curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Wouldn't they do that on any other social media platform though? And offline? It's not like the NYT newsroom or universities in 1950 were less 'elite sens-makers and narrative crafters jerking themselves in a circle'
curious_straight_ca
14d ago
No. The claim that lifting and combat sports make you politically right wing is just untrue in my experience. It seems true in online communities with beliefs that encourage both lifting weights and right-wing political beliefs, but if I exclude that from the anecdotal sample of people I know and control for background there's not much correlation.
Great comment, deserved more votes.
The contrast between what you say and gp's comment speaks to the utter detachment from historical context that possesses most reactionaries (ironic given their yearning for historical politics). Historic people mostly did not have the sort of universal freedom and capability that modern americans have, either in the 'negative' or 'positive' senses. Any reactionary politics has to find higher values than individual liberty and lack-of-oppression, instead of just claiming that 'liberals are the real racistsoppressors' and claiming a nebulous illiberal reaction is the only way to protect people from cherry-picked grievances that are rarer than any point in history. And while reactionary politics has exploded over the last ten years on the internet ... almost all of its popularizers have similarly incoherent grievances to OP's. Even if one has far-right sympathies ... do we really want to select the most capable social climber among these people and give them absolute power? I don't think the net effect of that is positive, even if we can acknowledge race and IQ or whatever. And this practical impotence extends to areas where I think they're correct in theory. The far-right can meme about eugenics and killing the weak all they want (based on racial or martial criteria for reasons that were the most legible / practical criteria in 2000 BC but no longer are today), but it's the progressives who are actually doing something useful or good with things like embryo selection.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
Why do people continue to think that this is a worthwhile point? Comey actually explained this and has been extremely vocal about his dislike for Trump.
No, I agree it's not good evidence the FBI hated clinton. But if things like that still happen to someone the FBI hates, why is it good evidence the FBI tunnel-vision hates trump given what happened to him? Especially given the impact on 2016 voters of comey's statement was, I think, larger than the impact of what they did to trump in 2016. Post-2016 actions would be a different discussion.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
What I'm claiming is that the, say, practical or utilitarian impact of the vaccines in terms of preventing deaths was almost as good as it would've been if they'd fully stopped transmission, which ... seems like the important part. That the media messaging around it and cultural norms around it was very confused doesn't change that.
Contracting COVID had also become socially shameful; friends of mine reacted to exposures or infections as one might to an STI. A vaccine that could not protect against this was unsatisfactory, so they yelled “anti-vaxer!” at people on Facebook for saying the vaccine could not protect against this.
Which is very dumb, but doesn't have much to do with how practically useful or effective the vaccine, the technological artifact, is. We (correctly) don't do that with the flu!
curious_straight_ca
10mo ago
Put the houses closer together, maybe stack some of them, and turn the space used by lawns and garages and driveways into community parks and such. Maybe density would enable 'mixed use urbanism', where there are enough people nearby to support small shops and attractions!
curious_straight_ca
10mo ago
there is no evidence to assert this as unique
If you can find evidence that a past president did something like this and wasn't prosecuted, I'll significantly change my mind.
a federal investigation over a crime it is not possible for the president to commit.
It is still illegal to lie under oath / to investigators about a crime you didn't commit!
curious_straight_ca
10mo ago
Ya I would agree you can’t prosecute Trump because he didn’t “lawfare” well. Otherwise then any non-establishment politician will get prosecuted.
Any non-establishment politician that makes false statements to a court? Yeah?
The indictment cites notes from a May 23, 2022, conversation between Trump and his lawyer Evan Corcoran in which the former president questioned whether he had to fully comply with the subpoena, including making the statements, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes. I don’t want you looking through my boxes,” “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” and, “Well look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”
Trump is charged with willful retention of national defense information; conspiracy to obstruct justice; withholding a document or record; corruptly concealing a document in a federal investigation; scheming to conceal; and false statements and representations.
I suspect an establishment politician who did that would be prosecuted too.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
10/year to 5/year is ... very noticeable. Just over a year, with shitty math, that'd be a one-tailed p value ("how probable is an outcome equal or more extreme") of .056. Over ten years, 100 -> 50 would be a p-value of 2.8665157187919333e-07.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
incoming modhat comment: "This isn't a good comment for the culture war thread" - effort, uninteresting meta topic "posting about posting", etc.
The twitter files themselves were discussed here, how is a rehash of them in congress interesting? The new J6 footage isn't particularly interesting imo, but it's more relevant, and anyone (you?) could've make a post about it.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Grounds in what sense? There isn't some lib in this conversation whose hypocrisy is being exposed by differing standards here. Why should I lazily believe dumb ideas just because people I dislike believe dumb ideas?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The innocence project reliably puts out stories of the wrongfully convicted or executed. If you propose a general increase in 'swift death' or 'permanent jail', how do we balance Berges against Cameron Willinghams? Our system reliably proliferates Berges, as it does pedophiles, fraudsters, schizophrenics, people with nine toes ... because out of hundreds of millions of americans, five hundred people who are released and later reoffend is genuinely difficult to avoid.
Not that you don't have a point, but the evidence here isn't enough to claim "progressives demonstrably make the world into a rotting sewer". Especially since crime rates, over the past 400 years, have consistently trended down, as everything's become more progressive. This is one of the issues I take with neoreaction generally - a monarchist claims crime was better under monarchy because of strict order, etc, but I've never seen this really elaborated upon, other than 'I read lots of victorian literature and they say so', yet crime seems to have decreased generally.
The mainstream media's function isn't exclusively, or even mostly, political propaganda and general misinformation - whether it's calling elections, writing about relevant events like antitrust lawsuits, reporting on trends in international politics, or just cooking, the MSM serves plenty of useful functions.
Wouldn’t even worse journalists just fill the void? That would be one effect. Yet the bigger effect, I warrant, would be a Great De-escalation
If the MSM disappeared and nothing else changed, people wouldn't stop caring, lying, or bullshitting about politics - the many independent left/right wing journalism websites, and twitter accounts, that are less 'fact-based' than either cnn or fox demonstrate that. There's plenty of demand, and the marginal costs of producing it are very low.
If "all misleading and not-motivated-by-truth media production" disappeared, that might be nice - but that's so common it's more in 'gene editing' or 'AGI' territory than 'just remove the MSM and we're fine!'.
I consume near-zero mainstream media, but I voraciously read history and empirical social science
My guess is this isn't true, and caplan gets a lot of information from the MSM. So:
... scrolling back on his twitter, an appearance on Tucker and and a RT of a NYT opinion by Douthat don't really count, but here's him posting a NYT article about NYC parking lots, here he approvingly QTs a Pinker article in the New Republic, he tweets "One of the best @arthurbrooks pieces" which is the Atlantic. That's all this January. He cites substacks like hanania or ACX more than he does the MSM ... but as hanania's approval of the media suggests, that doesn't cut the MSM out of the loop e.g. a few of the links in ACX linkposts are to the msm. But even if the MSM were fully cut out, and replaced with networks of independent blogs and substacks, we'd see more like Heather Cox Richardson's substack, topping substack's leaderboard at above 100k paid subs, described by Scott as
one of the few Substackers to have a New York Times article about her - in fact, part of the even more select group of Substackers who got NYT articles about them consensually. The Times describes her as a mild-mannered history professor who rose to superstardom “by accident” after an essay she posted took off. Her day job is studying the Civil War, and part of her shtick is comparing modern Republicans to Civil War era slaveowners, something there is certainly not zero demand for.
Still, all of her posts are like this. A daily discussion of one timely issue, a lot of useful context and explanation, and a paragraph or two about why it proves that the Republicans are the party of hatred and bigotry.
... along with Matthew Yglesias, "Bulwark+", Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson. Which isn't that much better than the MSM, if we interpret the MSM to include big center-right media as well.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Religion tends to imply far-reaching moral claims and ways of living organized around mystical / supernatural ideas. Anti-racism/progressivism may be distinctly christian, and may make significant moral claims, but it isn't a religion - it doesn't have supernatural claims, nor does it provide a grounding for all or even most moral claims.
It's claimed to be a religion because of the combination of moral dedication and seeming wrongness - as if people follow it religiously because of a 'religious impulse' to believe strong moral claims at the expense of correctness. This doesn't work because wokeness makes specific, non-mystical claims - calling it a religion doesn't actually rebut the claims (it'd come closer if woke people believed in an Anti-Racism Allfather that lived in the sun, but it doesn't!).
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I don't think that's manual censorship of 'fossil fuels', but ChatGPT responding to many only vaguely bad prompts with "I am an AI programmed by OpenAI and I can't respond bla bla bla".
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Obviously "the airport elon's jet most recently landed at, which is available to anyone at (i think) https://www.adsbexchange.com" and "the live location of xae12" are different
I literally cannot fathom the relentless, unceasing anxiety I would suffer if my child's whereabouts were inexplicably public knowledge.
If someone knows you personally, it basically is? They're, usually, either at your house (which you can usually get from a name), at school/school-associated location (the school is often directly derivable from house location, and generally not private) - and at predictable times!
This was 2rafa's point earlier, the knowledge necessary to harm someone is universally available and fairly easy to use. That people aren't usually harmed is due to people not desiring to, and law and society imposing punitive costs on those who try to.
Now then, if Hallock had been caught stealing women's luggage (twice), would it be as popular in the news? I think it would be close, but I can't confirm that
I don't think it would be? There are hundreds of deputary assistant undersecretaries, and at least one of them will have committed some wacky crime statistically, but I haven't heard of it. We heard about Sam not just because they were trans, but because Sam had media interest before the thefts both for being a brave LGBT person on govt from the center-left and for being a biden nominee while looking like that from the right.
Just how broad or narrow are we talking before we can generalize at all
"generalizing" is fine because lots of people have things in common, e.g. jews having high IQ. But it's better to grasp that jews have high IQ by reading a list of nobel prize winners or a page on the history of mathematics or physics, instead of because a few "smart" talk show hosts are jewish. I'm not saying "dont make negative generalizations that is bigoted".
Would you be more agreeable if instead of using Brinton as a sledgehammer on "LGBT writ large," it was narrowed down to, say, "public advocates of dehumanizing kinks"?
no because it's still dumb, there are millions of people who like disgusting kinks, you can read about thousands of them online. more here.
All sorts of things that are bad ideas aren't new; not sure of the point here.
Such proclivities (compare to random politicians doing sex crimes) were still common before trans people were appointed to offices, or even before gay marriage was allowed, or even before gay sex was legal, suggesting none of those are causative.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Can you elaborate / post a link that fleshes this out? This is a very widespread claim but I'm not sure how true it is. The 'addictive/parasocial' elements of twitter are - as far as I can tell - tweets having likes, people having follower counts, and tweets being recommended based on likes. Aren't those basic social media features that are legitimately useful?
Other criticisms of twitter are 'the short tweet form means anything subtle can't happen' (sort of true but its not like long-form platform with the same userbase is better), and 'the ui is awful' (kinda true)
There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.
Sure, but anyone who's getting a sentence of a year is unlikely to be deterred by a single physical punishment. The tradeoff is more caning vs weeks. I'm not actually sure it's on the pareto frontier. Time in jail sucks in a way you can't shrug off, it's burning time you never get back, whereas pain is just pain, it goes away.I think a most people would just shrug off the pain and do it again, unless the pain was bad enough it corresponded to a lasting injury. (And then you get into things that aren't just 'not-progressive' they're just 'obviously evil' from the usual perspective like using medical science to create a drug that causes extreme pain without permanent damage!)
I think swiftness and consistency of enforcement is much more important than the kind of enforcement, anyway. Even if organized retail theft had no punishment at all, cops just grabbed you, returned the stuff, and dropped you off an hour away, it'd quickly stop because there'd be no benefit.
curious_straight_ca
25d ago
In this specific case I really doubt it's a fetish based on the description
“He hides his fingers, keeps them flexed, leading to impaired dexterity, localized pain, irritability and anger,” Dr. Nadia Nadeau, of the department of psychiatry at Université Laval wrote in the journal Clinical Case Reports. He grew more determined to find a way to get rid of fingers he considered “intrusive, foreign, unwanted.”
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Yes, Chris is better than him. In the relevant sense of writing better posts, all this does have some correlation with all other ways in which you can judge a person's quality. The quality of posts an individual writes is strongly correlated across time, and I'd rather themotte have more chrises and less tyres, proportionally. There's a hierarchy - some people are better than chris, some people are worse than tyre, and a lot of noise, but it's true.
The first sentence is obviously somewhat inflammatory, but I don't think it should be. It is - first - a neutral statement of fact, phrased in the simplest possible way - and then, second - inflammatory because people do not like hearing it directly stated. But in order for the second meaning to exist, the first meaning must have come first, otherwise there'd be nothing to be upset about.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Right, because most of the smartest and best people are still fundamentally progressive, and oppose your actions. Change that, and you win. Don't change that, and you lose.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
I don't think this argument is going to go anywhere unless I write a 5000 word effortpost with a dozen tiktok, reddit, and discord screenshots each to actually convey the understanding of what it's like to be a 'trans kid' and why the school isn't relevant. And the time for that was a year or two ago anyway.
So instead, I'll go back to the above argument - put the mental effort into having an extra kid (or two, or ...) instead. Even heavily discounted, it's more important.
Or I guess working on AI or something. It probably seems like an odd tic that I keep bringing that up, but all of our moral philosophies depend on and don't make sense outside of the indefinite continuation of human life and civilization and power, and that is very much in question! If you're having a kid who will themselves have kids who will ... and so on and so on, I can see that as a divine duty of infinite importance, an unbroken chain - or, really, an unbroken interwoven net of sexual reproduction tiling the whole of your nation - of intergenerational devotion. If you have two kids who each have three kids who all starve to death because we're now to silicon as horses were to us ...
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
Yes I agree that all of that is dumb, and I think all but .2% of the people who use this site do too, so we don't really need to be reminded, because it doesn't directly impact the more substantial discussion above.
Uh, if they are better, then a 'push to promote them despite unpopularity' is good? Was the green revolution bad because it was pushed by the elite? (There may be problems wrt unnatural food, pesticides, etc but that goes along with the population increase) There was a push against cigarettes because they were unhealthy, this isn't exactly malicious. Nobody would care if the WEF were pushing for whole grains, food waste reuse, or food safety in africa (which, indeed, they are).
You're claiming something is, because we're not taking their stated goals at face value, as if they're hiding something. But hiding what?
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