dark
Veritas vos liberabit
No bio...
User ID: 1132
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
10mo ago
I'd put them in the same category as sex: not to the detriment of your health or other activities, not instead of self-fulfillment, ideally social and not masturbatory, etc.
I was going to push the artistic analogy but found the sexual one more compelling: artistic endeavors have too much of a positive connotation, gambling and smoking too much of a negative connotation, whereas sex straddles the boundary between puritanism and appropriate hedonism.
Video games can make you gasp and shake your head in wonder, can bring friends together to laugh and share, they can be a portal into a universe of creation, where the only limits are of the mind and the machine.
They can also be addictive and predatory, think of the people found dead at their computers, or with 6 figure debts from Candy Crush addictions. Is that any different than heroin or slot machines, or prostitution and camgirls?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
GitHub has a half decent censorship record? They usually only fold to DMCA requests (legitimate ones at that). But open to evidence of the contrary I have missed.
Cloudflare is more of a mixed bag. I used to strongly dislike them due to captchas from TOR exit nodes and VPNs, but they have a very robust censorship record, hosting "terrorist groups" and the 8chan until boards/shareholders likely twisted so hard management had their hands completely tied. They offer DDOS protections that allow sites that would otherwise be DDOS'ed to oblivion if they were self-hosted to stay up and available. How would you say they're hostile to the open web?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I'm personally a fan of the Wellness Wednesday thread as one of the best random internet stranger advice sources. It escapes the rage-bait/circlejerk flair that the r/*advice subreddits almost universally share.
This isn't a culture war issue.
"Queer interest groups call for social censorship of topics based on witchhunt of the week" sounds like a plausible lede to any CW thread effortpost. Sure, there's a personal spin, where the interest groups are instead his friends, but that's about as CW a topic as you can get without going into "my friends are being beat up by $OTHER_RACE every other week, any (Wellness Wednesday) advice on arming myself for the coming race war?".
That said, not a single comment actually bites and turns it full fledged CW shit-flinging fest, he evens gets a concrete solution with uBlock rules.
As for the downvotes, I'll be charitable and attribute them to a natural response to an obvious troll post. The writing style gives it away
How can I support my trans friends while also being okay with people enjoying the new Harry Potter game?
How should I feel about streamers who choose to play the new Harry Potter game on stream? In some sense they have disregarded my friends' feelings and excluded them from their community!
The level of detail - trans friends (who I love dearly) - coupled with the admittedly amusing false dichotomies is a dead giveaway. There was no need to go into that level of detail to get meaningful advice - "my friends are getting offended because content-creators have different views than them, what should I do" would have sufficed and would have nonetheless garnered, I reckon, substantially the same response.
Arguing that Jesus was gay at $IVY_LEAGUE might not be trolling, but walking into a Texas church and asking the pastor whether there's any evidence to support that claim sure is.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
This is outlandishly culturally biased. Essentially everywhere except North America, people live with their parents until they save up to buy a house/move in with a partner. They may temporarily move out for schooling and whatnot if it's not close to home, but the expectation is certainly that they stay and save while they're close to home (were you going for a meta cheap shot about Asians/South Americans/Middle Easterns being inferior romantic partners by inference?).
I was vaguely amused to see this pop up in the janitorial duties, this is probably one of the most eloquently written comments that's not there for 'Quality Contribution'.
That said, is there really a need for a fallacy in every sentence? The whole first paragraph is just bad blood coagulated into an ugly scab that's regurgitated ad hominem.
Next, I don't see @atokenliberal6D_4 suggesting mathematics is beautiful or a salve for diseased slums, just a counterpoint to the general narrative of decay and deterioration that permeates contemporary (and perhaps all human) rhetoric. You prop up a straw Colossus and then toss it ad populum, for them to supposedly tear apart with their physical, homeostatic hands.
As a crown of thorns for this cute little sophistical sermon, you conjure up some bizarre racial slippery slope whereby lack of aesthetic compatibility is leading to the decay of civilization.
The tone and style had me err on Bad, but after writing this up this I think it honestly deserves a warning it's so grotesquely specious.
I'd like to make a meta-comment here; I got this thread in the daily volunteer janitorial duties. Without context, I see consensus building, cherry-picked (though not insufficient) evidence to support his claims -- No Chinese-Americans are not just high IQ whites seems to be the one real claim of the entire post, which the subsequent evidence feels so disconnected from I almost forgot about it --, vague weakmanning.
That said, on a quick read, and without seeing his name, it wasn't even clear to me whether he was pro or anti East Asian. The first two sections seem to suggest that the babies are a lot tougher/more stoic than Europeans, not a priori a negative trait. The last section, without context, could read as evidence of East-West cultural incompatibility or discrimination. Initially, when reading the title, I thought he was going for Chinese don't just have higher IQs, they are more resilient/industrious in general. This falls apart in the third section, where he's hammering the trope of East Asians = seen by Westerners as emotionless/cold/disconnected, which I think vaguely passes muster? There's considerable asymmetry in general cultural exports between East Asia and the US after WW2/Korea.
He's begging the question with Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?, but taking a step back, my main exposition to Japanese/Chinese culture has been self-sought (barring reading Sun Tzu when I was a young teenager, who's become a ubiquitous prototype of eternal Eastern wisdom) and entirely autochtonous. I've briefly perused top 25 best books in Asian-American literature and don't recognize a single title (except for a Murakami book, whose inclusion I find borderline offensive).
I believe I rated this as Bad, maybe an extremely charitable Neutral, but I feel this showcases a shortcoming of the hyperlocal view the volunteer system offers: not only am I unable to immediately view his previous posts (which in my opinion are significantly easier to classify without context) -- they are two clicks away, context then profile --, but am also not necessarily aware that this is a toned-down/more indirect version of the usual manifesto, for which he was already warned.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
You sound like you have severe self-esteem issues and maybe mild anxiety. Not as a clinical diagnoses, but as character traits that hinder you in fulfilling your social potential.
Living on the spectrum comes with its share of frustrations because you will be routinely misunderstood. It seems you have at least in part overcome that, as a medical student, which is on the path to a high status/well respected job anywhere in the world. In countries with arranged marriages, you likely would have no problem at all finding a partner.
My suggestion to you would be to find some activities, true to your identity and interests, which would help you enlarge your social circle. It could be volunteering (natural since you're a medical stundent), exercise/sport related such as yoga, spiritual such as temple or church. Don't worry about finding a partner, focus just on finding people who appreciate you for who you are. Don't be creepy, but don't let fear of being perceived as a creep prevent you from talking to and meeting people.
You managed to overcome the limitations of autism for your professional life, you can do so (with work and practice) for your social life as well. You may think differently from people but that doesn't mean you cannot learn to understand them.
I'll dial back my tone a few notches so we don't talk past each other. I think you've started this thread out of genuine concern for the culture of this place, which is a good common starting point.
I suspect if the political valence had been flipped he would've received at least a more neutral/positive response
Maybe..? I really feel like the trollbait tone attracted more disparaging replies. Picture
I have some Young Earth Creationist friends (who I love dearly) and they are offended by some of the Ice Age movies. When they see Ice Age content (including streams and clips of the new Ice Age 2: The Meltdown game), it can be offensive and threatening for them.
Downvotes are the online equivalent of an eye-roll or a sneer. You're not (at least, necessarily) dignifying the thought with a fully-formed response or counter-argument, but you're shaking your head as your counterpart speaks. Now prof_xi has strolled into the temple and yelled Sibboleth, and though the Gileadites did sneer, they did not slay him.
The Culture War Thread aimed to be a place where people with all sorts of different views could come together to talk to and learn from one another.
[...]
But once you remove [spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse], you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
The one foundational principle of this place, the shibboleth of Mottizens, is the belief that if it can be said respectfully and civilly, it can be said here. This is a bastion of (moderated) free speech. The Motte left reddit (amongst other reasons) because of increasing admin attention, notably around transgender CW conversations. The Motte has survived the Pharaoh chasing them across the Red Sea (r/ssc -> /r/TheMotte) , and wandering the desert for 40 years (r/TheMotte under a fickle and vindictive YWVH/spez), before finding its Promised Land here. An entire Exodus just to keep worshipping at the altar of freedom of expression.
prof_xi wandered amongst the Israelites to ask how people felt about them Moabite thots and gods. He waltzed into a mosque to ask help for his friends who are putting together a Mohammed sculpture visible from space.
I believe that my trans friends should be able to browse the internet without seeing content they deem hateful/disturbing
This is about as antithetical to the spirit of this place as you can get. And as far as a response to the desecration of local idols go, that thread managed to remain essentially constructive and, in my opinion, exceedingly charitable.
What's on display here isn't Red tribe bias lynching a befuddled Blue tribe newcomer, rather overly polite entertainment of a pretty conspicuous troll.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I'm going to disagree on several points here.
It is typically male.
Female teenagers are edgy in other ways, they'll rebel against trad parents by espousing communism, sexual promiscuity or drug/alcohol abuse, dating outside/below their socioeconomic class, etc.
It’s a typically cosmopolitan feature of following the latest trend.
Trend opposition is just as twitchy and fickle as trend following. Edginess can also express itself as disagreeing with consensus, not just aligning with it.
Many progressives certainly want to appear cool — they follow the latest trends in fashion and music — but does this desire foment any edginess?
Edginess strikes me as fractal, on a small enough scale, you're at the edge of some boundary. In hyper-woke circles, any pushback or criticism of the status quo might be considered edgy.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
9mo ago
Don't you just start attending Mass on Sundays and holidays/volunteering for small stuff?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
10mo ago
Does protected sex/whoring contribute to real world development? What about pickup artists who go to bars every night to try to find women? Does that provide real meaning?
What I'm trying to get at here is that real meaning is ill-defined and most philosophers do include some form of pleasure and hedonism as an intrinsic value.
The worst fallacy, however, would be to try to argue meaningless work is more virtuous or valuable than meaningless pleasure. To argue that a substitutable office drone that shuffles emails around and does his 40 hours a week somehow is doing something intrinsically important than someone who plays MMORPGs all day. You can assign more value/respect to either of these activities, but I don't see how it's intuitively or aesthetically obvious that either is fundamentally superior.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
10mo ago
Many approaches to this:
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Pharmacological: Executive function in a pill, adderall, lisdexafetamine, modafinil, pick your stimulant (poison). Congratulations, spreadsheets and doing your taxes is now fun
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CBT-esque: Stop blaming yourself for failures, understand that most people are behind on their todo lists. If it wasn't urgent yesterday, it can't be that urgent today. If it's worth doing well, it's worth half-assing (perfectionism trap). This addresses the 'feel stupid' part of your procrastination loop.
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Mind hacks/habit building: Do this slowly, but maybe make a habit of 1 task at 6PM every night. Again re: CBT, don't blame yourself if you miss a night or two because you're sick. If it takes less than a minute to do, never put it off. Etc etc.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
What? I keep all documents under version control, whether blog posts, journals, or source and whether collaborative or individual. It's the most robust way of preserving changes and examining them over time. Git's even used under the hood for pass, my password manager.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Yeah, I think we disagree on the premise (whether it's trolling or not), which then colors our view of the rest of the incident. -- Sidenote: @ZorbaTHut, any chance for troll prediction markets with a karma reward system? Or actually more generally, karma system based around correctly predicting/adjudicating moderation results (i.e., extended comment judgement requires you to slide a probability bar for each of the outcomes).
I personally hate the type of feeling based analysis that pervades forums (it feels overwhemingly X-tribe, so much more than before, halycon days, blah blah blah). I think polling (modulo polling bias) and other analytics can give much better insight into dynamic and culture progressions than any rudimentary glance over a few threads. Since this is the "Something Shiny" thread, maybe optional polling built in to themotte.org? Recurring, get a sense of trends over time. With a system like that, you can conclusively* answer questions like are Blue Tribe folk actually leaving in droves? Maybe they're actually becoming Grey/Purple/Red as they spend time here. Maybe there never were that many, and they got busy with other things in life. Maybe they're actually more common, just more moderate in tone and therefore stand out less. These datasets are now all a SQL query away. I hope the custodians use it wisely.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Asia is facing its' own fertility crisis, but I think it's safe to say that almost universally, family housing isn't conducive to premarital sex. My point was rather that if it's a norm, it's not particularly unattractive, as it is in the US. Are Japanese, Indian or Chinese refusing to date because their counterparts still live with their parents?
Also, I can't say I've witnessed this in Asia, but Brazil, for instance, has the whole love motel thing going on, where entrepreneurial businessfolk set themselves out to allow the generationally entrapped to tryst and frolick away from the watchful eyes of their progenitors.
If your attacker is particularly skilled/motivated (or maybe this has changed with new tools, too lazy to duck it now), stylometry is also a hard to work around threat. It isn't as easy to use at scale (queries of the type: sort all users on Twitter whose writing most resembles this sample, descending, a la perceptual hashing), but if you can narrow down with communities that a person is likely to be a part of, it can be a pretty fast iterative search.
People particularly intent on segregating online identities often either take on affected styles (harder than it might seem at first, especially with 100% consistency!) or use a scrambling tool (rudimentary form of this used to be roundtripping translation).
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
What classifier architectures are you looking at? And in the supervised case, how are you planning to establish ground truth (correct label is comment deserves a ban)?
Maybe I'm too far out of the loop, but what are examples of CW books?
Flipping through my memories of childhood books, I'm getting
-- EDIT: Wow... A cursory search suggests 3/4 of these have been banned somewhere at some point in time (annotated below) so maybe I'm cruelly out of touch on this.
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Where the Wild Things Are; hard to imagine anything controversial here -- banned in 1963 (immediately after publication) for promoting witchcraft and supernatural events
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The Giving Tree; religious and secular interpretations and adoptions abound, nothing political -- banned in a public library in Colorado 1988 for sexism
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The Little Prince; maybe vaguely cynical, reflecting de Saint-Exupéry's disenchantment at the time of writing
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; a classic written over a century and a half ago, little to be controversial here, surely? -- banned in New Hampshire for allegories of sexual fantasies
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
9mo ago
Modern architecture is mostly horrific for reasons elaborate upon a myriad times. Usually having to do with architectural schools, snobbery and that the last pre-apocalyptic generations have died.. generations ago.
Define modern. The Louvre pyramid for example, widely decried at conception, is now a architectural monument to modernism at the heart of one of the pinnacle achievements of Renaissance work. Niemayer in Brazil? Le Corbusier? Art Deco in the 30s?
You can't argue we are not decaying.
Chill with the consensus buliding.
Collapsing industries due to energy costs
This is temporary nonsense due to geopolitical machinations. Gasoline is more expensive in the US than it historically has been, but electricity has fallen almost 100% since 1900, despite machinery and tools becoming vastly more efficient (not to mention the exponential compounding of computing power for fixed energy use). CPI-adjusted electricity has continued to fall since 2000, from 0.172 to 0.159 $/kWh.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
9mo ago
Sorry for the facile response, but your initial question lacked details.
Are you looking for a community, or a particular discipline in which to practice your faith?
Community fishing probably has the same guidelines as usual - class, tribe, values, culture - with the caveat that Churches tend to transcend (at least a bit) class boundaries more than other social groups.
Changing Churches for religious reasons is a lot more technical, what exactly do you object to in your current liturgy?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Seconded, this screams mind-body connection/physical symptoms of anxiety.
Obviously, it could be some super rare disease no one can diagnose. Most likely though? Psychosomatic. Get a psychiatric consult ASAP.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Whether it's a placebo or not, does it matter if it works?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Glad to see evidence of this (can't find any), but I think we've veered close to CW territory.
https://github.com/tbreuss/dns-blacklist-check
^ Project that uses blacklist with recent commits
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
A lot of advice on both sides has been given in other threads, so I'll try to shed some light with an anecdote or two.
One of my friends dated a girl like this: sweet, caring and kind day-to-day, but became a monster when drunk. A combination of undiagnosed BPD and low tolerance for alcohol due to SSRIs led to quarterly, then monthly, then finally almost weekly blowups. She would get belligerent, messy, self-destructive, would actively fight off/try to escape from people trying to help her, it was a simple nightmare. For some people with BPD, alcohol is the perfect stimulant/depressive/uninhibitive cocktail to get them to show a really dark/animalistic side of their condition. Independent of the alcohol, it can begin manifesting in other areas of life.
Alcohol tolerance can shift wildly from person to person and from day to day, depending on food and water intake prior, rest and wakefulness, exercise, etc. People tend to find comfort in keeping up with others, because that keeps their consumption in check (they should only really get as drunk as they next guy/gal). If you're consuming more than everyone else, hard to act surprised when you get sledgehammered. I've had friends of all ages get surprised once in a while by how hard 8 to 9 drinks can hit. In an environment where alcohol consumption is ubiquitous (i.e. the West, South America, and large parts of Asia), getting a bit too drunk is inevitable. @MathiasTRex brings up a good point, the fact that her friends let her get away from them in that state is unacceptable. The number of delirious drunks that jump/fall off high ledges, or even just stumble and hit their hand and suffer permanent damage, would shock you (ask a cop/EMT from your area if you're curious).
From your post, it's not entirely clear if she falls more under the former (alcohol highlights {un,under}diagnosed condition) or the latter (sometimes can't keep up with the social drinking, and somewhat stupid/irresponsible drunk). In either case though, going forward, extra caution is definitely warranted around alcohol.
Sidenote: I'd really wish people would move away from Medium (thanks heavens for https://scribe.rip/, which circumvents all the obnoxious crap and adds sane typographic settings) and the new kid on the block, Substack. I just saw for the first time a Substack article asking for a subscription (instead of letting me "read it now") and it just broke the cardinal highlighting rule.
Are Github/Cloudflare pages + Hugo/Jekyll/whatever's hot now that hard?
I miss the open web. *sigh*
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