assman
1yr ago
I get what you mean but isn’t this obviously not true? Maybe I’m misunderstanding what a dogwhistle is but if I wrote on here “the rootless cosmopolitan bankers are conspiring against white christians” everyone would understand it’s an antisemitic dogwhistle. If I said “no I’m just referring to the literal bankers guys, YOU’RE the antisemite for thinking bankers = jews!” nobody would/should believe that
assman
2mo ago
Are you in favor of open borders as a practical policy matter under our current political system which does include redistribution schemes, birthright citizenship, various employment regulations etc.? The libertarian case for open borders in a legitimate “libertarian state” makes sense to me as ultimate freedom of association, but in current year US it seems to have second-order effects that are detrimental to libertarianism given the voting tendencies of second-gen immigrants and the fact that they end up as beneficiaries of various redistribution schemes. Is it like an accelerationist point of view, where having actual de jure open borders (which seems unlikely to ever happen in reality) would quickly make redistribution schemes untenable? Or is it just that the moral/ideological importance of open borders supersedes the practical considerations for you?
assman
1yr ago
Why don’t US cities have pickpockets? I’ve always heard (in the US) that if you’re traveling to a major city in Europe to be on the lookout for pickpockets, and I’ve heard stories from a few people who have had wallets/passports/phones stolen there. But despite the US having more crime in general I’ve never heard of this happening in any US city. You hear that there are certain parts of US cities to avoid, and I’ve heard stories of muggings or bikes being stolen, but nothing about pickpockets. Does anyone have a theory about why this is?
assman
1yr ago
Well, at least two of the more prominent and intelligent voices in the online right (BAP & Yarvin) basically don’t see a path to power for the right until the current regime collapses on itself. I agree with you that I don’t think there’s much of a chance for the right to obtain power either. As academic agent says though, there’s many different factions with different goals and preferred destinations.
I think there’s 0% chance of establishing New Hyperborea, but I think there are at least a few avenues for the right to pursue that most factions would see as an improvement on the current regime, and have at least a slim but non-zero chance of working. You note that even the average red-blooded American, even those that are nominally conservative, find racism/sexism/etc. distasteful. But I think the left has shown that public opinion on a lot of these social issues is downstream of policy rather than vice versa.
So I think Richard Hanania’s idea of repealing the civil rights act, and (contrary to Hanania) actually enforcing immigration laws (deport illegal immigrants and don’t let any more in) would go a long way to accomplishing many of the online right’s shared goals. These ideas are obviously not very popular, and are opposed by basically every powerful institution in the country in addition to most normal people (which is why neither of these things will ever happen), but you could theoretically do them through underhanded but legal political lawfare, judicial rulings, executive orders and such, which the mainstream right has been able to successfully use in the case of 2A/abortion. To successfully do this I don’t think you’d actually need to “clear everyone out” down to the local librarian. You’d need republican majorities in both houses, and a president who is willing to fire the higher level heads of the federal agencies/military and install competent and loyal people in their place. Then use those agencies to actually aggressively enforce your ideology on non-governmental of sub-federal governmental entities. Over time, public opinion will follow.
Of course the problem is in getting the electoral mandate and a president who understands that it’s friend/enemy all the way down, and who is competent enough to get it done in the face of overwhelming resistance from our current regime. The only reasons to think this has more than a 0% chance to happen are that we are starting to see mainstream republican politicians who are at least trying to fight back, dissident-right political theory is seeping into the mainstream (Moldbug has been on Tucker), and as our institutions decline further maybe there’s some small chance that the stars will align and there will be an actual major conservative backlash in electoral politics.
assman
2mo ago
This is kind of what I’m getting at though- right now the status quo is that illegal immigrants have to traverse across Mexico, cross the border, and work jobs where they are paid under the table in shittier conditions than the government allows for its citizens. I and many others have problems with this, but this selects for these hardworking young people you’re referring to. I’m not sure if they end up paying into social security, but I know they don’t draw on it. So point taken there. The legal immigrants are often very smart and conscientious people who largely are a net financial benefit to the government.
But if we were to have de jure open borders, where the rights of citizenship are given to anyone who can scrounge up money for a plane ticket from around the world, you’re going to get a billion people and their old parents following them which would immediately cripple every social program and lead to massive crime and housing shortages. Do you disagree with this? If you’re suggesting some sort of permanent residency program where the immigrants are not ever given a path to citizenship or any entitlements like they have in the Middle East, I actually agree this could potentially work but I don’t consider that open borders, and I rarely see that proposal made explicit.
Regarding your last point about diversity decreasing support for welfare states, I would guess this is because the data is coming from western countries that went from being largely homogenous to having an immigrant underclass very quickly. The data also overwhelmingly shows that second-gen immigrants in the US and Europe vote for pro-welfare parties. This causes a larger share of the majority population to oppose welfare states, but if the previous majority becomes a minority I don’t know why we should expect the immigrants to stop voting for gibs
assman
1mo ago
I saw someone link to Meditations on Moloch in the college football subreddit a couple of days ago, to explain why conference realignment is happening and get a lot of upvotes. Was shocked to see Scott referenced in a normie subreddit like that
assman
1yr ago
Regarding the serial killer part, I find it hard to believe there are 2000+ serial killers in the US. Does “serial killer” mean Ted Bundy types or like gang members who have been involved in a couple of drive bys?
assman
1yr ago
I have a dumb question that I thought of while reading an article about the SVB thing. Say you have $50 million in a savings account. You are really smart (or an idiot) and after doing your research you expect the entire banking system to collapse in a few weeks, and you want to take your money out and figuratively “stuff it under your mattress” (as in not just wire it to a different bank account). Is it possible to even do this? I know you can’t just walk into a bank branch and ask for your $50 million dollars, but say you informed them ahead of time, will they actually be able to give you $50 million in 100 dollar bills? If they can, will they deliver it to you in an armored car, or is it your problem to figure out what to do with it? Is there some way of dealing with this where the Fed will hold it for you in something like a “bank account”, or you can get some sort of government IOU so you don’t need to take it out of the banking system in cash?
assman
1yr ago
What does everyone think Trump’s IQ is? I feel like you need to be pretty smart to be a billionaire/POTUS even if he had rich parents but speaking as someone who loves the guy he is so inarticulate and has such weird speech patterns that it’s really hard to gauge what’s going on under the hood so to speak. I think probably like 125 with +3 sigma charisma & will-to-power
assman
9mo ago
Sorry to necro but can you explain what tier two is? I can’t figure out what the HBD informed view of MTFs is and my curiosity killing me. You can send via PM if you don’t want to elaborate on here (if you feel like elaborating at all)
assman
1yr ago
What exactly does it mean when people blame “capitalism” for something? I see this a lot on Reddit and I have never really understood what people mean by it. I see it most often in the context of people blaming capitalism for some sort of exploitative behavior by corporations or individuals, or that capitalism is the reason for all sorts of mental health issues and other struggles with modern life. But I don’t see how “capitalism” specifically can really be blamed for any issues. Anything related to exploitative behavior can easily be attributed to human nature and the inherent problems that result from competition for finite resources. And most of the distinctly modern problems of atomization and things of that nature seem to be a result of technological changes. Basically I find “moloch” to be the best explanation for what’s causing most people’s complaints about modern society but I’m wondering if there is something I’m missing when people attribute problems to capitalism itself
assman
7mo ago
Not disputing it- just genuinely curious why Gates is considered 99.99th percentile? I’ve never read much about him so I’ve only ever heard redditors say that Gates was more of a ruthless businessman than a genius computer scientist
assman
1yr ago
I have a Fantasy Football/Medical question, not sure if there are a lot of football fans here but I think it’d be hard to get anything insightful from this in a sports forum.
My question is regarding the concept of “mileage” on athletes, which mostly comes up in the context of NFL running backs but sometimes is used in other sports. The idea is that there’s a sort of limited number of times you can expect someone to run a football before the “wear and tear” leads to more accumulated injuries and thus a quick decline in athletic ability. This is trivially true in the sense that all players will decline in athletic ability with age eventually, and you can only carry the ball more times and accumulate more injuries, so these things will all be correlated to some extent. Running backs in particular seem to suddenly drop off a cliff in performance rather than gradually decline, and often when they are quite young. So when trying to predict the future value of a running back to a team (be it in Fantasy football or real life), people often use this concept to imply “Player A and Player B are both 23 years old with no major injury history, but Player A has carried the ball 1000 times while Player B has only carried it 500 times. Thus, I predict that Player B will be less likely to get injured and/or have a drop off in their athletic ability in the near future”.
But my argument is that “mileage” is actually irrelevant, or even positively predictive here. To me the relevant variables in predicting the future value of a running back (all else being equal) are 1) age, 2) actual injury history, and 3) some sort of immeasurable “durability” factor, which would be like how injury prone you are and how well your body ages. “Mileage” then would just a proxy for 1 and 2. So in the example of Player A and Player B above where these variables are equal, I think the fact that Player A carried the ball 1000 times without getting injured would be a positive as evidence of their durability.
I’m wondering if any fellow football nerds have thoughts on this or have seen any data about it? Or if any of the medical people think there is something to the concept of a sort of finite amount of high energy bursts of acceleration and collisions that your body can withstand before it deteriorates (ignoring head injuries)?
assman
1yr ago
Play old school RuneScape and sell the gold, there are 1000s of Venezuelans who make a living this way
assman
8mo ago
I’m not sure I agree that stopping shaming for depression and anxiety was a wise decision. More generally, it seems that “society” is incapable of transitioning from “shaming a behavior” to “tolerating a behavior”, without the pendulum swinging way too far the other way and outright celebrating various forms of antisocial behavior. I might just be too internet-culture-war-brained, but the big examples of formerly shamed behaviors like homosexuality, transgender, various mental illnesses, to older culture war fights about how women should dress or whether people should have sex before marriage tend to immediately flip from general intolerance, to encouragement and celebration, without much of a “tolerate but don’t encourage” phase. It seems like you basically can’t get rid of shame, you can only change the polarity of it. Now you are shamed for being a *phobe, or for not having the “basic human decency” to accommodate people’s questionable self-diagnosed mental illnesses. Are there any examples of this not being the case, maybe for more banal, less politically charged behaviors? The only thing I can think of maybe is obesity, where most people agree it’s rude to outright shame people for being fat, but the “celebrating fatness” movement hasn’t really taken off
FWIW Elon posted a statement this morning
It seems like he wants to make it so that users themselves have more control over what they see rather than top-down moderation. I also think he is okay with moderation of “hate speech” to a certain extent, but he will stop moderating “misinformation” like Twitter has done for covid, the 2020 election, hunter biden story, etc. in the past. My prediction is that moderation of slurs, calling for violence, etc. will be handled much the same way it has been, but that opinions which don’t use no-no words will be allowed. I think most people won’t notice a difference but all he really has to do is not ban for “misinformation” and 99% of the controversy about twitter’s moderation policy is gone. Most people won’t care that you still can’t use slurs or whatever and journalists will get over the “misinformation” thing when crying about it stops being a useful tactic.
assman
1yr ago
TLDR: College football. 4 Team playoff good. NIL bad. Conference expansion bad and we need to get congress to fix it.
Viewership is still great AFAIK, but it seems like there are a lot of problems and complaints from the fans about the direction of College Football and I personally find it worrisome. Wondering what other people’s thoughts are and potential ideas for how they could be solved.
Playoffs. Basically, I think the playoffs are pretty much perfect the way they are. The allure of college football to me has always been how different it is from American pro sports. There are ~130 teams vying for a tiny postseason, and there are no artificial methods of creating parity like a salary cap or the draft. This makes the regular season extremely high stakes since you can only have one bad week and still hope to make the playoffs. Every major upset has a ripple effect throughout the sport for the remainder of the season. This makes it so that the regular season is the playoffs. Ohio State might have all 5 star recruits but they have one brutal loss to Purdue or Iowa and their playoff hopes are gone. This makes it so the championship winner is always the actual best team, as you have to be nearly perfect to make it, there are no situations like the 9-7 Giants winning the Super Bowl. A lot of people disagree with this and don’t like that there’s not a clear path to playoff but I think that’s what makes the sport so much fun. Every game matters, and expanding the playoffs will only dilute that. I don’t think the committee is actually biased, and the constant dickriding of G5 teams on Reddit is ridiculous. If they actually show on the field that they are a top 4 team they will make it as we saw with Cincinnati last year. I don’t think merely going undefeated against a shitty schedule should be a guaranteed playoff spot, the same people who beg for undefeated UCF with the 100th ranked schedule to make the playoff complain when Alabama plays one FCS team or Clemson makes it after going undefeated in the ACC. If Alabama could somehow play an AAC schedule where they’d go undefeated, winning every game by 40, the same G5 dickriders would say their schedule was too weak. The 4 team playoff has not produced any truly controversial winners and out of the 3 playoff games every year at least 2 are blowouts. There are almost never more than 3 teams who are legitimate contenders and expanding to 12 teams won’t change that.
NIL/Recruiting/Transfers. I found the constant guilt-tripping about the poor players not getting paid to be really annoying, and generally I think the players benefit much more from the school than the school does the players. At the same time, it seems unfair that players weren’t allowed to sell their own autographs or anything so NIL seems fair enough to me in theory. But as literally everyone could’ve predicted, it provides a way for boosters to openly pay players in a way that was under the table before, and players are surely getting paid much more now than when it was in secret. Many people complain about the positive feedback loop that is college football recruiting. Many schools have natural advantages in location, resources, history of success, etc. but recently the most successful teams just keep stockpiling more and more talent. People see NIL as a way to mitigate that, where schools with a lot of wealthy boosters can improve their teams recruiting by paying for recruits. But why is that good? I think the fact that success begets success in college football is a good thing, it’s unique in American sports at least and rewards you for running a successful program and hiring good coaches. If the other schools are mad that Nick Saban is getting all the recruits then hire your own Nick Saban. It’s not like it’s impossible to break into the elite of recruiting, Dabo Swinney did it very recently during the Saban era. I don’t see how rewarding teams for having rich boosters is better than rewarding teams for being successful and investing in the program. With the free transfers and NIL, college football success gets even further removed from the on-field results. Even for the lower tier teams a school like Cincinnati could have been able to capitalize on their success in the recruiting market, but that only becomes harder when worse programs with more resources can just throw money at the players. I don’t know how this can be fixed since I don’t think the NCAA would be able to regulate what is “real” NIL vs pay-for-play, but I think it’s really bad for the sport.
Conference Realignment. Nobody seems to support it but the incentives are what they are and it seems that some sort of consolidation into a super-league is inevitable. It seems like this is the least controversial issue in that everyone hates it. Nobody wants to see UCLA in the Big Ten. My only hope is that the consolidation leads to fragmentation again, when the conferences become so geographically nonviable that we can see a “Big Ten Pacific Division” or something that’s basically the old Pac 12. But my radical solution that will never happen and probably isn’t feasible is to get congress involved! This could be the bipartisan issue that unites the country around a common goal. The red team loves college football and tradition, and doesn’t want to see the once-great regional conferences marginalized. The blue team can say why are we spending all this money to fly college athletes across the country when we had perfectly good regional conferences, and we can’t expect the USC women’s volleyball team to fly to Rutgers for a Wednesday night match.
Wondering what everyone’s thoughts/ideas/solutions are about the future of college football?
assman
1yr ago
I think he’s probably referring to Noah Smith (noahpinion on Twitter) or maybe eigenrobot
assman
1mo ago
I agree there are some inefficient markets with deceptive pricing schemes, network effects that create effective monopolies etc. but the idea that this applies to food of all things is absurd. Yes, Wendy’s/McDonald’s are both highly priced now, so as a consumer I simply eat them less. I quite like fast food and if a quarter pounder with fries and a drink was $6 I would probably go to McDonald’s frequently when I didn’t feel like cooking, but it’s $12.29 (just checked) so I’ll get pizza for $2/slice instead
assman
1yr ago
Are you fishing for someone to say your post about your client not understanding the non-binary woman with huge tits? Because that’s definitely my favorite
assman
1yr ago
Everything you said is wrong, I use that example because I am a terminally online right winger and browse racist Twitter/forums where people post about (((bankers))) all the time. My point is that if you are an otherwise upstanding anti-racist progressive citizen who finds their way into dissident-right Twitter or /pol/ you’re not a “dog” for recognizing what people mean when they bring up wooden doors or “joggers” or whatever vague phrase is being used to avoid getting banned from normie internet spaces. Perhaps the confusion is that you wouldn’t consider those examples to be “dogwhistles” because they are so obvious? I agree with you entirely that the term “dogwhistle” 99% of the time is used as a political smear to associate politicians the left doesn’t like with ebil nazis even when it has no basis in reality.
assman
1yr ago
I don’t disagree with you or Hylnka that innocuous statements are called dogwhistles all the time even when they are actually innocuous statements. I agree that when politicians/mainstream media figures are called out for using dogwhistles it’s bad-faith partisan bullshit 99% of the time. My point is just that simply recognizing an obvious dog whistle doesn’t mean you are “the dog” if the statement is in fact a dog whistle. As in if you go on 4chan and see someone refer to (((bankers))) you’re not anti-semitic for recognizing what they are referring to
assman
1yr ago
Is there any update about the Canadian teacher with the giant prosthetics breasts? I’ve seen a bunch of 4chan screenshots claiming that the teacher is actually a right-winger and was intentionally trying to cause a media storm, but those are just unsourced rumors. Wondering if there has been any updates
assman
1yr ago
Not sure if you’ve played an MMO before, but there’s “black market” websites that facilitate gold transactions. RuneScape gold goes for about $0.30-$0.50 per million gold (in-game currency) depending on the supply/demand. It’s not super difficult to make 5 million gold per hour (so call it ~$2/hr) which I guess is decent in Venezuela, especially when your job is just playing video games
Are you familiar with Steve Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism?
“The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter looking”
There’s also Spandrell’s Bioleninism thesis which is that basically all of politics boils down to jockeying for status. So socialism is particularly attractive to High-IQ people who are ill-suited to a capitalist society (intellectuals, journalists, other wordcels, etc.). These people can then recruit various types of resentful underclass people (addicts, generally stupid or lazy people, ethnic and sexual minorities, weirdos of all kinds) who, since they have nothing to lose, are much more loyal and politically active than the people who are content with the system as it is. What makes his thesis “Bio”leninism is that in the 19th-20th century, society was less egalitarian and there were people being oppressed who would have otherwise been successful without these barriers which made socialism/communism attractive to a wider group of people than In current year, when all de jure discrimination is gone. Leftists then have to reach further and further into the dregs of society for loyal enforcers to the point where they draw from people who are biologically incapable of succeeding for genetic/HBD or mental illness reasons.
I’m not sure if I agree entirely, and I probably butchered the summary so it’s worth reading the actual blog. I think it does a good job of explaining why the people most loyal to the party (activist types) and enforcers (antifa types) seem to be fat, ugly, crazy, stupid, mentally ill, or some type of sexual minority.
To answer your question, I don’t think that something went wrong in these people’s development, I think most people’s politics are at least in part “taking a position that would benefit you personally, and then using whatever justification is available to explain why it’s necessary for society”, and the people who seem hilariously non self-aware about this are just in a bubble where nobody they respect has ever called them out on this. Didn’t some of the founding fathers have comically self-serving justifications for why slavery is good actually? I think pre-enlightenment societies had plenty of those type of people but most non-nobility had absolutely no ability to influence politics so probably didn’t worry about it too much, and no one with any power cared about the peasant’s political opinions. On a more local level, the scrawny wordcel who is resentful that he was born a peasant farmer’s only option was to become some kind of monk or something, where he can debate the number of angels dancing on a pin and scratch his itch for subversion (or become Martin Luther). What makes the “subversive” types dangerous now is that in a democracy these people as a whole have power, so harnessing their resentment becomes a viable political strategy.
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