coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
Google, the most influential and powerful search engine in America, which most Americans use when searching for product information, released a propaganda music video advising everyone to only buy from black people. Buy what, only from black people? Everything. During a specific day as a kind of protest? No, every single day of the year. This follows Google’s decision to artificially boost black-owned businesses on their Maps app, giving these businesses a special eye-catching symbol.
Buying All Black - Ludacris feat. Flo Milli (A Google #BlackOwnedFriday Anthem)
“It’s time to buy black. All day, every day. Choose black 24/7, 365.
The music video goes on to tell the audience to “buy black” thirty times, while the Google-funded music video showcases individuals searching for black-owned businesses of every variety, from restaurants to salons.
I for one, am less than enthusiastic about the hegemonic consumer search engine producing propaganda advising consumers to never shop at a white-owned business. I’m less concerned with the music video, which received 15 million impressions on YouTube alone (a Google product), than with the underlying sentiment that clearly permeates through the business. I’m afraid of what Google is doing behind the scenes in terms of showing services, and whether they are going to artificially reduce exposure to a business owned by the ancestor of an Irish slave, in favor of a wealthy and privileged Nigerian immigrant whose ancestors owned many slaves.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
4mo ago
In an escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and associated culture war, we now have one of the first(?) terroristic threat charges brought against someone in the States. A teacher felt that a student’s comment about his flag was disrespectful and responded by threatening to behead her. It is reported that the teacher shouted:
You motherfucking piece of shit! I'll kick your ass. I should cut your motherfing head off
And students report hearing that
"he would kick her fucking ass, slit her goddamn throat and drag her ass outside and cut her head off."
The teacher who made this terroristic threat is Benjamin Reese, a Jewish man from Georgia, and the flag he had in his room was an Israeli flag [1] [2]. I find this noteworthy for two reasons. A Jewish man is making threats that I would have guessed came from a Muslim, which tells me about my bias and the level of passion on both sides of the conflict right now. But I’m also surprised that, despite the story first being published 24hrs ago, it’s untouched by mainstream news except RawStory. There’s local affiliates, RawStory, and YahooFinance Canada. But there’s no CNN, Fox, NYTimes, etc. They can’t be waiting for more information, because we already have the police reports. I predict that this story will not gain the traction that it would had the threat been made by a Palestinian man, or Muslim generally. Certainly that would be brought up on prime time Fox.
This instantly reminded me of the Day of Hate news blitz, when the Chabad-affiliated Barry (Baruch) Nockowitz picked up a toddler and threw him against a wall because of “anti-semitism”, telling police he would find another kid to attack [3]. Besides Miami Herald, this had zero news coverage, all the while coinciding with the “day of hate” which received George Floyd levels of news coverage and zero crimes committed. (As proof of how little coverage it got, themotte is on the first page of google results for his name, linking to the last time I mentioned this crime).
These criticisms can apply to virtually every community. Every single community that has both young men and women in it, and which doesn’t cling to the values of young marriage and gender separation, will have these issues. They’re found in every music and art scene, every socialist community, every college house party, Hollywood and so on. Hit pieces like these are just a way for the powerful to selectively come down on whichever community they want to destroy. And if you form a community which actually has structure in the way of preventing these problems, like Mike Pence and his evangelicalism, they’ll write a hit piece about you, too!
The proper response is to start interviewing Time Magazine employees, and cataloguing how many more of them are doing much worse — probably with cocaine rather than psychedelics.
coffee_enjoyer
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22d ago
Texas Governor Abbott signs law attempting to ban free speech at universities whenever the speech criticizes Israel in certain ways (described below).
The Executive Order requires all universities to —
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Review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the institution.
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Ensure that these policies are being enforced on campuses and that groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine are disciplined for violating these policies.
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Include the definition of antisemitism, adopted by the State of Texas in Section 448.001 of the Texas Government Code, in university free speech policies to guide university personnel and students on what constitutes antisemitic speech.
Section 448.001 reads
Examples of antisemitism are included with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's "Working Definition of Antisemitism" adopted on May 26, 2016
And this definition includes (among other things) —
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Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
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Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
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Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
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Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
These examples are intentionally ambiguous and can be weaponized by politicians or the judiciary against critics. The first example simply bans anyone from criticizing Israel in the same way that Israel routinely criticize others, by comparing them to Nazis. This cuts off a whole spectrum of political comparisons from ever applying to Israel. The second example could imply that you are antisemitic if you criticize Israel for things without also criticizing other nations in the same breath, however culturally and politically distant the nation. The third implies that an ethnostate cannot be considered racist if it is Jewish. The fourth implies that no one — not a single politician who is Jewish — can be accused of being more loyal to his self-defined homeland than America.
IMO this is a clear affront to freedom of speech. I find it embarrassing that any conservative in America would sign a law like this. The ambiguity is dangerous because it could be used by biased politicians or judges in its broadest application. While I don’t think it’s good public rhetoric to compare Israel to Nazis, that should be legal because (1) Nazis are everyone’s go-to villains, (2) Israel was recently the subject of an ICJ inquiry regarding genocide, (3) ethnonations should be extra scrutinized for genocide, (4) ethnonations with a history of genocide (Kitos War) and who fondly remember their nation previously committing genocide in their Holy Text should be super extra scrutinized for potential genocidal acts. The holocaust, like it or not, has no actual relevance to the current conduct of the Israeli regime. In real life, multigenerational ethnic groups do not swear off the same violence that their grandparents were victims of. So comparisons are fair game, if usually in bad taste.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Personally, I would rather not have slavery and Jim Crow taught in schools without mentioning the global racism of the time, or that Americans were actually way ahead of other peoples of the world in terms of inclusivity, or that African Barbary pirates enslaved many White Americans, or that European powers forced African kingdoms to stop enslaving Africans. I would also want to include passages about how European philosophy is what paved the way for our notions of equality, and that “what do we do with the former slaves” is not an easy question when one group is significantly less developed. Finally, I would like an approximate calculation of how much black Americans benefitted from being taught by white Americans and being allowed to live in their free, prosperous, and protected nation — versus how they fared in Haiti or just Africa proper.
I mean, we’re not trying to whitewash the facts, right?
Those communities are often first or second generation, though. Little Italy is effectively dead, as are the Irish diaspora communities, and the only Jews who retain their culture have organized themselves as a micro-nation (the Hasids you mention). As your evidence for the patchwork of liberalism, you are looking at the insular communities that are recent arrivals to America, which have yet to be filtered by liberalism. But look elsewhere in America, at the 3rd generations, whether Germans in the Midwest or Chinese in California, and there’s no such patchwork to be found. It’s all some pesticide-ridden GMO monoculture crop, planted and picked and served at a corporation.
I don’t think liberalism allows people to pick the best ideas, for many reason: an adolescent does not pick anything, they are stupid and subject to cultural trends; the theory that an individual generally picks the best ideas is not evidenced from anything, and most societies had a specially-chosen group focus on picking the best ideas for everyone (for good reason); the culture that people will cling to is the one that is most pervasive, flashy, and marketed well, just like how they often pick products; Americans are ground down by stressors and obligations that they hardly have time to deliberately pick something as complex as their own culture, let alone assess the competing value schemes which requires understanding moral philosophy and psychology.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Something lost in the Martha’s Vineyard story is that the island is the vacation destination of the wealthy Democrat elite. Its architecture, town planning, and aesthetic preference are relics of a bygone era, Massachusetts’ original European American history. If you’re unfamiliar with the island I urge you to have some fun in google street view; I’m familiar with it because I vacationed there with a cousin who was doing an opera program, if that doesn’t explain enough. It calls to mind an earlier America of fabulously wealthy well-bred Europeans living in Federalist-styled homes over generations, exerting control over the planning of towns and showcasing their wealth with opulence and beauty.
The demographics of Martha’s Vineyard are also a relic of the past. It is 2% Latino and .3% Asian, 88% white with some parts 100% white. Its 0-9 age group is 94% White, 0% black, 0% Asian, and 0% hispanic, with the rest “mixed”.
The symbolism of Martha’s Vineyard is strong. Here is a place for wealthy white democrats to live in a Disneyland of traditional White America. They may claim that they stand with immigrants, when the Hebrew Center goes door to door handing out posters, but they have consciously chose to live in a White American paradise, where the demographics, aesthetics, and political influence are direct ancestors of 19th century Massachusetts. I suppose it’s easy to advocate for Democrat policies when you inherit a mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, and the Floridian governor is highlighting this dissonance by sending as few as 50 Hispanics to the island, enough to cause a national controversy.
https://www.mvcommission.org/sites/default/files/docs/web01_MVSP%20FINAL%20PRINT%202019-03-21-3.pdf
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money: New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.
The New York Times has an expose on how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English (as an example, one couldn't spell "America") and the state requirements are effectively optional or used as a study hall.
The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.
The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.
Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.
Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.”
Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum. The Times identified dozens of federal, state and local programs and analyzed how much they have given to yeshivas, looking most closely at the last year before the pandemic. The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in that period [...] they appear to get more government funding on average than other private schools in the state, including other religious schools, the analysis found. The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods
This might come as a shock to those who have no experience with Williamsburg, Monroe, Kiryas Joel, or Monsey in the NY tristate area. There is what can be described as a Hasidic Jewish mafia, that violates norms and laws to obtain hegemony, while siphoning resources from the surrounding communities. Towns are genuinely afraid of encroachment by the Hasids, because they move in en masse and quickly obtain town leadership positions and school board positions. They usually vote to reduce all extra funding, like extra-curricular funding for public schools, because their children only attend yeshivas. They label their homes as temples and don't legally marry their wives to reduce their taxes. Towns in subjected areas will purposely reduce sidewalks or veto funding for sidewalks in order to deter Hasids from moving in. Usually they will have a non-Hasidic lawyers go door to door asking to buy property with cash. They are involved in coordinated welfare schemes yet somehow get sweetheart plea deals of no jail time. Kiryas Joel was once the poorest place in all of America, and yet they have their own private security force that follows non-Hasids in SUVs if you drive through their estates, they have an enormous temple and their own state-funded maternity clinic on site and are able to obtain a unique 30 million dollar water aqueduct project.
I'm happy that the NYT is doing solid journalism on this. I kind of gripe with portraying the young as victims and bringing up the Holocaust, but it is what it is. In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
I might wind up supporting him, but a lot of your information is (at best) misleading. “Moonlighting as a rapper” is actually just occasionally singing the lyrics to Eminem at coffee houses. “Came with nothing” means being a landed aristocratic Brahmin-born engineer with a degree from India. He’s an “accomplished pianist” in the sense that he can hit some keys with graceful mediocrity. I’m too lazy to fact check everything but I’m going to assume large Ramaswathes of it are wrong, and I find the adulation a bit Ramaswarmy.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Fun article on how the Taliban feel about moving into Kabul since the end of the war
There is another thing I dislike and that’s how restricted our lives are now, unlike anything we experienced before. The Taleban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day. Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.
I’ve made friends with three guys who are from our province but have been living here [in Kabul] for more than 15 years. We sometimes go to Qargha, Bagh-e Wahsh [Kabul Zoo], Sarobi and Tapa-ye Wazir Akbar Khan. To be honest, every time I go with them, they pressure me to play and listen to music in the car. At first, I was resisting, but now I have given in, with the one condition that they turn it off when passing through security checkpoints because many other Taleban don’t like it, and it’s bad for a Taleb to be seen listening to it.
Although my new friends are from good families and are good lads, there are a lot of bad circles of youths in Kabul who smoke, use drugs and do bad things, so it’s hard for us to become friends with them. Our nature and values differ, and therefore most of our friends don’t make many friends in Kabul because we don’t fit in with them. Despite this, some Taleban have now become friends with such youths and are inclined to do many bad things, such as going hookah cafes [qilun khana].
In those first days, when we sometimes came out of the ministry to Macroyan bazaar, there were a lot of women wearing indecent clothes. We anticipated they would wear hijab,[7] but after the initial days when women feared the mujahedin a lot, their attire has actually become less proper.
Now, they’ve become assertive to the extent they’re entirely heedless of us. Many of our friends say that, apart from us coming and replacing the police and officials of the former regime, little has changed from the Republic’s time in Kabul. During the first few days, many of my comrades and I hardly dared to make our way to the bazaar because of them [women]. We hoped the situation would soon get better, but it didn’t. Even worse, one of my classmates in his computer course is also a woman. We sit in the same classroom. Although I despise women that don’t wear proper clothes, nonetheless, I can’t turn my back on the bazaar or my class because of them. If they’re unashamed, let us also be so. This is the only thing I never imagined a Taleb would encounter in his lifetime.
The San Francisco Chronicle has announced the discovery of a new Pretendian, the class of white women who pretend to be Native Americans to procure benefits ranging from job opportunities to social status. This story would be insignificant, since the public is now familiar with Warren and Dolezal. But the author has discovered what can be called the Chief Pretendian, none other than Sacheen Littlefeather, the most important female native American in the 70s and 80s. You might not know the name but you’re probably familiar with the clip of the pretty Indian woman making a speech on behalf of Marlon Brando at the Oscar’s. Turns out all the evidence points to her being a white Spaniard with no connection to any American Indian nation, and no connection to any indigenous Mexican group either.
The details are the details, what I find most interesting is: why? This is a pattern, not a one-off thing. White American lib women love cosplaying as Indians. Duplicitous Littlefinger Littlefeather went all in on the LARP, dedicating most of her life to her story as an Indian. The why is so much more interesting than the how.
My thoughts are that people, and especially young women, love costumes, specialness, and emotionally significant stories. The romanced notion of Indians is a whole wardrobe of social life that a person can put on and enjoy. Littlefeather had no interested in the non-romanced Mexican identity. Indians, however, had the connotation of being cool, one with nature, wise, and good. This costumed enjoyment is why the KKK larped as wizards and wore Spanish Catholic dress, why the Freemasons larped as they did, and maybe why the Liberal Woman -> Hijabi pipeline is running despite stretching more terrain than Nordstream. We live in one of the least costumed, ritualized, and play-tending time in Western history. The only thing we have left is Halloween (and liberal women love it too, rightfully so)!
coffee_enjoyer
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5mo ago
Hale was white, so the potshots at white people make no sense
Where have you been this past decade? There’s been a whole cohort of young white people raised to hate white culture and white people because of propaganda that depicts them as stained with the sins of oppression and racism. This is called “white privilege” discourse. The shooter specifies white privilege as one of her motivations for the shooting. The motivation is not muddled. She absorbed far left propaganda to hate her race and she lashed out violently as a result. She mentions white privileged, khakis, fancy schools and “Daddy’s money” because these are the ideological memes that she came in contact with.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Dahomey is whitewashed in a way that Europeans would never be whitewashed. No one would be okay with a movie about Leopold in Africa where the Africans are responsible for their own appendage-removal (although, ironically, this is the case, but accepting the metaphor…). No one would be okay with a movie about colonists which doesn’t show alleged savagery against Natives, or worse yet, shows Natives as the evil aggressor to innocent white people.
The problem is not historical inaccuracy, but an over-the-top double standard, where they are whitewashing slave owners because the slave owners were black, and making a villain of the emancipators because they are white. It is a racial double standard allotted to black history that is not allotted to white history, because “privilege”. This cuts through the pretense of social Justice and shows that Hollywood just wants to cast whites as villains and blacks as victims, without any deeper principle like social justice or historical truths. The Woman King proves that the guiding principle of Hollywood writing on race really is “white bad”, not “slavery bad” or “teaching history”.
The Titanic heroine is every woman’s dream. She is a wealthy and sought-after nubile. She has a wealthy fiancé who represents maximal resource and power, a wealthy father as well, and gets to have an affair with the handsome DiCaprio who represents maximal youth, vigor, and primal sexual desire. This is a combination of Zeus, Apollo, and Adonis, the children of the Titans all on board the Titanic. Our heroine gets to choose the best of all worlds. She has the affection of the two competing interests of the fertile women.
But the movie doesn’t end there. The smut (and the movie is emotional pornography) piles on. Because our heroine has all the right decisions made for her. She is captivated by DiCaprio, her interests momentarily cut in two like the Titanic, but she gets to leave him frozen in time while her “heart goes on”. She gets everything out of him that she wants while getting to keep her privileged status. The iceberg and the icy sea represent this process of freezing into memory. The female viewer takes away that she could have his child, while also retaining a powerful and resourceful upper class position.
Lastly, she’s the victim, while also looking superior to her peers. What more does a woman want than this? All the money, the vigorous male, the damsel distressed, and finally the superiority over the men guiding her. There is nothing more to add.
Obligatory Zizek: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9DocwBZyESU . The true tragedy would be if Jack survived, they had sex for a month in New York, and then she is hanged to try. Lastly, this emotional processing in the Titanic allows the modern woman to put Jack to death in her own life, much like the Christian can behold the Passion and put sin to death. You have been baptized in the frozen sea with Rose and buried with Jack, and now you can put away forever the delusions of youth.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Why did you not post the reason for that, which is that these accounts were posting or linking to the real time location of Elon Musk (and in some cases, inadvertently his children)?
As Musk put it,
If anyone posted real-time locations & addresses of NYT reporters, FBI would be investigating, there’d be hearings on Capitol Hill & Biden would give speeches about end of democracy!
This is absolutely true. If I had an account tracking the location of the editors of NYT, and one of my followers even blocked their car and jumped on their windshield wearing a mask, I would be: fired from any corporate job, investigated by the FBI, sued for harassment, have my own death threats against me, doxx’d by the NYT (including location of my home), and so on.
I think Elon Musk has greater chances of being killed by a left-wing vigilante than anyone else in America, because he’s now controlling what they previously controlled. There’s no substantive argument for why a person’s real time location should be shared publicly.
Chess World Controversy
After rising player Hans Niemann defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen as black (when wins are unusual), Magnus insinuated that Hans cheated and quit the ongoing tournament. Internet detectives and Magnus fanboys leapt at the opportunity to discover the truth and/or administer mob justice. Chess commentators, lead by popular Twitch streamer and top player Hikaru, analyzed Han’s post-game interview looking for clues. Lots of unsubstantiated claims followed: that he showed signs of guilt, that he made up a past game position in his analysis to hide that he cheated (later proven wrong), that Hans was faking his accent, that Hans was unable to justify his chess positions, and so on. The stronger evidence is that Hans claimed to have looked at the chess variation that Magnus chose as white, which is improbable (like 0.01%). However, Hans has a strategy of getting in opponents’ heads, and claiming to be able to predict the opponents’ preparations is a great way to do that.
The controversy goes on, and is made up of many parts.
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That Magnus insinuated and withdrew has led to many now saying “he is kind of a dick”, as chess teacher Ben Finegold put it. Magnus had a pure reputation before, but it was known he handled losses poorly. Magnus’ withdrawal, due to a technicality in the tournament rules, means that he keeps his high FIDE rating, while Hans’ win is somewhat discounted. Magnus’ silence since his tweet is blameworthy.
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Hans cheated online at chess.com when he was 12, and again when he was 17. He is now 19. The cheating two years ago was not in a competitive setting and was allegedly to increase his online rating to entice stream viewers. There has been no claim that he has cheated except in these two instances, and he has never cheated in a competition.
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Chess.com has allowed him to continue playing since his 2017 cheating incident. But after this week’s (unevidenced) cheating claim against Hans, chess.com banned him from future tournaments, costing him significsnt career opportunities and prize moneys. What’s curious about this is that chess.com is buying out Play Magnus, a separate company that Magnus has a relationship with. Did Magnus apply pressure on Chess.com to ban Hans? This would be more serious than other parts of the controversy, as it would mean that Magnus is one of the worst sore losers in chess history, not just hurting an opponent’s reputation but using backroom influence to take away his opportunities.
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Some chess players, like Hikaru and Naroditsky, leapt at the opportunity to accuse Hans, while others with greater reputation (eg Kasparov) defended him. There is now a stable opinion online that Hans did not cheat and that Magnus is in the wrong, but this took three days post-allegation to develop. Interestingly, it seemed like the chess players who were competitors to Hans were the ones eager to take him down, while the older greats defended him and pleaded for measured opinions.
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It should be noted they Hans’ had a meteoric rise in rating over the past year, one of the greatest in history. At 19, he has years left of improvement. So we’re dealing with potential world champion material, not just a random contender.
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There is rigorous cheating detection at this tournament (Sinquefeld Cup, St Louis), TSA-like security. Since the accusation they implemented even more security measures. The theories on how he cheated are truly bizarre, from Hans having an antenna in his hair, to having swallowed a chip that vibrated in morse code, to having inserted a vibrating ”device” sublingually to alert him on tactics, to Godfather-esque hidden bathroom devices. I’m not joking.
If I can don my conspiracy hat for a moment, Hans is opened his remarks after his Magnus win by talking about how he doesn’t want to be canceled for misspeaking (about Magnus having “tics”, when the PC term would be mannerisms). A keen eye would sense that Hans is not so progressive. Chess is political, with former champion Kasparov constantly in the news with his anti-Russian, Russian players banned from playing in certain tournaments, former leading chess players criticized (but not more) for claiming women cannot be as good as male players due to biology, etc. I wonder whether there are interests behind the scenes that do not want to see a Fischer-esque personality rise in popularity.
Links:
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Hans post-win analysis: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DCeJrItfQqw
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Hikaru insinuation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5qTs-eFgLqc
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Hans post-insinuation defense (a strong defense, as blackened reputation, Hans-variation), which earned him much respect online: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJZuT-_kij0
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Hans beating Hikaru, just for fun: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EJTg-emEAjQ
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Hans being beaten by Naroditsky, just for fun: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ddc-C3SqidI
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The funniest chess teacher, Ben Finegold: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DMxJbJGGKgQ
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If you want to play chess, use Lichess.com. Chess.com appears as a link because that’s the name of the company.
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
The people in charge of things have no training in traditional philosophy or morality, so it’s no surprise that they have botched the whole notion of a good execution.
Any method in which an inmate can fight against their execution and save themselves some seconds of life is going to be more dreadful than otherwise. This is obvious. This should be obvious. The feeling of dread from the slow experience of death and the knowledge that you can temporarily avoid it from, say, holding your breath, increases the torment manifold. We’ve known this forever, which is why the the worst criminals were crucified, and why the civilized method of execution back when we were enlightened was a quick hanging (death by breaking neck actually) or a quick beheading. These executions were done with dignity, relatively soon after their crime. Some dumb modernite had the bright idea that a prisoner deserves execution but also deserves to be kept in prison for years, allowed or made to continually gamble his life through the process of appealing his sentence to the courts. Horrible.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
"voted for him" and "terrorists" (referring to the Jan 6th rioters) are not mutually exclusive. I'd expect that sort of interpretation from a Trump supporter looking to deny
In colloquial English, when a person is referring to a large group of people who are defined by a single property, they are not making any claim about some infinitesimal small fraction of that group. When Obama spoke about how great Muslim Americans are, he’s referring to the normative case, not any who have murdered or beheaded. When Pelosi or whoever says Mexican Americans are our friends and neighbors, she’s not referring to the traffickers and rapists. When I say “I stand with Boston” after the bombing, I’m not referring to the worst possible cohort of Bostonians. This is just how it works for everyday English.
It’s clear Trump is referring to the normative member of a class of people defined by their having voted for Trump. It is ridiculous to assert that the non-normative 0.000005% cohort of rioters or whatever is being referred to in any sense. But, an argument can be made that this is coded language where the colloquial meaning means one thing but the intended meaning hints at another.
It isn’t pulled for “violence” — mainstream rap with corporate sponsors has been about killing your enemies for decades and many of them have, in fact, killed their enemies, like “Melly” who is[*] currently on trial (the kids love him!). The problem is (1) the song supports the politically controversial right for conservatives to defend their community, (2) the music video highlights the 2020 riots that the Dems would like to totally sweep under the rug.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Serving fried chicken and watermelon at post-Michelle Obama school lunches is the #1 way to get children actually excited for black history month. Sometimes I wake up thinking about that time I got a churro as a teen during some Hispanic-themed cultural school trip. That churro definitely swung my positive valence for all things Hispanic by 5%.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I think that permabans for longterm users should become 6-month and rarely year-long bans. The forum does not (yet) have the userbase numbers where permabans are favorable over longterm bans. If there were hundreds of users who ate bans and who would be expected to participate again, then permabans would be preferable, because no one wants to read one horrible comment every day from the returning exiled. But we don’t currently have that problem. Were Hylnka to be banned in 6month increments, we (1) sufficiently stave off the problem of bad content, because one bad comment every 6 months is entirely acceptable, and one bad monthly from ~6 banned longterm users is also acceptable; while importantly, (2) we benefit from the (perhaps) 20% chance that upon return the content follows the rules, especially because people generally become more pacified with age which increases the percent every iteration. If that 20% chance occurs, it’s a longterm supply of valuable contributions which are worth the few one-off bad comments you have to read before the correct dice roll. There’s also a unique benefit to forum culture for retaining those invested longterm.
An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction, after some ban period. And an alternative safeguard for good content upon return would be to automatically delete every comment by the user upon hitting -2 points after 10min, for a set duration of time proportional to number of times automatic deletion of comment occurs.
This is my analysis, deontologists may disagree.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
I think Weinstein put it best. “We can’t just exonerate a dead white guy who […]”. But it doesn’t matter what he did. These people hate straight white men, especially any from the past. They wouldn’t mind naming it after the Hidden Figures black women, despite their probability of being as or more homophobic (the majority back then, especially in the black community). And it wouldn’t matter to them that the Hidden Figures women were lower level employees doing college-level math to double check the actual mathematicians. They would be totally fine with it, Chandra-Weinstein would love it, because it means someone from their tribe is named. I don’t think there’s any reason to elaborate motives
From a 2014 article
On June 25th, Prescod-Weinstein tweeted that she wants “to burn the tent of whiteness down.”
A few days later, Prescod-Weinstein sent out a tweet declaring that all America has ever stood for is white power.
In a July 6th tweet, Prescod-Weinstein denounced Thomas Jefferson as a “ rapist.”
“To address white power,” Prescod-Weinstein said, “is to look evil in the eye and to challenge everything this country has stood for in the last 250 years.”
(I vaguely recall going through her ancestry and finding, like, three generations of Marxists on her father’s side. It’s like a family business. Wasn’t there also controversy over her wife not being real or something?)
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1mo ago
Wait, why does Scott trust Aella’s data? Aella is an internet propagandist for polygamy and promiscuity. Many happy monogamists who find polygamy disgusting would never subscribe to her or follow her. Her monogamist followers are preselected with being unsatisfied with monogamy, and her polygamy followers are preselected with finding polygamy satisfying (hence why they are following a promiscuous woman who talks about it all day). Her most die hard followers are the most likely to take the survey, even just because they see the link more often, and the followers are those who have found the most benefit regardless of how it affects the median polygamist. “Just in, atheists are unsatisfied with atheism, as proven by a survey of atheists who follow Bishop Robert Barron on Twitter.” Am I missing something?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10mo ago
The problem is that if we allow unknown provocateurs to “make topics annoying” by posting about them in the shittiest way, it gives anyone the power to veto the topic altogether. So, absent knowing the motivations of the shitty poster, it’s a better idea to just delete the posts and write them off completely. You would be amazed the lengths evil people go to ruin discourse. Back on Reddit there were people who would literally pretend to be a sockpuppet account of a different user in order to get that user banned, and other such shenanigans
Mr Beast’s Trans Debacle
Mr Beast is the Gen Z entertainment celebrity of note. Calling Mr Beast the PewDiePie of Gen Z would be underselling him. His 25-minute Squid Game YouTube video received 400 million views, which to put in perspective is 5x the total viewership of the Seinfeld Finale. His Tik Tok has 80 million followers, his most popular “YouTube short” has 650 million views, etc. He is more popular than what the average millennial or older would think (I fall into this cohort). When he visited a mall in my state to sell his burgers (one of his successful business offshoots), the line extended miles and made the news. Mr Beast has a childhood friend group with whom he makes videos. The rapport between the friends of the group, what might be called the “vibe”, is a crucial ingredient to Mr Beast’s success. They were, like many friend groups containing boys in America[*], all male; the pure boyishness was a major draw for his success.
This year, one of the “cast” members of the Mr Beast enterprise transitioned into a woman. (For brevity, I will just call the member she and a woman.) Chris, who had a child and went through a divorce, has transitioned in full. She is wearing dresses on video and taking HRT. If you were to plug Chris and Mr Beast into Google News, you would have no idea how the viewers have responded to this change. But plugging it into Tik Tok (the premiere Zoomer app) gives a different story.
The response among Gen Z has been overwhelmingly negative. When I checked last night, 8 of the 10 most watched videos for the search “Mr Beast” were a negative reaction to Chris’s transition, the total view count of which was more than 80 million. The comments overwhelmingly negative. A typical comment section looked like this, sometimes with more than 25k comments. The commenters chant “Mr Beast 6000 coming out”, referencing Mr Beast’s oldest YouTube channel known for political incorrect humor. The consensus among the fans is that the transition has ruined the group’s rapport and that Chris has got to go, but that hands are tied because she is transgender. On the latest (secondary channel) video for Mr Beast, the comment section is censored and moderated so that the issue can’t explicitly come up. The commenters instead spam “we want to see more Chandler and Nolan”, cleverly emphasizing their disinterest with Chris by omission. The fans on Tik Tok are trying to find any clip they can to get Chris cancelled, with one finding a video of him saying the N word and another digging up an anti-Islam tweet from 2017.
There are a few things to explore here.
Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform. Low censorship, low “authority-boosts”, and high anonymity allow for majority discourse like in the old days. It would be hard to gauge the fan reaction without looking at Tik Tok, which (conveniently) is the app that most of his fans use for socializing and discussion. This illuminates how manipulated platforms like YouTube and Twitter are, both because of censorship and because of cancellation fears.
The younger generation appears to be immunized against the transgender movement. The boys do not buy it. Mr Beast is a litmus test because he has a large, diverse fan base in Gen Z, the majority of whom use Tik Tok and have Mr Beast content algorithmically fed to them. These Tik Toks are as close as we will get to a “youth vote” on the transgender issue. They not only don’t buy it, but they think it is immoral and noxious.
Mr Beast is in a pickle. He became popular, partially, because of the authenticity and joy of his friend group. The discomfort involving the transition is palpable in the latest video. Body language, rapport, banter, and general “vibes” have ruined what led children to watch his content. He is the most data driven creator and knows this. He has previously mentioned that he edits out sneezes and coughs because it loses retention, and I believe once mentioned that adding a girl to reaction videos negatively reduces engagement. Alas, he can’t come out and fire the transitioned member without losing corporate sponsorship and reputation. He is stuck between losing popularity among his fans, or losing support among the progressive power structure. He is also losing support from parents who don’t want their 8-year-old watching a transgender. There’s also the moral issue of supporting a friend post-divorce.
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