This is because it's incentivized.
It's beneficial for business that capital, and labor, is fungible anywhere. Something something give me control of a something something money supply, and I care not who makes the laws, to that effect.
Place-rooted culture is a competitive weakness in a post Bretton Woods international order. Over time, of course the elite of this order would have no loyalty to place. They can move and spend their money anywhere they want.
clo
1mo ago
The point is not uncontroversial, because if you're going to blame all those atrocities on intelligent people, you can't get away with being selective about it. Intelligent people gave us the semiconductor, the refrigerator, the printing press - although whether the printing press was ruinous for humanity is a matter for debate in some circles.
There's also a very good argument to be made that you can attribute the atrocities you listed to a lack of intelligence.
Animals live short, nasty, brutish lives, and I think their inability to outcompete, outproduce and exterminate everything else within reach is a matter of capability rather than need. The historical record of nature tells us that they frequently hunt, feed, and reproduce to excess, and when biomes change over time go extinct or ferociously exterminate and outcompete those occupying similar ecological niches. As far as I know, humankind is no different, we're just better at it.
Your last paragraph is typical-minding and an attempt to establish consensus. Please check your consensus at the door. There are people who take these arguments seriously, including yours, and if I took your argument seriously I'd seek the mass extermination of the human race within my own means.
Or, you know, I'd just go around trying to lower the intelligence of the human race by introducing heavy metals into the water supply.
clo
2mo ago
This is not unique to modern western democracy, nor are powerful Jews the only one taking advantage of the hierarchy of everything. You are describing power. Power has not changed in thousands of years.
As someone who was in the machine for a few years, you're correct in that the value is in the IP.
And they've trashed their IP.
The missing thing everyone tends to overlook is merchandising. Consumer Products was an extreme overperformer in Disney's catalog during the Marvel golden years and the first of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Add to the ocean of Frozen merchandise... Disney makes significant gains on both product and selling the license to produce product for their brands, backed by a minimum guarantee sales agreement. Their IP did so well that they basically bullied toy and product companies into accepting whatever terms they wanted in order for access to their properties.
This is why The Last Jedi was so significant for Disney. It was a movie where the demand for product basically imploded. Hasbro lost their ass on it, and due to the poor performance of that movie's products as well as the chaos of getting anything approved by Disney for that movie (and the increasingly short turnarounds for Marvel ones in time for movie releases), it basically heavily damaged Disney's relationship with a lot of the toy and product guys.
Bear in mind Consumer Products did so well that they merged it with Parks to try and hide the black hole of Parks spending, mostly driven by overspending on development of new attractions, construction and cost overruns in upkeep.
If your company's value is the value of your IP, the price going through the floor is indicative of how the company is doing at IP management. Faith in Disney's ability to effectively monetize the IPs they own is critically low.
Fair accusations, but I believe nobody has consistent principles. Having consistent principles is not socially or evolutionarily advantageous in the long run. To navigate a world where power changes hands constantly, fluid principles are a necessary precondition for survival for those without power.
As mentioned, banning drunk driving is an attempt at modification of unwanted behavior. There is also self-preservation strategy; drunk drivers are a hazard to anyone who has to use the street.
And post-COVID I'm not sure anyone believes the FDA is non-politicized anymore. Today, the FDA picks winners and losers w.r.t. the pharmaceutical industry.
Of all the debates on here but HBD, this is the one that tires me the most, because no matter the conclusions, there is no solution that powerful and culturally-dominant societies are willing to accept.
The sexual marketplace is Moloch's little bitch. Women control access to reproduction. As long as women control access to reproduction, they gain power by withholding it. A man acts, a woman chooses. Q.E.D.: it's in the interest of women to withhold it to their own benefit for as long as possible (what if a better mate comes along?) while the world feeds them a constant parade of men to swipe left on. Sufficiently large network effects mean that this, at scale, will mean that reproductive access is limited to a smaller and smaller % of the populace.
There's no fixing this in ways that the currently dominant social and cultural paradigm will accept. How can you, when women can actively weaponize men against other men with nothing but the mere promise of access to reproduction?
There's nothing left to debate. At the rate things are going, either find a first world society someplace where TFR is above replacement so we can isolate the factors responsible, attempt some solution sufficiently alien the memeplex doesn't recognize it as a threat to women's autonomy, agency, education or power, or get women to actively seek reproduction with males they consider low status.
I consider freely available access to cold fusion, FTL, and entropy an easier nut to crack than the latter.
clo
1yr ago
Very disheartened by this "postmortem".
In my experience, it's not the "icky red tribe discussion" that's lowered the quality of the sub. It's actually the increase in number of people with niche or unpopular opinions, that are often coded right wing.
Worse, the newcomers or people discovering this place for the first time are not properly acquainted with the culture it inherited, a culture where their ideas are discussed and debated (on good faith). When someone genuinely tries to steelman their viewpoint and argue against it, the newcomer finds their genuinely held belief challenged. They will double down rather than change their mind or accept a new argument - as opposed to the standards of the motte, where steelmen grind against each other, and the weak are ground into filings - they consider any challenge to their viewpoint just plain wrong even in the face of evidence.
This results in a norm of more and more people that are willing to assert increasingly outlandish claims without evidence, as they understand on some level that outside this place, evidence is not needed to convince others for or against their viewpoint.
Evidence didn't convince them away from their viewpoint before, so why would it convince anyone else? This makes arguing in good faith extremely difficult.
Hats off to the mods, even if I agree or disagree with their positions. There are a significant number of genuine shit-stirrers who explicitly set out to skirt the rules while actively trying to sabotage discussion, and the place is the worse for it.
Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers.
I know we do our best to not typical-mind around here, but goddamn, when it's staring you right in the face and they are telling you exactly what they think, to deny it in this manner is like watching someone deny the walls they're walking into. From the suit alone and the tireless, documented efforts of the NBCFAE, it's clear that the competency and effectiveness of air traffic controllers mattered less than if they were African-American or not.
I remember TracingWoodgrains' attempt to try and start an offshoot of The Motte he believed needed to exist with "less of a right-wing slant". I remember thinking that the attempt was idealistic, misguided and naive at the time. It's nice to know that he hasn't changed that much. I wish him all the best, but when the leopards eat his face I won't be at all surprised.
clo
6mo ago
Why are you shocked? Support for Israel is Team Red-coded in America.
American political theater is so polarized Blue team in America could ritualistically eat babies and people still wouldn't vote for Team Red.
Enh, see, I want to agree with you. I really do. And I hate that I have to qualify this by saying that I am Chinese, because I hate that I feel the need to state my race before applying my argument, especially here. Ideas should be colorblind no matter where they originate from.
I want to tell you that you are simultaneously both spot on, and that you are overthinking it.
I think the best way to put it is that (mainland) Chinese are ruthlessly value-optimizing. They hold fundamentally different values, because of course they do. Whether these values are inherent, or they are taught, is not my concern - nature/nurture debates do not interest me, and modern Chinese history involves enough bloodshed to justify the color of the flag. What they are is what they are, and given that a multipolar world seems very likely barring dawning American AI dominance or continued military dominance, it causes me regular frustration that the vast majority of westerners fail to grasp that they're working off of fundamentally different values, let alone understand that they will naturally optimize for those values. Chalk it up to the American belief in universalism, or the standard American practice of saying (or believing!) one thing while doing another.
You may be absolutely right that your struggle with China is in fact racial. You may even be right in fearing a high-IQ species with alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts.
But at the end of the day, China is simply optimizing for its own values. Everyone does this. Your examples are entirely valid. Foot-binding conferred status and sexual market value at the time, so they did it. The weak exist at the mercy of the strong, so they are subservient to the strong. There are millions of Chinese people who are competition, losing the competition means you are one of the weak, so the toddler will eventually grow to be competition, so why care for it? Man's best friend is made of meat, and meat is protein, so why not eat it? Your political enemies can potentially threaten your existence, so why not eat them? You can sell a literature book by describing a scenario where the lower class gets a moment of catharsis by screwing over those more powerful, why wouldn't you?
I am entirely convinced, given the mess that America is in, that they are also subservient to perverse incentives. While they are not remotely comparable, the mechanisms behind it are the same.
It's simply more naked in China. Everywhere, the weak exist to be destroyed, or to be subservient to the strong. Losing in China is existential. The culture has a long history of genocide, either by the hard, physical method, or the soft method of cultural assimilation. Whatever chance that the weak had of affecting any kind of change was run over by tanks in the streets of Beijing as they were reminded what it meant to be weak, and what it meant to be strong.
You can't change anything about China without changing the values - or, well, as Chinese would put it - the dog-eat-dog nature of reality. If you don't wish to change the values, then there's nothing for it - nuke the bugmen, or attempt to practice isolationism. There are millions of Chinese. The preferred method of problem solving through the years by China's rulers was to throw bodies at the problem. Life is, and always has been, cheap. Winners win, and losers lose. If you can't grasp what this means, you haven't lost hard enough. Losers in China know what it is to lose.
(I lie, maybe I will bring up nurture after all - I have noticed that Chinese-Americans, especially the born-in-the-US generation, have poor comprehension of "winners win, and losers lose". Even if they lose, they assume family, community, social security, academia, the federal government, will be there for them and have managed to optimize for America in many ways. They will wear their "Chinese-ness" on their sleeves to get ahead for diversity points and wouldn't be caught dead wanting to move back to Mainland China. They know how the game is played.)
Maybe Chinese TFR being as critically damaged as it is will change some things. I'm not optimistic, because China will simply apply a top-down brutalist attempt to fix this. Or, alternatively, the opposition will become strong and eat the top, and apply their own fix that might be just as bad if not worse.
clo
4mo ago
Exceptional steelman of trigger warnings.
I finally understand. They're more easily understood as a way of gimping everyone else to make the triggered person feel more powerful.
Dune
Fertile
I'm sorry, what
By your own account, you think Dune licensing is mismanaged. And you still call this fertile?
Fertile means bountiful. There's much less Dune stuff than there is LOTR stuff. It might have something to do with the way LOTR invented a whole genre of fantasy fiction and then had a very popular and well-received movie trilogy that continues to live in the minds of "normies" long after it succeeded.
I think Marvel is heavily mismanaged, but still fertile. Just none of it is any good. They keep growing garbage. They keep making more and more of it, but it sucks.
They don't make a lot of Dune. Dune media is as parched as the desert it comes from. Had the newer movie not come out - a movie where even the company funding it was unwilling to commit to wholly and was on record not being willing to fund the second half before they saw how people reacted - I think licensing it would have been dirt cheap. I also don't think Dune is all that great, although it definitely fills its world with a ton of ideas and is quite rare in the world of schlock-sci-fi in terms of both its scope and breadth.
You could probably say the same about WH40k; a similarly rich and expansive world in scope, which takes the distinct opposite approach to licensing by shotgunning walls of flak at everyone in exchange for cashing big royalty checks from as many sources as possible, with a net result that maybe 15-20% of their licensed work is worth anything at all.
What makes a piece of media inspiring is a terrible question because what inspires people will vary from person to person. If I had to take a blind stab at it, I'd say it would probably have to do with stories that try to grasp at universal things about the human condition.
I think the enduring power in the LOTR work is that it posits the existence of clear good, clear evil, and that the corrupting presence of evil is not defeated by martial might or using evil against evil but by the willingness of small, humble beings from nowhere to sacrifice. These are things that speak to the human understanding of the world and the nature of evil.
Granted, I think the first Blade movie is Great. I also think Nabokov's Pale Fire is Great, and I think the Lives of Others is Great. I think all of these things are wonderful for entirely different reasons. I don't want things that are based on these intellectual properties, much less think they'll be great at all. Yes, even the Wesley Snipes vampire movie. The more of this we got the worse it gets. They fail (or succeed, rarely!) on their own merits, but I would not call anything based on the intellectual property great simply because it belongs to the same intellectual property.
That way lies Star Wars. And the more you look at Star Wars as an IP, the more you realize that sometimes dead truly is better.
clo
2mo ago
I think this is kind of a weird take as I played the hell out of the starship troopers FPS and most gunfights in that game are also extremely close, although it is possible to engage enemies at range with one or two gun variants.
Helldivers 2 has pretty bad gun balance issues and a flawed armor system, that's it. And fighting bots is an entirely different experience than fighting bugs that just rush or ambush leap you, bots can often snipe you crossmap with extremely accurate rockets.
clo
1yr ago
Because the idea that a low status male thinks he has a chance with her implies she is low status.
I think in normal circumstances, where the conflict is over land or resources, this would be a good framework.
The problem is that this is a religious, sectarian and ethnic war. Jewish holy writ considers Jews the chosen people and all others somewhere between subhumans and animals, to the point where when someone appeared claiming he had come to save even the subhumans and animals, they got the Romans to stick him on a cross.
And on the other side you have Palestine, not really Palestinians in the way the West thinks of them as citizens of a country, but the extremist wing of Islamic hardliners that have supporters all over the Middle East and are aligning their struggle with the destiny of Islam. Who also consider it divine will to murder non-Islamists and take their land, wealth and women.
What's the ZOPA in this case? Israel considers attacks on their country existential in a way that's hard for liberal-democrat live-and-let-live Westerners to truly understand. 9/11 gave America PTSD for a generation and that was a few planes and a building. Netanyahu has basically said nothing is off the table and you can expect Israelis to basically support whatever tools and methods he needs to sweep the Gaza Strip clean of Muslims. And Hamas and their supporters explicitly set out to kill as many Jews as possible and to claim tribal victory (with other goals, like throwing a rake in any potential Saudi-Israeli collaboration, drawing America into the quagmire at a moment when war materiel stocks are critically low, further destabilizing the Pax Americana being incidental). They are broadcasting their success. Killing Jews on camera and parading their hostages and victims on social media is like catnip to half the Muslim ME that has explicitly wanted Israel gone or at least curbstomped into being not a major player for generations, and acts as a recruiting tool for them (look what we can do!).
clo
2mo ago
Power accumulates. You want to be on the winning team, no matter who's winning. Expect everyone to 180 at the drop of a hat if the other team is winning.
Instructive recent case: citing national security concerns, Chinese governments and state-backed companies enacted policies banning Apple phones from the workplace.
What happened was that even companies without ties to the government with nothing in the way that could be realistically be construed as a national security concern attempted to do the same regardless, and made a point of doing so publicly, believing that by doing so they were demonstrating their allegiance to the government.
clo
6mo ago
I think you are, unfortunately, very naive about the human condition.
People who strongly update their priors, beliefs, and are open to admitting that they are wrong tend to not make it very far socially, in elite circles, local or international politics.
clo
1yr ago
I don't quite know how to put my thoughts in order given the vitriol of your response. On the surface, I agree with you.
But there are plenty of societies that aren't authoritarian hellholes that somehow don't have this problem. As well as plenty of societies that are authoritarian hellholes with decaying or depreciated social fabric/lunatic homeless.
I feel like the logic here doesn't quite hold.
I am not quite sure what it is, but I think it's something unique about Americans that makes them believe shared social anything is inherently a scam, or for suckers. A scam because it won't work (despite many examples of it working) or for suckers, because how dare anyone else benefit from something they pay for (because people paying for something they won't partake in is by definition, being a sucker). Then again, the game America as a country plays better than anybody aside from basketball is socializing their failures while privatizing the gains, so maybe it's genuinely cultural.
Not to disparage your comprehension skills, but the points he's making are fairly simple:
Even if the research is spot on, what can be done?
This is not new, here's a study from 1994 that has similarly ugly conclusions, but there is no will to do anything about it.
The conclusions of the research were not unanticipated. In fact the motives behind the results have been understood for centuries.
Power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that hurt people you don't like look like they occur naturally.
To solve the problem people need to admit they were wrong. They would rather keep searching for a solution that doesn't exist, rather than admit that the research shows what they think is unfavorable (in this case, black criminals prey on whites, and this has a direct correlation with white flight).
You can come up with all the facts you want, but there is no way around the problem that people understand the will to power.
I'd actually go so far as to say that in 2023, there are no non-fossil fuel power systems that can be run sustainably without government subsidies. And even then, governments are playing a global game where the flow of fossil fuels are tied to geopolitics.
I was working in China during the Great Solar Adoption. Endless fields of them, blanketing dozens upon dozens of factories. What they don't tell you is that photovoltaics are incredibly toxic to handle, dispose of, and manufacture, they require regular cleaning before the efficiency generation drops precipitously, they don't last anywhere near what they're supposed to and produce incredible amounts of dangerous e-waste. They were only adopted because of incredibly generous government tax benefits and subsidies, as well as awards for reaching a significant % of total power generation from solar, and kickbacks to companies manufacturing solar panels.
Current state of renewables simply don't scale, not if we want to maintain the same quality of life. Maintain, not improve. There is no solution. You can shit up people's quality of life, but you'll get pushback, especially as the shit won't be evenly applied.
Honestly the only energy sources I have hope for are geothermal and nuclear. And nuclear has a long list of caveats in that even in the face of overwhelming security precautions, black swan events can have outsized disparate impact. I hope we crack fusion regardless.
There is definitely a way to make our world much more ecologically sustainable - bomb all non-agrarian Third World countries to glass. If "degrowth mindset" is in vogue, might as well go all the way and yank the ladder out from countries seeking to take advantage of readily accessible cheap fuel to industrialize.
clo
1yr ago
My mistake. I assumed you were making a request in good faith. I won't make that mistake again.
clo
6mo ago
I think if you advocate genocide in a hot take you need to justify your bona fides. ie you should have murdered someone, or been a war veteran, or had your family murdered or something.
Agreed, definitely! I would therefore advocate for using this framework, and logic, to permanently silence Americans off the entire internet. The amount of ignorance demonstrated by citizens of the global hegemon is a massive net fail and the foreign policy conducted as a aggregate of and on behalf of that ignorance is, in my opinion, worth kneecapping an American with a shotgun and taking away their internet access every time they say anything about anything they know nothing about and have never experienced.
Luckily, or unluckily, we don't live in a world where people's feet are held to the fire every time they say anything stupid, so people can continue to spout their hot takes as they wish.
clo
1yr ago
You may want to read TLP's dissertation on the subject, whether you agree with it or not. Beware, following this guy down the rabbit hole may be infohazardous.
When they say, "it's a woman's choice" what they mean is "it's not a man's choice, it is thoroughly stupid to wear make up just for men, the only acceptable reason is if you do it for yourself, if it makes you feel better about yourself."
Let me offer a contrary position, unpalatable but worth considering: the only appropriate time to wear make up is to look attractive to men. Or women, depending on which genitals you want to lick, hopefully it's both. "Ugh, women are not objects." Then why are you painting them? I'm not saying you have to look good for men, I'm saying that if wearing makeup not for men makes you feel better about yourself, you don't have a strong self, and no, yelling won't change this. Everyone knows you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, now you're saying the cover of the book influences how the book feels about itself?
I am not doubting that in fact you do feel better about yourself, I am saying that that fact is both pathological and totally on purpose. Since this cognitive trick does help you feel better about yourself, by all means go ahead, but at what point will you stop pressuring other women to go along with it? When will you stop "requiring" it, like when you say, "oh, she's so pretty even without makeup" as if the default was makeup?
As a neutral observer who just thinks it's fun to watch women destroy each other, the existence of TERFs strikes me as intuitively obvious.
If "what is a woman" is a fight worth fighting, women who have fought to advance the causes and benefits of women will see their work undone. They see what power they (believe) they've wrested from the men slipping through their factory-broken, labor-calloused fingers disintegrating, and they don't like it.
If even New-Labour-Government-neutered, "wizards invented magic to disintegrate their own shit" JK has figured it out, the midwits who haven't are really in for a rude awakening.
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