ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
10mo ago
The effect isn't primarily through direct government suppression. Maybe one or two people with nasty rhetoric will be punished, but it's about generating a news story "look at how evil incels are," not any real likelihood that they'll act. You'll probably have a government unit dedicated to convincing young, stupid men to say they'll commit outrageous violence, just for the sake of making sure that story percolates through media on a regular basis.
Its effect will primarily be to reenforce among women that men complaining about, well, anything are icky and low status (note that "dangerous" is not one of those adjectives). A guy complaining about his inability to pay for dates is really just an entitled incel, so he deserves to be excluded from society. And he certainly doesn't deserve to have his complaints treated as a systemic issue, because we live in a perfect utopian world where anything bad that happens is men's own fault.
Men will then self-censor and retreat from a losing battlefield, at best working until they become a good cog in the system or (more likely) turning in on themselves and self-soothing with video games and porn, until eventually hanging themselves.
Incels won't be a threat to the system, because men who are plausible leaders will never be actual incels, and no one will take the massive status hit that comes with taking up any incel-adjacent positions. Instead, incels will just end up being a drag on the system, supported by the dole and their parents' retirement funds. It's also a self-correcting problem: the more men that drop out, the easier it is for the remaining men. The negative feedback loop ensures the system is stable.
ThenElection
7mo ago
Crimes are real, and people in high places commit them. But prosecuting them is reactive, and prosecutorial discretion lends itself to petty political witch hunts. Trump supporters, of all people, should realize this.
What would be gutsy and genuinely salutatory would be for Biden to offer broad, blanket pardons of controversial figures on both sides. And it would be helpful for Democrats: they wouldn't spend the next four years chasing down crimes, real or imagined, that don't really matter (compared to other issues) and that don't help them win elections.
ThenElection
11mo ago
I don't love Vance, but he's definitely better than the swamp creatures. I doubt the VP pick matters electorally, but the selection is important to define the future of the party and the country. Imagine Trump was incapacitated, senile, or otherwise incapable of exercising the duties of the Presidency: who do you want to be the new torchbearer?
The status dynamics are interesting. Having worked at McDonald's sometime in the past clearly isn't something that Democrats feel there should be shame over--regardless of the veracity of Kamala's work history, it's still something she thinks gives a boost to her resume. But the response is nevertheless unhinged.
Is it some kind of stolen valor? I'm imagining Trump stocking shelves at CostCo in a photo-op, and I doubt he'd even get any media attention. Or even doing the same exact thing at Burger King: despite being identical slop, the response wouldn't be nearly so vituperative.
It has to do with what McDonald's represents. Kamala worked at McDonald's, but it was something horrific she was forced to do, serving the lowest of the low so she could better herself. If her life is ever dramatized by Netflix, her last day there will depict her departure as she gives a soliloquy about the depravities of mass consumerist slop, corporate wage slavery, car-centric culture, and factory farming. Trump, by contrast, is not only going there voluntarily, but going there as if there were nothing wrong or shameful about going there. Anyone with his privileges doing something so declasse is breaking a code.
It's also useful to think about how Communism made itself inspiring. You have bold posters of attractive, young, bold comrades ushering in a new world; powerful displays of military might and stories of the underdog throwing off the yoke of foreign oppressors through sheer will and heroism; technological marvels invented by Communism. (And, of course, the enemy is ugly, misshapen, obese old capitalist men.)
Turn that around. Create an unashamed capitalist aesthetic of beauty and power and success. If you do that, it's barely even necessary to paint Communists in any light at all. We certainly don't have that at all today. Probably Musk is the closest to that aesthetic, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.
ThenElection
9mo ago
Since this is a gossip thread...
I have a couple friends who genuinely want the extinction of the human race. Not in a mass murder sense as they conceptualize it, but in a create a successor species, give a good life to the remaining humans, maybe offer them the chance for brain uploads, sense. Details and red lines vary between them, but they'd broadly agree that this is a fair characterization of their goals and desires.
Where do they work? OAI, Anthropic, GDM.
I have a fair amount of sympathy for their viewpoints, but it's still genuinely shocking. It's as if you suddenly found out that every government official was secretly a Hare Krishna or part of the People's Temple, and then when you point it out, everyone thinks the accusation is too absurd to be real.
ThenElection
7mo ago
He has this manic charisma that makes no sense but is incredibly compelling. Imagining a counterfactual Harris victory, her speech would be full of positive words but have no joy behind them.
Trump has an optimistic vision of the country, who he is, and his role in it. I think that's what won it for him.
ThenElection
8mo ago
Protect cryptocurrency investments so Black men who make them know their money is safe.
...what? I'm sure men are more involved in crypto than women, but why black men?
And what does "protect cryptocurrency investments" even mean? Providing a price floor for them? Making them more regulated? How?
My bias is that crypto is speculative gambling for the mass public, though I believe there are valid use cases for it. What's next, subsidies for Amway to protect women-owned small businesses?
A lot of the more obnoxious prescriptivism came from elites who wanted to impose (imagined) Latin grammatical structures on English. Entirely status and in-group signaling, and totally contrary to English as spoken by anyone at the time.
Recognizing that AAVE has its own consistent structures doesn't mean you can't teach SAE. But it's kind of important to recognize that it's a shibboleth to indicate education level and class membership. That way you know that someone who says nucular is an outsider and therefore an enemy (if only by virtue of the fact that they're choosing to use the vernacular of the enemy).
ThenElection
13d ago
The risk is that this escalates to a broader conflict. Not Iran vs whoever--Iran is a paper tiger, and all other factors being equal it's good that it's now further from getting nukes than it was (one hopes). But I'm worried this triggers a series of international incidents that leads to a Taiwan war. Although it seems far-fetched, it also seemed far-fetched that an assassination of an archduke could spiral to a world wide conflagration.
Iran needs to respond somehow, for domestic political reasons if nothing else. And, one thing leads to another, and Hormuz ends up mined, and China decides, well, the world is going to suck for a couple years and the US is otherwise occupied, might as well take advantage of the moment.
The debt isn't a bad thing: it's common for campaigns to end up with debt. 20M/1000M is 2%. When you're spending those kind of sums over a very short time period in a high stakes situation, with uncertain, variable income streams, it's almost inevitable. It will end up being paid off, and IIRC donation limits are reset after the election (though, if someone was a Kamala donor, I do not envy how much begging they're going to endure for the next couple weeks). Maybe Trump will magnanimously bail her out.
And, although she lost, I'm not sure you can say it was badly spent. As stupid as it is that paying Beyonce to fart in your direction can make voters want to vote for you, if you're flush with cash and you think it'll help, why not? What else would the campaign spend it on? Yet more clueless college grads to run social media accounts and spam Reddit with Kamala memes?
Final point: Kamala did much better in the swing states where the money was being spent than the country at large. A ~2% shift across every state would have resulted in Kamala holding the blue "wall" and winning the electoral college, while still losing the popular vote. Going into the campaign, the expectation was that Kamala would need to be running 2-3 points ahead of Trump nationally to have a shot at those states, but the campaign managed to eliminate this gap. This wasn't done through offering thoughtful policy proposals that addressed their specific regional concerns, or through her personal charismatic connection with white rust belt voters.
Money is good, and it's an edge Democrats will have for the foreseeable future, even if there are diminishing marginal returns to it. They just need a better product to market.
ThenElection
11mo ago
Biden has never been a favorite of the Democratic elite; he's always been an old white man with a tendency to go off the rails when let off the leash. In 2008 the elite favored Obama and Clinton over him, and in 2016 they (including Obama!) favored Clinton over him. The only reason they ended up jumping to his side in 2020 was he was the only moderate positioned to beat Bernie.
From his point of view, he's always been kind of shat on despite paying his dues for decades, and now these disloyal bed wetters are freaking out because of a couple of bad polls (when his likely replacements show no real signs of doing any better than him). At least Hunter has his back.
Note that I'm not advocating this POV--he is obviously too old, and at the least shouldn't be running for re-election, and from a purely electoral point of view it makes more sense for Democrats to go with the high variance strategy of replacing him with an unknown. But his populist rhetoric isn't cynical and comes from genuinely held feelings of aggrievement.
ThenElection
4mo ago
I'm not sure why that would be; there are multiple ways an LLM might evolve to avoid uttering badthink. One might be to cast the entire badthink concept to oblivion, but another might be just to learn to lie/spout platitudes around certain hot button topics, which would increase loss much less than discarding a useful concept wholesale. This is what humans do, after all.
Jailbreaking would never work if the underlying concepts had been trained out of the model.
ThenElection
8mo ago
To be fair, I would also ignore any media organ asking for comment from me on something long ago. In 2022 one reached out about an old college roommate who was running for office, and I sent the email straight to the trash.
I don't think McDonald's headquarters would respond about a private employment matter, and I'm not even sure it would have employment records from almost half a century ago.
ThenElection
16d ago
I think the take is usually "even if someone gives fully informed consent to have a violinist attached to their circulatory system, they have the right to remove him at any time, even if it causes his death and they agreed not to initially." There are people willing to bite the bullet on this.
ThenElection
8mo ago
This is basically where I'm at. My vote doesn't matter, but it's going to Kamala (unless I get particularly annoyed at something in the next week). Regardless, it's a bad sign for our institutions that these are the choices we've been given.
My personal wish casting is Republicans take the legislative branch, to make all of her policy platform stillborn. And she wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote (appearing slightly more likely in recent polls). The wailing and gnashing of teeth from everyone would be amazing.
ThenElection
11mo ago
In the medium term, how likely are young men to take to the streets, instead of wasting their lives watching porn and playing whatever the modern equivalent of WoW is?
We are a long way from the point where there's a domestic civil war. I think the left should pay a lot more attention to the needs of men, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that it loses anything if it doesn't. Men are just withdrawing from society and stagnating, not rioting. Even vote wise, each male vote lost is more than compensated by an additional female vote won.
Yes, the world at that point was a powder keg, and you can name at least a dozen incidents before the assassination that could have set it off. The assassination was far from the root cause, but it was the proximate event in a spiral.
The world is in a similar state today, and normalcy bias is what prevents us from seeing it. Seemingly minor events can trigger repercussions far out of expectations if conditions are right.
ThenElection
8mo ago
I agree that the Harris campaign would have more motivation than anyone else. I just think this is assuming malice when incompetence is more than sufficient. Campaigns are extremely crazy internally (it's really hard to convey just how crazy they get unless you've been on one), with unclear lines of responsibility and a giant workload that you'll never get fully through. Even if they have Harris' lifetime tax records on hand (they should if they're available, but they might not be), there's no particular reason to think some intern or junior staffer would have an easy line to pass them on to Snopes. And even if they did, the expected benefit of convincing a Snopes reader that Harris worked at McDonald's might be outweighed by other considerations (giving away unrelated information that could provide avenues of attack, or just in setting a precedent).
ThenElection
8mo ago
Approximately no one dates based on politics. Everyone of both sexes looks for someone attractive, and the smarter ones in addition look for someone who they can have a pleasant time with and build a life together with.
Someone who turns their dating profile into a political screed is going to have a harder time forming relationships, but that's because they're revealing themselves to be an unpleasant person, not because of mismatches in political philosophy. A man who raves about Kamala and rants about Trump all the time is going to turn off even the most hardcore Democratic woman, and that's true regardless of the sexes and political valences involved.
ThenElection
10mo ago
I think it's reasonable to assume that a male who's unwilling even to change his name to signal his commitment to his newly discovered gender identity is unwilling to remove his testicles or undergo hormone therapy.
Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?
FWIW, it does seem like the truscum side is at least coherent and it's possible to make meaningful policy based around their demands. Gender dysphoria (regardless of its etiology) exists, and adding a bureaucratic process to classify people as truly trans or not seems like a bare-minimum requirement if you want to have any social institutions that take into account sex/gender.
ThenElection
11mo ago
The lack of preparation for Kamala is one of the clearest cases of political malpractice I've ever seen. It's not some black swan event: people have anticipated this for months if not years. Even the Trump campaign itself was suggesting it would happen! And yet Republicans are caught entirely flat-footed.
In retrospect, the Trump campaign should have anticipated the likelihood of Biden having a candidacy-ending disaster at a debate, and made sure every debate happened after the nomination.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality; Democrats have a failure mode of cult of not personality or ideology but of whatever bureaucrats and various cultural elites organically land on as the Important Signifier of the day. It's distinctly less personalistic. People learned that the message of the day was that Biden is the greatest person in the whole world, and they knew questioning it made you a Bad Person who must be punished. But the Democratic blob recognized a weakness in the candidate that they couldn't paper over and, in the span of a few weeks, shivved him, memory holed him, and made Harris the greatest person in the whole world. That dynamic does not and could not exist with Republicans and Trump. In Presidential politics, Democrats perform a kind of pseudo-personalism: the point of acting as if you believe X is the Great Person of History is not to indicate any true belief but to indicate tribal membership. Biden dead-enders were heavily marginalized everywhere a day after Harris became the heir apparent, if Biden dead-enders even ever existed.
It's not as clear to me as it is to Scott, though, that one cult is clearly less damaging than the other. The reaction to COVID did far more damage to our economy and wellbeing than the tariffs will (and I believe the tariffs are ridiculous and incredibly damaging), and that can be squarely laid at the feet of the neoliberal bureaucrats.
ThenElection
3mo ago
"People in power" here being "people who have a 401k and buy things."
In the wake of her
weaknessincredible historic strength among young men, Kamala has a new ad out on IG and SC, "Don't Get Popped":https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1847720298335948932
For those who don't want to view it, I'll transcribe the ad and set the scene: a speed dating scenario where women rate the man.
On the face of it, this seems entirely tone-deaf. The theory seems to be "vote Democratic, or we'll Lysistrata you" but I can't imagine a single man who would react in the way the campaign would want them to. Most would just roll their eyes, and, if you're a young man frustrated with dating, it would probably provoke outright hostility. So you might write it off as a clueless campaign hiring a couple of rich white women and gay men trying to imagine a way to make young men vote Harris and failing, just another example of the empathetic gap between who the campaign gets ideological inspiration from and the voters she needs to win.
The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.
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