daguerrean
1d ago
Any smell is disgusting and rude, it is the equivalent of black kids blasting music on their phone on the subway. Hard to believe, but the smell of a Yankee Candle store does not give me an erection. I disallow my wife from using any scented products at all.
daguerrean
1d ago
Why do you want cologne? The best smell is no smell, just be clean. I’ve never once had someone walk by me surrounded by a miasma of perfume and thought to myself “How wonderful! How intoxicating!”
daguerrean
2d ago
Seems fairly insane. Is anyone defending this? It reminds me of those cases (that might just be urban legends) of teenage girls getting hit with child porn charges for sending photos of themselves to their boyfriends. One would like to think common sense would step in here somewhere
daguerrean
3d ago
They don’t have to give any reasoning for banning guns other than “prevent shootings.” Also they can just ignore this shooting if it isn’t politically advantageous. I don’t think the left is losing sleep over this
daguerrean
3d ago
There were some seriously hilarious headlines based on police quotes about a "Gunperson in a dress"
daguerrean
3d ago
I think in a way both sides were right about Gamergate. On the one hand, it really was about women entering into a "boys' club" space, not ethics in gaming journalism. So at the level of literal claims, the feminists were basically correct. However, I don't think it was wrong to oppose women entering a men's space and seeking to change it, just the pro-Gamergate side didn't have the language to frame this in a sympathetic way so they avoided saying it.
What was happening to gaming and online nerd spaces (like Reddit itself) was essentially a form of gentrification. You had a "marginalized" community (nerds) that had made something interesting in their ghettoized spaces (videogaming, online forums like Reddit, open source software, tabletop games). The mainstream that had previously stigmatized them decided they wanted to move in, force out the original communities and sanitize them for mainstream consumption. The same process that happened to Reddit is what leftists complain about when it happens to some neighborhood in Queens.
Anyway, as for my own personal journey through it, I was a bit older than you. All of this happened after I had already graduated college, and so I never really got invested in the whole Youtube debate/criticism sphere. I never watched Sargon of Akkad or Jordan Peterson or whoever. I think it was around that time, 2013 or 2014 that my brother sent me a link to one of the more popular SlateStarCodex posts which became my entry point.
daguerrean
5d ago
- The Olympics viewership relies on some degree of nationalism. Nobody watches bobsledding outside of the Olympics. People only care insofar as they’re pulling for Team USA to win as many as possible. Less nationalism=less care
- Social media and infinite entertainment options means nothing can ever achieve the cultural omnipresence of things before social media’s explosion. I don’t think there will ever be another Harry Potter.
- The athletes are too transparently mercenary. Why was Joel Embiid, a Cameroonian guy playing for Team USA basketball in the Olympics? Because the NBA is in the USA so he lives here for work and would never get a gold solo-carrying Cameroon. Hard to have national pride when Team USA is just a collection of international athletes we paid for.
daguerrean
5d ago
This is an excellent point and a specific case of a general form problem. The same could be said about sex. Porn and masturbation can be endlessly optimized, AI, VR, devices like fleshlights. Sex with your wife or girlfriend is more or less the same as it was fifty years ago for most people unless you get into things like strap-ons and such. One is much more constrained by reality and biology, the other is much freer to endlessly optimize and improve. Learning a language or a musical instrument is mostly about as hard as it was fifty years ago (yes, apps like Duolingo and Youtube can improve this somewhat) but video-games are orders of magnitude more entertaining now. I even see it a bit with children vs puppies. We aren't genetically engineering children to be extra cute, extra docile and so forth, but we have actually done that with dogs. It's unsurprising that a certain amount of people would choose to be dog moms. Generally, real life experiences like relationships, children, skills like musical instruments or woodworking, advancement at your job, doesn't really work that differently from in the past and is often limited by real-world constraints. Especially with AI I think this will be a major life problem people have to face
daguerrean
5d ago
I never really believe that money is the factor. Take for example if someone walked up to me and asked me "Hey Daguerrean, why don't you buy a new car?" I suppose I would answer that money was the reason. But let's say they then asked me, "So what car would you want to buy?" Suppose I answered and on-the-spot that person cut me a check for X dollars, X being exactly the price of the car I named. So am I going to go out and buy that car? Of course not! Obviously not! Only if buying a new car is top on my list of priorities of "What I would do if I had X dollars", which presumably it isn't. Maybe I would get some repair done on my house or landscaping. Maybe I would save the X dollars because "Having 10X dollars saved" is a higher priority for me than "Having the new car". In reality, even if the car costs X and money is the reason I don't buy the car, you might have to give me 20*X dollars before I actually go out and buy that new car today. I'm not lying that cost is the reason I don't buy the new car, if the car cost $1 or I had unlimited money I would go buy it today. But it's obviously not the whole story, and a check for $X won't make me buy it.And if buying the car actually were the top of my list of financial priorities I would already have bought it as I routinely make and spend $X.
I think children work the same. I don't think people are lying, and if they had unlimited time and money they probably would have children, but I don't think we can just assume money will fix it. Even if we calculated the cost of raising a child for the first 4 years of life and gave that check to every newly married couple, I imagine the effect would be minimal. It is about the priority of having children. If having children is low priority behind vacations to Europe, new cars, bigger houses, luxury goods and cosmetic surgery then the quantity of money it would take to get them to have children would be absolutely massive. You'd have to pay for the cosmetic surgeries before the dollars had anything to do with children.
daguerrean
5d ago
It's actually extremely interesting you mention this. In the past few years my two vacations have been to Italy and Britain, both with a small child. In Britain it was almost impossible to find a nicer restaurant that would allow us in with a baby/toddler. In Italy it was the complete opposite, everyone was extremely welcoming and fawning over our toddler even at the fanciest restaurants in Rome and Naples. But as you said, fertility rate in Italy is trash. My sense is that explanations for low fertility are often very poor and the people giving them don't even give the most minimal examination at international comparisons.
Asked why they aren't having children, American millennials will usually say things like lack of affordable housing, lack of universal healthcare, and so on. But Scandinavia with their generous social welfare is not really doing much better. In Italy they will probably point to things like fashion/beauty culture making turning women off being a mother in order to preserve their looks/figure/etc. The real explanation obviously has to apply to Sweden just as it does Japan, USA and Italy, so anything culture-specific can only be but a small part.
This won’t be particularly substantive but hopefully it’s enough to avoid a mod-slap. Apparently a group of women customers accosted staff at a Minneapolis yoga chain and berated them for not having some sort of ICE signage up (presumably a “No ICE allowed” sign, as if ICE agents will be stopping in to do yoga).
Here is a direct link to the viral TikTok in question
The video’s author is Heather Anderson, 51, essentially the archetype of the wine mom, the core demographic of the latest frenzy. She appears to be an elementary school teacher and host of a podcast Belonging in the Classroom which presents itself with this description:
Belonging in Classrooms: Stories of Anti-Racism in Minneapolis Public Schools How do we practice belonging in one of the most segregated spaces in America? Who are the people challenging the systems? What do they do differently? What do they wish you knew about their experience? Join us on a journey to tell the stories of educators, students, and community members working to dismantle racism in Minneapolis Public Schools.
Of course this dovetails nicely with our discussion of another winemom-cum-podcaster, Jennifer Welch and her open calls for Republican blood. In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now? Have Democrats effectively weaponized Karenism?
The incident reminds me almost exactly of scenes that we saw in 2020, like this similar incident you surely remember of diners being surrounded and screamed at for not raising their fists in solidarity with BLM..
There is much endless discussion of peak woke, but to me it feels almost exactly like we are back in 2020, if not for the historic cold weather of the last few weeks and general time of year, I imagine it would be nearly identical.
daguerrean
8d ago
I have heard variations of this every few months for four years now, it’s always the same. Some random town I’ve never heard of with a population of 300 is about to fall which will cause the entire Ukrainian defense to collapse in a matter of days. Nobody is more consistently wrong than pro-Russian “realist” posters on The Motte. I know nothing about the situation but I know you’re wrong
daguerrean
8d ago
I think the theory generally is that they set Epstein up as a fall-guy who may generally have not been aware of his role and so his behavior actually does accord with just being a "rich lech" not a "Israeli super spy", because in some sense that's what he actually was. Perhaps Epstein wasn't even aware he was running a blackmail operation and his island and plane were outfitted with recording devices without his knowledge. In his mind he was just a rich playboy having fun and mingling with the rich and famous. I think according to this theory Ghislaine was definitely aware of the situation and that she was working with Israeli intelligence. Consider this. Imagine they had used some secret channel to acquire girls. If Epstein got arrested presumably they would start asking the girls, looking into their backgrounds and it would become obvious they were acquired through some channel that would not be available to an ordinary rich lech.
daguerrean
8d ago
Epstein is truly the modern-day Count of St. Germain
daguerrean
8d ago
More evidence for the body cam vibe shift, here is a New Yorker article from two days ago: The Body-cam Hustle Targeting Young Women which seems to be attacking bodycams from the angle of the classic joke “World Ends; Women and Minorities Hardest Hit ”. Of course the article presents zero evidence that youtube bodycam channels are actually somehow targeting women. The article’s subtitle is “Police body cameras were supposed to prevent abuses. Now YouTubers are using the footage for clicks.” The word choice there “supposed to prevent abuses” even carries with it the implication that “we know we told you guys to support these things years ago but we’re changing course now.”
daguerrean
9d ago
gattsuru is an absolute god, I am continually amazed and have no idea how he does this.
daguerrean
9d ago
Remember right after the 2016 election when all liberal media started talking about “dezinformatsiya” lol?
daguerrean
9d ago
We don’t arrest people but we do question them for being “likely” to commit a crime. See the original quote:
Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches
Nothing here about arresting people based on ethnicity
I can't say that it's out of the question, but it's extremely implausible
This is why I regard it as pretty comparable to the “Kirk Shooter was MAGA theory.” “SIG lol” as the entire basis for the theory is pretty comparable to “his parents were MAGA” as both are just probabilistic arguments while all the direct evidence we have is contrary. The grey jacket guy didn’t react as if the gun in his hand went off, and he looked behind him over the opposite shoulder. As far as I know ICE/DHS has not even claimed this misfire theory in their own defense, it is 100% cope. As you said, is it strictly possible a misfire happened despite all the evidence? Sure. In the same sense that it’s strictly possible Kirk’s shooter is a groyper chud despite the evidence.
daguerrean
9d ago
There have been extensive discussions of this memory-holing process over the Intellectual Dark Web subreddit.
Do you have any links? Sounds interesting
daguerrean
9d ago
The likeliest explanation seems like it went off as it was being confiscated from him.
I cannot believe I’m still seeing this Kirk-shooter-was-actually-MAGA tier theory in the wild
daguerrean
10d ago
In general I think this class of problems is not dealt with sufficiently by many conservatives. Like, okay, if we take away women’s right to vote, what will be different this time around? We already had that in 1900 and where did it lead us? Here. The same can be said for an all-White society, all-Christian etc. I suppose the argument is something like, “We didnt realize how important having an all-White society was back then so we didn’t jealously guard it, but this time we know and we’ll do things differently.” And I imagine the same goes for patriarchal/Christian/etc. It isn’t a totally absurd argument, but I think it’s lacking. Conservatives at the time definitely understood having a White country was important, they weren’t exactly lacking that information. I struggle with this argument myself as someone that generally-speaking endorses some of these things
Agree with the overuse of the term goth, there’s nothing really goth here. I will note however that there’s sort of a stereotype here that gender ideology is something associated with college-educated coastal elites, and it may be at an intellectual level, but not as-lived on the ground. Walk around Princeton campus and the kids will look normal, they wouldn’t even look bizarre by the standards of twenty years ago. You’ll see much more gender nonconformity at a Walmart in rural Alabama than at Harvard.
I think this is basically the intellectually permissive ideology of colleges finally filtering down to Walmart, where it just gets interpreted as a complete collapse of any normative standards or shame. So you get this mixture of mall ninja aesthetics, anime, furries, piercings, tattoos, hip hop/black culture in an unholy combination assisted by algorithmic blending of previously distinct subcultures. Similar to interracial relationships. There may be nigh unanimous support for interracial relationships at Harvard, but you won’t see many except some White/Asian pairs, you see far more at your local Walmart, especially White/black. These ideas are formed at colleges but mostly inflicted on the trailer park class.
You know, separately I want to talk about poptimism and the death of subcultures. I was reading Chuck Klosterman’s book on the 90s (good fun, I highly recommend it) and he was pointing out how “selling out” was a huge concern among indie music fans in a way it isn’t today. In the 90s subcultural fans had an expectation for their celebrities of loyalty to the subculture, of purity, and of resistance to debasement. In the early 2000s for example, hip hop had its own unique fashion that was totally independent from the world of high fashion houses and luxury design And you would have never seen Modest Mouse collaborating with Cam’ron. At some point around 2012 when proto wokeness was emerging, indie music press started to become self conscious that their disdain of pop music was in some ways sexist and racist and they began to notice that the then-popular bearded-flannel-mandolin indie of Fleet Foxes and Iron & Wine was disturbingly White They shifted their ethos from searching for the most obscure music to praising the top-40 hits of Beyonce or Kanye for their racial politics, thus poptimism was born and the end of subcultural gatekeeping. I mean look at the writing credits on Beyonce’s 2016 lemonade, you have former indie darlings like Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend on there, this is like if Jeff Mangum was writing songs for Britney Spears, absolutely unthinkable twenty years ago. IMO aside from the algorithmic melange & capitalistic aspects, there really is a part of the story where wokrness and concerns over sexism/racism/gatekeeping destroyed distinct subcultures
daguerrean
13d ago
The null hypothesis is that racial intelligence differences do not exist
How does the null hypothesis have a place here and why do you get to decide what it is? We aren’t approving drugs here, we’re just trying to weigh two theories, it’s completely unfair to arbitrarily privilege the one you like more.
We should be able to pay to ban users or change their names or flair like old school Something Awful
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