (which is easy for them because the hiring policy greatly benefits them, and they are practically immune from being fired). Consequently, all open source software is developed by males, and anyone presenting as a woman is actually a trans-identifying male, especially the people who are into a super-niche field that women wouldn't give a fuck about because it won't help them get a job, like developing game console emulators and stuff like that.
It's not about discrimination either. It costs you nothing to create a github account, or to sign up for a competitive programming contest. But females will absolutely refuse to do any of that stuff. So yes: all the CS-related blogs are written by males. I'm not even being facetious: there is not a single worthwhile CS blog written by a biological female. If the above comments sound sexist to you, please prove me wrong by citing counter-examples.
MartianNight
1yr ago
I think you're greatly overthinking this. If you assume females don't care about computer science, then logically all CS blogs are written by males, and the only CS blogs written by “women” are trans. This is exactly what happens in practice.
MartianNight
1yr ago
Yes, I exaggerated for dramatic effect, but I think the field is more heavily skewed than you imagine.
It's true that tech firms like Google sometimes hire women to work on open-source projects like Chromium, so technically there are female open-source contributors. But since these women don't haven an intrinsic interest in the field they're not really going to push the boundaries, which really is necessary for other people to follow your work.
It's like going to a tech convention where someone hired a bunch of booth babes to improve the gender ratio, but at the end of the day, the most interesting conversations happen in the hotel lobby, after the women have gone home, because nobody paid them to stay and they have better things to do with their evening than talk to a bunch of nerds about a topic that's boring to them.
Open source software development is still based very much around passion. Linus Torvalds famously announced Linux with “I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)”. Terry A. Davis developed TempleOS because God commanded him to; it's an extremely impressive project that, unlike Linux, is used by nobody. It seems like only males take on projects like this: things nobody asked for and that do not come with the promise of a reward. Is there literally a single female person on the planet who would consider creating an operation system from scratch just as a hobby?
MartianNight
1yr ago
What do you mean, “communist”? That's present-day Russia: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TbzV1it1YPY
MartianNight
11mo ago
The belief that he is a “degenerate” whose death doesn't matter is founded on the assumption that he was a menace to society himself, beyond simply being a homeless subway busker. Then it matters a great deal whether the violent crimes people attribute to him actually happened or not.
This is a general pattern in the culture war that really irks me. People decide they don't like someone, then either fabricate evidence or present it in the most damning way. This happens on Reddit all the time. For example, Redditors say the executives of Norfolk Southern should be in jail because they turned East Ohio into an uninhabitable wasteland. If you point out that there is no evidence that the area is or will become uninhabitable by any reasonable definition, they downvote you, because you're challenging their conclusion.
In the case of Jordan Neely, if you think he's a degenerate because he kidnaps children, it's rather important to prove whether that's true. If Jordan Neely is a degenerate even without evidence that he kidnapped a child, then people should present the evidence for that without resorting to unproven allegations.
And don't get me started on the fact that many charges can be framed in completely different ways depending on whether you like the accused or not. For example, “he kidnapped a child” can mean anything ranging from “he snatched a random toddler off the streets and stuffed her in the trunk of his car” to “he took his fifteen-year-old son on an out-of-state family visit in contravention of the custody arrangement with his ex-wife”. When you mention “child kidnapping”, people probably instinctively think of the former, while most cases are probably more like the latter.
First, an obligatory comment that dropping bare links as top-level comments in the Culture War topic is a faux-pas, boo you, mods will probably scold you a bit for this.
Second, and rather low-effort, I can't get over how utterly obnoxious most writing for the New Yorker is. I assume everyone here appreciates detailed, long-form commentary, and the New Yorker superficially provides that, but the thing is that making an article long and wordy doesn't make it good. Scott Alexander's posts are long but what makes them good is that he uses this length to cover a lot of ground. New Yorker articles, including this one, often feel like someone took a mildly interesting anecdote and prompted an AI with “pad this short draft out to 10x the length it needs to be, while making the author sound like a pretentious twat that has no greater joy in life than smelling their own farts”.
Case in point, what the fuck is up with paragraphs like this:
I spoke with a trans person in their early thirties who told me that the number of available labels at first made them pause. “Those are the labels that exist, but they exist almost like a step ahead of where I exist,” they said. “I’ve gotten closer to those labels based on the connections that I’ve made, but I wasn’t in a place to know them ahead of time.” The language of identity does not always precede experience, they continued. Over time, “you figure out what language you need to speak in order to be seen.”
What the fuck is this supposed to convey? What's the information content of this entire paragraph? This is just fucking garbage writing that was included because the author is a pathetic handmaiden that had to include some trans POV to get her article published.
And not to mention the final paragraph:
The people who craft anti-trans legislation and laws to control sexuality see lives that are different than theirs as a threat to their own integrity. Imagine what that must be like, to not be able to think about change, and the possibilities it might offer.
What the fucking hell has any of this to do with a dating app for pretentious fartknockers?
Okay, let me try to balance out the pot shots with some commentary on the meat of the article. What I gathered from the article, Feeld is a hookup app for pretentious assholes who disguise their base horniness with pompous terms like “ethical nonmonogamist”, and you pledge allegiance to the woke by hating on straight white males, as is tradition.
With that in mind, look at the author (who, by the name, I assume is female, though given the wokeness of it all and the fact that their name is ”Emily” might well be a female-presenting transgender), and their experience on the app:
Feeld, unlike most other dating apps, quantifies the interest its users receive with a number that Kirova assured me is real. In the two years I’ve been on the app, more than eleven thousand people have liked my profile, whose only proscriptive has been “no liars.” I’ve never felt as much license to dismiss male entitlement as I have on Feeld. If a man casually insults my appearance; if he pressures me to meet after I’ve said that I’m busy; if he treats me like a food-delivery service, ready to serve him when he’s in the mood; if he imposes rote pornographic fantasies on me without any curiosity or charm; if he indicates that he’ll try to negotiate his way out of using condoms; if he is coy or unforthcoming in a way that makes me suspicious; if he has no sense of humor or isn’t kind—I disconnect without hesitation or regret. There is no reason to tolerate any dehumanizing or insulting behavior.
Summary: woman puts minimal effort in her dating profile, receives thousands of likes anyway (mostly from horny straight white males, who are to be despised), and quickly dismisses the majority of messages from men. This somehow makes Feeld special, but isn't this the absolute standard norm on every dating/hookup app ever?
I’ve gone back to the standard dating apps a couple times, but none offered the same ease of connection. I kept experiencing a suffocating gender dynamic: regardless of the kind of person I am, I was somehow forced into the role of a desperate pursuer trying to win the affection of the elusive and “emotionally unavailable” male, a dynamic that was confusing to see revived in a moment when I was experiencing as much sexual agency as I’d ever had in my life.
Again, assuming that this person is a cis-female that is not absolutely horrendous-looking, what dating app were they on that they can't get 100 messages from desperate males within an hour of signing up with a single bad photo of themselves? It all seems like total bullshit to me.
I wonder how much people get paid to write this kind of garbage, and who's paying them. I doubt they're doing it for free.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Based on this explanation, the kids were 100% in the wrong, and the nurse 100% in the right. They might not have been trying to steal her bike and make her pay the lost fee, but they were still entirely at fault for the whole interaction.
The entire point of public bikes is that anyone can reserve them. When the kids returned the bikes they no longer had a claim on them and the nurse had every right to try to rent one for her own use. That she was pregnant and came off a 12 hour shift doesn't even have anything to do with it: the boys had not rented any of the bikes, and did not want to rent any of them at this moment, which meant they had absolutely no justification for stopping the nurse from renting one.
their version is that if they'd given up the bike, one of them would have had to find some other way to get back to the Bronx
This is a pitiful excuse. First, that's not her problem in the least. Second, this has an obvious solution: the final guy just waits until someone else returns another bike.
Even if you accepted that there were only X bikes and X+1 people needing to get home. Shouldn't one of the healthy able-bodied teenage boys walk home rather than the obviously heavily-pregnant nurse?
In conclusion, according to your version of the story, the boys were selfishly abusing the system. This is why we can't have nice things: assholes want to benefit from the system (free rides), but don't want to play by its rules (after a certain amount of time, you either start paying or return the bike so someone else can rent it).
MartianNight
11mo ago
I'm not accusing you of fabricating anything. I'm just saying I find your conclusion baffling, according to the facts as you present them.
MartianNight
11mo ago
In isolation I would agree with you but a lot of the criticism came from the sort of people who say stuff like “you can't call the cops on black criminals because the police might shoot them [and if they do, that's on you for not wanting to be victimized]”, clearly implying that ultimate consequences are on the consciousness of the instigator. If we are consistent and apply that same logic here, then the black men are at least partially responsible for the harmful results of the video they chose to share online (despite knowing they were in the wrong!)
Take for example this article (from a “journalist” that cannot group sentences into paragraphs):
This was a dispute over a rental bike, but she escalated it in a way that could have caused harm to those young Black men, and we cannot lose sight of that.
And:
The situation could have easily been resolved, but Sarah Jane Comrie chose a different tactic.
She chose to do a thing a lot of white women before her have done — a thing that has caused the deaths of so many Black people — and that is why everyone is upset.
That is why her actions are being labeled racist.
That is why she is being called out.
This was a dispute over a rental bike, but those black men escalated it in a way that has caused harm to this pregnant woman. This situation could have easily been resolved, but the men chose a different tactic. They chose to do a thing a lot of black people before them have done — a thing that has caused so many white people to get fired from their jobs — and that's why everyone is upset. That's why they are being called out.
MartianNight
11mo ago
First, I don't think it's true that if the races were swapped the right would be defending the men. Right-wingers like pregnant women and don't like selfish gangs of young men. In general, I think the left hates white people way more than the right hates black people. So you would not necessarily see a reversal of attitudes, but rather loud condemnation from the left (how dare those white privileged male privileged devils harass a proud woman of color?), and at best a muted response from the right.
Second, practically speaking, even if right-wingers would condemn the black woman in the hypothetical gender-swapped version, there is absolutely no chance in hell that right-wingers would be able to get a crying pregnant black female nurse suspended from her job for being bullied by a group of abusive white guys, and that's double true in New York City. Let me know if you disagree but I think this is such a blatantly obvious truth that it doesn't really require more elaboration.
MartianNight
10mo ago
I think it's quite common for audiences to rate movies higher than critics. It seems to happen a lot for sequels and remakes, where dedicated fans will go out and watch it even though critics pan the sequel for not being sufficiently innovative.
For example, The Black Stallion Returns, the very unnecessary 1983 sequel to the beloved 1979 original, holds a 20% critic score but a 73% audience score. Why the discrepancy? Critics correctly pointed out that this film followed basically the same storyline as the previous movie yet it didn't improve upon it in any way, so there was no reason for this movie to be made. Audiences seemed to like it for exactly the same reason: they loved the original and this is more of the same so why shouldn't they like it too?
You can also see this effect in the ratings for The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, the sequel to the Disney classic, which practically copies the storyline and cast of characters from the original. It has 17% critic and 45% audience approval, and although both scores are low, again the audience seems to be way more forgiving than the critics.
The same applies to the live action remake of Beauty and the Beast which is more popular with audiences (80%) than critics (71%), despite starring notable feminist Emma Watson. (This movie was only mildly controversial because they'd made LeFou explicitly gay, which probably boosted critic reviews, and lowered audience scores.)
I can totally believe that for the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, the verified audience (i.e., the people who paid money to go see the movie) are more positive about it than the critics. It seems to follow the same pattern as other Disney remakes: not a lot of innovation, but the fans seem to eat it up anyway.
So I think your second possibility is closer to the truth: the people most upset about the race-swapping probably didn't even watch the movie.
In addition, I suspect there is some selection effect going on: I suspect the woke are more likely to be verified Rotten Tomato users, since it seems to involve sharing your personal data to Rotten Tomatoes or something (I honestly don't know how it works), which would probably exclude older (i.e., less woke) people and people critical of big tech (i.e. less woke). So the “verified” population probably skews heavily woke, and is not representative of the overall audience.
Also, Peter Pan & Wendy, another woke remake coming out at almost the same time, has an audience score of 11%.
Note that in this case, Rotten Tomatoes shows you the all audience score, not a verified score. That movie was also the subject of woke controversy due to race and gender swapping a bunch of characters, so a lot of the negative scores probably come from people who were unhappy about those changes. This isn't an apples-to-oranges comparison.
MartianNight
10mo ago
If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe.
Again, it's not “with no comment”, RT explicitly tells you they are only including verified viewers, so that cuts out the review bombers just like on IMDB, and probably limits votes to American audiences (which are probably more supportive of race-swapping and other woke nonsense).
What I typically do when looking up ratings on IMDB is check out the distribution of votes (which I believe is not censored), ignore the highest and lowest scores, and then look at where the bulk of the histogram is. This doesn't work for movies that are extremely good or extremely bad (e.g., The Godfather, or The Room) but those are exceptions. It works great for controversial films, e.g. Cuties has an average rating of 3.6/10, and 70% of voters gave it 1/10, but the bulk is around 7/10 which I think is a fair grade.
Using the same metric, take a look at The Little Mermaid and the other remakes you mentioned:
You can see that audiences legitimately rated this one higher than all those other remakes (the bulk of the histogram is at 7/10 but 8/10 is really close with 6000 vs 5600 votes). Aladdin comes closest but cannot exactly match it. And yes, the score on IMDB is lower than on RT but that's partially because IMDB tends to be more critical overall, and because the calculation is different. Again, Aladdin has 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.9/10 on IMDB. Unless you believe RT fixed Aladdin's score too, it's fair to say that IMDB voting patterns support the fact that audiences liked The Little Mermaid at least as much as Aladdin.
MartianNight
10mo ago
Mulan was also the released at the height of the COVID pandemic, which probably had a larger impact on its revenue than the contents.
MartianNight
10mo ago
Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you.
I don't assume that; I tried to investigate the possibility by corroborating the RT figures with more transparant sources like IMDB, and I think it's plausible that the RT verified audience score is real.
It sounds like you've predetermined that RT is explicitly manipulating the data (beyond the biased selection mechanisms which we've already discussed) and you are not willing to consider evidence to the contrary.
I get that if you're an old conservative curmudgeon on a forum of likeminded people it's hard to imagine that 95% of the audience could like this movie, but you should at least be able to realize you're not the target audience, and consider the possibility that the actual audience doesn't have the same preferences as you do.
What percentage of Mottizens do you think are fans of Cardi B's music? And what percentage of people who attended a Cardi B concert do you think would say they enjoyed the show?
It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something
Okay, but this is a testable hypothesis at least. I don't see any reviews with less than ½ star or with no text. Is it even possible to give a zero-star rating or leave a rating without any comment? Or maybe comment-less ratings don't show up on the site but are still included in the score?
Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days.
Again, you assume that measures against review bombing are taken only for political reasons. Even witout politics, you need to do something to prevent review-bombing, otherwise scores reflect nothing but which group was able to drum up a larger army of trolls. That's obviously not what movie ratings should be about, regardless of political views.
I don't blame review sites for trying to combat that; I would probably do the same thing if I ran such a site, and I'm not left-wing and definitely not woke.
MartianNight
10mo ago
Ukraine was arguably a nicer place to live pre-war, although my guess is most white South Africans wouldn’t make the move in 2019 even if offered (generally they hold out for Australia, New Zealand, Canada, sometimes Britain, or bust).
The obvious answer seems to be that they don't want to move to a country where they don't speak the language. Afrikaans is a hybrid of 18th century English and Dutch, so obviously an English (or Dutch) speaking country is preferable to an Eastern-European country.
MartianNight
10mo ago
I think the analogy is more like maybe this is the meteor that kills the dinosaurs so the mammals can thrive.
MartianNight
10mo ago
This change is uniformly impacting everyone
This is plainly false. The API changes mostly affect third-party app users, and moderators that rely on bots/external tools that depend on the Reddit API. Users of old.reddit.com or even new.reddit.com aren't directly affected.
I always assumed that phone users made Reddit worse for people interested in information and discussion: following external links is harder in apps so this discourages citing sources or reading external resources, phone screens are too small to read long-form content, and writing detailed messages is hard. Consequently I imagine app users disproportionately write one-liners and upvote memes and short comments (the opposite of what people do on The Motte).
I think reddit without phone users would be an improvement over what it is today, even if it doesn't fix the moderation problem.
No, people do not deserve to be shot because the algorithm doesn't favor every creator equally (never mind the fact that the people she shot at weren't responsible for the YouTube algorithms in the first place). That's an insane position and if you truly believe it, you ought to defend it with arguments.
This wasn't a case of a person being wronged unfairly by Google, as happened in the past with people who had their accounts inexplicably suspended. Aghdam's account was never banned, but her videos were suppressed by the algorithm because they were cringe and weirdly sexual (example 1, example 2). This is exactly the kind of content YouTube discourages, partially because filling the frontpage with thirst traps doesn't fit its image, and partially because big advertisers only pay for brand-safe content. If you don't want to play by the rules, you shouldn't be on Youtube.
Whatever algorithm is used for recommendations, it will never be possible for every creator to become popular. It's no different with musicians on SoundCloud or aspiring actors in Hollywood. Any algorithm will therefore have winners and losers (including “completely random” or “newest only” feeds). There's no justification for the losers to go on a killing spree because they couldn't succeed within the ecosystem as it exists.
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