But now, society starts believing that learning to code is a secure path to having a high-paying career and the American Dream. It seems that only the sky is the limit in the digital revolution and the booming online sector. Young women come to realize that calling undesirable men ‘nerds’ just comes across as dumb and baseless to most people.
I honestly don't think this has much to do with it. I think it's like prison rape: feminists insisted that rape wasn't funny, and then everyone had to be consistent on this despite men unthinkingly making such jokes forever (I don't really think there's much of a material explanation for this shift). A general tendency to look down on bullying and slut shaming took hold (as well as a claim that men being judged by their attractiveness to women turned women into objects in male status games*), so feminists had to try to be consistent.
Of course, low-status is low status and, whatever people say, they need a way to recognize it or tar things as such.
Flaw 2) Defeatism Silver derides politicians as irrational, for foolishly believing "their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day." This is accurate, but also ignores the point: if you don't think your party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers, then you shouldn't be doing this. The only reason to get into politics is because you think you can win. If you can only lose, you need to change strategies
The big flaw imo with "right side of history" thinking is not that parties don't generally think they're right, it's with the assumption that things will work out eventually (somehow). It's not defeatism or a rejection of your belief in your answers to be pragmatic or to hedge your bets.
Don't waste energy lobbying for Sotomayor to retire, lobby for Ds to pull their heads out of their asses in the heartland.
Yes, this is the sort of advice I'd expect the GOP to give Democrats.
Flaw 3) Eliminating the Individual Silver assumes that any D is as good as any other D. That any D Senate is as good as any other D Senate, and any D justice is as good as any other D justice. This is misguided. The D justice that would get past this D Senate is probably going to be a milquetoast, below average, moderate
This was also "Notorious RBG's" argument - she may have even been right. But, at this point, even the most fervent pussyhat-wearers have begrudgingly admitted that she erred. In isolation this argument works I guess but not if the comparison is with a potential Republican pick. Certainly not for Nate Silver's audience.
Likewise, Bill Cosby's blackness has not saved him from having his reputation in shatters. In his case perhaps the most damaging factor is the seemingly callous, premeditated, and repeated nature of the acts.
Insofar as blackness shields you, it's because the mainstream defers judgment to "your" community: Kanye got a pass on things like "slavery was a choice" and the Confederate flag because he was already getting criticism from black people and it was seen as an internal thing (then he crossed state lines). Same with rap's misogyny, despite this making no sense. Allen's community meanwhile is not just white, but likely to be disproportionately turbolib.
Cosby is an interesting example in that there was a simmering resentment towards him for his conservative lecturing and his attempt to act like a grandee to enforce this in the AA entertainment industry. His "pound cake speech" has a whole Wikipedia page. And the things he was saying...well:
But these people, the ones up here in the balcony fought so hard. Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged, 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else, and I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, 'If you get caught with it you're going to embarrass your mother.' Not 'You're going to get your butt kicked.' No. 'You're going to embarrass your family.'
And:
We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.
Can't have made him popular.
It's pretty interesting that the first domino was Hannibal Burress getting frustrated and basically pointing out his allegations due to his behavior towards other black people.
And then we were off to the races.
Intellectually, I recognize that executing your opponents at will because they are not uniformed soldiers of a recognized nation state might not be a good policy because one man's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter, and having certain humanitarian standards makes conflicts with non-state actors less gruesome.
Less gruesome for whom?
These people are already happy to kill and rape civilians and turn their own people into unwilling martyrs while benefiting from the restraints on their opponents.
Rufo actually seems to possess brain cells still, unlike the weird degradation of Peterson and the embarrassing emotiveness of Alex Jones, Glenn Beck and other frothing conspiracists.
The problem with a lot of the former type isn't intelligence. It's a weird sort of...effeteness? Peterson might actually be better than most here, since his messianic tendencies make him disagreeable
But you see it a lot with the "IDW" - everyone in it is likely smarter than average - where they basically seem to see the dirty work of politics to be beneath them. Instead, they just want to...talk. Uncharitably, because it'd require them to truly break with their original tribe (who they disagree with on a pivotal but small set of issues). Charitably, they've been burned and it isn't really their thing.
Tanista
1mo ago
I’ll go further; sex is not a private matter even if you don’t let other people see you doing it. It’s a matter of concern to the entire community because it just is
The Christine Blasey Ford thing came up again and all I could think was "if the entire nation is going to have to relitigate decades-old teenage parties filled with drunk kids maybe people should keep a tighter handle on them, cries of tyranny or no". Because clearly it can't help but be everyone's business.
That is a particularly extreme example but still.
Tanista
1mo ago
"Teach men not to rape" infuriates the political opposition
The political opposition was routed out of places like university campuses where this stuff runs rampant. It's aimed at fellow traveler men.
Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
I wouldn't agree on Paul but it did occur to me that Jessica, due to the movies downplaying how much her going AWOL (and kicking off the deaths of everyone as a result) was about love , really comes across as vastly more malevolent not just in this movie but in the first one too.
Tanista
1mo ago
I think "normal" people don't get how deranged this debate can get online.
That might actually help along the swiftboating: surely no one would attack JKR in this insane way if she wasn't really a Holocaust denier (yes, that was recently a thing)/racist/person who thinks all trans are rapists right?
It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it.
This is where already being a depressive is useful: I've become depressed about much less substantial things, so I simply told myself that this was just my latest excuse.
I'm still depressed, but I don't have this totem in my head I can blame. Tomorrow I may not be depressed, regardless of how we do on Raven's Progressive Matrices tests.
If the worst version of HBD is true (I believe some version is but am agnostic about how unfixable some problems are), if the "crazy" Lynn numbers that even some DR folks seem to be squeamish about are accurate...fuck it.
In a sense, nothing "changed". We all knew growing up that Africa had a disproportionate share of failed states, as kids we believed Asians were better at math and like the two Asians we knew were and I honestly think the older, less educated generation believed in HBD and would just nod along here.
If anything, all it means is that I don't have to spend time reading the huge "it's not HBD it's..." corpus or feeling like I have to do something about it (my father is still fighting the good fight and laments that his constant complaints* have made his children cynical about joining him and trying to help the old country). Just move on and live the best life you can. Even if it was malleable, I'd probably have a minimal-at-best role in changing fate anyway. If it isn't...why the consternation?
If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink. Not because it doesn't matter and we can all be individuals. But because there's nothing else.
* One of his confessions was he felt embarrassed because he goes to the Westerners and asks them to take African agency more seriously, meanwhile even basics don't seem to be done and I quote "our economy doesn't amount to a hill of beans".
When the clueless blame Hip-Hop for hood culture, they are blaming rock for the decline in lasting relationships and the rise in casual sex and they are blaming GTA and Call of Duty and 2A for Sandy Hook. In Hip-Hop it is that most classic mistaking of cause for effect: Hip-Hop didn't cause hood culture, hood culture caused Hip-Hop.
Except soft power matters. Hip hop may not have created gangs but it provided prestige to, for example, California gang culture which everyone around the world knows of for a reason.
Not only do we see this mystique ruin rappers who are from the hood but refuse to stay out of it once they make it, we see people who are not (Chris Brown) get entangled with gangsters because of the cultural cachet it possesses (Tupac is probably the ur-example of this, and should be in Wikipedia under "when keeping it real goes wrong").
If rich people who have every incentive to avoid this are falling victim to the allure of this stuff, I don't think marginal youths in weak communities are going to be less susceptible. That, imo, is the difference between rap and CoD: neurotic suburban mothers who don't have real problems and so have to manufacture a panic are not in the same boat as people whose children actually are at huge risk. They don't need additional cultural pressure pushing in the direction of hedonism and violence.
If that slice of ability in the community suddenly lost or never had that outlet, do you think those communities would be better or worse? Worse, obviously. Some of those artists, the few who did grow up in the shit, who do have a real brilliance, they'd have fallen into crime and not gotten out. They would have done very well. More crime, more violence, more kids, more deaths.
What about all the cases where hip hop money was essentially used to fuel gang beefs? The whole Tupac/Biggie beef was made infinitely worse by drawing in gang members who were looking for money. Both died (it almost sparked a war between gangs), the artform was weaker for it and the community hardly benefited when Death Row folded and even the hyenas soon went hungry again
In places like Chicago drill only seemed to feed the cycle of violence. It was bad enough, people making songs insulting dead enemies didn't help. Lots of people - including rappers - died as a result.
And, of course, Young Thug who was apparently using his money and cachet to get involved in all sorts of organized crime in Atlanta - beware any man who can maintain street cred after dressing like a woman in the most homophobic genre ever - allegedly almost leading to the death of Lil Wayne, another rap potentate.
Tanista
1mo ago
I'm struggling to think of counter-examples.
Armie Hammer looks like the jock, cancelled. Gina Carano literally used to beat people up (including Fassbender in one of her early roles), cancelled. The rapper DaBaby is black and a jock (I think - killing people in self-defense and bragging about it seems pretty masculine), also cancelled for homophobia. Johnathan Majors is black, looks like this and was cancelled (though he gives off theater-kid-narcissist energy underneath all that armor)
Plenty of Americans describe themselves as "Irish" or "German" or whatever without trying to imply they are less American.
It should go without saying but: She didn't call herself Somali. She gave a speech advocating for Somali interests and called herself Somali.
Fair to say that's a different thing from half-Indian Jay highlighting his heritage at the icebreaker.
Why is "victim blaming" in quotes? You're actually blaming the victim. This is the second post I've seen this morning asking women to have more agency over being raped or assaulted.
Either it's not victim blaming because we tell other people in similar situations (e.g. leaving a car unlocked in a bad neighborhood) to take preventative measures without that label. Or it is but it's a specific thing where we don't apply the same logic to other places, which raises questions.
Either way, I can get people putting it in quotes.
Tanista
28d ago
I've seen that said but I can't actually find her stating it in response to Obama's light pressure.
She was asked to resign before the 2014 midterms , I doubt she was defending not doing so by saying she'd wait for the allegedly inevitable next Democratic president. I think the above take might have been cope after they lost the Senate and it was clear the GOP wouldn't confirm anyone.
I think people like her honestly just don't want to retire and the rest is just posthoc rationalization. Look at people like Feinstein.
I don't think they explain it past that in the books. I guess the BG were gonna massage it later but the implication is that's how they would get some peace (or at least preserve one of the lines)
In the films they do say that Jessica was told to carry daughters but not explicitly that they were to be wed to Feyd (like many things, there's enough to project the book canon unto it but not enough to recreate it). It is explicitly said in Part One that Paul is a boy because Jessica wanted to bring about the Kwisatz Haderach early and was willing to risk Paul's life to do so.
Casts all of her behavior in a very different light.
Tanista
29d ago
I am pretty sure that the school is for the underclass/lower class. In those cases, yes, in order for people to get along even to the point that they stop disrupting the learning process you practically have to beat the tribalism out of them.
Yeah, I went to a "multicultural" school mainly made up of the children of middle-to-upper-middle class people from across the globe. Russians, Chinese, Nigerians.
None of this shit was needed, because people mostly self-segregated and figured out a way to live within that* and teachers simply didn't tolerate shit, it's not like they couldn't find someone else to pay those extortionate tuition fees. My first assumption hearing this was this was a no-excuse school for the problem kids (I wonder if this is a "win" or not for Wax's model: the 'no-excuse' school still faced attempts to destroy it on grounds of difference, just as she claims income-integration schools do, yet it survived)
* Though maybe the next generation will lose the segregation aspect and have more conflict as a result...
Tanista
2mo ago
Progressives won’t be convinced by the “HBD supports meritocracy” argument because meritocracy isn’t axiomatic for them
- You don't necessarily have to convince hardcore progressives. All "respectable" antiwoke complaints are basically aimed at liberals who share progressive assumptions about helping people and remedying racial injustices but have relatively positive attitudes towards things like meritocracy (it's just they have no conceptual answer to "meritocracy hasn't worked, so it's clearly also racist")
- While we're at it, how many people have soured on meritocracy because they've just take for granted that racism is the cause of group differences that they keep seeing meritocracy recreate?
Feminism's defenders will counter that there are many existing role models available for men, often listing real or fictional people like Ryan Gosling, Marcus Rashford or Ted Lasso. These men are either fake orliteral one percenters whose lifestyle an average young man has no hope of to attaining.
"Unrealistic standards" is a feminist complaint. Most men will never be like Tate either. Every kid on the football pitch wanted to be Ronaldo, down to the overpriced boots and free-kick pose, even though it was obvious that he was a 99 percenter in looks, before we even get into athletic talent.
Don't disagree with the general point that (progressive) women seem to be the target for a lot of this, which is what stops many of these efforts from being effective, though. EDIT: Norms are also enforced bottom-up, regardless of your idol, but that's harder when no one can agree what they are.
It’s clear that wokeness isn’t the cause of bad game writing. The very suggestion is ridiculous.
Obviously. This still doesn't really say anything.
I agree that Dragon Ball Z is badly written in many ways. The bloat is infamous, the way it handles succession to new characters (it doesn't) is bad, the plot is built on a loop of new transformations that boil down to differently colored hair and so on. These are all recognized flaws. So recognized that they literally invented their own Abridged series to handle the bloat. They charged people twice to get a passable viewing experience! And the fans bought in anyway. They know what they're getting.
Handing it over to woke American show runners would lead to a very different sort of bad.
Which is what fans care about.
You're not owning anyone, you're just marginalizing yourselves, and ceding the entire institution to your rivals. It's not a gain.
The rivals were already calling shots in the institution. The two-mothers, non-binary woman ad came from inside the house.
By your own account police departments are red-triber enclaves. But I think blue states made their displeasure felt after George Floyd and other such incidents. Budgets were cut, people were made uncomfortable enough that older cohorts took retirement...
The reason "DEI" has taken over as a general online-conservative curse-word is cause it allows them to express the insight that not all institutions need to be taken over from the bottom-up.
He's "clinging to guns and religion" and stopping progressives from solving the gun crime problem.
And that was Obama trying to be charitable.
Tanista
1mo ago
If you take migration to be about short-term goals like getting engineers, sure. If populations have different mean IQs and will trend towards them then no? Yes, your Nigerian quantum physicist is going to work great, what's going to happen in three generations? Especially given they might (almost certainly, in some countries like the US) assimilate into the existing non-migrant population of the same race...
That is the killer.
In any case, it doesn't need to follow in some absolute way. Historically what happened when the majority of Westerners had these beliefs is clear. That alone makes being concerned rational, and that alone makes the "focus on the individual" refrain unconvincing. People are not failing to understand individualism as the Harrisian-Hughesian argument goes. It's not confusion, it's experience.
Tanista
3mo ago
As Dave Chappelle put it (speaking about white women): "you were in on the heist, you just didn't like your cut".
When a "privileged" person is overthrown in elite spaces, it's rarely by the weak. It's by "the weak": people in the same space or close enough who want power and use the few levers they have to beat their rivals/tormentors.
They are advancing their interests, but that often involves punching up (allegedly) rather than down.
There was an exodus of people with wherewithal and high human capital from Russia anyway right?
Seems like a good balance that harmed Russia without causing more drama over even bigger migrants flows.
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