I don't give a damn whether it's a black cat or a white cat so long as it catches mice.
This position works because the government of the person who said it is not democratic. It actually does matter in America if the masses think the government is right or legitimate in what it does.
Tanista
4hr ago
I can't help but think that they're not really giving 'informed consent' to the activity if they can't really grasp the real odds involved (they overestimate their chances of success, nobody dissuades them of this) and the first order harmful effects, much less the second order ones, that can result.
This is perilously close to an argument against liberalism for the general public.
Tanista
11hr ago
Afroman is funny but I don't know that anyone thinks of him as a top battle rapper.
On the hip hop side it's inseparable from the song being used (which is why one of the recent Drake-Kendrick songs became vastly more popular than the rest even if it wasn't the best).
On the pure battle rap side it's just inseparable from crowd work and performance - and writing for that particular person. Since battle rappers have an incentive to spend time in the ring (unlike rappers, for whom it becomes a potential danger once they're famous enough to not have something to gain) their styles become much more distinct and you have an incentive to attack them.
This joke about an opponent's style can only land in a public performance, and only if you know your audience.
You also get points for off the cuff freestyles, which obviously don't work online.
Like any roasting session, you need to be saying it in the kid's face in front of the other students on the playground to get the full effect.
But attempting to recreate it via AI is pretty on-brand for TheMotte.
Tanista
3d ago
As a Gambian I'm torn. I don't want Senegal to do too well on principle but the alternative is Morocco and the incompetents who officiated this. Kinda have to root for them I guess.
The accounts I'm seeing are malding for a different reason though: this validates the claims (made by Jamie Carragher for example) that AFCON isn't a serious tourney.
Tanista
3d ago
Rappers seem like a very bad target for this sort of extortion . Their audience absolutely does not care about them mocking cops (one might even say it's expected), so they suffer no reputational damage from refusing to settle. You might actually make them more money.
Also, Afroman doesn't seem that rich.
Not really. Common threads across that genre is that the ridicule connects to something real
The biggest recent beef (that reached the Super Bowl) had entirely unsubstantiated accusations of paedophilia and domestic abuse. And that was just the worst stuff
I used to watch pure battle rap (which has diverged into its own sport as opposed to a proving ground for new rappers). Yes, the most memorable and devastating moments involve something true. Especially if it's unknown.
But lying is also acceptable if it's funny and well-crafted.
Tanista
4d ago
This didn't actually prevent some government orgs from assuming otherwise, e.g. in the British OBR projections that assumed migrants would be as productive as locals.
That and lobbying from business (and fears of a dying healthcare system) explains the massive post-COVID migration spike.
Incredibly short sighted (basically low wages for business that didn't like how COVID shifted the labour market + pretty projections of growth so you can borrow at the expense of taxpayers for decades) but governments can be shortsighted. It also doesn't help when discussions on human capital are basically taboo so it's hard to coordinate criticism without being called racist.
Of course, that's another structural problem caused by aging: there aren't really many high IQ populations to squeeze since most of their countries are both wealthy now and aging (and, in the case of Britain, they left the EU). If you think migration is your solution it's gonna be Third World migration and we've seen how even selective immigration systems that try to get the cream of the crop from places like India got corrupted by the incentive to import cheap labour.
Tanista
4d ago
The fertility decline/rapid aging of the citizen population doesn't help either imo. The younger cohorts are much more diverse.
It also means that you can't ever stop and assimilate people. People always bring up the Ellis Islanders or whoever but that stopped and the intake slowed for a generation after. Nobody who cites that as a success story even pretends that's going to happen because they want workers and to show population/economic growth.
Nobody can ever make the argument to ease off for a decade or two, even for specific groups.
There's some pretense that they're gonna fix the plane when it's in flight but no one actually knows how to do it.
It is cheaper in terms of political capital to double down on indoctrinating the host heritage populations to accept the 'eccentricities' of immigrant groups over mandating assimilation
It's the only group with revolutionary potential so it's very dangerous to embolden their critiques of multiculturalism or show it may be worse than they think. I think, in the eyes of the leaders, it runs the risk of becoming a runaway train where they take it too far.
Of course, this is partly what helped the very offenses that make it even harder to fess up and further discredit the system.
An absolutist monarch can do whatever they like. Why bring up the law element? Presumably because you want something more stable than his whim.
But therein lies the problem: what an absolutist monarch has done, he can undo (or just ignore). The appeal to law is just pointless at best then. What you're actually appealing to is the idea that it's always going to be in their interests to not only suppress domestic hatred of Israel but also help suppress revisionist Palestinian attacks on Israel. Not turn a blind eye, be actively complicit (when simply refusing to do anything about Palestine is already unpopular).
And they're going to do this forever, no matter what happens, because ??
I personally wouldn't feel very comfortable here.
Is Israel more trustworthy with their constant ceasefire violations?
Is Saudi Arabia's defense against genocide taking Israel's word for things?
People want peace in theory, and favor de-escalation in principle, but are nevertheless comfortable with the proposition that Israel should not exist, that they should not do business with Israel, nor accept aid from Israel, nor come to Israel's aid in case of a natural disaster, etc.
A cynic might say people want peace when they're losing. When they're winning (or even vaguely appear to be inching towards their goals) they get emboldened.
When I hear pro-Palestinian supporters in the West complain that unilateral withdrawal doesn't work or withdrawing from Lebanon discredited the more peaceable types who wanted to negotiate I don't know how to take it except as an admission that the particular memeplex Palestinians have adopted (or has possessed them) makes showing weakness (what some call "good faith") the exact wrong thing to do.
I’m not so sure. Israel, as a condition for their recognition of a Palestinian state, can ask the Arab monarchies to enshrine its borders into law and penalize those who openly call to dispute these borders.
What exactly does "rule of law" mean to a bunch of autocrats and how is it supposed to protect them from the paroxysms of their own people when they have to go murder Palestinians for the sake of the Jews?
Because that IS what it'll come to. And it won't be a clean war. It'll be the terrorists doing what they do now and hiding under hospitals and other places that'll make it even more monstrous in the eyes of the Ummah to do Israel's dirty work.
There's always this selective lack of realism . I don't think I've ever seen anyone suggest that passing a law would protect Ukraine from Putin's Russia.
It doesn't even make sense on a feminist view to say race doesn't matter, because feminists are progressives and progressives believe that racial/aesthetic inequity is a real thing. That's why fat and ugly and black women were everywhere when the revolution triumphed in 2020, that's why Sydney Sweeney became the topic of (inane) culture war discourse when those brands pulled back and did the conventional thing.
Are we really going to argue that people don't know that celebrities have groupies, that fit men are more attractive (where's the male slob sex symbol?). I think what's new is the doomerism - that it's over if you don't meet some ridiculously high baseline. This isn't purely about social messaging but about tech (it becomes much more serious if you can just filter out 5'11 manlets online) and people being more neurotic.
I think the feminist position is deeply flawed in that it's narcissistic and refuses to take sex differences (or hell, basic facts about how crimes and abuse cluster) seriously. It fails to factor in that even a bad plan is better than no plan for men (and, likely, older feminists simply overcorrected and assumed men would always be as socially adroit as their generation no matter what bad incentives they created).
But there's only so far you can get with the argument that people are this ignorant, that they think Chris Hemsworth takes his shirt off because women are attracted to Aussies. Either they're neuro-divergent to the point of suicidal credulity (in which case I don't trust that you actually read society's message correctly, there are implicit messages), very young or are actively in denial. Someone like Lindy West or the fat acceptance types are not unaware of their lower status, they reject it and reject anything that could fix it because they've decided a political situation is the only moral one. I suppose you can say that the last group were brainwashed into it but they're not ignorant. They're willfully opposed and you have to know what you're fighting to fight it.
Tanista
5d ago
The companies were also probably not the same, in part because of the Arab Spring. IIRC around the time of ISIS Twitter was more libertarian about the whole thing but then were stuck on the horns of a dilemma. Do you let your platform be used to show beheaded Americans and propaganda that was actively radicalizing people? Do you shut down those accounts and kill possible intelligence sources? Their solution was more coordination with the government.
Once you cede that principle you're not going back.
Tanista
5d ago
You forget the lying about WMDs.
That's the bigger deal because that's what makes it so hard to motivate a war with Iran.
They had one blank cheque for that and they blew it on Saddam.
Tanista
5d ago
but it's weird to me that you (and many, many others) present anti-Israel as the neutral position.
The lesson to take from this is that if you're unreasoningly hostile other people will find it more convenient to bend to you rather than forcing you to a compromise position.
No perverse incentives here of course.
Here's the truth nuke: Clavicular is not an incel. He is living proof of the sexual marketplace the manosphere describes, which is heavily determined by looks, money, height, race, social status, etc. He pulls taken women with minimal effort.
Everyone already knows this. The only reason we don't discuss how much pussy NBA and NFL players get is because it's banal. Every rapper consistently brags about this (besides buying jewelry and cars you don't need, taking a "broke nigga's bitch" is the ultimate sign of success.)
These people are, however, rare. And so their transactional and/or hostile approach to sex is seen as just one of life's natural inequities. We don't like that a star gets better treatment in some domains but we just live with it because we almost never directly compete with stars.
PUA/Looksmaxxers/etc. and the rest are, in their critics' eyes, an attempt to mainstream a bleak and transactional attitude amongst men who don't have the excellence for it, made even worse by the ressentiment that drove them to find those tools in the first place (the Nietzschean take being that they're more bitter and cruel than the natural aristocrats). Those men probably don't benefit from having the hostile attitude rappers can afford to sing about and, if those men "abuse" women, it'll be regular women not career groupies or pass-arounds who orbit high status males.
And, of course, if they buy into the worse beliefs and become doomers their parents' bloodline ends. Westerners don't have many kids, you can't afford to throw away one as a failure.
Lastly, since #notallmen was mentioned as a gotcha, can I point out how this "collective guilt" only flows one way? If every man should feel ashamed about the manosphere because we share genitals with them, what about the (overwhelmingly male) miners, linemen, firemen, welders, construction workers, road workers, steel workers, etc etc who commit to physically intensive and dangerous labour everyday to keep your lights on?
The simpler charge of hypocrisy is that this only applies to men generally or white men specifically. Nobody ever suggests that Muslims should suffer collective guilt because "most of the M&Ms may not be terrorists but would you take the risk?". It's pretty laughable to be focusing on white incel terrorism when places like Britain haven't even reckoned with the grooming gangs and refugee rapists and the audience of people like Tate are disproportionately Muslim.
I haven't watched this doc beyond some Twitter clips, but I did see Louis Theroux's original doc on PUAs maybe a decade ago. There's been a generational turnover. The original cadre was much whiter*. Less misogynist? I dunno. But less nakedly so. Myron Gaines especially comes across as someone who loathes women. Like, not just sexually frustrated but actively loathes that they have any power.
* And much less incel/blackpill. People like Neill Strauss did have some experience with women to temper their doomerism, they just didn't know how to transition into the relationship they wanted.
You misunderstand. I don't care that the Chinese have a different system, I may even admire parts of it. I'm saying that the democratic/American system cannot be blase about this in the same way. Americans are very puritanical about their liberty, if nothing else.
Countries don't do things, people do. The question is whether the American people will tolerate that argument baldly put. I think there's obvious financial incentives in destroying the last guardrails of the old world, but the arguments about freedom that license it find far more purchase than they did in the past and that's because of the people.
It's self-evident to me that Islam Is Right About
WomenGambling. But "this is simply a net loss for society and you're fooling yourself if you think we need to run this experiment again - humans are still as weak and stupid as they ever were" probably would have failed on many, many people and that matters.Xi doesn't have to care. Small d-democrats do.
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