Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
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User ID: 265
Disclaimer: this post was written with LLM assistance; the ideas are mine, and I stand behind them
The Simp/Pimp Dialectic: Authenticity and Cultural Knowledge in 1980s-90s Hip-Hop
The term "simp" emerged in 1980s West Coast hip-hop not simply as the antonym of "pimp," but as a more nuanced critique of inauthenticity, cultural shallowness, and failed masculine performance. While contemporary usage has flattened the term into a simple insult for male submission to women, its original deployment by artists like Too Short, E-40, and Sir Mix-A-Lot encoded a sophisticated commentary on taste, realness, and the difference between genuine cultural knowledge and mere posturing. Understanding "simp" requires moving beyond the binary opposition of dominance versus submission and recognizing it as a term that could simultaneously attack both the fake player and the genuinely weak—united by their shared failure to embody authentic masculine competence within Black urban culture.
Too Short's description of a simp as a "knockoff pimp" is particularly revealing. The word "knockoff" suggests counterfeit goods—something designed to look like the real thing but fundamentally lacking in quality, craftsmanship, or authenticity. This framing positions the simp not as someone who has chosen a different path from pimping, but as someone attempting to inhabit that same space while failing utterly. The simp might put on the performance—talking the talk, claiming status, pursuing women—but lacks the genuine article beneath the surface. This interpretation aligns perfectly with hip-hop culture's broader obsession with "keeping it real" versus being exposed as fake, a distinction that could make or break an artist's credibility and, by extension, anyone's standing in the community.
Sir Mix-A-Lot's 1992 deployment of "simp" in "Baby Got Back" makes far more sense through this lens of authenticity versus superficiality than through any simple pimp/simp opposition. When he raps, "A lot of simps won't like this song / 'Cause them punks like to hit it and quit it / And I'd rather stay and play," he's not calling committed men simps—he's calling the "hit it and quit it" crowd simps because they're shallow, trend-following poseurs. These are men whose tastes have been colonized by mainstream (read: white) beauty standards, who chase after "Cosmo" ideals and "rock video" aesthetics rather than possessing the cultural depth to appreciate what Mix-A-Lot celebrates. They're fake because their desire is derivative, borrowed, inauthentic. They lack the connoisseur's eye, the deep cultural knowledge that would allow them to recognize and value what the mainstream dismisses. In this reading, the simp is culturally shallow—influenced by "skinny white girl culture" rather than grounded in authentic Black aesthetic appreciation.
Yet the term clearly also carried the "simpering weenie" meaning—the overly accommodating, submissive man who places too much value on women's approval and lacks the masculine self-possession that the pimp archetype embodied. This wasn't contradictory so much as it was targeting a different manifestation of the same fundamental failure: the absence of authentic masculine competence or "game." The 1992 Boyz II Men track "Sympin' Ain't Easy" captures this dimension, describing the degrading work of begging and pleading for female attention. Here the simp isn't pretending to be something he's not—he's genuinely weak, openly subordinate, transparently desperate. But both the fake player and the genuine weenie shared a common deficit: neither possessed real game, real knowledge, real cultural authority.
The semantic flexibility of "simp" allowed it to function as a catch-all critique of masculine inauthenticity in multiple registers. You could be a simp by being a poseur—someone trying to perform dominance or cultural knowledge you didn't actually possess. Or you could be a simp by being genuinely submissive—someone who had given up the performance entirely and openly accepted subordination. What united these uses was the fundamental assumption that authentic masculinity required a specific kind of cultural competence, self-possession, and freedom from both mainstream influence and female control. The pimp represented someone who had mastered this competence; the simp represented various modes of failure to achieve it.
This etymological complexity has been largely lost in the term's contemporary internet usage, which has reduced "simp" to a simple insult for male emotional availability or respect toward women. But the original 1980s-90s usage was far richer, encoding debates about authenticity, cultural capital, aesthetic discernment, and the performance of masculine competence within a specific subcultural context. The pimp/simp dichotomy wasn't really about control versus submission—it was about real versus fake, deep versus shallow, culturally grounded versus colonized by mainstream values. A simp could be someone faking dominance just as easily as someone genuinely submitting; what mattered was the failure to embody authentic masculine authority and cultural knowledge.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
23d ago
75% of your bodyweight in protein.
Wew, lad! What is your conversion factor, lbs to grams?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
23d ago
inhuman competitive forces.
Your point is taken and well-made, but I have to mention: Mises would disagree, but not Moloch!
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1mo ago
Which facts are you disputing? The deadly weapon operated by Good was an automobile. Good struck the officer with her vehicle. Assault with a deadly weapon. Babbitt did not assault any police officer and was unarmed. Babbitt died while trying to breach a windowed door.
Which side is my side?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1mo ago
One was an assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon. The other was breaking and entering. I believe these have different thresholds for the use of deadly force.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1mo ago
Here is some more on CoT that I find related and interesting, but revolving around deception:
https://nickandresen.substack.com/p/how-ai-is-learning-to-think-in-secret
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
2mo ago
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
2mo ago
Chris Bray has an interesting take
If you click on that last link, you’ll see a local TV news journalist going to one of the same daycare centers that Nick Shirley went to, and doing it long before. But you’ll also see a bunch of obvious differences in framing that turn out to be extremely important. Nick Shirley just said there are no children here; the mainstream journalist did a questions are being raised story, a “some claim” thing, noting the presence of regulatory violations. He even says out loud that he didn’t see any children at the supposed daycare center, but he can’t quite bring himself to stick the landing. He needs a government official to say that there are no children there. He needs an official narrative to advance. Watch for yourself if you want to see the difference.
There’s almost no difference between the facts aired by a Minneapolis TV station in January and the facts aired by Nick Shirley in December, but the tone and the framing are from a different universe. Mainstream journalists have been saying for years that some say there is fraud in Somali social services in Minneapolis. Controversy is swirling. Questions are being raised. Officials are looking into. Their instinctive focus is on narrative, on what is being said. They pull back. Nick Shirley races forward, and lavishes attention on the agitated response. Legacy media haven’t ignored the story; they’ve tiptoed up to its edges a thousand times.
See also the remarkable example of County Highway, which recently produced a long, detailed, deeply reported, and thoroughly grounded story on Somali social services fraud in Minneapolis, with eagle-eyed political context. Sample from a long story of what County Highway put into print well before the Nick Shirley video:
The state’s entire view of its role in society would soon change in ways that made the frauds far easier to execute. In 2016, Minnesota introduced a $35-million program that provided direct funding to state-based nonprofits working on issues of racial equity. Over the next few years, the state embraced an easily abused model of service delivery through private-sector clients, even as evidence mounted that these programs were beacons for fraudsters.
In 2018, a whistleblower claimed that over $100 million in payments through the state’s childcare assistance program had been fraudulent. The way the scam worked was dismayingly simple: Daycares and other childcare providers, which require a license to operate in Minnesota, would obtain names and identifying information for children eligible for state-subsidized care and then bill the government for services they hadn’t actually rendered. Mark Koran, a Republican state senator and former tax official who has worked closely on the fraud issue for nearly a decade and who I met in Saint Paul, said that millions of dollars in such proceeds were taken to East Africa in cash. In 2017, Twin Cities travelers declared $100 million in physical cash transfers out of the country to airport customs agents.
But this story produced something like a fraction of one percent of the attention that Nick Shirley got with a dramatic video, which is an…interesting thing to notice.
Swiss cheese: Information has to flow through a long series of gates that don’t overlap, overcoming the faked-up reactions and distractions, overcoming the absence of patience among consumers of information, overcoming official uninterest and calculated distortion, and probably a dozen other gates that we can think of if we put our heads together.
Note that the first point here collides with the second point: All the people saying that Nick Shirley suddenly just made up a fake story to get clicks or advance his evil far-right agenda run head-on into the problem of a decade of the same topic being discussed.
Nick Shirley wasn’t the first, or anything near it. But he was the one who broke through, for reasons that can be discovered and elaborated. That’s something to think about as we consider all the things that need to be dragged into the light in a sick political culture.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
Wasn't it Lorenz who secretly surveiled a Clubhouse gathering only to falsely accuse Marc Andreesen of being retarded?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
As Churchill said, nobody now mourns the native Americans beyond the vapid and entirely European absurdity of “land acknowledgements”.
What did he say?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
You seem to say that judgement is a major factor. It's not merely the quantity of labor expended that makes something valuable. People have to like it.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
5mo ago
I never really cared for the guy but had some kind of lasting respect for him. I desperately want to watch the CK documentary or be involved in its production.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
5mo ago
They deserved the humiliation, but the pretense of "promoting dialogue" was completely hollow, and the massive number of shallow, cow-like people in the US for whom it is convincing depresses me.
This depresses me.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
5mo ago
I have read that Claude and/or Claude Code has gotten dumber lately, due to "quantization", which I think makes a lower resolution model that is cheaper to operate. So that may be why I feel like Sonnet has a case of the dumbs. I rarely interact with Opus or Gemini Pro these days, on the CLI.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
6mo ago
I got interested in the ESP32 stuff just from learning a little about the language, Espressif? It might have been something else, and you can see I never got into it. But one day! I will be a hardware guy doing a lot with cheap chips.
EDIT: I realize that I am not quite following the instructions for this forum. I thought of this is as more of a technical discussion forum and did not want to post this in the CW thread.
Coding agents.
I use Gemini and Claude. I pay $20 for Anthropic Pro, so I am not using API tokens for Claude. With Gemini, you can do a lot with just a google account, or at least you definitely could on day 1.
I am hating Gemini lately. If I load the Pro model (default), I get mostly nothing but 503 errors. This was not the case roughly a month ago, when Google was promising a Pro response every 60 seconds and "you won't run out of tokens" or whatever. Fine, it's free, I get it. So now I use gemini-2.5-flash mostly. But this motherfucker is constantly undermining me. If I can get flash into a groove, we do fine, but I fight this guy a lot. I also get a vibe of "petulant laborer". It kind of cracks me up.
Claude is great, super friendly and helpful. I almost exclusively use Sonnet, and Sonnet has a case of the dumbs. It's extremely manageable, and I get more work done with Claude than Gemini. I can switch to Opus, and I will run out of my Pro credits and then open a Gemini session.
When I get stuck, I go to chatgpt.com and copy/paste. This usually unsticks me or gives me a new direction. I see this for 3 reasons:
- a new model
- a web prompt is a more direct interface to the model than the coding agent
- OpenAI sauce
I guess I'll use the OpenAI cursor thing sooner or later. I am CLI-only, headless linux for dev. I have a graphical environment for browsing, etc.
I rarely have the agent make commits, and I have regretted every session where the phrase "vibe coding" popped into my head. I try to discuss more with the agents than make edits, but I do have them make a lot of edits. They are more edit-happy than I would like. The main value-add for the agent, for me, is just the read-access to my project. That they can edit files directly is nice, but also kinda scary and has gone wrong for me. I'm much more comfortable with code generation than code editing. I love these guys for code generation, but I always edit their code, which usually works but ugly. I ask for review more than generation more than edits.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
6mo ago
Ha, definitely not. But I'll take it as a compliment.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
6mo ago
Thanks for this. I grew up in the Deep South but with California parents, mostly irreligious and a mild political divide (red dad, blue mom). My dad the provider, my mom raised us to be broadly liberal, in maybe the best way. I grew up thinking of old stodgy conservatives and young fresh liberals, but not quite in those terms. Around 14 or 15 I had a heavy influence from a big leftist peer, though I didn't recognize this at the time, but also developed my libertarian instincts from a high school history teacher slash debate coach.
I went to college and 9/11 hit, and it was big rightward shift. Atheism, Sam Harris, Muslims, Terrorists. Sam Harris of course at this time is nowhere near the right and remains so IMHO. But I had never considered ROTC or CIA or FBI and all of a sudden these are interesting to me. At this time, I am starting to get psyched about shock-and-awe, learning about M-16s and M-4s and AR-15s, but also drinking Sierra Nevadas and going to Phish shows.
For lack of any wrap-up I'll end here.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
6mo ago
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
6mo ago
Very broadly speaking, and using these terms in the American context, liberals and conservatives are fine-grained and coarse-grained thinkers respectively. Liberals tend to believe that the machine of society can be tinkered with and engineered at every level to produce desirable outcomes (it's not a surprise that more educated people, tend towards this political orientation). An extreme example of this for instance is the energy that a non-trivial number of people in academia and the media devote to the intricate rules of what counts as racism sexism. Conservatives, OTOH are more inclined to view society as a collection of fudges that more or less function to keep the anarchy of nature at bay. They're consequently typically concerned with much more coarse-grained issues: things like crime or illegal immigration.
Brilliant! This delineates the concept of "microagression" beautifully -- basically a foreign concept to a conservative, who can be very focused on macro-aggressions like crime, terrorism, breakdown of rule of law and order, riots, etc.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
6mo ago
I'm having trouble reconciling two different AAQCs from FC:
https://www.themotte.org/comment/359139?context=3#context
Let's take a concrete example. I used to be very concerned about government spending and the national debt. I thought that it was very important that we get this spending under control, and bring the debt down. This was part of the basis for my voting for George W Bush in 2000. But Bush then blew the budget out funding the war on terror, and then Obama (who I also voted for) blew the budget out even worse (to my recollection, corrections welcome) with his various domestic and foreign policies. Voting for fiscal responsibility did not actually secure fiscal responsibility.
https://www.themotte.org/comment/357773?context=3#context
When I was much younger, I was a deep-blue progressive atheist deeply embedded in the Blue Tribe narrative machine. I believed that Bush did 9/11, that he was a fascist, and that he intended to overthrow American democracy, probably by conducting another false-flag terror attack and then using it as a pretext to suspend elections. This was a quite popular belief among Blues back then, and I bought it all hook, line and sinker. I believed it so firmly that I moved to Canada and seriously considered renouncing my American citizenship. Only, none of the things I believed would happen, the things the people I was listening to predicted would happen, actually happened. There never was another major terror attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11, false-flag or otherwise. Bush was re-elected in an election I and most of my social circle was certain was rigged, but then four years later Obama trounced Romney, and power transferred as normal.
I can certainly reconcile this on my own, but I am also getting a little bit of a "chameleon" vibe that I hadn't noticed before. This not meant to be any sort of callout, as a longtime fan of FC posting, just a note.
Spendy, but check out https://www.maisonmargiela-fragrances.us I am familiar with their Replica collection, like "Jazz Club", "By The Fireplace", etc.
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