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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

From NYT (archive): Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.

As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group's first female leader spoke. Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.

"When it arrived, everyone was happy," said Tsainama Marubo, 73, sitting on the dirt floor of her village's maloca, a 50-foot-tall hut where the Marubo sleep, cook and eat together. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergencies. "But now, things have gotten worse," she said. She was kneading jenipapo berries to make a black body paint and wearing ropes of jewelry made from snail shells. Lately, the youth had become less interested in making such dyes and jewelry, she said. "Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet," she said. "They're learning the ways of the white people."

After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.

During the meetings, teenagers swiped through Kwai, a Chinese-owned social network. Young boys watched videos of the Brazilian soccer star Neymar Jr. And two 15-year-old girls said they chatted with strangers on Instagram. One said she now dreamed of traveling the world, while the other wants to be a dentist in São Paulo.

A case study in what happens when you take a “natural” society and introduce the internet. This relates in some interesting ways to an overview of Hunter-Gatherers and Play that I posted a few weeks ago in the FFT:

Given the indulgence that hunter-gatherer adults exhibit toward children, it is no surprise that the children spend most of their time playing. Play, almost by definition, is what children want to do. The adults have no qualms about this, because they believe that it is through play that children learn what they must to become effective adults. In a survey of ten hunter-gatherer researchers, who had lived in 7 different hunter-gatherer cultures, all of the researchers said that children were free to play essentially from dawn to dusk every day (see Gray, 2009). In a published report on how Ju/’hoan children spent their time, Patricia Draper (1976, pp 205-206) concluded: "[Ju/’hoan] children are late in being held responsible for subsistence tasks. Girls are around 14 years old before they begin regular food gathering and water- and wood-collecting. This is in spite of the fact that they may be married before this age. Boys are 16 years old or over before they begin serious hunting. … Children do amazingly little work." In a study of peoples with mixed hunter-gatherer and agricultural subsistence, in Botswana, John Bock and Sarah Johnson (2004) found that the more a family was involved in hunting and gathering, and the less they were involved in agriculture, the more time children had to play.

Hunter-gatherer children are never isolated from adult activities. They observe directly all that occurs in camp––the preparations to move; the building of huts; the making and mending of tools and other artifacts; the food preparation and cooking; the nursing and care of infants; the precautions taken against predators and diseases; the gossip, discussions, arguments, and politics; the songs, dances, festivities, and stories. They sometimes accompany adults on food gathering trips, and by age 10 or so boys sometimes accompany men on hunting trips. In the course of their daily lives, they see, hear, and have the opportunity to explore everything that is relevant to becoming a successful adult in their culture, and they incorporate all of this into their play. They play at the activities that they observe in the adults around them, and as they grow older, their play turns gradually into the real thing. There is no sharp division between playful participation and real participation in the valued activities of the band.

The above-mentioned survey of researchers elicited many examples of valued adult activities that were mimicked regularly by children in play. Digging up tubers, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders, building huts, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defending against attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying animals and learning their habits), making music, dancing, storytelling, and arguing were all mentioned by one or more respondents. The specific lists varied from culture to culture, in accordance with differences in the skills that were exemplified by adults in each culture. All of the respondents said that boys in the culture they studied engaged in a great deal of playful hunting. The two respondents who studied the Agta—a culture in which women as well as men regularly hunt—noted that girls as well as boys, in that culture, engaged in much playful hunting.

Apparently, when children are free to do what they want, they spend much of their time playing at the very activities that they see, from direct experience, are most crucial for success in their culture. Their conscious motive is fun, not education. It is exciting for children, everywhere, to pretend that they are powerful, competent adults, doing beautifully and skillfully what they see the adults around them doing. From an evolutionary perspective, it is no coincidence that children are constructed in such a way.

Equally important to learning how to hunt and gather, for hunter-gather children, is learning how to interact with others assertively yet peacefully. In their play, children practice arguing. Turnbull has described how older Mbuti children (age 9 and up) playfully rehash and try to improve upon the arguments that they have heard among adults.

In a “primitive” or natural society, childrens’ play is an effortless rendition of adult activity. Over their crucial years of cognitive development, children slowly become adults through stress-free exploration and imitation. The playfulness guides them toward skill acquisition, not unlike a fun video game. In the absence of superstimuli, there is no better way to “play”, so boredom promotes the learning behavior effortlessly. This has the inherent benefit of acting as “shaping” (in a psychological sense) because the skill that is learned is never beyond one’s capacity, is imitated through one’s father, and with the older children who act as mentors (“the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise”).

Their original arrangement was paradisal. Just from a psychological standpoint. It is the optimal way for a child to learn. When StarLink was introduced, the paradisal order was disrupted — innocent children have consumed Apple in the prelapsarian garden, so to speak. There is no turning back; they will likely look at their loincloths and feel shame at their nakedness. But I do wonder then, what about us developed people? Are we doomed to fall further and further from grace, our children forever destined to the cognitive hazards of superstimuli? Is there no way out, no rope we can grab to lift us back to grace?

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

Anecdota on Von Neumann I find interesting, pulled from different sites

Equally, von Neumann had no interest in sport and, barring long walks (always in a business suit), he would avoid any form of vigorous physical exercise for the rest of his life. When his second wife, Klari, tried to persuade him to ski, he offered her a divorce. ‘If being married to a woman, no matter who she was, would mean he had to slide around on two pieces of wood on some slick mountainside,’ she explained, ‘he would definitely prefer to live alone and take his daily exercise, as he put it, “by getting in and out of a pleasantly warm bathtub.”

It is interesting that the smartest man who ever lived did not engage in any physical exercise short of walking.

he claimed he had low sales resistance, and so would have his wife come clothes shopping with him

He was not a skilled poker player

Did his genius come at the expense of social awareness? Maybe. I find the idea of zero sum cognition utterly fascinating.

He famously always wore a grey oxford 3 piece suit, including when playing tennis with Stanislaw Ulam, or when riding a donkey down the Grand Canyon

I felt that he was sometimes somewhat peculiar that he would be impressed by government officials or generals and so on. If a big uniform appeared that made more of an impression than it should have. It was odd.

Parties and nightlife held a special appeal for von Neumann. While teaching in Germany, von Neumann had been a denizen of the Cabaret-era Berlin nightlife circuit.”

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

I have read that hand gestures aid memory / cognition. I also recall reading that medieval art and Roman oratory theorists developed systems of hand gestures. Does anyone know if there has been a more scientific development on the use of hand gestures (and general embodied cognition) for cognition?

It’s a little funny to think that there could be gains to learning and remembering with the use of hand gestures, something literally everyone has at the palm of their hands, but no one has like… developed anything systematic with it. Like we just haven’t fully grasped the application.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

To be clear I am criticizing your comment, not the person who you are responding to (I agree they deserve a warning; although blocking someone and then insulting them is IMO cowardice). Yours comes from a mod position and —

[doesn’t] address the actual arguments being made [and] uncharitably projects motives onto them that they have not expressed.

You are implying that I am motivated by “Jew hatred”. But I am not. I have made comments criticizing Islam and mainstream Christianity. Off the top of my head, I think a few months ago I posted about danger of Islam in the West, and some time ago about how bad the “HeGetsUs” campaign was for Christianity. I think I have also made comments about the “religion-ness” of secular progressive America.

I don't recall anyone saying this explicitly

Then I will quote:

Not all people, not all civilizations, not all tribes, are equal. This is a core conservative conceit, it’s also inherent to ideas like HBD that you yourself agree with. Human progress has always involved the conquest of some peoples by others. Punching down’, in other words, may be more moral than ‘punching up’. The many settlers of the Americas did what they did and so, perhaps, will the Israelis.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by “explicit”. Not that the comment deserves to be dinged, but it is an example of how “Jew-hater” does not turn into “Palestinian-hater” when inverted. Even though that comment (clarified in the thread context) implies it is okay to take others’ land if they are less intelligent or developed.

As you do. Constantly.

I don’t think I make many top posts on the topic anymore. The “Jewish billionaire group chat” I felt was of legitimate political and cultural interest. I mostly stick to replying when someone else makes a thread on some issue.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

“This person’s comments are motivated by pure racial animus” is uncharitable. Were I to say that a Jewish poster who continually defends Israel is motivated by unadulterated racial hatred against Palestinians, and smeared him as an Arab-hater, clearly that would be rule-breaking and I would be banned. Yet there have actually been commenters who have cited the IQ of Jews as reason for why they deserve their illegal territorial conquest.

“Jews” have been a steady culture war issue this year because of Israel and the protests. And because of their over-representation in influential American positions of power, organized Jewish groups have been worthy of discussion for previous years and for years into the future. Since Twitter has become unmoderated it has been shown that normative American discourse includes discussion of the group power dynamics as well. So it is not even a dissident idea anymore.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

They lose subscription revenue and advertising revenue if they lose the support of organized Jewish groups. They lose advertising because businesses may decide against advertising in the NYT in the same way businesses decided against advertising in Twitter. They may lose subscription revenue through a secondary means: AIPAC, ADL, whoever can damage their pristine image among progressives by finding some misconduct and enlarging it into a narrative.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

I think there are some bad things in the religion, like ethnocentrism.

Jew-hater

No more than a Jew who critiques Christian culture is a Christ-hater.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

That’s essentially correct. Morality requires knowledge, so those developments required the moral-scientific realization that humans are equal in regards to basic humanity, and that their primary nature isn’t due to their bloodline. Morality also involves mutually-decided rules of conduct, so nations formed the UN to develop rules on how to treat people (Israel is currently in violation of some UN rules). There was in fact a time when people thought that a slave’s nature was categorically different than a free person’s nature, I think you find that in Aristotle.

Perhaps this highlights the differences between old-style Jewish thought versus new / non-Jewish thought. Traditional Jews believe that God gave them all the rules that they need a long time ago, in the written law of the Torah and in the oral law (despite no evidence of an oral law in pre-first century BC Jewish life). As such there can’t be “moral developments” which hinge on human realization because this would violate a precious dogma.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

lands stolen by genociding the natives and importing slaves

It’s generally acknowledged that humans have moved past 19th century norms. We treat natives as fully human now, and most of the globe also considers Palestinians human now too. So the moral questions are significant. And in the article the oppression of Palestinians is considered both factual and significant by none other than —

Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, once head of Israel’s Central Command
Ami Ayalon, head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000
Mark Schwartz, American three-star general, once the top military official working at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021
Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties

These are not exactly renowned antisemites we are talking about. I don’t know anyone more important whose testimony should be heard short of Yahweh appearing on Mt Sinai again with a PowerPoint on his tablet.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

no more love for the conservative religious right in Israel

But the article is saying there is a systemic issue in Israel generally, not just regarding the right in Israel. They are also jeopardizing their Democrat interests by publishing things which may lead Zionists shifting to the Republican Party. It’s not as simple as “they are liberal therefore criticize Israel”.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

what the heck does Israel do about it?

You punish them, like any other state should. Failure to punish is complicity.

More generally, how can a state recover when a substantial minority refuses to go along with its orders

Punishment will continue until morality improves. They can implement mandatory educstional curricula that aims to dismantle notions of Jewish supremacy. Failure to do this is evidence of complicity.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

The NYT is a Jewish-dominant newspaper filled with Democrats. Of course they will relentlessly malign Trump, because that helps them. But it’s not so clear that they have an interest in criticizing Israel to the same extent. Especially because there is moneyed interest at stake. No one is withdrawing support for the NYT because of misrepresentation about Trump (it was never there to begin with), but they may for criticism about Israel. As we saw with Ivy League schools and the conspiratorial group chat of Jewish billionaires that WaPo wrote about.

Gell-Mann amnesia

is a meme. Is there any evidence that experts by and large find that the NYT misrepresents findings in their field?

Do you understand Israeli politics well enough to know why ~10% of the Israeli population will vote religious-right regardless of who's leading it?

Maybe he does? I hate this idea that only Jews living in Israel have the esoteric moral knowledge regarding Israel. Sorry but you have been a controversial nation for decades, lots of people know how Israeli politics work.

it would take actually living here to get it.

This appears to me to be a nonsensical excuse.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

Most scientific and academic papers I read don’t do this though. The abstract only says their conclusion for a few criteria, sometimes only in general terms. The discussion or results section you’ll often find more complete conclusions and a lot of sentences that contain words like “surprisingly”, “unexpectedly”, “interestingly”, “one noteworthy finding”. That’s a lot of information that should be front and center rather than buried in the discussion section.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

Unless this is wrong, it has decreased since 2018. Something else I’m interested in knowing (but haven’t found yet) is a really solid income x cost of living estimate which accounts for the higher paid jobs increasingly being in high cost areas, eg white American well-paid professionals moving into Silicon Valley or city centers — “average cost of living” tells us nothing about specific cohorts. Have white American wages since 2010 actually accounted for white Americans moving to higher cost areas? Idk. Also curious if it accounts for delayed age of retirement and delaying work because in grad school? Maybe someone smarter than me can inform on that.

the right has no human capital

I don’t disagree but I do think they can develop this, over time

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

True! Probably can now.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

I find all the “this is an escalation that will lead to unrest” thoughts going around dangerously naive and fantastical. There is zero possibility of political unrest in America. Americans of both spectrums are increasingly isolated, sedentary, and addicted to their phones. White Americans are becoming poorer. Everyone is addicted to a device which spies on them continually, and all social activity now begins* online. The upper rung of intel communities are hyper-elite well-connected individuals with names like Robert Swan Mueller III who likely care more about maintaining intergenerational wealth and family influence than adhering to abstract principles of justice. If through some cosmic miracle you managed to create some organization intent on unrest, it will be Ruby Ridge but with drone strikes. It’s simply impossible. Any “unrest” would have to come from inside the upper rung of the intelligence agencies, not among the common squabble.

This fact needs to be accepted so that conservatives realize the whole moral burden of correcting the perceived injustice rests in their ability to propagandize, boycott, and culture-craft. There will be no cavalry or Calvary moment to save you. If you do nothing politically or culturally productive, nothing will happen. Ever. Ad infinitum. The new world does not allow for the smallest amount of unrest. They will drone strike you (you will once again complain it is an “escalation”) before they allow any unrest that could be utilized by foreign actors to reduce American influence.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

Every book and every long article should start with a bullet point preface of significant conclusions and noteworthy evidence / argumentation that led to the conclusions. That way we can quickly parse whether it is worth it to invest our time on it (or whether: we have gone through the information before; there is nothing noteworthy to glean from it). Even scientific articles should do this immediately on the first page, not just somewhere in their discussion / conclusion.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

Sublimate it upwards so you only care about what some Ideal Perfect Judge would say across an eternal span of time and with only a perfect concern for what matters. Could also help to stop judging other people by vain / unchangable characteristics

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

The ArtOfMemory forum has really good posts on this. I think what can be helpful is “feasting->fasting” process: fill up your cognition with beautiful imagery you see in the world; dwell on paintings, then test yourself with spaced repetition to see if you can recall; explore novel environments with good visual stimuli. This increases visual memory growth. Then enter a “fasting” period where you no longer take in much new visual stimuli and instead only focus on your intended visualization process.

perfect nurturer meditations

Elaborate

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

Yes, as a factor of relatability / maturity / descriptive ability. But if I think the narrative is immature I will consciously refuse to relate to it. Or if I just don’t want to relate to it (I think it’s harmful to feel too much emotion when it’s not beneficial to your own life). The proper use of narrative art, IMO, is to consume something which mirrors your own current problem/interest, so the art acts like an extended metaphor for you to draw from. (Hypothetically: watch 12 angry men if you are about to be on a jury or work in HR manager; watch Free Solo if you want to model a spirit for doing something daunting; watch Up to remember significance of love or to humanize your older relatives). Anything else is probably more harmful than good because it’s wasting your attention and emotions.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

Hot dry sunny days or a dense humid thunderstorm. Everything else is boring. The first is like using a sauna and being relaxed inside, the second is like witnessing something eerie and feeling safe inside. For evenings I think colder the better, though.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

Of course they looked at the bosom, and of course Susanna was painted with temptation in mind. But that is what makes it so intelligent, no? You identify either with Susanna, the virtuous woman about to be wrongfully propositioned, or you identify with the status exemplars, about to use their high status to impugn a virtuous woman. You want this kind of association seared in your mind, that when you consider lust you remember the near-tragedy of Susanna and the righteousness of God. Art wasn’t divorced from the religious culture at the time, so everyone knew the story of Susanna and Daniel. It’s not like today where it’s just a vague story you need to pull from the recesses of your mind. It would have been brought up half a dozen times a year in sermons, made a special lesson in school, made an allusion in high class conversations. You have Handel writing operas about it and Mozart riffing his character in Figaro off her. It’s casually mentioned in Shakespeare and 1001 Nights. It’s anachronistic to interpret the nude as just a nude.

And consider: some of the best of these paintings were commissioned by queens and bishops. And if you were a wealthy aristocrat with your own painter, you could just have him paint a nude that doesn’t have such a looming moral threat above it. For pure nudes, just request the Greek nymphs or something else, right? They would essentially be cursing themselves / giving themselves bad vibes by purposefully commissioning Susanna just for her nudity when there were hundreds of different ways to procure a nude scene. But I guess the modern person would excuse all this and say that the queen was a lesbian and the bishop was horny.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

Twitter

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

The You was the Church, or if not, a wealthy religious aristocratic. The Past wasn’t so naive as to leave artists to their own devices. Eg

The newly recovered painting of Susanna and the Elders was commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria

The figures are in the School of Reims style found in works commissioned by Bishop Ebbo

The work may have been commissioned by papal nephew Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi

But again, what’s great about the scene is that the artist must identify with the men sneaking a look at Susanna in a story that completely rebuffs lust and perfidy. It trains the moral immune system of all involved, the artist especially. I like to think this is a semi-conscious “social technology” rather than an accident.

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coffee_enjoyer ☕️ 1yr ago

Status in the progressive art scene

There’s a thread on Reddit about social progressive influences in the youth arts and music scene. (The link is an archive with all comments, no need for account.) It’s a glimpse into a social world from members who would otherwise not talk about it. This particular community is artistically and culturally aligned with progressive culture but politically more moderate or to the right. A lot of this you have probably heard before (quick to cancel, quick to signal), but I found the below selection to be informative:

”I grew up evangelical Christian going to youth events/camps blah blah and the in-group out-group culty dynamic is literally the same. None of these fuckers are individuals”

”i understand that obsessive complaining about "woke" stuff can be cringe, but when people claim that the dogma isn't actually as cartoonishly insane as it's made out to be, you know they have never played in bands in places like this. even actual RWers don't understand how crazy it gets. when my bf's parents make fun of pronoun stuff we're just like, don't even start, you guys have noo idea”

”I live in a particularly "progressive" part of Philadelphia, and this is how so many people are. I feel like so many people learned about the depths of systematic racism, started to scream about how terrible white people are, realized that they were white, and instead of learning a fucking thing about how to cope with this, they decided that they too are victims of systematic oppression, and this led to a spread of smug virtue signaling culture. Makes people feel like less of a potential perpetrator of racism or whatever phobias if they begin to identify with every marginalized identity they feasibly can”

”This generation are obsessed with curating their looks amd their spaces. Everything is tailored, edited, thought out and calculated except the music and the lyrics. The amount of palace intrigue that goes into consensus building about what local bands, people, places are permissible is ludicrous. It's like there is a giant Pravda book everyone is reading from silently at home. When they go out they wanna impress the Party. When they go back home.they inform and do espionage in little meetings no one hears about. Dark non-arts are taking hold everywhere.

The characterization of “palace intrigue” is insightful. Indie art, basement shows, etc are unpoliced places where the members have no religion, organized morality, or moral mentors. They are anarchic gatherings of young horny people who do not believe in higher authority or cling to a moral tradition. Status is rewarded with fame, sex, drugs, favors from the few trustfund members, and coveted but longshot employment opportunity at some shop / label / magazine / bar. Low status leads to utter and irrevocable ostracization. The stakes are, uh, big. So what happens is that authority and a code of conduct develops organically but very primitively through cliques and “palace gossip”, with the valuable positions at the top guarded tyrannically. Its Lord of the Flies except sometimes it smells worse.

I think the missing piece for understanding why the scene is so unhealthy is that members are imitating group exemplars. The imitation of group exemplars is a universal human habit, a relic of tribal days. These scenes first congregate on Twitter, tumblr, or instagram, and only then do they disperse to real life watering holes. (As one user put it: “music scenes were about capturing real life and putting it online; now it's putting online into real life.”) What they see on social media is that gossip and public accusation gets the most attention and name recognition, which is valuable for securing a place in the social hierarchy. The more signaling you do and the more explicit you do it, the more you gain attention. The increasing numerical value of likes or reblogs on social media tricks the users into believing that the number is an accurate sign of social value — and this consequently turns it into a real social value. You only need to persuade a small minority that the numbers indicate social value for the numbers to eventually become the dominant social value. Why? Because if 5% of social value is suddenly administered according to an online number, then this will be noticed and more people will pay attention to it, leading it to comprise 6%. And if 6% of social value, then … and so on. This will continue until participating online is a necessary requirement for obtaining the niche’s social value (how LinkedIn works). That original 5% is guaranteed because social media is addicting.

The reason it devolves into a base form of status signaling is that, well, everything is status signaling. But developed cultures long ago figured out ways to sublimate status signaling toward prosocial ends through the laying down of criteria and similarity with which to judge value. Were these guys Confucian, their ability to memorize prosocial axioms and follow certain rituals would give them value. If they were Muslims, their ability to mirror Muhammad in their life and live according to Allah’s decrees would give them value. (Interestingly, Muslims go one step further and ban all music except the whiny melodies which color the precepts of the Quran. This is certainly one way to ensure that your music scene doesn’t devolve into a monstrosity).

But why does the signaling competition devolve into Progressive shibboleths? Why not something else? I think the boring answer is that it started that way. If this alt scene were originally Confucian, then all new members would have adopted Confucianism. But it started progressive because no one with a strong traditional morality would dedicate their whole life to hosting licentious music. They cared more about school, they prioritized health, they had reservations about playing music bad for the soul. Meanwhile those without morality have no such concerns, and also use drugs as a lure for their power. There’s probably also an element of progressive shibboleths being boosted because the primitive wisdom that kids learn in early education is “everyone is the same, be nice”. So naturally, any devolution would go back to the shared morality which encites even the dumbest person. If everyone in school learned that the ultimate evil was being racist and mean, then that becomes the criteria for ostracisation. If you’re in a group of not very intelligent or moral art people, you can imagine the difference between accusing someone of being racist versus accusing someone of “a sophisticated ruse in which they themselves accuse others of being racist in order to elevate their standing”. The second one makes less sense when you are drunk or high, and it’s way too many words for me to read on Twitter at 2am. The first one contains the word “racist”, which I have been trained to bark at like a dog.

As mentioned in the thread, artists and musicians can’t say anything about the tyrannical hold of social progressivism because their career, reputation, and social network and under the purview of this process. When that occurs the shibboleths become an unconscious signal of membership, leading to a deep internalization in the heart of individual member. (Remember that normal people don’t think their beliefs through; like, writing about social and political values and engaging in discourse is an unusual thing. People want social value, not an optimally correct system in the grand scheme of things.)

One more thing to add. There’s a story in the Book of Daniel where two high status men threaten to blackmail a woman for sexual favors. She refuses to be blackmailed, so the high status men accuse her in front of the whole community of infidelity — something that would lead to her death. Our heroic prophet of the story, the young Daniel, takes on the role of Mr Bean. “Are you all so stupid that without examination or evidence you are going to condemn this woman?” He asks each one of the men alone under which tree the event transpired. One says a large canopied tree, but the other says a distinctly small tree. They have been caught in their lie, and the high status men are executed by the community.

This is the kind of story which humans once had as their foundational tales. Less “crime bad”, more “withhold judgment until wisdom, because corruption worse”. Kids would have learned this story instead of “racism bad”. And for artists, the story of Susanna was one of the most popular scenes in the history of Western art. Think how beneficial that is! You require your artists to draw Susanna, a beautiful semi-nude figure, and then you require him to draw the corrupt licentious high status figures, ready to blackmail her before being executed. It not only creates a good moral tale for children but it ensures that your artists don’t become regressives.

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