coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
11mo ago
Trump raising his fist in the air and speaking to the crowd after being shot through the ear with a bullet is a genuinely legendary moment in American history, however you feel about him.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Checking out the front page of various news sites, it’s noteworthy that the headlines deny Trump the honor of being grazed by a bullet or having survived a clear assassination attempt.
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NYT: “Trump safe after shooting at rally”; “One spectator is dead after chaos at event in Pennsylvania”
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CNN: “Trump shooting being investigated as assassination attempt”;
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MSNBC: “Trump safe after shots fired at Pennsylvania rally”
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FoxNews: “Trump rally shooter was killed by secret service counter sniper team, source says”
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Googling Trump and finding first headline: “Trump safe after being rushed off rally stage when shots fired; gunman and audience member dead”
What’s up with this? The headline is clearly, “Trump survives assassination attempt”, the vastly more important subject of the event. I would write, “Bullet pierces Trump’s ear in failed assassination attempt”, because this includes the important information of the bullet’s proximity. The clear, plainly visible assassination attempt is 100x more important than that a shooting merely transpired at an event in Pennsylvania. This is also the most attention-grabbing title, so the news has an incentive to report this way. The bias is boundless…
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
Those aren’t the main points.
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The murder weapon was improperly handled by the police, and they did not use “touch DNA” at that time. This means that DNA could not be factored into the murder, not that DNA either exonerated the suspect or acts as evidence against his involvement through omission. The DNA on the murder weapon was from the police, and it’s greatly misleading to just write “the DNA wasn’t his”.
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From my reading, the shoeprint sole pattern wasn’t his. That’s not a big deal because the perpetrator would have disposed of his bloody shoes if they were sufficiently bloody as to leave marks (they were). The Appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court makes no mention of shoe size.
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You are wrong that there was a financial motive. The girlfriend never requested reward for information about Ms. Gayle’s murder. (Don’t make top level posts explaining the “main points” if your main points are wrong, this isn’t Reddit).
You ignored significant other main points:
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The jailhouse informant provided information about the crime that was not publicly available, yet consistent with crime scene evidence and Williams’ involvement. Other individuals were present when Williams bragged about this murder, and they were disclosed to Williams’ team before trial and have been discussed in subsequent proceedings. “On August 31, 1998, Williams was arrested on unrelated charges and incarcerated at the St. Louis City workhouse. From April until June 1999, Williams shared a room with Henry Cole. One evening in May, Cole and Williams were watching television and saw a news report about Gayle's murder. Shortly after the news report, Williams told Cole that he had committed the crime. Over the next few weeks, Cole and Williams had several conversations about the murder. As he had done with Laura Asaro, Williams went into considerable detail about how he broke into the house and killed Gayle. After Cole was released from jail in June 1999, he went to the University City police and told them about Williams' involvement in Gayle's murder. He reported details of the crime that had never been publicly reported.”
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Gayle’s personal items were found in the trunk of Williams’ car. “Asaro told the police that Williams admitted to her that he had killed Gayle. The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle”.
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This was his face around the time of the murders. The media likes to show him as a weak old religious man today.
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This is sufficient to use the death penalty. There is zero chance (zero.) that he otherwise came into possession of these personal items, and he happened to have these worthless items in his possession (of no monetary value), and his cellmate just happened to accuse the wrong person who happened to have these possessions, and that he happened to guess the right details, and that the made up confession happened to also be reinforced by two separate made up testimonies that the confession occurred, and that the black hood girlfriend with a strict no snitching policy happened to rat our her boyfriend immediately. No. Come on. He did it. It’s not a question.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Scott comes off as cowardly and needlessly pretentious. Doesn’t everyone know that bureaucracy and bad laws are part of the issue?
If your plan is to change the case law around involuntary commitment - to expand the definition of “dangerous to themselves or others” - it probably won’t matter, because most of these decisions are based on vibes that only loosely connect to the written law
Change the laws and departmental policy to make them overrule vibes, which is how most laws work. Do vibes overrule IRS laws?
doctors commit many more people, it still won’t matter, because those people will stay in the hospital for a few days
You can trivially solve this by increasing the time of commitment according to infractions over time.
If your plan is to “lock them up long-term”, keep in mind that (for now) there are almost no institutions equipped to do this
You build them. What kind of point even is this? You build buildings. They can be built. They are frequently built. Who does Scott think he is writing to that the reader would no longer support a cause because it requires a city to build buildings?
Do you expect San Francisco to be good at this?
Vote for any of the millions of Americans who can, and do, competently build buildings.
How long are you keeping people there
A reasonable amount of time. What is a reasonable amount of time? Low enough that a person whose condition is manageable can get out soon, and high enough that a person whose condition is consistently unmanageable stays in longer. So an intuitive and “normal person able to think” solution is to increase it by infraction, and for the institution to gradually allow the patient freedom so as to check his capacity.
and (if the drugs work) appear significantly saner within 2-4 weeks. Best-case scenario, they’re completely sane. Now what?
Most normal people thinking about this issue would be able to solve it. My personal take is that you go from full institutionalization to check-ups, and if you fail checkups you go back to the institution.
Etc. Nothing Scott wrote can justify his assertion that “it might be time to hit the books, learn about hexamethyldecawhatever, and make sure that what you’re demanding is possible, coherent, and doesn’t have so many tradeoffs that experts inevitably recoill”.
Most (?) homeless people are only homeless for a few weeks […] If someone was going to be homeless for a week, and instead you imprison them for a year, you’re not doing them or society any favors
This is a category error. Public displays of psychosis are not found in the median ”transitionally” homeless person staying at a friend’s or relative’s.
coffee_enjoyer
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5mo ago
The benefit to justice outweighs the small injustice here. This is a signal for future courts and agencies that if you over-punish a thousand people, we will under-punish the batch in full. The government and courts now have an incentive try and punish everyone fairly, or else even those who deserve their punishment go free. A similar mechanism is already at work in our law: if you violate rights in obtaining evidence, that evidence will be thrown out, as otherwise it incentivizes the police to continue violating rights.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
JD Vance comes off as a normal guy. More normal than Kamala, Trump, Joe, Pence IMO. Obama had charisma, but his artifice was obvious in longer conversations — too effortful. Vance is so normal that if you removed the political parts and told someone Joe picked a random guy off the street, it would be believable. And his audience isn’t some biased conservative audience, it’s about as average Joe as you can get, and the conclusion in the comments is that Vance is just a normal dude. This isn’t always the case — comments often criticize guests for being blowhards or criticize Joe for not letting guests finish.
This cements my thought that the “Vance is weird” campaign is a fully enclosed propaganda ecosystem, as in, it isn’t exaggerating some aspect of Vance (eg “Trump lies”), it is just totally made up. And that’s really spooky, because there’s a section of the public that will believe whatever the DNC wants them to believe. If they can make you believe Vance is weird they can make you believe anything.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
This is the WhitePeopleTwitter effect. Reddit had a popular default sub called BlackPeopleTwitter where everything was positive and pro-black. In order to be an approved poster (?) you needed to prove you were black, unless you were an attractive white woman. Sensing the possibility of a white version popping up, they preemptively made WhitePeopleTwitter and used it to de-potentiate and emasculate white identity. So BPT gives positive valence to blacks, WPT gives negative valence to whites and white identity (intermixed with some humor). I just checked WPT, and the first post is Kamala Good Trump Bad, and the second post is telling everyone to call Republicans weird (a very interesting strategy which deserves its own post, hopefully someone writes it out, but it is the perfect minimization of the entire progressive strategy for years). The third post is actually about white dudes for Harris! The fourth is GOP weird and racist, the fifth is GOP weird. On BPT, the first video is “cool black people interrupted by annoying white women! Colonizing their space”.
Social engineering slop, all of it, certainly. But it works! You want whites to have a negative response when they think about their own group; that is, if you want to subjugate and destroy them. Replace their heroes with black drug dealers who rap and demean their women. So for Kamala, it is helpful to broach the topic of white identity insofar as it is used to vote for a black-indian woman. In the same way, in the corporate world you are allowed to acknowledge you are white when you at DEI training.
Are Republicans shamelessly sexually-humiliating their opponents enough to win this election?
I’ve long held the belief that the opposite of slut-shaming is incel-shaming. A woman's reputation is damaged if she sleeps around, but a man's reputation is damaged if he is deemed a weird incel who can’t get laid. Recently, the Democrats launched a “weird incel" attacking strategy against JD Vance. Tim Walz alluded to a fabricated story about JD Vance fucking a couch in his first speech as VP. This is wholly fabricated: the origin is a twitter user who made up a paragraph from Vance's book, something easily checked. But the meme was astroturfed regardless, and Walz shamelessly referenced it in his first speech. Last night, 5 of the top 10 default posts on Reddit’s /r/All were references to Waltz’s remark.
The strategy is in line with the Democrat push to label Trump “weird”. But it actually seems to cross a line. It is bullying in an especially purified form. It’s the sort of thing you would hear in a middle school, where a bully ostracizes a student by making up a story wholecloth and having his friends repeat it. The bully knows the accusation is false, but the point is to say it confidently and shamelessly where others can hear it and join the ostracizion to protect their reputation. There’s talk about Trump being a “bully”, but nothing he has said has come close to the shameless slander against Vance. Calling Hillary “crooked” is par for the course of political messaging and doesn’t actually impact her reputation. Making fun of McCain for being captured as a PoW also doesn’t really affect McCain’s reputation, and if anything harms Trump’s. Trump usually exaggerates something true, but the attack against Vance is wholly false in origin.
I checked in on the incels over at 4chan to see what were saying about this. And I actually found an insightful analysis:
You can make up literally any random accusation and if enough people in the group either don't like you or just don't want to be left out, they will join in the accusation/mockery no matter how baseless the claim. It only serves to benefit them by being part of the in-group, and obviously feels good to mock someone you dislike or don't care about. You can see this in the democrat "weird" campaign or the "JD Vance fucked a couch" meme. It doesn't matter how juvenile or immaterial the accusation is. It degrades and humiliates the enemy. This effect is particularly common among women and feminine men where it pertains to humiliating enemy men sexually. This wouldn't really matter if it didn't have realized consequences in how people vote or otherwise express their desires and opinions. There are people out there that will actually change their vote or their speech because they don't want to be perceived as "weird' or "creepy", which is the whole point of this type of warfare.
It can also be noted that the attack against Vance has an element of sexual harassment. What would our “cultural elites” (D) say if Republicans went all-in on a story about Kamala Harris violating the intern’s Oval Office laundry machine? Or that she used a priceless piece of White House memorabilia as a dildo without cleaning it off after? This would just be shameless sexual harassment, right? But so is the official DNC strategy against Vance. It’s harassment for the purpose of humiliating someone sexually to change voter perception via shame response.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
This series is not designed to be informative about any issue, though, it really seems designed to introduce terror and humiliation when specific cues are presented. These cues are the white child protagonist and a few buzzwords, but the show doesn’t even focus on the buzzwords, so it’s really only the white child. Just as someone who has spent a little more time than the average person reading about how specific cues can be manipulated to generate emotional reactions, modified through reactivation and reconsolidation, the directorial choices only make sense when you imagine an evil director who wants to inspire bad feelings about specific cues. Because it lines up too accurately.
For instance —
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the hiding of the boy’s face in the car, so that you don’t relate to him on his isolated journey back
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the emotionless bureaucratic faces of the police that strike down any sympathy to the boy; the bureaucratic language intentionally designed to train the viewer to treat the boy in a dehumanized way
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the white woman chosen for the minimum possible amount of emotional expression on her face, even worse than that Star Wars actress of yore
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the third episode which begins in a way that you could plausibly feel sympathy, and then reconsolidates that into terror and fear at him and some disgust
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the questioning designed to humiliate him, in other words, to demean his status in the eyes of the viewer
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showing a random encounter of a white student bullying a black student (the nephew of the cop or something), and then having a white woman cry over an African girl, for no other reason to instill a sense of a racial villain
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the use of childhood photos to make the viewer think it’s real
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the music (described as “tense and oppressive” in the subtitles)
Here’s what I mean. Imagine you like your friend Joe. I can get you to dislike him a bit more, maybe a lot more, by presenting a series of cues about Joe and then right afterward elaborating upon the ways in which Joe is unlikable. I can show you Joe’s face, and then I can play ominous music and talk about murder — this alone would move the needle if done repeatedly. I can go further, and have a sequence of clips of Joe mentioning why he is likable, and then right after each sequence I can show you someone in a higher status position showing no empathy to him and then talking about him like he is dehumanized. I can show you clips of him dehumanized, for instance him pissing himself, needing his father to put on pants for him, being stripped in front of him, being asked whether he’s gay — intuitively you know, bullies will create rumors like this because bullies are looking for the best way to reduce your status — and if I do this in the right sequence and with right power, everyone will like Joe less, scientifically, it will be measurable. You don’t realize how strong the effect is: there are studies which show it can be used to reduce cravings in alcoholics by reconsolidating the cues of alcohol to cues of disgust. It’s strong.
Someone involved in this movie was specifically interested in psychologically manipulating the viewer, to decrease positive valence associated with white male children and even white males generally, and increase it for minorities and women. Cue by cue, this is really what the movie is about, and the actual incel etc stuff takes up only a small fraction of the screen time, and wasn’t the intended cue manipulation by the director.
To make it worse, the black actor who we are supposed to consider a dignified British person is actually not, and I don’t mean in a physiognomy-enjoyer way, I mean in real life he was jailed for a gun offense and fined for assault, and his own demographic in the UK is disproportionately responsible for stabbings. But consider also that physiognomy reactions are strong: imagine Steve Schirripa playing a math genius, or imagine an aboriginal Australian woman teaching a Chinese guy how to do math — this is the British version of this, someone from a criminal people in a position above a boy who looks like he should be singing Anglican evensongs at King’s College Cambridge. Literally inverting the entire social order of the UK, the best that the UK can produce being put into a humiliation ritual by the worst that the UK still has to deal with.
There’s always been debate about whether Donald Trump is anti-establishment or a member of the establishment. Since he is a billionaire, does he relate more to the billionaire class? Because he’s a Republican, will he always conform to Republican pressure? Because there’s photos of him with Epstein and Hillary, is his anti-establishment ethos just a larp?
His prospective appointments suggests that he is anti-establishment now. The appointees include:
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Robert F Kennedy, one the most vocal critics against the pharmaceutical and processed food industries. His statements include: “the principal objective of the FDA today is to serve the mercantile interests of pharmaceutical” and “get President Trump back in the White House and me to DC so we can ban pharmaceutical advertising”. He has called for the regulation of unhealthy food, the banning of fluoride in tap water and the legalization of psychedelics. In Trump’s victory speech, Trump proudly stated that RFK will “go wild” with his blessing provided he doesn’t touch fracking or the oil industry. Many say his uncle was killed by the deep state.
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Tulsi Gabbard, who has disputed the American account of Assad’s chemical weapon use, argued against the American funding of Ukraine, and argued against sanctions on Russia. She was placed on a heightened TSA terrorist watch list.
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Rumors of Thomas Massie being tapped for agricultural secretary. He has the most controversial foreign policy view of any Republican politician. He wants the legalization of raw milk and more freedom involving small farms selling their produce. His stance is anti-corporate.
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A possible link up with Ron Paul, the foremost anti establishment candidate of the late 00s.
If he goes through with these appointments — and to be fair, that’s a weighty if — I think it would make him the most anti-establishment president since Andrew Jackson.
coffee_enjoyer
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5mo ago
The word stochastic terrorism is rightfully derided, but what do you call this kind of speech, which received 42k votes?
To my fellow Feds, especially veterans: we're at war Announcement
We watched this goon try to overthrow the government on live tv four years ago. Now, we are witnessing him try to overthrow it from within. We are the last line of defense against fascism.
We are being led by the same types of people our grandparents fought against in
They want to harm you. Do not give in to this nonsense and remember your oath to the constitution and the people of America. I don't know what the future holds, but I refuse to bow down to this fascist authoritarian elite class. Nobody is coming to save us but we have strength in numbers. It's time to buckle up, and continue protecting freedom and democracy.
Edited for brevity. If you convince a person that they are at war with Hitler, and in fact the last line of defense against Hitler, what do you think the end result is?
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
Her official policy release on the plan is wild. It’s specifically only for black men. “Black men” occurs 70 times in nine pages. “Black women” occurs zero.
Teenagers are inherently “rebellious” in the sense that they pursue sex and fun even if an old man tells them not to. I suppose this is rebellious, but really it’s that the old man lacks any authority of significance: control over sex and fun. Terror organizations like ISIL were able to recruit young men precisely because they offered them sex and fun, even though this entailed a swap from one authority (being some Muslim kid in UK with an overworked Dad and a principal you never see) to a far stricter authority (literally a violent extremist religious cult which micromanaged daily routine). The sex came in the way of slaves, and the fun was multifaceted: brotherhood (highly instinctually appealing), war (instinctually fun), explosives (you already know)… but these are the more obvious funs. There’s also the aesthetic and fantastical pleasure associated with the apocalypse. There’s also the ingrained potency of religious language which, in a peculiar sense, places you in the center of the universe by totalizing the importance of your feelings, actions, and identity. All of those are quite seriously fun.
Incel ideology is inherently unsexy and non-fun. I don’t see anything coming from it, pun unintended. The dangerous incels are more likely to become Muslims and the smart incels are more likely to learn how to manipulate women (thus solving the problem) or visiting Southeast Asia. The Hitler Youth sprung out of a hippie-ish hiking and trekking brotherhood by the way, so its origin were very fun. And it took that fun and placed more fun on it, a quasi-religious identity package that is fun to dwell on.
coffee_enjoyer
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5mo ago
All of those questions are absolutely and infinitely beyond human comprehension. A human can no more understand the nature of the universe or consciousness than a genetically engineered worm can understand the human mind. This “answers” the difficult question. It’s like if someone with down syndrome asked you about the nature of financial markets — the correct answer is the most beneficial answer. What answer promotes the holistic good in his life? Whatever answer gives him comfort and motivation, and which turns him away from investing time or money into something beyond his understanding. Even if high-powered AI provided we mortals with a definitive answer, some long equation stretching five miles wide when written, this wouldn’t do anything to satisfy our need for an answer, because the answers we are looking for are human-digestible answers just like we look for human-digestible food. The way science is going, material developments on the universe are going to require so much training and intelligence that no one will understand it holistically; it will be specialists working alongside some holistic AI.
Now, once we confess “I am not high-minded”, and declare to ourselves, “I do not exercise myself in great matters which are too high for me”, we can begin our real song of ascent, and “quiet and calm our soul, as a child is weaned from his mother”. You are a designed organism, whether you are a creationist or an evolutionist. This is why you have a need for purpose and clarity. But your need for purpose and clarity is not for things beyond your understanding, because that is not its design. Its design is to obtain the Good, which is evident by results, consequences. This Good can only be obtained in your sphere of concern. Our instinct for broad purpose is to align ourselves with a collective, and our instinct for clarity is to ensure that the path ahead of us will provide a good life.
Surely this is the real answer you are looking for, because imagine if God gave you, and only you, the definitive answer to the universe and consciousness. After a few days that will cease to be interesting, and your instincts will rear their restless head and you will once again be left with an interest for more purpose and more meaning and more clarity. “Okay, I’m happy I have understood the whole purpose in life and science, but now I really have to understand why my boss is mad at me and why my stomach is acting up and why my character’s build isn’t working as I thought…” The answer will not be satisfying. What you want isn’t an answer to this particular question, but to enjoy some designed pattern of life which routinely provides satisfaction and interest, more than other possible life patterns.
Putting it one more way, imagine you sacrifice everything in your life to understand the universe. You understand it, then die. You arrive in some heavenly place but the gate doesn’t open for a few hours, so you sit alongside some Hadzabe hunter from undeveloped Tasmania. You tell about all your suffering and toil and then the answer you found, and he is momentarily interested in the answer (he figured it had to do with the sun god). But then he tells you about his life: the wild hunts of animals, how he met his wife, the feuding tribes and the taste of raw honey, the ways in which he pleased the sun God. Who is really more satisfied? Where did your answers get you? Was it not vanity of vanities?
So IMHO the answer people should be looking for is, “what belief and answer winds up optimizing my life for value”, and this value is in an evolutionary sense, the joys which all of us are evolved to favor: safety, interest, paternal love, friends, helping others, healing the world, and fulfilling our biological role. The optimization of our evolution is something religion-like, because it allows us to perceive the vastness of the cosmos as the expression and handiwork of your loving Father’s glory, and not a dark cold alienating backdrop to a confusing life upon a floating rock. We want an Edenic walled garden. Let the scientists continue working and in 4,000 years perhaps they will find some interesting material answers which can take us to a new earth. But even the scientists when they are off the job should have their walled edenic worldview, as (if what they value most is maximizing scientific knowledge) the stress-reduction and purpose-maxxing and honesty-enhancing benefits of belief will enhance the quality of their output.
As a last note, really, look at how our atheistic age spends their time without religion, and you see that it’s just as fantastical and delusional if not more — playing fantastical video games where they are the hero who must heal a fallen world, reading fantastical mangas and erotica, listening to rappers extol a life of abject hedonism, over-concerning themselves with political drama — but it lacks all of the invisible benefits of religion. This tells us something about what we crave as humans. There’s no use in being “scientifically accurate” if we wind up wasting even more time on stranger fantasies without reaping any benefits. I lied, I have one last note: do you really want a world where every human has long periods of existential dread and confusion? How inefficient, yet this is any world without irrational dogma. Irrational dogma is good! Which dogma most efficiently promotes scientifically-evident good behaviors and feelings?
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
epically fuck up what's left of America's standing in the world.
I don’t get this. I’ve heard people repeat it a lot. People respect and like countries that have a high quality of life. They want to move to countries that have high earnings potential and safety. They also like cultural products. America’s cultural products aren’t going away, so what we are left with is QoL, earnings, and safety. Is the candidate who supports DEI and more immigration going to increase QoL and safety?
But also, why the hell would you even care about what someone in Kurdistan, or China, or Bangladesh thinks about you? During the Cold War, much of the world hated America for propaganda reasons, and who cares? Lots of the Middle East hated us because of our wars, and yet… it doesn’t matter. I don’t think people should care about how “popular” their country is on the world stage. We should care about how popular it is among our citizens, which would involve not incessantly telling about racism, slavery, and oppressive institutions.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
I happened to speak with two Canadians this month and in both cases housing was brought up. One told me that there were too many immigrants arriving too fast but that their country of origin was immaterial, and in any case Canadians don’t have a right to complain because of the residential schools controversy. The other told me point blank there were way too many Indians arriving, that it is ruining the country and that they would vote for Trump if they lived in America. The former was a white Canadian of colonial stock and the latter was a first-gen Pakistani replete with accent.
An interesting thread on Twitter about status underlying fertility declines
S. Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP. Both are failing. Yet the small country of Georgia spiked its birthrate massively without spending a dollar. How?
[Status] finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth). Status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute.
Status is also of existential importance to individuals. This is necessary for our inquiry: we are seeking a behavioral determinant which is powerful enough to influence fundamental human decisions like whether or not to reproduce. People kill themselves over loss of status.
In the mid 2000s, Georgia spiked its birth rate, which went from
50,000 to64,000 over the course of two years - a 28% increase, which it sustained for many years. How? The evidence points to an unusual factor: a prominent Patriarch of the popular Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children onwards. Births of third children boomed (so much so, in fact, that it eclipsed continuing declines in first and second children).
Will Storr describes: "In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge." In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status.
[Post-enlightenment things began to change.] We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.
I find that small “status is relative” comment valuable for understanding fertility trends. It’s obvious, but it’s an essential piece of the puzzle easy to ignore. There is a limited amount of status to go around, and we disperse status points as if we are in a video game dispersing points on a skill tree. We can only increase certain behaviors at the expense of other behaviors (through omitting esteem and interest, ie status). With that acknowledged, let’s remember that motherhood is a complicated and arduous 6-year process per baby (overlapping) which requires specific skills and a specific interest (nurturing a young human). This means that even if we did esteem motherhood as highly as women working traditional male jobs, that wouldn’t affect fertility because of the additional contingent pleasures of the workplace (socializing, disposable income, a familiarity of work skills via schooling and no familiarity with homemaking and motherhood skills). And so what is actually essential is to, well, actively dislike women working. To increase fertility, we have to improve culture by only esteeming women who specifically focus on motherhood. Women working needs to be degraded, demeaned, or at least lowered relative to women focusing on the life required to be mothers. This would appear to be necessary to increase fertility according to basic human psychology: the importance of status and reward-contingency as a necessary component of reinforcement. As long as women obtain status from work, it’s unlikely that attempts to hack together a high-status motherhood culture will work. If a guy can get status from video games or war, he will choose video games, right? Motherhood is more difficult and more important, so the status associated with and the lifestyle which precedes it needs to utterly dwarf the Industrial GirlBoss Complex.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
Contra some of the other comments, I do think democracies are a proxy for civil unrest, even if that wasn’t the express purpose of democracy originally (cf etymology fallacy). Democracy is an outlet for political rage and catharsis. Radicals become political influencers and their danger to civil order is diminished as a result. Corrupt people who love power don’t raise armies but lobby politicians. Everything becomes a little safer and more prosocial with the democratic spectacle. I think there’s actually an interesting principle, “subversion subversion”, that’s at play in different antifragile social organizations — you subvert the subversive’s tendencies back toward the social order, like Ted K’s writings on the System’s Neatest Trick. Democracy does this by having political radicals work through the political process but it also does this through the mythology of voter equality, voter knowledge, and votes mattering; there’s an implied value scheme you don’t realize you are signing on to, that your political power is identical to someone else regardless of qualities. Chinese “communism” does this by calling itself true communism, giving actual communist rebels difficulty gaining support (but we have communism at home!). Christianity does this by venerating a figure of religious radicalism and innovation, capturing rebels toward the cause while also delegitimizing the attraction to antisocial rebels (we already have that figure, he is the head our hierarchical church).
Even their top fact check is unadulterated propaganda. “ I think our country right now is in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in” is a statement Trump ties to a plausible future war, as is clear from his speech. A war with China or a Middle Eastern war will affect the economy negatively. NPR ignores this.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
The point may be to simply give the person anxiety and stress. This tactic was used by East German and Soviet secret police to inflict psychological harm on targets. They would also secretly enter their apartments and move things around in noticeable ways.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
She isn’t receiving the money for insulting a child (with a word he is likely to use 1000 times in his life against other Africans, often with prejudice attached). She is receiving the money as reparations for an unjust system of oppression that permeates the fabric of America, where a small racial infraction while White leaves you reputationally and financially destitute. There is a huge difference here. It’s not for congratulations, it’s a sympathetic safety net for a mother who has to deal with institutional racism against her people in America, in a state which her forefathers braved the cold to build from nothing.
Two other things to note:
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Somalians are statistically horrifying, with low intelligence and high cousin marriage, with a TFR greater than 5 and a grizzly Islamic culture resistant to Western civilization, plus a history of scams in Minnesota eg autism clinics. There are 100,000 in the state and growing. If calling every Somalian the N-word got them out of the state, it is arguably a moral obligation incumbent on every fairer resident to do this, in terms of securing utility. Shiloh is on the Right Side of History, if there exist future Whites in the state to write it in Deseret.
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The funds have the secondary effect of deterring the antisocials from filming grievances that they instigate. If white people get money for their low willpower replies irl (colloquially called n-word fatigue), then we will have fewer White / Karen shaming in America. This is for the utilitarian good.
coffee_enjoyer
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4mo ago
US government agrees to confer ‘minority’ status on Jewish-owned businesses
“We’re going to be able to benefit from billions of dollars of these programs, contracts, some loans, grants, the hundreds of different programs that every single Jewish business is going to benefit from,” Duvi Honig, founder and CEO of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce, told JNS.
Tribalism is here to stay. I cannot actually find much information about the total amount of benefits that Hasidic Jews will reap from this ruling. The Minority Business Development Agency considers Hasidic Jews to be “socially disadvantaged”, which means that they would be eligible for the $50,000,000,000 in yearly benefits allotted to Small Disadvantaged Businesses. Harris increased Black SBA loans to 1.5 billion in 2023.
coffee_enjoyer
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5mo ago
the perspective of a person who is willing to wait an hour in traffic, but is not willing to wait 15 minutes plus pay $9. In a world of rational actors, this person should not exist
Most people can’t arbitrarily decide to work more billed hours, though. 45min saved from no traffic isn’t 45min of extra work the next day. There’s nowhere you can immediately sign up for 45min of labor providing minimum wage or more. Then you have to consider whether the person is doing something in traffic which they would otherwise do for 45min in the absence of traffic. A lot of people enjoy time zoning out, listening to music or a podcast, talking to someone on the phone or even being alone for a moment. So some portion of the time in traffic isn’t completely written off, but is actually an activity they would otherwise enjoy on the couch at home.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
Bernie Sanders put out a statement
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right. […]
Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not. In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions. Stay tuned.
The first episode is pro police brutality. The protagonist of the first two episodes is a police officer, and the daughter corrects her parents when they ask about a complaint. The response is considered justifiable by the police and the child’s own counsel didn’t consider police brutality worthy of attention. The audience takeaway is that this action is justified — all the cool protagonists were involved, and it’s only an angry low class Dad who temporarily wants to file a complaint. Episode two is where we learn about incels and the “red pill” from the detective’s son, and that this is what caused the murder. The accomplice is also clearly depicted as being incel adherent, hence his obsession with looks and asking the detective about whether he got girls.
I have never seen a piece of media that is so clearly a psy-op. The series is designed to (1) make children afraid of ever coming across something online about incels or the red pill by introducing a strong terror response, for instance (a) imagining themself as the boy and having your father watch as the police inspect your penis [this is the director’s intent, hence the focus on the father’s face], (b) making the boy utterly humiliated and demeaned, for instance his peeing himself and crying and then being thrown in jail after being humiliated by a woman, (c) making you think you can be an accomplice also thrown in jail, hence the plot line of the body who was beaten by the black girl [the only time the “authority-coded” characters cry and sympathize is for the black girl]; (2) make women afraid of boys who look or behave like the boy protagonist, by associating the boy with all sorts of evils and shock and humiliation; [3] artificially raise the status of minorities, for instance the black police officer and the south Asian teachers, whereas there’s an ugly white police officer who is intentionally depicted as an ugly older incel
It’s really not about “bullying is bad” at all. That’s what episode three was about. Episode three is about raising the possibility that this is the case, and then the director shooting down the notion psychologically via (1) depicting the boy as aggressive and manipulative and violent, (2) making us unsympathetic to the boy and instead sympathetic to the dominant detective, (3) showing the detective denying any sympathy to the boy at the end and then breaking down, signaling to the viewer to sympathize with the woman and not the boy.
What I just can’t wrap my head around is —
is it a foreign country somehow spending, like, billions of dollars in espionage and subterfuge to get this show made and shown to the youth? Why would anyone show this to their own children?
is it a domestically made psy-op in order to, like, “subjugate” white people in the UK further? Did the government think they were getting too uppity because of the grooming gangs?
Like there is nothing organic about the directorial decisions at all.
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