QuinoaHawkDude
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User ID: 1789
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
but then the median viewer's going to be muttering at her TV something along the lines of "Oi wot's all this shite made outta rattlesnake meat, I 'fort it's Mexican week? Where's the bloody tacos?"
I really don't know what GBBO viewership demographics are like in the UK. However, the way you phrased and spelled your imaginary median viewer's quote implies that they would be lower class British, the equivalent of a southern/hick/redneck accent in the US. And as a American fan of The Great British Baking Show, I can confidently say that the American fanbase is solidly Blue Tribe, educated, urban, PMC, etc. And I certainly don't react that way ("Yo, I thought this was supposed to be British, where's the steak and kidney pie?") whenever they pull out some obscure European cake or bread or pudding I've never heard of for a technical challenge. I Google it and go "huh, that's interesting". I agree that GBBO/S doesn't have a requirement to teach anybody anything, but one of the reasons I do enjoy it is the opportunity to learn about baked goods I'm unfamiliar with.
For what it's worth, the only commentary I've seen on Mexican week online was a bunch of TikTok videos making fun of Brits inability to pronounce "avocado" and "guacamole".
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
It's impossible to know for sure, but I think if President Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, the US would not have put men on the moon in the 1960s. Or 1970s. Perhaps not ever (so far).
Kennedy's martyrdom made the Apollo program a political third rail, so pretty much anybody with the potential power to cut its funding kept their mouth shut until the first successful landing. But nobody spends hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars without a lot of people wanting that money to be spent on something else that they think is more important.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Before I moved to a state with universal vote-by-mail, I pretty much only ever voted in Presidential and (maybe) midterm elections. Since moving, I've voted in every single election I get a ballot for. Being able to vote by mail, without having to ask for the privilege, removes a lot of friction from the voting process. You might say it's not that big of a deal to go vote in person, but where I was living, even if I did early voting it was going to mean about an hour standing in line (either because I got there way before the polling location opened to be first in line, or because I didn't do that and had to queue behind everybody else who did).
For those concerned about fraud, it's perhaps worth noting that I was kind of casual about my signature on a recent ballot, and my ballot got challenged because the signature didn't match my driver's license signature, and I had to go re-sign in person.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
As one of Freddie's subscribers and occasional commenters, prior to his "talking about trans people in the comments of one of my posts about an unrelated subject = instant ban" policy, it really was common for at least one comment thread on all of his posts to end up centering on trans issues, no matter how unrelated the post's subject matter. It was annoying.
I believe that this community experimented with a ban on the HBD topic for a while for similar reasons, and I don't think it was because the mods were anti-HBD per se, they were just tired of it being the only goddamn thing we talked about. That's my memory, anyway.
About the least charitable take I have on Freddie's banning commenting on about trans issues is that he may realize just how badly the social justice left has shot itself in the foot in the last five years with the trans issue, and is tired of having people using it as a generic gotcha attack on social justice politics in general.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
99%+ of AR-15 owners don't commit mass shootings; it doesn't stop the half of the country that doesn't understand gun culture from finding all AR-15 owners at best suspicious and at worst actively threatening.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I've heard an alternative take, which is: "Democracy is how we get different groups of people with widely-varying value systems to live in the same place without violent conflict." It's like, every N years, we have a mini civil war, except instead of actually shooting/stabbing/punching each other, we just line up everybody's troops on opposite sides of the battlefield, and whoever brings the biggest army wins, and we all agree to go home without bloodshed until the next regularly-scheduled civil war.
One can argue that there's no point in including people who are indifferent to politics in this process, because they're not the ones likely to start an actual war over anything.
On the other hand, one can argue that if we did make everybody show up, the issues being discussed would be more mainstream and less fringe. Wedge issues like trans rights, gun control, and abortion might be much less salient.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I saw somebody claim that in $CURRENT_YEAR what most people mean by "that's unconstitutional!" isn't "I've read the US Constitution and it's amendments and found this specific text which clearly prohibits it". What they mean is "I feel so strongly that this is wrong that I don't want to have to argue with anybody about it anymore". Saying that something isn't political because it's a human right is pretty much the same.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Side note, but I really would love to run a study where you just showed headshots (all taken in the same light/background) of a bunch of randomly selected people to another bunch of randomly selected people and had the second bunch rate the headshots on a 1-10 scale of attractiveness, then tried to see what latent variables about the people in the headshots (age, BMI, wealth, education) correlated most strongly with the 1-10 ratings.
My hypothesis is that for straight men looking at pictures of women, the 1-10 ratings would correspond really closely to age and BMI. I would be really interested in seeing what the results would be for straight women looking at pictures of men.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
If the protester was predominantly agreed to be righteous, the protest would be unnecessary; the contra-factual target(s) and/or their society(s) would already be trying to carry out the protester's desires.
In general, I can agree that somebody is right about an issue without approving of their tactics in trying to convince others.
More specifically, I can agree that my wife is correct that we need to replace the carpets, and still be annoyed if she slashes my car's tires every morning before I leave for work until I agree to call the carpet store immediately.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Money (as in "a countable medium of economic exchange") is great and pretty foundational to human civilization, but it does tend to distort people's thinking once the scale of the numbers, and thus the corresponding impact on the real world allocation and distribution of scarce resources, gets several orders of magnitude beyond what they're used to thinking about in their daily lives.
Like, it's clear that if a man is spending $1000 a month on booze and gambling while his kids are starving, he is being evil. He could very easily spend $1000/mo on food for his kids instead of on his own enjoyment. $1000 of food per month is a tiny fraction of your local food economy.
It's less clear to me that Bezos could end world hunger overnight by putting his billions of dollars towards that goal instead of building rockets. What real-world resources are the two different projects competing over? Food production is mostly about arable land and physical labor; rockets use very little of the former and relatively modest amounts of the latter. The main resource that space project money goes towards is smart and skilled people's time and creativity. Whether you think world hunger could be solved by Bezos would seem to hinge on whether or not you think that if all those smart rocket scientists were put to work figuring out how to grow more food (or, realistically, how to distribute it better - I've never heard anybody gainsay the conventional wisdom that the world grows enough food to feed everybody, it just doesn't get it into everybody's hands efficiently enough before it spoils) it would make a sustainable impact.
There's also a separate issue of the difference between a one-time investment in developing a technology that you expect to eventually turn a profit (as far as I know, SpaceX, Blue Origin and all the other private space companies definitely expect to get their money back down the line once their rockets are developed) versus sustaining a charitable non-profit (if "solving world hunger" simply means "give money to everybody who can't afford to feed themselves, from now until eternity if necessary") which has no financial upside (except perhaps in a macro sense, i.e. people who aren't starving will be more productive and the economy as a whole benefits, but that's the government's job, not Bezos's). Leftists would still claim it's the right thing to do with that money, but approximately none of them have built billion-dollar businesses by spending their money on things that will eventually make more money, etc., so they really have no clue what it takes to get those resources in the first place.
And let's not forget just how effective poor people are at ruining the best-laid plans to help them.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
The obvious difference between colonialism and immigration (as these two concepts are generally understood by average modern Westerners) is that colonists tend to primarily be interested in exploiting and expropriating a nation's resources (natural and human) for the benefit of the colonist's home country (even if they do temporarily move to the colony in question to run a business, they aren't intending to make it their home, nor do they expect their children to be natives of the colony). Immigrants, even if they do end up changing the culture of the nation they move to, are invested in the success of their new home country, and the value they create stays in that country, modulo a few small cash transfers back to their relatives in their native country.
I expect, however, if you were to bring up any counterfactuals to this way of thinking to your bog-standard progressive, they would fall back on "Who, whom?" (or, as you put it, intersectionality). The mass migration of British people to its colonies (e.g. Australia and the USA before 1776), replacing the native culture with their own? Bad, because it was bad for non-whites. Mass migration of natives of former and current British colonies (e.g. India and Jamaica) to the UK, changing the culture of the UK? Good, because it's good for non-whites. (Also, curry and kebabs are better than steak-and-kidney pie.)
Even without considering the racial aspect of things, a simple rule might be "If a person moves from country A to country B and is immediately wealthier and more powerful than natives of country B, that's colonialism and that's bad. If a person moves from country B to country A and is immediately a member of the poor working classes, that's immigration and that's good."
As a sidebar, one of the things that fans of immigration might need to come to grips with is that the modern world of cheap air travel, global telecommunications and electronic banking makes it much, much easier for immigrants to avoid assimilating into their new country and put down roots there. They can still talk to their friends and family back home every day, travel back home once a year at least, and send them whatever is left of their income after covering their living expenses, invalidating my claim in the first paragraph about immigrants being invested in and benefiting their new country of residence. This is radically different from the immigration of the 1800s that American history textbooks look back upon so favorably.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
As somebody with basically libertarian views (and therefore is very much out of tune with the current progressive zeitgeist) but who has also been involved in music and theater since early childhood, I am very much interested in this question, and have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. After reading the other comments in this thread, many of which I think are grasping at different parts of the elephant, there's one potential explanation that I haven't seen and that I would like to suggest:
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Parents know that some activities/careers are right-coded and some are left-coded.
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Children are likely to absorb some or all of their political opinions from their parents.
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Parents are likely to encourage their children to participate in the activities and/or career paths that are more aligned with their politics. For example, conservative parents are more likely to encourage their kids to participate in sports or cheering, and progressive parents are more likely to encourage their kids to participate in things like music, theater and art.
Or it could just be as simple as people naturally sorting themselves into groups of other people who are like them. If all the people you know from your church are on the football team, you're more likely to play football. If you're gay and the other two openly gay kids in your school do theater, you're more likely to do theater. (There was a discussion on here recently about the search for the first openly gay Premier League soccer player and the inability to find anybody like that, and while the idea of a genetic explanation is appealing to me, especially given the high percentage of female professional soccer players who are lesbians, I can't discount the argument put forward by others that if you're gay and everybody in the locker room of your youth soccer team is constantly spewing homophobic slurs, you're probably going to find something else to do for a living.)
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Yes, it is useful to challenge your basic assumptions about our reality. For example, did you know that Earth has a four corner simultaneous 4-day time cube?
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I remember listening to an econ podcast (I want to say either Freakonomics or Planet Money) that was exploring some things about how restaurant menus and pricing work, probably centered around how they work in the US. The big question was "what's up with free bread or chips and salsa? Why are restaurants giving away free product that just fills you up and keeps you from spending more money?" The answer was "so you don't order dessert". What restaurants (particularly large American restaurant chains) want is to turn tables over as fast as possible. They really don't want you spending two hours at a table ordering an appetizer and an entree and a dessert (which is kind of a stark contrast with my personal experience of dining in the UK, where restaurant table reservations are for fixed time spans, usually 90 minutes, and they seem to get offended if each person doesn't order three courses). Most restaurants really can't make desserts profitable, they can't sell them for what it costs to make them and keep them around, plus you're occupying the table that could instead by used by people who are going to order a main course that they can charge 3-4 times as much for but ultimately probably costs the same to make and serve. However, most sit-down restaurants feel like they have to have desserts on the menu because it's just expected of them. They just don't feel any real incentive to make them spectacular.
A few other things that could be at play, just off the top of my head:
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Sugar and fat could just be so great at being superstimuli that you don't really need to make them all that great to satisfy most people.
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Regarding the lack of variety, I can at least personally attest that on the rare occasions that I do decide to order dessert at a restaurant, I want to make sure I'm going to actually like it, so I'm less likely to go for something I don't recognize.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
The parallels between a woman on a dating site and a manager looking to hire a new employee are strong. Both are in a position of negotiating strength; both are going to have vastly more "applicants" than they have positions to fill. However, that doesn't necessarily make their job an easy one, because finding the one applicant that will actually work out for them long-term is quite difficult. I have no experience being a woman, but I do have experience being a hiring manager, and I can tell you a few things:
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You're looking for reasons to quickly eliminate candidates from consideration (so you don't waste time interviewing/dating them). Auto-rejecting somebody because they have misspelled words on their resume (or wearing Crocs in their profile pic) might seem cruel, but anybody who is paying attention knows what the rules are, and you don't want to hire/date people who aren't paying attention.
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Unless you're the sole owner of a private company, you will have people to answer to if you end up making a bad hiring decision, and so it's important that your choice be defensible according to your applicable social consensus. "I'm sorry so and so didn't work out, but they went to Harvard and their resume had all the right keywords" =~ "I can't possibly be blamed for Chad turning out to be an asshole, he went to Harvard and said he was a feminist and wanted a long-term relationship and kids". You're not really looking to take chances on people who have what most people consider red flags even if you personally don't think they're a big deal.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
It feels like a while since the term "reality-based community" was in vogue, but I remember wondering how support for trans rights could possibly fit well with that back when I first saw progressives using it, without realizing it was just a shorthand for "we believe in The Cathedral, not The Church".
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I wouldn't overlook the possibility that the people in charge of promotions (who are likely to be married men themselves) might give preferable treatment to a married man, thinking to themselves, "this person has a family to support and needs the extra money more than a single man (or woman)". They might also think that a married man is more likely to prefer stability to opportunity and is therefore less likely to quit and move across the country to take another job.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
But now I'm puzzled, because A) I feel like I have a moral obligation not to racially discriminate in friendship, but B) I don't feel like I have an obligation not to choose not to befriend a tennis player just because I don't have the necessary desires, even though tennis players don't deserve friendship any less than black people.
This seems like "Deontology Gone Wrong 101". The idea "I have a moral obligation not to racially discriminate in friendship" sounds like a great idea...hard to argue against, in the current Western zeitgeist. But most people, hearing that phrase, are thinking "right, it would be totally wrong and stupid to reject friendship from somebody who is otherwise completely suitable to be my friend (i.e. lives close, shares a lot of the same interests, knows a lot of the same people, similar age/education/SES) solely because they are of a different race". They're not thinking "I have a moral obligation to make sure that my group of friends has similar racial demographics to the population of the country I live in" or "I have a moral obligation to actively prioritize friendship with people of other races". They're certainly not thinking "a person of X race whose friends are all or mostly other people of X race is an evil person".
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I'm not sure why you think Gates and Bezos get a pass. I've seen plenty of hate for both. I've seen very serious articles written about how the Gates' charitable foundations are actually evil because no single person should be in charge of how much money is donated to good causes, it should be THE PEOPLE in charge.
They just don't stick their heads out of their foxholes quite as often as good ol' Musky does. If there only one thing to admire about Musk, it's that he genuinely seems to not give a shit what the chattering classes think about him.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
The older I get, the more I realize I just don't have the mental or emotional energy to try and figure out who the good guys actually are in any of these things. So, my position has markedly shifted from "pro-Israel because based on everything I've seen and read about the conflict, Israel are the good guys" to "pro-Israel because Israel looks like civilization and Palestine looks like hell." I find it far easier to identify with Israel and Israelis; they look and act more like me than the other side. Simple as that. Pure tribalism.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
The other thing is that news organizations typically are unable or unwilling to do any background research on stories; they depend on their network of "experts" willing to comment on stories. Particularly if you want the news to break and quickly become front-page material. Everybody's got a "school shooting expert" or "police violence expert" in their Rolodex; they probably don't have a "vinyl chloride train derailment" expert lined up and ready to go at a moment's notice.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
"Whole-language" might be a bad technique for trying to teach illiterate kids to read in a classroom setting, but I think the insight that it's better for readers to parse written language as whole words as opposed to a stream of phonemes is correct. I remember sitting in elementary school reading classes, where kids would be randomly picked to read some passage out of a book, and it was painfully obvious which of my fellow students could only read by sounding out syllables based on the spelling of words; they had absolutely no idea what the semantic content of what they just read actually was.
I was privileged to have parents who made teaching me how to read a priority, by reading to me/with me as a toddler, and before I ever set foot in a public school classroom I was already reading books by myself. At this point it feels like they gave me a superpower. Maybe not every kid is capable of learning to read this way. I have no memory of how much or little my parents may have been teaching me about how the spelling of written words mapped to the phonemes that make up spoken words.
Anyway, I think learning to read is far too foundational a skill for any parent who cares about their child's success in life to leave up to schools, no matter how elite. I'm kind of baffled by some of the other comments in this thread about parents who spend the money to send their kids to private schools having the clout to demand that the schools adequately teach their kids to read; I would really assume that anybody who has that kind of money would understand that it's their job to teach their kid basic reading skills, just as it's their job to teach their kid how to speak, and other things like hygiene and how to dress themselves. Like, you wouldn't send your kid off to their first day at kindergarten without being potty trained; why are you sending them there without being able to read at least, like, Thomas the Tank Engine, if not Charlotte's Web? Oh, and if the parents really are too busy with their elite careers to read to their kids at night, hire an au pair/nanny/governess/tutor/whatever.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
It's interesting that you've framed this as a comparison between "progressives" (a political belief system) and "Republicans" (a political party and its supporters). In that case, you could argue that "Republicans" are just the political coalition of different interest groups that are opposed to progressivism for one reason or another. But if you'd said "Democrats" instead of "progressives" you could just as easily say "Democrats are the political coalition of different interest groups that are opposed to conservatism". Lots of people vote Republican because they really don't like some key progressive policy and have nowhere else to go in the USA's two-party system, and vice versa, as opposed to enthusiastically supporting the whole party platform.
Occasionally somebody will say something like "In politics, at some point you have to go beyond just opposing things you don't agree with. You have to actually be for something." This is harder for conservatives from a political standpoint because in many cases, the solutions they favor for problems (when they agree with progressives on what things are problems) are more personal, private and local, and so there's no alternative government solution to propose.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Wild animals in the jungle is a misleading analogy. A better analogy would be "I'm not persuaded of the automatic moral duty of bystanders to intervene when one human being robs another" (which in these days of "property crime isn't all that big of a deal, especially when it happens to rich white people" leftist thinking is perhaps not as extraordinary a position as I might prefer). Just as human beings who want their property to remain in their possession have a vested interest in making sure other humans' property is protected from theft, countries who want their sovereignty over their territory to remain intact have a vested interest in defeating any defector nations who decide that they should just take that other country's land because they can.
And yeah, sure, these same Western nations have their own history of military conquest for profit. That doesn't make them hypocrites for standing up to Russia in 2022, any more than if my grandfather happened to have been a professional thief, it would be hypocritical for me to become a police officer.
I recently saw a comment on a video going over the latest scary "any amount of alcohol is bad for you" research that said "it's funny how alcohol is the only drug that people have to justify NOT using". Not that I think that's what you're trying to do here, as you said, you're just curious. At the end of the day, however, I'd just take the win and be happy that you don't enjoy something that's bad for you, no matter how many other people love it.
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