Tanista
21hr ago
- The Shield, which is a better version of Breaking Bad (which imo got way too enamored with its lead for such a moralistic show). This is not to say that it was fun. I found it an incredibly stressful watch but the show had basically made tension its trademark circa Season 6 and never stopped so it was true to form.
- Succession also knew to wrap itself up instead of overstaying (it was on the brink) in a way that feels true to the plot.
- The Good Place expanded as far as it could go, had maybe one additional twist on the premise and then ended well.
Suppose instead, after first going viral, Mr. Beast had decided that "looks are the most important factor in achieving positive social outcomes" and doubled down on that, rather than his 'stunt' focused avenue. Would he have ended up with better social outcomes? No.
On the flipside, Liver King's hard-earned clout immediately evaporated when he broke kayfabe and admitted it was all based on a contradiction and he was full of shit.
MrBeast's gimmick is basically inviting you to watch a Youtube nerd recreate Fear Factor with some additional consumerism for that fantasy element. So long as he can find some new wrinkle in that formula (or new people) he can get attention. Not sure it's the same for people like Clavicular.
How can society better support the men who sincerely look up to Clav as role model?
Ban social media.
I don't see another way to square the reaction to the recent articles about female radicalization (where most people seem to think the internet/ideology caused an unjustified reaction) with this post (where we seem to take it for granted that men are reacting to some objective fact about their circumstances). The internet is the common factor. We can't control when people feel oppressed but you theoretically could ban the internet.
Of course, a lot of us don't consider this feasible or wise in practice.
Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?
No, they all seem crazy.
Seriously, who is the best adjusted streamer? It seems to select for the most dramatic. Going down the list of streamers I know something about:
- Destiny, of all the recent left-wing influencers probably one of the best political streamers because he's autistic enough to read sources and then disagree if he thinks it something doesn't make sense (which let him get shockingly far in recent Israel discourse with "experts" like Finkelstein) but has an incurable addiction to crazy white women that inevitably destroys whatever career he's built up since his last relapse. May have also blown Fuentes.
- Fuentes, may or may not have been blown by Destiny.
- Hasan Piker, the least masculine masculine role model who has drama continually. Honestly, you might as well put Ezra Klein on TRT and he'd do a better job of it.
- Clav, overdosed on stream.
- Johnny Somali, ran into Korean justice because he was stupid.
- Vitaly, ran into Philippines justice because he was stupid.
- IShowSpeed...okay, he seems pretty cool. I only see him doing a) implausibly athletic things or b) visiting various countries and actually being well-received cause he's not going to do some bullshit.
Spending untold billions to get a terrorist who really annoyed you is something which some people might think is worth establishing as a precedent, but I would hardly call it necessary.
Bin Laden's attempts to harm Americans overseas were "annoying". His attempt to harm America on 9/11 and get its attention was simply "successful". He made it clear that he had no intention of just being another annoying nemesis nestled in the Outer Rim.
Other countries had to suffer evil men who committed mass murder against their population enjoy their freedom, and yet they survived.
Something can be necessary and not an existential matter. Nations that have the wherewithal and are expected to respond to aggression globally can only be so circumspect.
Packing up and leaving other inconvenient battles may have been what emboldened Bin Laden in the first place.
It's not a problem unless you're the SOB born at the exact wrong time to benefit from either family support or welfare (or AI)
The country/ethnic group will survive but it's not gonna be fun for you personally. Which is a major incentive, in people's eyes, to not fight immigration or the dominant pro-immigration parties.
Tanista
5d ago
Unfortunately, the last two factors only work if the state is significantly stronger than the corporate entities, and willing to regulate them. When social media companies become big enough to sway public opinion though, they get the power to significantly reduce the will of the population, whilst lobbying for politicians to deregulate.
Chinese social media sites already tried this to stop the sale of TikTok. That's my real problem here: this doesn't prevent this happening, it just prevents you from having your own companies (which do respond to US government pressure, e.g. with the pressure over "misinformation" or the Hunter Biden story).
So only jobs are left. This is important of course, but I would argue that mega corps are not necessary for this. After all, several countries exist without mega corps and still manage to have low unemployment.
The countries that don't have megacorps are basically buying their services from the US. The EU doesn't have its own social media sites and the solution is to just take US ones and regulate them. Of course, this only works if the US doesn't respond badly (which it is now). All of this seems strictly inferior to just building your own.
There's also the fact that these more regulations focused states are simply not doing as well as the US and arguably leech in some fields like pharma where the US spends more. I don't think wanting to control social media companies caused this, but maybe the mindset may apply elsewhere and be damaging.
I've always found it an irrelevant point. At one point you could also say that the US didn't want to get involved in the world domination business and wanted to just make money and control its near abroad.
Tanista
6d ago
I am essentially asking for policies that would prevent individuals and companies from getting this big in the first place, and to break up the existing monopolies into smaller, competing groups.
Is China going to reciprocate?
I don't think that we can assume that American champions are just going to continue to be massively successful without the economies of scale or that even less accountable foreign companies won't take over. This, I assume, is Nybbler's complaint about wanting upsides with no downsides.
At the risk of sounding callous, this was totally survivable.
If all Osama Bin Laden had to show for his actions is a displaced (temporarily or otherwise) Taliban and a bullet in his face it wouldn't have gone down as badly. It might even have been accepted as the cost of having an empire.
The damage domestically was due to the neocons deciding to overdraw on the opportunity he gave them in Iraq by lying.
I'd take this seriously if it was a response to a hurricane. Given human adversaries who can respond to your math I think it's not a good idea to tell shoplifters so long as they stay under $X they're good.
It might be more expensive and "pointless" in a sensible world but you're just going to have to ruin some lives here.
They may, however, be motivated by weakness. Osama saw the US pull out of Somalia in one of its fits of humanitarianism over a relatively small human cost. This is not the sort of message you want to send to a person like that and the organization he leads.
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