Tanista
17hr ago
As long as you believe there is a good chance for you to become rich, that is often enough to justify voting against it.
Why would you believe this when you see your group failing more in the market?
The problem is that races are not equally politically united. It's not a given that any race (besides African-Americans) are going to be for a party to such a degree that a partisan gerrymander is synonymous with a racial one. So you risk essentially rewarding the most polarized groups (presumably the thing we eventually want less of) and/or disenfranchising less polarized people in order to give them representation.
It's not an easy problem. I'd say it's near unavoidable under the current system, like gerrymandering itself. What is the compromise solution here? Some room for partisan gerrymandering except where it causes a racial gerrymander which then, by your own argument, is a partisan gerrymander that necessitates a gerrymander in the other direction?
Tanista
1d ago
Same for the weird relationship with the Sublime
The Sublime seems to resolve most of your complaints it seems to me.
It's a process any collective group can go through that takes them to a realm where it's proven nothing can die nor get bored (in fact, realspace is so boring in comparison most people never return) and there's endless discovery and growth.
It's more democratic than realspace since non-Minds can have it and apparently all sapient races can achieve it.
Tanista
1d ago
If I write a dystopia about an oppressive one-party state, but then add a lot of statements into the story that in this world it has been scientifically been proven that this is the logical endpoint of any and all societies, does this suddenly make it not a dystopia?
It's a dystopia because of the "oppressive" downside, Culture Minds are not oppressive, just superior.
Tanista
8d ago
They also went after Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz for being anti-Islamic extremists/racists (they eventually settled this with an apology).
Harris I can get even if I wouldn't defend it. He dared to defend Charles Murray after all.
The Nawaz one was just particularly grating . Reminded me of a lot of leftists who don't actually know or care about Islam but feel justified in taking a stance on it based on how it fits their own domestic political battles (this is actually my charitable take: the alternative is that they got taken in by anti-reform Muslims). Absolute no sense of care in how they use their supposed expertise.
My take is a different one. 3k people killed in 9/11 is bad, sure, but his real success was to drag the US into a war in Afghanistan. Not only did the Taliban kill another 3k US and allied troops during 'Enduring Freedom', they spent more than 150 billion dollars on it.
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.
This is simply not cost-effective when the marginal price of a QALY in US healthcare is on the order of 100k$.
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.
Nor are jihadists motivated by fear of retaliation, Bin Laden himself was (I think) a minor Saudi noble who could have happily lived without having to work a single day in his life, but instead spent it hiding in caves doing Jihad.
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.
Tanista
10d 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 and stop them being subject to memeplexes that push people towards self-victimization.
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
15d 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
16d 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.
What do they actually want?
Marxism, or the leveling they expect it to provide.
It's just the labour theory of value conveniently cut off at such a point that it doesn't apply to anyone they know (or could conceivably be) or their favorite allied rich people (culture-producing left-wing celebrities and athletes ), though even some of those will breach the generous cap.
Halo does NOT depict a racial struggle at all, it is portrays a religious struggle.
Yes, you might as well say that Stargate is fascist and about racial struggle.
In fact, both stories aren't really a religious struggle but a struggle of science against blind superstition and plain lies. The stories don't really grant respect to the opposing side as theories or moral systems.
The Covenant are just provably wrong because they've sacralized what are scientific instruments and their credulity has led them to not only kill their own gods but get used as tools by the Prophets (who know some of the doctrine is false but refuse to collapse the business model).
The Jaffa/servants of all of the Goa'uld in Stargate are also just wrong (and terrorized into submission): their gods are not only technologically advanced aliens masquerading as such, they're not even the original inventors of their technology! The actual inventors are, while effete, durably in the scientist-humanist camp.
(Stargate did have to wrestle with the inevitable power creep taking them to a place where their enemies could make a good case for being gods and their religion was at least somewhat efficacious though)
It’s a common argument, and not just among SJWs, that white-on-black racism in the American South was mostly just a result of white men’s suspicion that many of their women are susceptible to getting seduced and boned by big black studs. To the extent that such fears really were there, I’m guessing they were overblown, because we know that white women are the social group least likely to engage in exogamy
This doesn't actually require you to believe that white women would broadly be willing. (Though people also didn't like the willing ones).
The closest modern analogue is the fear of refugees in Europe, the claim is not actually that they're especially attractive to Western women but that they won't let that stop them.
"We need to violently check these people who're prone to rape" would probably be categorized as racism rather than sex-based insecurity by most. If anything, the claim is that the inferiority complex is on the other side.
Even in that fight Halmich got caught in a grapple.
Most realistic version of the Hollywood fight is (a taller) Black Widow kicks him in the leg until he can't fight back. Never Back Down did it and it was perfectly cinematic (and accurate, it really would take only a few), it just isn't as cool as acrobatic jiu-jitsu.
Presumably that youth players often rise to the full team when very young (I think Walcott got in at 16?) but no woman has. And then we can look at their relative level of competition to see if it's just bigotry
Why dont more MMA fighters get to those powerlifting numbers?
Opportunity cost. MMA fighters also have to be technically skilled and have a gas tank and be at the best weight for their professional prospects . All of that takes training time and conflicts with being as strong as possible.
And at a certain point height does just matter. Jon Jones comes from a family of athletes. MMA fans joke that he's actually the worst performing of his entire family. He has a horrible vertical and just can't seem to put muscle on his legs. But he had the perfect body type for light heavyweight because he was a great wrestler and out-ranged everyone. Daniel Cormier was an Olympic wrestler and he couldn't get past the height difference to take Jon down.
And maybe that is the other thing: MMA simply doesn't attract top talents as easily as other sports. Jon Jones - one of the greatest of all time - is essentially a fuckup who ruined his wrestling career which is why he jumped into MMA so young.
Tanista
30d ago
I'd say that intelectuals in general were considered high status historically.
How far back are we going here?
If we're going very broad, I'd say the advantage intellectuals have is that their achievements are still legible today, preserved as they are by other intellectuals. The conquering noble (who may legitimately be illiterate) may have been higher status in the past but we only see him through the eyes of historians.
Modern era? Sure.
Yeah, that's a pretty hard sell given that manifestly it is considered a problem in the community and even rich blacks line up behind Democrats as a result.
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