Spookykou
1yr ago
I think these “tribes” will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics. Harvard might skew 80-20 in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, 90-10 in terms of liberals vs. conservatives, but maybe 99-1 in terms of Blues vs. Reds.
I have quoted the deep lore.
I think Harvard culture is basically interchangeable with Oxford culture, such that the college elite of both countries are culturally very similar. Which is why I called the political elite of the UK, blue-tribe. I see globalists multiculturalism as a pretty ubiquitous cultural affectation of western college elites.
Spookykou
1yr ago
I can admit that I might be stretching the meaning of Blue and Red too far, but I like to think that I am actually getting to the heart of the division. I think it is mostly a college/political elite vs prole/working class divide, and that this divide is very similar across all countries under US cultural hegemony and has become increasingly similar over the last fifty years or so, such that it is coherent to talk about the working class proles of the UK as being 'red tribe', and the political elite as being 'blue tribe'.
In this particular instance my position is that the blue tribe or college/political elite are generally multicultural. My read is that globalism was in full swing across basically all of the west by the 90s, such that the political elite across the west were broadly in favor of increased immigration and multiculturalism. I think if you went to the best universities in Germany, France, the UK the US in 1995 and grabbed a hundred random students from each graduating class, and asked them how they felt about multiculturalism, you would get back 80%+ favorability with little between country variation. Maybe I am wildly off base, I do not actually have a survey to back this up, it is just how I feel, having spent time in all these counties during this time period. As well as my general read on the cultural output of these counties during this time period.
Spookykou
1yr ago
Blue tribe does not cleave easily along political parties. It is the culture of the college educated elite, and generally holds across western nations. The soccer hooligan and the NASCAR redneck have more in common with each other than either does with the Yale Conservative or the Oxford Liberal, and vice versa. The college educated elite like diversity and want to live in a multicultural world, they want to go to the sushi restaurant with their black friend and watch the India vs Pakistan cricket match while drinking a microbrew. It's their culture.
Which is exactly why it does not change much with lost elections.
Spookykou
1yr ago
When it comes to women being able to open a bank account on their own, 1974 is 'shockingly recent'.
Recency is contingent on the subject.
Spookykou
1yr ago
I don't buy it.
Immigration is something the blue tribe just wants.
The blue tribe didn't start from the position of, how do we improve the economy, and then searched around and found immigration as a good policy for promoting economic growth. The blue wanted immigration and looked around for ways to justify it. Sure, they also believe the justification(trust the science), but the justifications are not to convince themselves, they are to convince those damn red-tribers.
They really want to live in a 'diverse' world, with ethnic restaurants, and friends who speak English with an accent, who have weird fun customs, different clothing, and different skin tones.
They are absolutely attached to it.
Spookykou
1yr ago
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what physically happened. This video seems fairly clear to me, I have attempted to write out what I am seeing in this video with as little editorializing as possible.
The Pivotal Action: Watch 0.25 speed starting at 10:35
She is told to "drop the fucking pot" a couple of times, at gun point.
She puts the pot down (the things in her hands are pot holders).
She crouches on the ground.
The cops approach.
She rises suddenly, re-grabbing the pot and holding it over her head with her right arm.
The officer gets out the word 'drop' before shots are fired.
Spookykou
1yr ago
Obviously I get all my news from the most reliable sources, The Motte. So imagine my surprise when I randomly heard a news clip today and someone said MAGA, pronouncing the MA, like from the word maw, instead of mad. Before I embarrass myself in conversation, the reporter was a weirdo right, everyone says MAGA with the MA sound from mad, right?
Spookykou
1yr ago
Yeah I loved their 'house of congress' analog turning out to just be a giant pit full of spiders.
Spookykou
1yr ago
The idea behind 'superpalatable' is not necessarily that it is more unhealthy (calorie dense), but that it is more delicious, so you over eat more, or are more likely to want to eat it instead of something else(something healthier). 'Upping the game' here, means tastier sauces, better crust recipes, perfecting baking time/and delivery/heat retention, quality of cheese, cheese blends, herbs, spices. Making more palatable food does not require making it more calorie dense. Can you imagine a world where room-temperature school-cafeteria pizza is the best possible delivery pizza, and how that would effect the frequency with which you order pizza?
Although, you can almost always add calories, one of the headline changes of their 2010 recipe was an herb and garlic butter glaze on the crust.
Spookykou
1yr ago
If Trump had died, I think [Blank] would happen.
A few possible responses.
A. Trump didn't die. (breakfast anyone?)
B. [Blank] didn't happen.
C. I don't think [Blank] would happen.
D. I think that [Something else] would happen instead.
E. I agree.
If [Blank] is, [reasonable possible consequence] or [totally unreasonable consequence], does either option make B a good response?
The first two results for Counterfactual in google,
If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over. The counterfactual is kangaroos without tails, the assumption, is that a kangaroos tails is necessary for balance and without them, kangaroos would fall over.
If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here. The counterfactual is Peter believing in ghosts, the assumption is that the location would be scary for a person who believes in ghosts.
In as much as a counterfactual is used in a conversation, it is to display your model of reality, for instance, your assumptions about the balance of kangaroos, or the mental states of people who believe in ghosts. The discussion that follows would either be to agree with the persons model and the extrapolations that they postulate in the counterfactual, or disagree with it, and argue for something else. Kangaroos actually only use their tails for balance when moving at speed, and so kangaroos without tails but at rest, would not topple. Peter is actually stupidly brave, so even if he believed in ghosts in this spooky location, he would not fear them. Peter's belief in ghosts does not include a belief that ghosts can harm him, so he would be interested instead of afraid.
Spookykou
1yr ago
U.S. seem no more superpalatable in 2024 than in 1990
This seems wrong, the difference between the average restaurant in Plano Texas from then to now is staggering, and not just in terms of quality, but variety of cuisine as well. This might be controversial, but I think the expected quality you would get from a high-end restaurant in 1990 is what you can expect from basically any restaurant today(controlling for location). Cooking knowledge seems to have really been spread through the information age, and a base line expectation of quality ingredients also spread through the country during this time window. Do you remember when people used to advertise that they used arabica coffee beans, before it just became the standard? Dominos pizza is a particular stark example, and that change happened in 2010, in part because they had fallen behind, because all the other pizza places had been upping their game for years. I think the idea that, because on the surface you could go to a Wendy's and get a burger and fries in 1990 and in 2024, the 'superpalatability' of the food has not changed, is wrong (Wendy's is another place that seriously improved and is constantly tweaking and improving, a few years ago they drastically improved their fries).
I will agree that it is not super cleanly defined, but in general I think the availability of good food has improved pretty significantly since the 90s.
Spookykou
1yr ago
As a fat person, I am constantly ashamed of myself. Unfortunately, delicious food is the only thing that makes me feel better. Tragic.
Spookykou
1yr ago
Personally I do not really model governments as 'entities' that take action based on some sort of game theoretic rational self interest. Governments seem to be collections of people who are generally following their own individual incentives which can very easily lead to governments doing things that are not really in the interest of the government as a whole, if one was to think of it as an entity.
To the specific question, I think there was a very effective march through the institutions which caused woke/progressive ideas to reach fixation in the university system to such an extent that 90%+ of college graduates to come out of the last 15 years (give or take) are 'true believes' in as much as mid-wits can truly believe anything. One of those true beliefs is that crime is (almost?)totally down stream of societal oppression, and specifically that the criminal justice system is a sort of negative feedback loop that creates and then punishes criminals and that the cruel impositions of the criminal justice system upon the 'criminal class,' is an untenable injustice. I think once enough young professionals filter into the various DA offices of the world who hold these beliefs and similar you eventually get to a point where they are able to coordinate action and push through soft on crime practices based on the idea that contact with the criminal justice system is toxic.
Spookykou
1yr ago
I am a bit confused by the direction and nature of the relationships you are purposing here. It seems to me that you are saying there is a rise in 'selfishness' because governments 'lost trust', by favoring marginalized demographics. I would assume, based on this, that the increase in selfishness then, would be found in the, non-marginalized, non-favored, demographics, but my vague understanding of the spike in shoplifting is that this is not the case.
I think government action, or often inaction, is probably contributing to the rise in the overtness of these behaviors, but I am not sure the mechanism is any more complicated than, some people will act up if you remove the consequences from their actions.
Spookykou
1yr ago
I remember trying to read that post and finding it pretty impenetrable, which is also the most upvoted comment on the post. I will try to retreat back to the 'easy to read' component of 'well formatted' here to salvage my position.
Spookykou
1yr ago
Personally I find legal discussions to be the most 'valuable' I have no domain knowledge but they seem to consistently get a good back and forth and express opinions that just do not seem to exist outside of this place. Often I wonder if TheMotte could be a better lawyer for Trump than whoever he has hired based on the strength of their arguments. Trumps legal troubles as presented by 99.99% of the internet, he is clearly guilty and wrong and the case against him is iron clad, Trumps legal troubles as presented here, absurd novel legal theory that requires literal time travel to be a crime.
Just, love reading it.
Spookykou
1yr ago
I think it is unlikely that a fear of getting banned is very relevant to this issue. I think that people feel at least a mild incentive to upvotes a top level post where the poster clearly put in effort even if it is not particularly interesting, so most large, well formatted top level posts get at a minimum 20 upvotes and some engagement.
I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action. Honestly, if a modhat came along leaving the only comment saying you didn't try hard enough, ten people would suddenly come in out of nowhere to defend your post even if they would have never engaged with it otherwise.
Spookykou
1yr ago
That is hopelessly confounded.
It is certainly confounded enough that I did not mean to imply that I have some sort of formula that accurately describes the relationship, but are you contesting that the relationship exists at all, or do you think it is not big enough to meaningful inform how we think about the efficacy of therapy? My thought process here, in simple terms, would be that a person who is having a shitty time but does not exist in therapy culture, has a less shitty time than the same person in therapy culture. So, a study that finds that people who show up with depression get better after therapy, has the problem for me, that I do not know if that person would have had an equally bad condition in the counterfactual where they don't know what depression is. Imagine if the anorexia in South Korea story is correct, and previously Korean girls never got anorexia, and now a bunch are getting it. Someone coming along and telling me that therapy does better than a placebo at treating their anorexia with super high-powered top-tier most excellent and well replicated research, is still not offering me a particularly compelling defense, if I think therapy awareness campaigns 'caused' the anorexia in the first place. See also all the stories of, trauma counseling that traumatized someone.
I'm not trying to say that the myriad forms of mental illness have no basis in real human experiences and emotional states. I just think it's possible that therapy, and the (unavoidable?) downstream therapy culture, might actually be a bad way to structure a societal understanding and response to those feelings.
Is it a good thing that we have the option of paying money to talk to someone in private instead of running about with a machete?
Maybe? It isn't easy for me to evaluate the counterfactual. I have no idea exactly how destructive a, the way to deal with bad emotions is to go a little wild and break stuff, society needs to be, the purge is (probably) too far, the way I dealt with stress as a kid (running around yelling), probably healthier than what we do now.
Spookykou
1yr ago
One wrinkle for me when trying to think about the efficacy of therapy is that the incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture. This is supposed to be caused by increased awareness, but then you have things like Scott's Anorexia in South Korea story, that push me towards a different theory. Therapy culture is horrible, and therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well. Outside of a handful of mental illnesses with consistent cross cultural manifestations, everything else is either conversion disorder with people trying to fit their negative emotional states into a culturally understood framework, or increasingly, excuses for shitty behavior and to avoid accountability. The framework spawned by therapy culture in the west is particularly bad, mental health awareness is bad, stoicism is probably correct.
Spookykou
1yr ago
If it was just America vs EU I would have a simple theory that sounds right to me. American youth have always grown up in 'these' conditions, and so have antibodies and memes that allow them to ignore being mugged or having their bike stolen, in a way that the average European does not, because 'these' conditions, brought on by the refugee crisis, are a very recent change with only the youngest generation really growing up in it. The problem with this theory is the UK, but maybe the global internet means that the protective American memes are actually just protective English memes.
I just google Denver, CO homeless camps and got tons of articles, videos and photos of them(I suspect Denver was not always like this, my city wasn't). I then googled Denver homeless crime, and while I will admit it is very narrow in its focus, the article titled
stood out.
The OP mentioned a car break in, so I tried to google that,
I tried to find stats on just breaking into cars to steal stuff, but all my google searches were swamped with, leading the nation in auto theft, articles (I even checked page 2)
Which is all to say, for all I know OP lives in Denver.
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