I referenced /pol/ to try and demonstrate that it was a general point about the risks of letting propaganda weapons into your brain without a filter. Although admittedly even there a lot of it is committed by leftists for trolling or demoralization, it's still a good example of a community poisoned by all sides.
But yeah, if some people want the boo outgroup rule to mean "you have to take 'Kamela is Brat, Vance fucked a couch!' propaganda at face value," rather than treating them as weapons to be analyzed and defended against at arms length, I think the community is fucked.
Do you not think that fighting against propaganda campaigns is helpful? One of the founding events of the SSC community was Scott countering the "men are more likely to be struck by a meteor than falsely accused of rape" propaganda campaign from our old friend Charles Clymer. (Who in his defense was never falsely accused of rape lol)
Fighting propaganda campaigns to keep their power outside your walled garden of discussion has always been a fundamental goal of the community.
SteveKirk
6mo ago
I don't even mean on an individual level, despite agreeing about possession. It's that there are entire narratives on the Internet that are manufactured from the ground up to be weapons. A literal evil think-tank sat around brainstorming ways to disrupt organic conversations with propaganda, and then deployed that propaganda through controlled media, paid influencers, bot networks, reddit powermods, etc.
When you run into something like the "haha Vance fucked a couch Republicans are weird" thing, you are being attacked by a literal virus designed to hurt your ability to think. Look how much time and mental energy people wasted arguing about it here, remember how gleeful the attackers were that it was working to demoralize you.
You need to sanitize those attacks with a flamethrower if you're going to have any kind of real community discussion in this propaganda warfare environment
SteveKirk
6mo ago
We can only imagine unless he posted it somewhere. It's probably funnier that way to be honest.
SteveKirk
6mo ago
You have seen reddit meta sub threads where they talk about strategies for taking over communities and imposing censorship. You've seen literal government and NGO sponsored influencer campaigns complete with bot account boosting. In the last six months you've seen the most manufactured consensus enforcement machine ever created in the Harris campaign.
I'm asking you, do you honestly think that the correct way to respond to these is arguing over the definition of "brat" and whether Kamela fits it? Or is the only appropriate response to note and analyze the propaganda campaign for what it is?
SteveKirk
6mo ago
I've already seen reddit arguments that descended into "chatgpt, lecture this bigot about The Science," and there's something absolutely horrifying about someone making an active decision to hit the "brain turn off, let machine move mouth" button.
I always got that sick feeling of watching an ideology speak through someone, but never expected it to become this literal.
No exaggeration, we're only a few advances in machine interface away from becoming wetware for mind parasites, like an even gayer John Barnes novel.
SteveKirk
6mo ago
Please please please make this table into a template image. It's wasted hidden in the depths of the culture war thread.
I thought the child prostitution had moved to... Cambodia now? I'm not wise to the ways of the early access passport bros, but I do remember some BBC article about how the thai govt crackdown had pushed it to poorer countries.
SteveKirk
6mo ago
At least their blockchain solution won't melt my GPU any harder than AV1 lol
As an anecdote, we absolutely do see this with livestock. Females bred to a male of very different breed will visibly have more trouble relating with their own offspring than with non-relatives of their breed.
You don't really appreciate the importance of genetics until you see a group of young animals foraging in dense brush just like their sire's breed does (despite never meeting him), while the spooked mothers yell for them to come back and eat grass properly like they were taught.
Having noticed this is why Scott's line about "I don't understand why he's acting like his violent psychopath father: he couldn't have been a bad influence because they've never met!" made such a strong impression on me.
SteveKirk
6mo ago
I'm upset they didn't quote Hyde's reply, which would have been the funniest line in the article
SteveKirk
6mo ago
If you're anywhere around the northwest US, I can get you a system that's about 100% faster single core, on an itx board for a micro build IIRC, and a GTX 970 if you've any use for it. If you're not maybe some other motter local to you could
Key parallels to the recent "pro lifers don't care about babies after they're born" discussion, where everyone's preconceptions rest on a base of leftist propaganda carefully shoehorned into every tv show, with the goal of making counter-argument impossible.
Preparing the ground of a fight with land mines and razor wire is just as important as waging it, and conservatives keep walking right into prepared kill zones by engaging as if it's a debate club rather than a battle against enemies trying to exterminate them.
"I have enough money that I don't have to care about making sense" is useful to express in some social situations. Even wearing the fake one that sharp people notice is fake can be a tool if you do it very carefully, in a group that will go "aha, not a bad fake rolex, this guy isn't an idiot with more money than sense, but understands the importance of appearing to be."
Oh, that's less than I thought, but I still consider another two years a long time in PC terms. That pushes things out to "I'll deal with it on the next hardware change or reinstall," even if someone isn't comfortable running an unsupported system.
Exactly, that's four paragraphs wasted responding to a mindless one sentence smear. And then Trollbot5000 responds with "lol ur weird for being so invested in justifying ur bigotry, bonus transphobia yikes, have a normal one weirdo," 40 other identical replies instantly appear to ratio you, and you are reported to bluesky for hate speech.
Your thoughtful reply didn't help because there wasn't any communication happening in the first place, just a DDoS attack on your brain to bully and deflect from people asking "huh, has anyone else noticed more people on fire in the subway than usual?"
we should be willing to look critically at the preferences and beliefs we do have
Who is "we"? Because I have never once seen this phase used to mean anything other than "you".
We're always told that "White cisheteropatriarchal beauty standards" must be "critiqued", "deconstructed", "subverted", and "abolished", but only as a political project to harm the people who like those beauty standards. There is no effort made to explain why we can't equally critique the "brown queerhomomatriarchal" preference for wheelchair-bound lesbians with vitiligo, because the whole concept of "critique" privileges (even sacralizes) the identities and preferences of ally groups that work to oppose and undermine the majority. See the endless academic talk about the Powerful Holy Beauty of Black Trans Women. I have an entire folder full of papers on this theme.
"the process of changing that fact is much more a socio-cultural one" presupposes that it must be changed without justifying why, or why only that beauty standard must be abolished. "Because your beauty standards get in the way of the leftist political project" is at least a real answer, but one that's never made explicit outside of friendly territory.
When the argument is used around and against normal people, the justification is left out entirely in favor of a strong accusation to throw them on the defensive, leaving them struggling to justify their personal preferences to the satisfaction of an inquisitional critiquer.
What do you want my response to be to "American conservatism just doesn’t appeal to me because I’m not scared of everything"? Can you write us a sample response to that claim, if it's not a waste of time engaging with?
Do you want me to waste time pretending it's a real argument we have to disprove to avoid being epicly owned by SmearBot420@x dot com?
The sole purpose of a tweet like that is claiming territory by shitting all over it. It is not a real argument. It is not speech. It should not be listened to or responded to, only talked about in terms of the hostile political project it represents.
Oh, there's lots on both reddit and Twitter (and 4chan, although most of that sewer is just regular troll posts). Some are so good they almost pass for human , but others still use all the instantly recognizable chatgpt tells: "However, it's important to consider factors like", etc.
Others seem like real language until you realize they're just sampling random phases from the conversation while throwing in slogans.
I think dead internet theory is going to be a reality by the end of next year, if it isn't already.
Holy shit, you'll need to block vp9 as well, force it to use h264 (which uses way more bandwidth). Last time I had to do that was with a 4th Gen laptop from the landfill that thankfully killed itself in shame.
Wish I could mail you a better system, or we had enough people to do local trades.
My last PC was one of those '12 amds, a 5800k with the Radeon 7660D. Can't imagine using one in current year!
Its not worth thinking about any of this at the object level. The things you are interacting with on social media are not human beings, they are AIs programmed to hurt you with weaponised language. By engaging with them you're allowing them to set the terms and tempo of the debate, and their only goal is to prevent real debate from happening because it's their best strategic option right now.
The words are a cloud of ink. There is no "real" message it's possible to engage with, and the people responsible just need to be supressed and incapacitated .
Just having to wade through their posts spamming a board and wasting time thinking about them is an attack on you, just as much as when they ddos a wrongthinker's website. Flooding the zone with DARVO ragebait bullshit is just an effective counter to drag the discussion away from people being burned alive on the subway, which they can't defend on the merits.
If you want the purest demo of this possible, go to /pol/ and see if there's any threads worth responding to. It's all ragebait, disruption, shilling, trolling, etc.
Check your GPU in the task manager "resources" tab while YouTube is playing, and right click the video to show "stats for nerds."
You'll probably see either vp9 or av01 under "codec".
If you see "video decode" being used in task manager, you have hardware acceleration for that codec. If you see high CPU use and only "3d rendering" being used on the GPU graph, you don't.
You won't get hardware accel for av1 on an old PC (Intel 10th gen or older), and it's really hard on the cpu. Try to turn it off in settings or with a browser addon.
If you have a vp9 video but hardware accel isn't working, you either have a really old PC (intel 6th gen or lower), or one of a list of problems:
*Browser isn't set to support hardware accel. Chrome is especially bad for this out of the box. Your standalone YouTube player is gonna be a good fix for this one.
*Browser running on an old GPU (GTX 9xx or lower, or an AMD from before 2018, because they added support stupidly late). This is why I have to set my browser to run from igpu instead.
*You sacrificed the wrong breed of goat while dedicating your PC to Satan, and the hardware is now cursed.
Bit of a tangent, but imo the question in your first point is answered by colonialism not being a historical grudge at that point. The US had the Philippines, the UK had India and burma, the Dutch had the islands, France had Indochina, Russia was moving south. China was in pieces and looked like it was ripe for taking.
From a 1930s Japanese perspective it looked like they were getting crushed between the western powers and were going to be deindustrialized into another colony by economic warfare (like the oil embargo). Defending hadn't worked for anyone yet, so... Banzai.
There's an interesting question of how willing the US would have been to let Japan beat the other colonial powers. But US expansion sure looks like the most immediate threat to Japan, so it was probably impossible.
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