assman
1yr ago
I think part of the reason (which you seem to understand) that people immediately resort to extremely sketchy thinking in culture war debates is that often the debate is really more about inherently unfalsifiable, aesthetic, ethical or metaphysical claims that aren’t arrived at through logic or reason. But trying to argue my personal aesthetic or ethical preferences are the best is very unconvincing to anyone, so these debates turn into the battle of who has more studies they can toss out there to prove their preferences are objectively better for everyone.
Often this turns out to a tennis match of who’s studies are more methodologically flawed or faked or whatever. But I think another part of the problem with Data and Studies is that most people have certain opinions where they think they know what’s good for other people, better than those other people know for themselves. And I think in those cases, how can you possibly use data to change someone’s mind?
You could come up with the most methodologically sound study in the world which proves that everyone is happier when they do XYZ. But if my belief is that, sure, I think those people think they are happier when they do XYZ, but it actually makes everything worse in some difficult to quantify way, then there’s basically no amount of data showing that people are subjectively better off doing XYZ that can convince you otherwise. And I don’t think that’s an irrational position to hold, or the same thing as assuming the conclusion and arguing backwards from there. I think most people feel something close to this about drugs or junk food. But it’s very difficult to argue this convincingly to anyone who doesn’t already agree in some sense, especially in a short debate format and on a topic where it’s near impossible to quantitatively prove the causality for XYZ being a net harm.
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
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.
assman
1yr ago
There is definitely something upstream of politics that makes someone a Theater Kid, but I think the particular political inclinations of the Theater Kid are path dependent. What separates a Theater Kid from Someone Who Likes Theater is that the desire for attention is the number one priority at the expense of everything else, so I think any sort of ideology the theater kids hold is merely what’s useful at the time for gaining attention. I have basically no knowledge of art history but the idea of art being dominated by the left seems like it started no earlier than the late 18th century and possibly much later, and is downstream of the political and intellectual movements in that time. I think the Theater Kid archetypes in medieval Italy would be loudly proclaiming their piety to anyone who would listen, or boasting about how great their local Duke was or whatever would get them approval.
This is also why it seems like different artistic mediums in the modern world have different political splits. I think the artistic types who are drawn to theater specifically are at the right tail of the bell curve for “desire for attention”, followed by movies/tv, music, visual art, and writing. The majority of popular work in all of these mediums is “left coded”, but it seems like there is still at least somewhat of a market for conservative-leaning movies/TV, music, and writing, whereas the idea of a conservative broadway musical is laughable. The tendency for the conservative-ish versions of popular art (network cop shows, Michael bay films, country music, etc.) to be low-brow, while the prestigious versions (classical music, hbo shows, opera, art galleries) are overwhelmingly left wing is probably just a result of the rural-urban divide. I would think ~70 years ago when rich urban PMC types were WASPy republicans, things like classical music performances and art galleries were right-coded.
The “hostility” of the average red tribe person today towards art is also a result of the hostility that modern art has towards them. There’s definitely some sort of practical-mindedness more common to right leaning people as /u/hlynkacg mentioned that makes them appreciate art less, but I think in the past those types of people wouldn’t have been actively hostile towards art, but probably just apathetic or uninterested. The modern hostility of the average right winger towards art is from being told they are uncultured for not appreciating Jackson Pollock and piss Christ, being shown as villains in popular movies and tv, watching satanic themed live musical performances etc. Modern art as a whole is almost like a reactionary movement against the type of “objective beauty” that even more practical-minded people can appreciate. There isn’t an inherent distrust of art in right-wing thought, there’s just an inherent distrust towards art that is anti-right wing for obvious reasons, and as of now effectively all of the “important” art is anti-right wing.
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
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
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
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
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
My instinctive thought is to agree with you that it’s none of their damn business, and I find the whole reasoning about “power imbalances” in these situations to be shaky at best. So I wish it wasn’t this way, but from the perspective of the organization, it is much better to strictly prohibit employee relationships for a number of reasons.
People have been using the phrase “don’t shit where you eat” for a long time before MeToo or anything in that same vein. There’s obvious conflicts of interest and bad situations that can come about from coworker relationships.
But aside from the normal drama of breakups and stuff, there’s major legal liability to the organization, especially in something as public as an NBA team. If the woman wanted to come out and say that she felt pressured to hook up with the head coach of the team, and the organization found out about it and didn’t do anything, it would 100% cause a massive media shitstorm. There’s no amount of evidence you could show about the relationship being consensual that would matter.
assman
1yr ago
Good write up but I feel like you kind of glossed over that he’s not really proven as a pocket-passer at all. People point to the injury concerns for a running QB, and Lamar has a bit of an injury history now, but I think the main problem is simply that we’ve only seen him succeed in a sort-of gimmicky offense tailored to his running ability. He had one incredible season, plus a couple more good ones, and he is certainly a good QB. But the reality is that he has thrown for over 3000 yards only once in 5 years and has played terribly in the playoffs. There’ve been plenty of examples of guys who are great runners, and just okay passers having great seasons and then flaming out, and we haven’t seen any QBs who aren’t primarily passers win any Super Bowls.
Regarding the public reaction, I think you’re also ignoring that tons of people have been claiming it’s the owners colluding to not give out guaranteed contracts. I agree though that the reaction at least on Reddit is a little more sane than I would expect. I think that can be explained by the fact that 1) the ravens offered him a mega-deal that just wasn’t quite big enough for him, 2) many fans are skeptical of giving him a long-term deal due to either injury concerns or (like me) thinking he’s unproven as a passer, 3) the player who received the gigantic ill-advised contract he is asking for is black so it makes it hard to argue the racial angle, and 4) the media has had this weird paternalistic relationship towards him since before he was drafted a few teams wanted him to work out as a running back which many media people considered to be racist. So when they see him making a stupid decision like acting as his own agent and essentially asking his team to cripple their future, they can’t condemn him for being stupid and go with the “oh what a pity” reaction instead
assman
1yr ago
There definitely seems to be some bipartisan China-hawk rhetoric that picked up around then and hasn’t stopped. To steelman? the idea that it’s not a top-down propaganda campaign though, I think around then is when it became clear that China was no longer just a “developing country” that would inevitably become a liberal democracy as it got richer and become a client of the US through trade dependency, but an actual illiberal near-peer who wasn’t going to just fall in line with the US
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
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
1yr ago
Great post. I’d go further and say that even in the Big City the general attitudes and worldview of the tradcon can be applied to daily life, there’s enough self-sorting that within your “Dunbar number” you can mostly interact with great, kind people who are enjoyable to be around regardless of their racial, religious, whatever identity. It’s not necessary to know or care about the average IQ or murder rate of different groups of people at all. But when you are talking about governments they are by necessity only dealing in population-level abstractions when they do anything. The “dissident right” (DR) view is that when you are dealing in population-level abstractions, there are natural differences in the way groups of people who are not genetically similar will behave and perform, ON AVERAGE. So depending on what your society is optimizing for, different groups will have different outcomes on average, and there’s almost nothing that can be done to change this.
So in response to this the government can do what Hylnka and FC and other trad-cons would like, which is pretty much nothing. Don’t discriminate based on immutable characteristics, arrest people if they commit crimes, have a pure meritocracy without thumbs on the scales like affirmative action, and don’t worry about how the race/gender/etc. distributions of doctors or prisoners may end up. Encourage and incentivize strong family values to everyone to give them the best possible chance to give a good life. This is the idealized view of the 90s to a certain extent. I think everyone in the DR would view this as a massive improvement to what we have now.
The problem is in the DR view that this is inherently unstable. People notice how different groups act on average, this creates collateral damage against good people who come from lower-performing groups. People form natural ingroups based not only on shared culture but on shared “superficial” identities like skin color. So, in a democracy, this creates coalitions of people who will advocate for their group’s interests, which by necessity takes the form of legal discrimination, framed negatively as Jim Crow, or framed positively as civil rights laws or affirmative action. I ask the Hylnka’s of the world, what can be done about this? In the progressive view there are all sorts of social engineering projects that aim to fix these problems. I think Hylnka would agree they have only made everything worse. So if you could be handed the keys to a country as multi-cultural as the US is, with a similar form of government and completely race/sex/ethnicity-blind policies, what would you do to prevent it becoming exactly what we have now?
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
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
9mo ago
I actually think I have a pretty good idea of how the discrimination against Asians worked in practice. I went to a public high school (not a magnet or charter, just a regular public high school) of about 1500 kids, which was around 50% Asian split pretty evenly between East and South Asians, which placed around 20 kids into Ivy League schools every year out of the ~400 person graduating classes, and many more into the next tier of schools. My 1500 SAT was like 80th percentile in my graduating class iirc. I’d say there were about 100 kids who were the stereotypical children of Tiger Mom’s. They were obviously very smart, but they weren’t geniuses- they studied really hard to get high scores on their APs and to do well in their classes. When they weren’t studying they were doing some sort of resume box-ticking like playing in the orchestra despite not seeming to be passionate about music, playing a sport they weren’t really trying to compete in like cross country, or joining one of the random schools clubs that didn’t really do much. Many of these kids really did seem to fit the exact stereotype of Asian kids with “bad personalities” that seemed to be joylessly going through the motions of trying to get into an elite school, and their résumés and test scores were certainly good enough for any of the ivies. These kids mostly seemed to end up on a large scholarship at local public school, or at one of non-Ivy elites. I’m sure most of them will be very successful in tech or engineering or whatever, but I doubt any of them will be remarkable. The kids who did make it to an Ivy League were the 10-20 who were either: 1. Extremely nerdy, but legitimate geniuses. The kids who took the AP calc exam in their freshman year, and were winning Olympiad competitions and such and 2. The Asian kids who fit all the Tiger Mom criteria, but were also social butterflies involved in student government, seriously competed in sports, etc. The type 1s I expect to be impressive academics in whichever field they study, and the type 2s will fit perfectly in the “elite fields” which require more soft skills like finance, law, consulting or whatever.
I don’t agree this is a fair system at all, but I will say in my experience it seems like the Ivies were quite good at spotting the “future elite” types out of the dozens of qualified Asian resumes they received every year from my school
assman
1yr ago
Play old school RuneScape and sell the gold, there are 1000s of Venezuelans who make a living this way
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
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
2mo ago
Don’t you think it’s more likely that for the jobs that AI appears to be capable of automating right now (a lot of things, but basically any job where you sit at a computer all day) we’ll increasingly just turn our jobs into makework? Email and excel have already made us 100x more productive at white collar work, but that’s only created more of it, and people often point out that there are tons of e-mail jobs where nobody is really sure exactly what these people are doing, right now. I don’t see why that trend won’t continue, we’ll create project managers who oversee the AI’s work output, we’ll need people to interpret what’s needed and figure out how to ask the AI for it. We’ll have AI audits and compliance. We’ll create professional licenses to use certain AIs. We’ll have companies employing a bunch of people to have meetings all day about nothing. I think you work in high finance?, if so you’d be well aware there are boomer MDs who don’t know how to use excel and dick around on phone calls all day making million dollar salaries. There are people who work from home for 5 hours a week making 200k in tech. Theres millions of people in low level admin roles making $50k who do approximately nothing all day.
Until we see really impressive AI robotics which automate manual labor (it’s fair to extrapolate capabilities, but we’re not there yet), I don’t think it will fundamentally alter our economy that much. There will be various disruptions, but ultimately I think there is way too much status and people’s self worth tied up in their jobs to fully do away with them. The market is competitive and in theory incentivizes companies to automate away as many employees as possible, but we’ve all seen with our own eyes that lots of companies are very bad at this and employ thousands of people who don’t help the business at all (see Elon firings at Twitter). Plus already a substantial number of white collar employees work for government or non-profits.
assman
2mo ago
In some sense yes, I think “libertarianism” is not a viable political program in a democracy (or maybe at all). But for something like drug legalization which you mentioned below, a lot of the more mainstream arguments for this are that it actually reduces drug use, or makes it safer, or the cost-benefit of enforcement isn’t worth it etc. There’s plenty of arguments that even with our current political program it would be beneficial for various reasons, whether they are correct or not.
But for open borders- I don’t understand what is even meant by this when it is put forth as a policy. If the US were to pass a law tomorrow that literally anyone who wants to live here can show up and be entitled to the benefits of citizenship, we would immediately see millions of immigrants from poor countries around the world show up who are now entitled to welfare, food stamps, healthcare, housing and minimum wage which would become unsustainable immediately. We’re able to mostly handle high levels of illegal immigration now because these people are not entitled to government benefits or subject to minimum wage laws or other labor protections. When people argue for open borders as a policy- do they mean we maintain de jure immigration laws but just completely stop border enforcement and allow anyone who shows up to remain here as illegal immigrants not eligible for our entitlement programs?
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?
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?
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