aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
2yr ago
And there were offshoots of the offshoot. Some users moved to a more "right" version of The Motte called (I think) /r/culturewar (it's banned now, so that would make sense...). One prominent moderator on The Motte started a more "left" version.
Ah, a retrospective of someone who hasn't even been following closely enough to know /r/culturewarroundup and /r/theschism exists, surely they'll have a balanced reading on the place.
A few days ago I saw a top-level comment wondering why prostitutes don't like being called whores and sluts, since "that's what they are." Some commentators mused about why leftist women are such craven hypocrites.
I read at least the top post on every thread and don't know what this could even be referring to. Why is it whenever people critique this place they always come up with the threads that don't represent the modal motte thread at all? This all comes off as a thinly veiled /r/sneerclub post trying to keep /r/slatestarcodex users from visiting us.
The attitude of conservatives towards women's sports in my lifetime has been blase at best and condemnatory at worst.
This frequently made point is over stated, at least unless by 'conservatives' you mean the online presence rather than the actual constituents . Conservatives with daughters want their daughters to be able to compete and while I've met plenty of liberal parents with kids in sports nearly every conservatives parents I've met has had their kids do sports. Sports in general are conservative leaning(this again is not to say that most normie left leaning people aren't also involved)
I doubt many conservatives would care too much either way; they might not exactly rail against the idea of a school being forced to spend ungodly sums on unprofitable women's sports because they spend millions on the football team
I always find this comparison facile, the men's sports are profitable, they subsidize other parts of the school not the other way around.
But the relevant governing bodies imposed testosterone limits, and while we can argue that those limits are too high or too low, we can't argue that no man is meeting the most lenient ones without taking supplemental estrogen.
And without the conservative railing this might not have happened, and it still doesn't seem fair. Fairness really matters in sports, violating it is a big deal. Did you actually ever play sports growing up? It takes a substantial amount of time to be competitive, undermining that with unfair practices is crushing. You can see how upset unfairness makes whenever a referee makes a call that people think is incorrect.
One thing you never hear about is what the actual women athletes have to say about this.
Of course you don't, they'd be canceled.
And if those most at stake don't care, then why should we? After all, when it comes to the priority of things, sports are pretty far down the list.
Like all appeals to "Why do you even care about this? It's so unimportant". The response is obvious. If it's not important and we care more than you do then let us have our way. If you think it is actually important enough to fight over then drop this shaming act.
aqouta
2yr ago
Dude you're almost certainly making something like five times the national median household income, you are not normal.
aqouta
7mo ago
My empathy for trans people is precisely why I find the entire phenomenon so impossible to look away from. I can find in myself some ability to reason myself into what they're claiming to be going through. I can imagine myself as a kid, not particularly popular and with plenty of angst, deciding that what is really wrong with me is my gender identity and clamping down on that idea. I am privileged to know what not doing that results in and it's a good life where I get over my angst. I fear for people who might trap themselves in a false understanding of the world that will lead them to living much worse lives than they could have led.
I know that memes are powerful enough to do this people. Memes can bend people into myrters, Jihadists, self immolators kamikaze pilots, and many other forms in service of the meme. Maybe the framing where I'm cis by default is true and they really are experiencing some extra sense that I am blind to. But I know, absolutely know, that given the right circumstances growing up I could have been made to think I was feeling that sense. I know, absolutely know, that if I had convinced myself of it I would be stubborn enough to cement it into my identity. Because of this I know that there is a boy somewhere that is going to sacrifice his health and exceptionally happy future to chase being a mere mimic of a woman. I see myself in him, I recognize that for the grace of god go I, and that breaks my heart.
All this is well and good, if we lived in conservative world absolutely men should take responsibility for their offspring. But we don't live in conservative world, we live in the hyper individualist progressive world where accountability is a dirty word and men are noticing that everyone else gets to reap the rewards of this tradeoff except themselves. All these universal values that we're supposed to stoicly bear when they're against our interests seem to turn to sand the moment a situations comes up when they might defend our interests and we're starting to see that the game appears to be rigged. That if there is an universal value in play it is that we will do what is best for women and this is only not said aloud as to dupe credulous men. alimony seems very much to be less about the kid and more about the state leaning on it's monopoly of force to skip out on a bill that is the obvious consequence of its other policies.
If consent to sex is consent to a parenthood then lets live in that world, if it's not please stop pretending that we do when it harms me.
aqouta
5mo ago
This is the natural outcome of weaponizing moralism. The pictures of crying refugees being turned away to shame anyone who would deny a sympathetic person entrance leaves the person who demands a border of any kind to either harden their hearts or concede. Because concessions would dissolve the nation hearts have been hardened, it could never have been any other way. I think this is the bedrock of Cthulhu swimming left, there is no actual solid ground between hard hearted conservatism and ruin but every step towards ruin is rose scented, every resistance to it mired in cruelty. Left leaning people will say that of course we can still have a border and laws but they can't believe it because every argument they make to move one step left has no limiting principle, it will take us all the way to borderlessness and lawlessness. They rely on the pull back from conservatives to keep them from the abyss and resent the pullback at the same time.
aqouta
2yr ago
Why don't left types just admit that a wall on the southern border would reduce illegal immigration and....
It's because they don't want the policy and the objection to it isn't based on the efficacy of it. Why give up ground for no reason?
aqouta
2yr ago
Honestly this all seems super unnecessary. No one is actually confused at all about this stuff. Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category. As cliche as it is, human beings naturally have two legs we don't need to blow up this useful assumption because of amputees or people with disorders that caused them to grow some other number of legs. The only reason these unusual conditions are brought up at all is because trans advocates want to conflate these unusual conditions with the intentional efforts used to mimic the opposite sex that trans people undergo. If we drop the abnormal conditions it just collapses to "sex is what you are identified as if you don't intentional put substantial effort into changing that perception", which is what everyone, even trans people and their advocates actually use as a category. If it wasn't the case then trans people wouldn't need to put in the effort and the concept of 'passing' would be incoherent. The major disagreement is on to what degree this mimicking should be humored.
aqouta
2yr ago
I too find the vibe shift where supposedly the Social Justice Advocates are in retreat a little too good to be true. I think we should wait until a few months past the 2024 election cycle and see how we feel then. The DEI march continues in my giant financial institution, but being behind the times is pretty on brand for giant financial institutions. More than anything I'm certain trying to read the direction things are going on a month to month scale using a handful of discrete events seems foolish to me. A lul before we ramp into Trump 2.0/Desantis rise looks pretty identical to a woke disintegration.
aqouta
2yr ago
It's been asked enough times that the answer has gotten quite compact. HBD is a defense against the tendency of Blank slatism to see a disparity and tear all of society apart trying to fill it with the racism of the gaps. The future where HBD understanding in the mainstream is not one where Black people are discriminated against openly, it's one where we become as disinterested in the achievement gap between whites and Asians as we are with the achievement gap between blondes and brunettes. I think this is a better future.
aqouta
5d ago
I don't think there's exactly a word for it but I see this phenomenon everywhere on open internet forum forums and social media sites. It really seems like all it takes is a couple posters with views that someone finds intolerable being tolerated that gives the impression to some subset of people as totally captured. The Social justice lot on reddit genuinely convinced themselves that reddit was a right wing echo chamber held up intentionally by the admins because a handful of harshly moderated communities were, for a time, allowed to remain.
I don't think it's cynical, I think people with this perspective are reporting their experience truthfully. But I always come away from posts like this scratching my head. I have read/listened to greater than 80% of every comment that has been posted to a CW thread since the site spin off and before. It's just not the case that neonazis right wing extremists run rampant, it's just not that case that they outnumber liberals. It's not even clear to me that if we held a motte wide vote that Trump would win. The last couple times I've broached the topic here it felt like, although there was plenty of representation of the opposite side, my generally pro-israel position was at least as well received. The jew posters we do have receive strong pushback on their posts even if I, like many, aren't that interesting in relitigating the subjects as endlessly as they are.
If for your own good you can't maintain good mental health in a place that allows nazis to post if they do so under certain conditions then I hope you do what is right for you. But if this is related to a recent crash out drama then I think you're just misreading the room.
aqouta
2yr ago
Are they in any danger of getting booted off reddit? I don't really think sneerclub ever served the purpose of keeping us epistemologically humble.
I believe she made the wrong choice but I strongly object to removing that choice. We should have exit rights to life. If you can't choose to end it all I don't think you can truly be free. My fiance is a psychiatrist that works at a public hospital where she sees some of the most chronically afflicted, she has stories and I'm aware that there are many common ways of being that I would choose death over. I trust no one but myself to decide what those states are. This is not because I trust the medical establishment but because I do not trust it.
aqouta
1yr ago
This seems like a misunderstanding of the reasons our democracy is failing to deliver compelling candidates. It's not the system, it's not the candidates, it's not some shadowy "they" at the top that will see the signal in your blank vote and adjust things to compensate. It's that we, the voters, have no single coherent thing that we want or can demand. Some few individuals, over represented on this forum, have thought out coherent ideas but as citizens in general we collectively want lower taxes and more government spending. We want less immigration but cheaper labor. We want our burgers to cost less but the guy flipping them to be paid more. What we would want is impossible so we can't have it.
What's the platform you imagine a better class of candidate would even run on? We've all had the self indulgent experience of imagining the speech we'd give on the campaign stage to bring the nation together. But after your elegant and coherent vision is expressed to the camera the other guy is going to accuse you of wanting to raise taxes or failing to support some popular increase in services and they'll be right.
The truth is that we're a divided people under a system that is designed to lock shut if there isn't a mandate. Our representatives can't push through what we want because it's not popular enough but they can shut down the other guy's thing that also isn't popular enough and we're going to keep supporting them in that shutting down because we find their radical ideas repellent. That's the way things are and they way things will stay until we as a nation are able to come back together and unite under a shared vision.
Vote blank if you want, it won't do anything because it can't do anything. You're screaming into a void and no one is listening.
aqouta
2yr ago
Has retard really hit this level of the euphemism treadmill that it is included on this list? Besides the dead naming and stalking I could have produced anecdotes for that whole list for myself and many people I knew growing up and none of us even considered ourselves that bullied. Discipline the little shits doing it for sure, they need to learn what is unacceptable but am I really supposed to be that surprised middle schoolers are little bastards to each other? I suppose if these are tasteful understatements that might be different but that doesn't seem their style.
aqouta
2yr ago
The reason he keeps doing it is because he thinks these people are on his side and just mistaken. He has an unshakable prior that there must actually be some genuine truth to the trans question and there are just a few bad apples and bad bits of science that need to be cleaned up. He truly believes the emperor is wearing clothes and he just needs to find the right light spectrum that everyone else must be looking through to see it and can't tell that all the other people telling him his methods are a ridiculous insult to the emperor because he's obviously wearing clothes are lying to him.
There's plenty of room to articulate a vision for the future that is better than what democrats have to offer. I wish someone would try, and we could see two visions of utopia competing for popular support rather than the depressing political morass we've been languishing in for the last decade.
I think maybe left type people misunderstand right type people's vision for the future. The idea isn't that things shouldn't get better, it's that things are already getting better on their own, capitalism and investment are making all of society more wealthy and we need to avoid killing the golden goose responsible. Tomorrow will be better than today just implicitly so long as we don't do some foolish nonsense like destroy the whole system in a frenzied desire to make sure wealth is equally distributed among the different hair colors or dismantling our industrial base because it offends people that those who invested critical dollars early get the biggest return.
To conservatives progress is sound investment and carefully maintained stability for that investment to grow. Like a carefully planted garden. And to conservatives much of the progressive proposals are of the "Brondo has what plants crave" variety. Conservatives see themselves are pleading with angry short sighted people to leave the plants alone, it's better to eat the fruits than the seeds.
aqouta
3mo ago
Look, I understand finding a topic uninteresting but we're talking about a thing that could upturn the whole world economy. And the reason there is so much uncertainty about it is because the president of the united states is intentionally yoyoing us back and forth across the precipice. It's not a psyop that this is being discussed, some thing are actually genuinely important.
In a more formulaic and low stakes corner of the culture War Ubisoft has announced "assassin's creed Shadow". The series is known for offering open world exploration set in various historical locations and times from the Nordic to ancient Egypt. This installment is appearantly a popular fan request in being set in fuedal Japan.
The culture War angle is that the game has two main characters, a female assassin and a disputed historical black warrior named yasuke. Now I haven't played one of these games in over a decade and am not particularly invested in this title but the response has been a fairly clean case study in marketing by controversy and I think it might be worth dissecting.
In my corner of the web I first learned of the game's existence from the preemptive "man, racists right wingers are going to hate this" posts. And indeed if one looked it was not hard to soon after find right winger racists filling their niche in this tired dance. One can always find bad takes that isn't what is interesting about how this kind of thing develops.
A trap seemed to be set, I don't know which end first broached the topic of "historical accuracy" but because it took the form of what legitimate criticism might look like the culture War quickly fell into a groove of progressives defending the historical existence of yasuke being a real samurai and pointing to other popular media depictions of him as well as pointing out that the assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple. The anti-progressive backlash is in a hard place because I think there is something legitimate there but the shape of the discussion is not condusive to making the argument.
I think most of the anti-progressive front probably doesn't have an issue with a black sumurai in a game made by people they trust to have making awesome games as their first master. There's something itching in the back of the head of the backlash crowd that the reason we have yasuke isn't because a black guy in Japan makes for interesting segments of blending into crowds but because the people making the game have an anti-majoritarian view. The same thing that gave us yasuke is what motivates someone to put on a "fuck white people" shirt.
This is a feature of the culture War I'm seeing more and more. Proxy battles that few people care deeply about but have features that make them better or worse to do battle on. This game seems like favorable terrain from the woke angle and it's tempting to just give them it but I understand the impulse to fight on the terrain anyways.
Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality.
And they've had the reins and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.
But I honestly don't even care if this ridiculous debate is settled, all I want is for the blank slatists to actually have to justify their interventions and pay some cost when the inevitably fail. That all the costs of their failures are dumped on their outgroup is unacceptable.
aqouta
2yr ago
I think you have this precisely backwards, not that it makes life much better for the worshipped. White men are given maximum agency and the progressive stack can be run backwards from there to determine agency. A homeless black man is nearly minimally agentic, they would be less so only if they were also trans or some other identity minority, and thus can attempt to, with full intention, push others in front of trains and have this written off as simple non-agentic manifestations of latent society and be back out on the streets within a day of the incident. While a white man can, against their actual intention, kill a black homeless person while trying to restrain them and be held to the standard that this was intentional homicide. This interpretation seems to accurately reflect how society reacts to these two types of people and has something for everyone to like and hate.
aqouta
2yr ago
The entirety of Freddie DeBoer's life outlook is that he loved hippies/bohemians in new york in the 90s and then turned out to be quite smart and a world view crystalized around that abstract attraction/memeplex. It was pretty clear in his infamous planet of cops piece and it explains exactly why he lives in a groundhog world of noticing the left has lost it's mind but waking up the next day completely forgetting that realization.
As for the 90s vs today, the tech sucked and was expensive, the domination of the moral majority sucked even though it's piercing light gave contrast to interesting subcultures just as much as modern progressivism sucks despite it's life giving contrast to communities like our own. The grass is greened by the lack of our, or at least my, current enemy but there is a cause for the sword in every era.
This kind of "all the sheep will die" fantasy seems not healthy. I thoroughly oppose things like mandates on liberty grounds but the demand for the rolling out countermeasures to a widespread deadly disease to somehow also have been irrational is unseemly. Consider it in a world where they were not mandated, a new vaccines rolls out that seems quite effective but as all things has some risk of unknown very negative long term side effects. The disease itself may have very negative long term side effects in addition to the immediate risk of death. So you must decide between rolling the dice on the vaccine or the disease and given the information available the vaccine seems like a better bet. You can only blame people so much for rolling a snake eyes at a critical juncture. As far as I can tell there was no mistake made in actual risk management.
edit:post originally mangled by phone autocomplete.
aqouta
2yr ago
I thought of this, but given that these situations are very rare, I don't think it really matters that much.
Are they really? I've seen the thumb on the scale even in my relatively low stakes white collar office when I was told we were either getting a white/asian/male senior engineer or junior URM/woman with the same budget. Unsurprisingly we got a woman, who is absolutely fine and I don't blame at all but it's an unsettling thing to see a process that would have rejected you for no reason in the wild. If it doesn't matter much, how about we just don't do it? Save everyone the controversy, bring on the dice, hell record it's rolling publicly, hash the candidate names for privacy.
Besides, if the "marginalized" groups really do face a disadvantage
This is just shifting the power to whomever gets to decide which disadvantages count as you mention elsewhere. I put forward that by the time you get to applying for this position all the other legs up given to underrepresented minorities means white candidates have a disadvantage, please propose a way to determine who is correct.
If members of both the overrepresented and underrepresented groups adjust their beliefs rationally, the total amount of "feeling quite bad" should remain the same (that is, of course, an enormous if).
There is a reason this originally unironic comic is referred to as "bike cuck". It's even worse to expect other people to unwilling make their peace with their discrimination. It is hard to quantify exactly what effect this kind of resentment will have but Trump is not as bad as things can get when people move past wanting to show the establishment a middle finger to other displays of disapproval. Scott put it best here but replace "liberalism" with "identity blindness"
People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.
I think people on your side of this debate do not understand just how much rage bubbles under the surface when people see things like this going on and it's a pressure cooker that discussing and venting about this is a career endingly dangerous thing to do with your name attached. Some people tried to overthrow an election on behalf of the frankly embarrassing figure that is Trump, the democrats seem hellbent on forging the weapons of tyrants such as speech control and normalizing broad executive overreach. Someone is going to come along and show us all how to wield them. I do not like this path, I do not want to go where it leads. What you think we're getting out of this, it's not worth it.
Where are the scholarships? Where are the outreach programs? Why was none of the gender uplift social architecture ever designed to work in the general case and not just the specific cases where women were disadvantaged?
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