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User ID: 442
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1yr ago
Good point:)
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1yr ago
I think it goes beyond just the human machine relationship to systems; but also and much greater throughout all the human systems that we come in contact with. We are subjected to numerous black boxes that operate on rules and systems too complex to understand. It's impossible to even understand the human systems on a meta level as subjects like economics and sociology etc are extremely imprecise and often proven wrong. It seems we are walking blindfolded whist tripping on LSD with only a peephole to see towards the future. A large part of what we see and hear is influenced or even created within this human / technological system, what we experience as human beings is dictated by editorial or algorithmic biases decisions outside of our control.
The reason why the 'Nigerian Prince' spam emails were full of bad grammar and spelling mistakes was not because the authors were stupid semi-literate Nigerians; it was instead because they used the mistakes to filter out the truly gullible and stupid from the rest of the population. If you're spamming 10,000,000 you only need 0.01% of the stupidest to find a lot of marks. Social media on modern algorithms already sorts people towards the content that they want to interact with, that suits their proclivities. The most commonly used social media platform by young people is Youtube, with 95% penetration, which is considerably higher than often maligned platforms such as TikTok, with the algorythm itself finding and feeding marks to the relevant content producers of all shades.
This is the environment that is shaping both our perceptions and the very world that exists around us at the same time. A machine/human system metacognition that is shaping our very sense of the world around us at the same time as it shapes that very world. As we increasingly integrate AI into our businesses, governments and other organisations, we are increasingly becoming a party to and a part of 'the machine'; however, this isn't a new phenom, but a continuation of an already existing one. We are vulnerable to this system because we accept it as part of our lives, so we must at least try to understand the consequences and risks of what we are plugging ourselves into.
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1yr ago
This started as a post reply, but I decided to make a top level post instead. It's an opinion piece to sum up my own personal reflection on what used to be 'my side' of the culture war. I believe that by the very definition of racism itself if we used the 'privilege + power' definition a lot of Western institutions and cultural beliefs can easily be classified as racist and as a system of power and hegemony they may actually represent a cultural memeplex that blinds people to the true nature of their beliefs and creates a systemic myopia to what I would define as 'cultural white supremacy'. I'm kind of trying to get back into writing more, but unfortunately in many ways this is kind of a poor attempt and ought to be revised and revisited, and I kind of just wanted to get something out there.
There has been significant trade and cross-pollination of cultural ideas between East and West for a significant length of time. So much of what we would consider to be purely European or American cultural, political and economic ideas have been adopted wholesale or in large part by Eastern nations to the point where I would argue that the argument itself that 'white people' have no culture is in effect a product of the tacit white supremacy of progressive and left leaning intellectuals. It is pure narcissism in the way that they often assume the only cultures with agency are major Western powers and this by extension can deny that same agency to those whom are intended to be helped. The phrase "white people have no culture" can cause annoyance, or worse, to the people on the right; but, considering it as something that essentially camouflages a hegemonic belief system amongst powerful NGOs, governments and businesses that directly interface with a significant proportion of the global population I find it particularly chilling. Focusing attention on a few blow-hards and random easily provoked 'losers' isolated from real institutional power is a giant red herring against the very real and extremely powerful institutional power ideas on the left have.
Cultures can export much more than just music and consumer goods; there is a whole spectrum of significant cultural adoption and adaption to new technologies, economics, geopolitical realities and social/societal relations. Europeans sold much more than guns for instance, they also shared the military culture and tactics that stemmed from it as well. One of the biggest factors is the adoption of Western style education, and especially the university system that represents nearly a 1000 years of European tradition, to the point where higher education is used as an indicator of 'immigrant fitness' in most countries that use a 'merit' based criterion for selecting immigrants. The greater the level of education the better the fit seems to be between the immigrant and the host society when considering net immigration to the West from other areas of the globe. An uneducated illiterate laborer is likely a terrible fit for instance, but as years of education increases the average compatibility improves. One major push for instance is the spreading of education to the masses, which is truly in my opinion an honorable goal, has the added effect of spreading and increasing the cultural hegemony of the West. My imagination of this is basically Abe Lincoln sitting bored at his computer endlessly hitting 'ENTER' to win a culture victory on Civilization.
If we consider for instance the perspective of 'seeing like a state' in the context of understanding foreign governments the mass adoption of Western norms of government has made the whole world 'legible' both in an imperialistic as well as real-politic diplomatic sense of global relations. Non-government organizations also have a similar 'ease' in dealing with foreign countries and local peoples as they can interface with both an international system as well as peoples that have already been exposed to significant Western ideas and concepts through everything from entertainment to education and the way their governments have agreed or been coerced to adopt significant foundational beliefs of the West. Our governments and institutions are staffed with the products of our University systems so the beliefs they adopt from these institutions have significantly greater power than a few uppity 'right wing' billionaires. Robber barons eventually sleep, but it's those who are doing it 'for your own good' are tireless for their crusade is a righteous and moral one. Random billionaires have not got the economic or political firepower to completely upturn a society; however, there are major institutions and governments that do. We should therefore be much more critical of the nature of the beliefs of those who wield actual power over the stupid overexposed wailing of the relatively powerless.
I believe that if we judge the institutions from the frame-work of the left then PMC (professional management class) leftists who are true to their core beliefs would be compelled by their own 'scripture' in essence to tear them down. The culture wars against religion helped to unseat the WASP (white anglo saxon protestant) somewhat from political power and increased the power of social organizations such as universities and government agencies. The issue with the education system is that beliefs that have as much actual 'proof' as scripture in essence can borrow the prestige and credibility of the hard sciences. These cultural beliefs are being presented with the same credibility often as actual hard sciences through the error or myopia of the media. At the end of the day it is the beliefs of the most powerful people in the world that has the greatest impact of human beings, so we should and must question the institutions that exercise power over us. Are we ruled by people with no concept that their shit stinks with nobody to tell them their questionable clothes choices are leaving them looking rather naked? Using the Bible to prove the existence of God is just as circular an argument in essence as using educational credentials as credibility when those credentials are based not on fact but belief. The people who form the parts of the education system working to 'smash the patriarchy' for instance could be viewed from a certain perspective as the actual white supremacists themselves due to their power and the hegemonic nature of their beliefs that are based on culture as clearly as religious beliefs are too formed through culture. From Nietzsche's perspective God is dead; but, from a post-modernist perspective God is very much alive and that could be even more scary.
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8mo ago
Holocaust denial is a factually incorrect position to take that bears an implicit threat against Jewish people. Given the fact that threatening statements are already acceptably considered 'beyond the pale' I don't see this as a free speech issue. It is instead explicitly codifying the idea that 'yes we know what you're doing, so cut it out' -- the venn diagram of people who deny the holocaust and hold anti-semitic views is practically a circle. Since it simply builds off of an already acceptable principle, why does it matter if a specific type of factually incorrect statement is explicitly legislated against?
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8mo ago
I think it's because culture war issues are cheap issues, it's politicised tribalism where it costs almost no time or effort for politicians . It means that they can free significant political capital to spend on their own personal in-group interests and the interests of their key supporters. If all you have to do is take any reactionary/annoying/grumpy talking point and amplify it, and say 'other side bad', then you have a quick and dirty means to bolster cheap support. I think we need to look deeper than the specific talking points of the culture war to the underlying structure of the game that is being played underneath. The culture war excites our limbic system, but I feel that it acts as a distraction as its straight up buying the kayfabe and talking about the game under the assumption that it's being played straight.
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8mo ago
This is simply a specific implementation of 'anti inciting to violence' provisions of speech, clearly defined and accepted within constitutional law consistantly around the world in most democratic countries, in order to make it easier to specifically target a clearly delineated type of person -- neo-nazis.
Which part do you have a problem with?
A. Laws restricting speech with respect to things like inciting or the promotion of violence etc exist? B. Holocaust denial is automatically considered to be 'hate speech'; whether by means of common law/case precedence or explicit laws to that effect? C. Censorship exists?
This isn't about preventing some 'unpopular truth' from coming out, it's a specific mechanism being used to target a specific hateful counter-culture.
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7mo ago
Which city are you intending to reside in?
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7mo ago
Thank you for your very interesting and informative post, it's a shame that we're yet again in a position with not a lot of information and little idea about how things are going to play out over the short term. We don't even know if the situation is going to escalate or dampen down, it's simply too early to say at this point. What I am concerned with is the potential to have another 'Austrian Duke' style issue whereby one side feels compelled to act in a harsh way and the other side is compelled to respond. Information is a critical component, that's the difference between a 'Tigray' style Ethiopian ethnic cleansing and the Ukrainian resistance. The difference between the two is that Ukraine got their message out whilst the Tigray were under radio silence and the world simply didn't pay attention to what might have been going on. It's going to be extremely difficult to be a moderate in Isreal if the early reports of massive casualties are true as modern social media has the power to create incredibly evocative content that can be shared wildly quickly amongst people with little in the way of infrastructure to restrict or censor it.
Yonah Jeremy Bob, a military analyst for the Jerusalem Post, says Israel is likely planning a major ground assault into Gaza – the biggest since the 2014 invasion.
“There’s going to be a second act and that is an invasion of Gaza, and I think larger than 2014 when Israel called up 80,000 reserves. Israeli has four divisions of reservists that it is already calling up and has moved 35 brigades to the border. So what Israel had a 6:30am this morning [when the Hamas attack began] was minuscule to what it has now. Within a day or two, Israeli will have a massive force that will be able to overwhelm Hamas forces in Gaza,” Bob told Al Jazeera.
“What the question will really be is how far they want to go? Does it want to topple Hamas and have to figure out being in control, or handing control over to the Palestinian Authority, or a multinational force and all the consequences that could have?”
I can't imagine Israel demanding anything less than a complete destruction and removal of Hamas from the Gaza strip. The issue with this isn't with justification for doing so, but how far they will go in the attempt. Whilst Israel may be short on manpower they can certainly make up for it with munitions. I've been following the Ukrainian war and it has really shown off the power of drones as both tools of surveillance and recon as well as acting as weapons themselves. For every suicide bomber they have to deal with, Israel has hundreds to tens of thousands of suicide drones to send back the opposite way. As the casualties mount up on the Palestinian side it will increase pressure on other Arab countries and potentially China a justification to intervene into this matter and up the escalation ladder we go. It's still too early to tell, but I have a strong feeling this is going to turn into a 'shit-show' pretty darn quickly.
I have long feared the use of drones as a tool of genocide. My mental image of it was of a person in Nairobi Kenya sitting behind a large high definition computer screen sipping diet coke whilst blowing up 'insurgents' in Afghanistan. The issue with the corresponding rise of artificial domain (wrong word?) intelligence is that you no longer need that person 'in the loop'. It combines the immediate deadliness of bullets and shrapnel with the emotional/moral distance of proxy methods such as hunger and displacement to achieve their ends. I hope I am right that this current potential conflict is a little too soon for talk of the worst outcomes of the adoption of drones/AI, but this still represents a complete shift in the balance of terror for States fighting insurgency/guerilla adversaries.
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7mo ago
That's cool, I live in Auckland so if you need any information I'll be happy to help.
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6mo ago
That’s a vile thing to write. It’s a vile thing to contemplate. And that’s the difference between the spirit of ‘68 and the spirit of ‘16. The latter is born of a willingness to confront the ugliness and the foul consequences of the spirit of ‘68. That’s why it trades principally in “hate facts.” The spirit of ‘16 knows that black IQ is on average one standard deviation lower than white. It knows that despite making up just 13% of the population blacks commit 60% of homicides. It knows the average gay man has over 100 different sexual partners in his life, and the outliers may have thousands, and that what gay marriage is really talking about is men brutally fucking each other in the ass; It knows that 100% of homosexual adoption is child sexual exploitation. The spirit of ‘16 knows that gender confirmation surgery is adult genital mutilation. It knows that a trans woman is a man who gets off on the idea of himself as a woman, so he has a surgeon cut a bloody gash between his legs, which smells like a septic tank for the rest of his life. The spirit of ‘16 knows that the vast majority of homosexuals, male and female, were sexually abused as children, because homosexuals are vampires who “reproduce” through sexual molestation. This is only the tip of the iceberg, (or the icestein, or the icenthal, if you prefer.)
And the rest isn't actually that much better... Accusing the opposition side of pedophilia, like somehow Chicago Black Panthers are somehow aligned with French intellectuals on child age of consent laws. It's got more than factual error problems, it's basically a shameless bash of the other side and doing so by making some terrible arguments at that.
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5mo ago
It's ironic on so many levels. Two groups of socialists, both alike in 'dignity', trying to promote an ideology created by and associated with Jewish people to an anti-Semitic Islamic audience.
Israel itself is a pan-Arabic failure and a symbol of the collective helplessness of the Arab world. We own their leaders and their leaders use this issue to own and control them. We prop up dictators because they are cheap and easy to pay off, and they use whatever tactics are required to ensure we get what we want in return. The reason why they get a pass with the 'Professional/Management class' (PMC) is that it is assumed that we are on an 'auto-win' trajectory. Either they become secularised, educated (westernised) and tolerant; or their entire civilization will collapse into the sand that it emerged from and the remaining muslims will be 'managed' until they are no longer problematic. Unironically I see the way the Left as a coalition treats Islam as irrelevant is more shameful than the rightwing outright hate and mistrust.
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5mo ago
Good luck, which city are you moving to?
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5mo ago
The last book I read was: The Dictator's Handbook -- https://www.amazon.com.au/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845
It was a really interesting take and an entirely different mental map of power than I am used to. The unfortunate side effect of this book is that if it's 'true' then it engenders a heck of a lot of cynicism in the reader about political power and government in general. The TLDR video by CGB Grey effectively covers 80% of the content in the book -- https://youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&t=3s&ab_channel=CGPGrey
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5mo ago
Yeah that doesn’t sound like very appealing accommodation, what are you looking to do in the country? Anything I can help with?
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5mo ago
They do use decoys, but you’re not going to fool your modern drone operators. They usually use two drones, one for observation and one for the attack. It’s unlikely that after observation at >720p for a few minutes that anyone bar the drunkest Russian would be fooled.
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5mo ago
Off the top of my head I saw one study ages back that suggested 4 point advantage for gay people. I think this is possibly a selection effect as people who never realised they were gay probably skew lower iq.
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5mo ago
80% of the difference is pornography in my opinion, and briefly: Dopamine/addiction effects mean they don't seek it out and perform badly when they get it; they get bad ideas from porn which affects their partners and these are sexual mores that used to be considered 'out there' such as choking/anal/facials/etc; masturbation aids being normalised for women mean they are often happier by themselves than with a partner and finally this all compounds because it causes women to raise their standards whilst many men fall through the floor.
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5mo ago
That could be worth a shot. +1
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4mo ago
I think one fundamental core issue at the heart of the trans debate is who or whom ought to have the authority to define key cultural concepts such as gender and sex. Is it the experts who have taken the time to clearly delineate the particular issues or the visceral/emotional reactions of the people who have to live in and with the consequences of the expert's decisions?
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4mo ago
That is absolutely insane. I don't know what else to say...
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4mo ago
It's an interesting tidbit, but at the same time it doesn't really tell us much more than pointing to the idea that many of our assumptions about crime and income may be incorrect in an area where the social safety net eliminates most cases of extreme material deprivation.
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4mo ago
I think the difference is made by the 'fact' that people like their hedonistic overlords more than their puritanical peers. Moral righteousness and asceticism just don't quite hit the same as a cheese burger, fries and a beer. It's for this reason that the arguments themselves are immaterial, because the decisions are not made on a logical level. The basic argument is the same <You would be uncomfortable if you understood / saw X, Y, Z> vs <I don't want to know> and this kind of sums up the basic left vs right argument. The right understands and responds to the limbic systems of their 'clients' to the benefit of their overlords; whereas the left faces an uphill battle pretty much everywhere outside of professional or academic contexts.
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4mo ago
One of the major reasons for progressives to take up both causes is due to resource constraints. As an Indian you'd surely have to acknowledge the relative unsustainability of 1.3 Billion Indians living anything remotely like a westerners lifestyle. It simply cannot scale up, and India lacks the ability to take resources from distant parts of the globe to sustain its lifestyle. Even in the West, we have a stark choice between living a relatively resource constrained lifesytyle that would still make the average Indian person jealous; which unfortunately would be considered an affront on the non-negotiability of the American way of life. It's the inconvenient truth, our lifestyles are unsustainable and we are approaching multiple eco-system limits with a blissful disregard for the sheer terror we might have unleashed upon ourselves. We can culture war all day every day about the relative decline of our own lifestyles and who is truly to blame for that, but relative lifestyle adjustments for us are an inconvenience; whereas in the third world they carry a body count.
Petition: We are all special snowflakes and we deserve special characters in our user names.
¿Can we please have special characters in our names? I think it would add cool customization to usernames and it ought to (naively) be a simple change to the website.
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