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.
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".
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.
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.
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
3mo 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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
He's "clinging to guns and religion" and stopping progressives from solving the gun crime problem.
And that was Obama trying to be charitable.
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
1mo 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.
Tanista
1mo 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
4mo 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.
Tanista
4mo ago
Concurring with Nate Silver that the whole thing was an embarrassment and the time it took means Harvard still looks awful despite doing the thing
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
And so if we listen to a lot of HBD proponents like Murray and ‘accept’ it and dismantle those programs that largely benefit those communities, and abolish / criminalize affirmative action and so on, do we really think that the social problems we see in black communities are going to improve? That issues with eg violence are going to improve? It just seems very unlikely to me.
Problem is that the anti-HBDers are not standing in place: recent anti-policing pushes have made black communities worse off.
It's not simply "keep what works even if you have to lie about it". The other theory has motivated policy that is now not only hurting black people but affecting others, with no sign of stopping.
The latter is a much less attractive status quo.
it was often because they didn’t want to see the country burn.
A black guy gets shot by police at the wrong time and the country may burn anyway.
Tanista
2mo ago
Then I guess the segment of the poor population that favors the lottery has to be relatively high IQ, or I have even more questions.
But then it occurred to me: the message makes 100% sense if we start from the assumption that modern feminists, eager to right cultural wrongs of the past that they perceive, really want to make sure their messaging never ever entails even a hint of the notion that women need to exercise any level of agency in order to avoid rape, assault or harassment of any type i.e. avoid bad men, because in all cases that would be “victim blaming” and horrific etc.
You could do this while admitting that rape is disproportionately carried out by Dark Triad types (especially when society has already been trying for decades to grab all of the low-hanging fruit of "normal men who just think this is okay") and not harangue Robin Hanson types as well. From what I recall from my early internet days when Jezebel was strong, feminists were insistent on rejecting this sort of point.
There's an element of class guilt that is also useful.
Also, if you believe rape is about power or some patriarchal ideology not sex, I suppose "teach men not to rape" sounds more appealing as an actual solution and not just a cynical messaging tactic.
Tanista
5mo ago
Maybe America could do with a general taboo against the display of all flags except the US flag?
I recall the debate over Tlalib's Palestinian flag (and comparisons to a Congressman showing up in his IDF uniform) and it all seems like a - somewhat distasteful - hassle.
I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far. 99% of the topics experts agree on or are on places like Wikipedia are true. If you look up something like the Central Limit Theorem on Wikipedia the answer will be more or less correct. But most things are boring. The ideas we focus on that are controversial and we don't trust them on are ones that cause the experts to lose their minds over and lose the ability to be impartial. Some examples are HBD and Covid. But if you open up a biology textbook, you can take most of that knowledge to the bank.
Using your own examples: in 2020 it would have just been HBD. Now it's "HBD...and a global pandemic". Am I supposed to be relieved that they can still be rational about stellar mechanics and calculus but not an actual global health emergency? If I had told you ahead of time that we can't trust the experts on an upcoming pandemic, would you see me as going too far?
And I bet, a decade ago, there would be no controversy over the sex binary. Now I'm seeing publications like SciAm flirt with nonsense on this topic.
Who said this is a fixed situation? Polarization is driving this behavior and polarization begets polarization. If you see that as the underlying issue there's little to be sanguine about.
Also, what about the second-order consequences of irrationality? Let's grant HBD is true for the sake of argument. If you cannot be rational about this it'll cascade into everything: your views on schooling, diversity, the causes of poverty, how to handle the Third World, how to handle crime, interpreting history, immigration...All of these are then suspect.
I don't think this is hypothetical, I think a lot of the derangement and ludicrous (like, actually dangerous to lives and entire localities) policy and absurd expert advice we're seeing across a huge number of fronts is due to exactly this sort of cascade of irrationality.
I'm not smart enough to tell when something is just a harmless little carveout from rationality. I'm not smart enough to know some of the consequences of these beliefs in the moment (many of the current irrationalities du jour like gender ideology were uncritically supported by my past self). I imagine many people aren't. Which is probably what alarms them when they can tell someone with authority is being irrational (especially in a partisan way). What about when they can't tell?
The political opposition was routed out of places like university campuses where this stuff runs rampant. It's aimed at fellow traveler men.
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