A clip which was surgically cherry-picked for the purpose of destroying a comedian's career is usually not going to be a hilarious standalone representation of their work at its best.
I just made my first comments on the site, and, from checking in incognito, they did not appear publicly at first. This was the case for both a top-level comment in the CW thread (which stayed invisible for hours, overnight), and a reply (which stayed invisible for a few minutes).
In both cases, the comments only appeared publicly after I reported them myself (as in pressed the "Report" button on the comment, and submitted one to request they be "approved" or whatever the mechanism in action here is), but also in both cases they appeared publicly within seconds of reporting them. So either the mods are extremely on the ball in responding to reports (but up-to-hours off the ball in approving new comments unprompted), or it was the act of reporting them which automatically caused them to publically appear (which leaves it frustratingly unclear what would have happened to them if I hadn't self-reported them).
I doubt I would have been singled out/shadowbanned since I hadn't done anything yet, so I assume it is representative of the (new?) user experience. It is off-putting.
It would help to know what the intended behaviour is here and what to expect.
For the above comment: again, did not appear in incognito at first, then did within a few seconds of self-reporting the comment.
I will leave this one un-self-reported for a few hours as an experiment.
20 minutes: this comment still does not appear publicly.
45 minutes: comment appears publicly after Zorba's attention
I feel like there's enough information leaking through here to infer what happened -- why would they stay quiet, with no defectors; "a range of events"; etc -- but I'm too stupid to put it together.
Any guesses?
Looking back into this a few days later: some people went to a strip club
Much less interesting than I was imagining.
bro
1yr ago
In Scott's latest Open Thread:
3: Alexandros Marinos continues his critique of my ivermectin post, and his broader ivermectin advocacy. I can’t remember if I’ve said this before, but I commit to writing a summary and response within four months of him being done, which as far as I can tell is not yet (yes, four months is a long time, but it’s a long series and I’m really busy this winter). His most recent post argues that the big COVID drug trials (TOGETHER, ACTIV-6, COVID-OUT) haven’t made their data public, and offers to donate $25,000 to a charity of my choice if I can get them to do so. I have no idea how to do this, but I agree that they should; if anyone from these trials wants to get in touch with me and talk about it and I would be interested in hearing what’s going on.
attn @AlexandrosM
bro
1yr ago
Off-topic for subthread but since you are here:
Was Elon Musk actually on Myrotvorets or is the screenshot fabricated?
The furthest I've been able to trace this has been to an Intel Slava Z telegram post of the only screenshot of it that seems to exist (2 minutes before the Eva Bartlett tweet of the same screenshot, that Musk later responded to), and I'm not fluent enough in the russian side of the internet to look any further than that.
There are no public archives of it:
I don't follow him that closely so maybe he has, but I haven't seen Marinos himself make anywhere near so strong a claim as "covering up hundreds of thousands of deaths, using bogus statistical analysis to fool everyone".
I think his thesis in all this has been "if you judge many accepted findings by the same standards by which plausibly-for-other-reasons-disfavored findings have been dismissed, a lot of it wouldn't hold up".
biggest fan
My first gut reaction whenever I encounter him after having not for a while is "this guy's so fucking annoying, just stop", and the degree to which I ever read any further is out of a desire to see him slip up badly enough I can dismiss him altogether or see him definitively put in his place by someone who clearly knows better.
The problem is I haven't seen that yet.
Here's hoping I don't get so entangled this or any time that I can't return to not paying attention. There's enough other and more consequential shit where the same general dynamic that his claims point towards is ruining everything, that it would already be several full time jobs' worth of time and misery to attempt to follow it all.
But yes, unless he's been properly owned and continued anyway in purely ego-driven contrarianism-poisoned bad faith, god bless him for not dropping it despite it making him This Fucking Guy? Again?
bro
1yr ago
If a non-black celebrity was robbed, then tweeted about how he's about to go DEFCON 3 on black people and gave multiple interviews about how he's not about to keep getting victimized by black criminals, would it go very differently?
bro
1yr ago
Yes, undisputed. That is not the same thing as "jews are the one group that is off-limits to debate or criticism".
Effective altruists wrote the semiconductor export restrictions
Is there anywhere else a public discussion of this is happening besides that impenetrable tumblr thread? This seems incredibly significant.
What an absolutely fucking wild thing to off-handedly drop as a polemical jab in an off-topic subthread lol
The absolutely fucking wild thing here is not that some particular group of policy wonks wrote a policy.
The absolutely fucking wild thing here is that what is potentially one of the most profoundly consequential geopolitical things to have happened in our lifetimes may have been done with any (much less a primary) influence from EAish concerns/panic over the risk of imminent human-extinction from out-of-control AI.
Also, putting the purported screenshot through another round of broken telephone for (what I'm fairly certain was also @DaseindustriesLtd's primary intended) emphasis:
[...]
-EAs wrote the semiconduct export controls
-this does slow down China, and many people think the point was just slowing down/winning an arms race with China
-that was not the primary aim in writing the semiconduct export controls, though slowing stuff down Generally Considered Good
-of at least equal and possibly greater importance was that a bunch of global governance stuff looks way easier if there is one chip supply chain and no alternatives
[...]
Uh...
Eigenrobot loves his illegibility, but I think if you were to really pin him down "far right" would be a nontrivial mischaracterization.
He's not especially anti-immigration, for example. And he considers "right wing" an outgroup. Among other things.
bro
1yr ago
my pick whenever I'm not using Mac
How are the bathhouses in Istanbul, I hear good things
When [first-tier world-class sporting event] came to my much less contentious area, all reporting on "its costs" included all infrastructure spending that came anywhere near it.
Including "would have taken place regardless" stuff, which is not even close to a hard line (ie, based on other local infrastructure tendencies before and after it, "was going to happen anyways" can read as "within the next 60 years, maybe")
Ours was much less, but we had much less done than an entire city, an entire expressway system, a brand new airport, a port, etc.
I think your issue here is with a precedent that was set a long time ago, and that this does not seem inconsistent with. Of all the crimes of the media, I'm not going to get too worked up about this.
Rolling Stone lol
That really is the perfect source to use to accompany this take.
I don't even know where to start. The whole thing has been a fever dream. You will never be able to convince me that the last ~week especially hasn't been a simulation being fed into my brain as it's dissolved in a jar.
bro
1yr ago
The war part of WWII is absolutely unbeatable, no other war can compete. I dare you as an autistic man to not enjoy this 29-hour, 41-part series on the Battle of Stalingrad told via map.
I can assure you that there is a 0% chance that Kanye is just doing this as a stunt for publicity. The reported-on material consequences alone should get you down well below 10%. "What good is a publicity stunt when X", for about 15 different values of X. Following it unhealthily closely will get you all of the rest of the way to 0%.
And if your experience of this whole thing is primarily as an input into a Trump-DeSantis primary election horserace narrative, rather than both the Kanye-Fuentes axis and a Trump-DeSantis race being roughly equal inputs into what happens later, here's some light reading to start with.
It took having been reading every post of yours for like 3 months leading up to that one (sidenote: lol) to have had even the slightest chance of barely beginning to understand what the fuck you were talking about, at the time. 7 months of lost context and cognitive decay later, there is no chance I am ever getting there again. I'd need it spoonfed to me like an idiot.
It seems extremely implausible to me that the Yuddites are only pretending to be suicidally hopeless and their real motivating goal is eternal tyranny, rather than that, rightly or wrongly, eternal tyranny is sincerely the only alternative they see to certain doom.
YouTuber Montemayor, one of the very best producers of the "battle told via map" genre who releases about 1 very high quality video per year, released Battle of the Eastern Solomons: Told from the American POV today. It's pretty good.
Check out his Midway from the Japanese Perspective first if you haven't.
If you love The Operations Room, I would be extremely surprised if you did not find Montemayor's (very few but very good) videos worthwhile. They're quite similar, but Montemayor goes into more depth about who knew what when, and what big decisions looked like to the person making them, vs Operations Room's slightly more rote recounting of what happened from a god's eye view.
The explicit "fog-of-war from the personal perpective of the commander" approach that he takes in Midway and Eastern Solomons is absolutely incredible, I'm starving for more of it.
Very highly recommended. And if the YouTube algorithm has not also pointed you towards Eastory, Historigraph and Historia Civilis, I have no idea what it's doing. Also TIK, though he's slightly more of a stylistic divergence.
Is the new season of Star Trek: Picard worth watching?
For the type of curmudgeonly old trekkie who had to stop watching Discovery after 1 season because it was genuinely too hurtful to see that done to something he loves, and has only experienced any of Picard through the noble sacrifice of the Red Letter Media reviews?
I stopped watching the RLM reviews halfway through this season because it seemed like it might actually end up worth watching the show, but the problem is now I can't check in to see their final verdict without having it spoiled.
The New Yorker has published a 9000-word article rehabilitating Shane Gillis (archive), the comedian who was prominently fired from SNL in 2019 after clips surfaced of him making racist remarks against asians.
(almost immediately after being announced as part of a new cohort including the first asian cast member, the shitstorm centered on a clip which included him saying the word "chink" on his podcast (original instigating tweet, offending clip, full episode), and he was fired 4 days later)
(fwiw, this was in the context of doing an implicit impression of "the kind of guy who would say that"; but he's said "worse", about even more protected groups, in ways which would require even more discernment than this to escape, which is already impossible enough that he didn't ever publically attempt it)
That they attempted to bring Shane Gillis into as hallowed an institution as SNL in the first place was remarkable and seemed to me at the time like it could even have been an early sign of a potential vibe shift (at a time which absolutely did not have a lot of that). He was explicitly intended to be red-tribe outreach, and as far as I know SNL has not attempted anything like that again since.
That he even lasted 4 days at that level of shitstorm in a cultural place so far behind the lines is remarkable, and there is all kinds of kremlinology you can do at any level of suspicion about how deliberate or coordinated any of it is about how that went down.
Similarly with this rehabilitation.
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