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deadpantroglodytes


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 13:29:17 UTC

				

User ID: 568

deadpantroglodytes


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 11 users   joined 2022 September 05 13:29:17 UTC

					

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User ID: 568

It has absolutely lost its original propagandistic edge and become all-purpose filler. A recent NYT article about a scandalous Russian party made me laugh out loud:

The suggestive photos and videos that surfaced on social media soon after were unremarkable. Yet the blowback was immediate and severe.

“The country is at war, and these scum, beasts, are putting on this,” one of the country’s most prominent propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov, wrote on his Telegram channel hours after the event. “Cattle who don’t give a damn about what’s happening.”

Some prominent conservatives went further, claiming, without offering evidence, that the party was a satanic ritual because it occurred, according to their calculations, on the 666th day of the war in Ukraine.

Perhaps it was a joke? Is anyone here willing to own up to entryism at the New York Times?

[Edit - instead of being so snarky, I feel like I ought to give more weight to the opposite interpretation, that it was an occult signal, a quiet protest or a cry for help from within.]

Yeah, I don't think there's a plausible story to explain a widespread deep-state conspiracy. But there are other plausible theories (completely unsubstantiated, to be clear). They would involve either

  1. an informant with bad judgement going full Leeroy Jenkins or
  2. an undercover agent assessing the crowd, deciding they didn't pose a real threat, and doing their best to goose the crowd on

In the absence of evidence, those are idle speculation, but I'm a little surprised they didn't come up (or at least not more clearly).

I also prefer the written word, but I like to listen to podcasts when running and driving.

Podcasts also give me an option to avoid the farce of trying to do dishes while thumbing through essays and comments with wet fingers.

I enjoyed a lot of this, and admired Shakesneer's composure under rigorous questioning even if I think you have the better of the argument, Yassine.

But wow, I wish I'd skipped the first hour. Couldn't you just stipulate that the PMC hates MAGA voters instead of pressing so hard on their motives, in this context? For a while, I thought you might be trying to go Socratic and lure Shakesneer into admitting that the Feds have a rational reason for persecuting conservative groups, beyond losing their jobs (if one grants that they persecute them). But it didn't quite cash out that way.

I'd say that employees of federal agencies have strong motives for their hatred of conservatives, even setting aside the "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup" reasons and fear of losing their jobs, especially if we're talking about the FBI and ATF:

  • Conservative political thought emphasizes the contingency of the state's legitimacy, moreso than the left (CHAZ notwithstanding). Right-learning separatist groups are closer to the mainstream of the conservative movement than those on the left, at least in the US.
  • Conservative political thought challenges the state's monopoly on violence. Pro-gun advocacy makes the FBI and ATF's jobs harder.

And that's how it plays out in real life. I have several friends that are FBI agents, and I occasionally go to parties where more are present. To a person, they take it for granted that Trump and his voters are contemptible. I'm sure it's not unanimous, but it definitely isn't generational - I'm a Gen-Xer, and the parties are generally +/-10 years around me.

I've been with you all the way up to here, upvoting and even reporting one of your comments in this thread as a QC, but this is clearly wrong: the feds can be guilty of luring the protesters/rioters into taking risks that would make them look bad and expose them to prosecution.

I agree, not much, but the federal government can definitely avoid exacerbating the problem by limiting supply.

The Democratic response is infuriating. The way this is currently playing out is simple: people and families that would benefit from skilled nursing either get no care or, like a close relative of mine, spend weeks in a hospital (soon, months).

As an aside, this has increased my appreciation of the Fed and reduced my enthusiasm for keeping unemployment extremely low as a method of spreading prosperity.

Plain old supply and demand drives CEO pay, for the most part, not value-over-replacement.

Even sub-replacement-level CEOs require an extremely unusual skill set. Large companies are like Game of Fucking Thrones. Running one is like herding cats where one of every three animals is actually a serial killer, a thief, or a company-destroying liability risk and three out of four would sell you for a sandwich, must less a shot at your job. On top of that, you're steering (at best) half-blind in a hurricane, an earthquake, and a tornado at the same time (macro-economically speaking).

There are certainly problems, like back-scratching boards determining compensation, but I don't see obviously superior alternatives.

I was vehemently agreeing with this comment, until the unfortunate conclusion:

I trust that combination of judgement [the student's and school's] a fairly high amount, again especially given the asymmetric dangers involved here

This idealized view of educational personnel doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's mired in the present conflict and lacks perspective: institutions have a long history of abusing the trust of children and do not deserve this level of confidence or deference.

It's tawdry to quote myself, but I don't think I can put it better than I did before:

I agree that this is an old phenomenon with a long history: courageous teachers becoming involved with a child's welfare at some risk to themselves. But institutionalizing it changes everything. Guaranteeing state support dramatically reduces the risk to the teacher, which destroys the balance of incentives.

I'm sympathetic to kids trapped in a hellish adversarial relationship with their own parents, but predict that solving their problems by substituting state-approved parental figures will create a different series of problems that will probably affect a much larger number of children. Attempting to solve a tiny minority of problem cases, these laws create a new vector for neglect and abuse, because they cut parents out of the loop, when they are, in most cases, the people most committed to a child's well-being by many orders of magnitude.

I had a lot of great teachers, people that encouraged and supported me, but I also had egomaniacs and narcissists who took great pleasure in driving a wedge between kids and their parents (with no long-term concern for the children). I saw more than a handful of teachers happy to sexually exploit their students*. And I saw a substantial minority of lazy, time-serving clock-punchers.

* And a few relationships that I wouldn't call exploitative, but imagine most would.

I agree with you, without reservation. Moreover, I loved reading your post I was responding to - the historical perspective is useful and relevant in Hanania's case.

But I stand by my point, which is that while Hanania has come a long way, I don't think it's reasonable to describe him as a convert. Moreover, as you observe, progressive activists would welcome converts - from whatever ideological distance. But the price of conversion is complete submission, not apology or even renouncing myriad specific offenses. I don't think any American intellectual is willing to pay that price, whether it's because of pride, tribal instincts, or the manifest philosophical defects of the social justice worldview, which means we may never see CCP-style conversions. (At least I'm crossing my fingers that it never comes to that.)

As another data point, in my affluent blue bubble, hyphenated children's names are everywhere, partly because of the relatively large number of same-sex couples, but not remotely exclusively.

This includes mine, and while I have to admit that hyphenated names can be a mouthful (paving the way for endless jokes about fitting names on, e.g., swim caps), I love them for surfacing family history. I've always loved the extravagance of Spanish names for that reason, even if they are usually truncated for daily use.

Most historical ideological movements were quite happy to adopt former foes if they agreed to repent. Yes, you had to convert or die, but at least you could convert.

This isn't right: progressive activists are more than happy to accept converts, as long as they abase themselves completely and become zealous true-believers. If you continue to challenge their authority or their most important commitments, you have not actually repented in a meaningful way.

Consider Peter Boghossian's one-time collaborator Émile P. Torres, turned dogged antagonist of rationalism and BFF of Timnet Gebru. Hanania didn't do this: he merely renounced some of his earlier beliefs. It's as if Martin Luther trimmed his sails a bit and decided he would only stand behind sixty-three of his theses after all, and, by the way, the Pope still isn't legitimate.

It was a big change for him, but as far as progressives are concerned, he hasn't even started to repent.

Hanania should just say that his views have changed, and that he is no longer the kind of angry young man who wrote those comments

Bullseye.

the only annoying part is that "meritocracy" is both of these things at the same time

I somehow missed this response, but two months later, I need to recognize what an excellent line this is.

Jad is funny and winning, the two of you had good chemistry, and I appreciated how he responded to your gentle pushback (about the emptiness of the term "extremism", about legal tactics, etc.). He tells funny stories, communicates how broken the news is in a way that's very accessible, and makes interesting observations (for example, about why Substack can't solve the weaknesses of the legacy media).

I generally prefer reading, like many others here, and Jad's sound could have been better, but I really loved this episode. It's the first Bailey episode I'm sharing with normal friends, which I can do in part because he's insulated from some predictable attack angles by virtue of being Arab-American. On top of that, his humor plays better than the (understandably) strident confrontational attitude of many other people in similar positions (like, say, Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Anyway, great job, from a non-podcast type.

I wasn't bored, but as a movie it sucked: it's an artless piece of relentless exposition, a paint-by-numbers Wikipedia adaptation. Nolan doesn't understand the most important unit of cinematic language, the scene, and tries to hide it with garish sound design and 60s-era hallucinations.

It had at least three times too many characters as a movie can really handle. He should have started by cutting Oppenheimer's brother, who adds nothing substantial to the film. If there's no way to tell the story without them, Nolan should have just told a different story, one better suited to the strengths of motion pictures.

Turchin seems to believe in, for lack of a better term, socio-economic Malthusianism, and his more formal historical work requires Rube-Goldberg-style epicycles to substantiate his grand theory (constantly zooming in and out of geographic regions and gerrymandering timescales to make data fit). But even even though his Spengleresque ambitions won't amount to anything, "elite overproduction" is an exceptional framework for explaining local conditions in varied social environments, like the American media or academia. I can't see any reason to take him more seriously than that.

This is mostly wrong. It's trivial to decompile a large share of contemporary software - the opportunity is there, but it is vanishingly uncommon for competitors to seize those opportunities. Similarly, my company had a large multinational client who availed themselves of the right to purchase our source code and walk after five years of business. They took the source code, then came back into the fold a few years later after throwing resources at their fork, being unhappy with the results, and missing our on all the great stuff we'd added in the same period.

The reason why is that most software is in a state of perpetual improvement.

That's unfair: atokenliberal's username is a wry commentary on the average orientation of The Motte, plus his/her posting history demonstrates both a solid degree of self-awareness and a reasonable theory of mind of his/her political opponents.

Same world, different screens? I don't know how to reconcile these two comments with my personal experience.

My spouse has been a tenured humanities faculty member at a BAU for 20 years, with several different stints across the country the decade before that. Between our own experience and that of dozens of friends in the academy, everything the OP wrote rang true to me, except the timeline at the conclusion (our institution is 5-10 years ahead of the OP's account).

I'd add that faculty social life is stultifying - it's not that you can't ever have real conversations with people about difficult topics, but it takes a long time to break through the suffocating blanket of conformity. Most social encounters start with progressive consensus-building about the issues of the day, and often can't move past that. It's worse if there are unfamiliar people in the group, or administrators.

These phenomena may not universal, but are, at a minimum, widespread. Above all, I'd love to know what your institutions are doing right that you don't see this.

I agree that this is an old phenomenon with a long history: courageous teachers becoming involved with a child's welfare at some risk to themselves. But institutionalizing it changes everything. Guaranteeing state support dramatically reduces the risk to the teacher, which destroys the balance of incentives.

I'm sympathetic to kids trapped in a hellish adversarial relationship with their own parents, but predict that solving their problems by substituting state-approved parental figures will create a different series of problems that will probably affect a much larger number of children. Attempting to solve a tiny minority of problem cases, these laws create a new vector for neglect and abuse, because they cut parents out of the loop, when they are, in most cases, the people most committed to a child's well-being by many orders of magnitude.

Why should there be such a middle ground? "Cancellation" aims to make someone unemployable, which is several steps short of murder but absolutely moving in the same direction, and not in the slippery-slope sense.

Am I wrong to have read the HBD bit at the end as sarcasm? We're supposed to speak plainly here, but every now and then some artiface slips through.

This was the justification for affirmative action 1.0, and is occasionally still evident as a first line of defense, but aa 2.0 is based on two completely different ideas:

  • That diversity makes organizations stronger in a variety of ways.

  • Proportional representation is required for organizations to be "democratic", in the somewhat novel sense of engaging the whole population.

As an aside, I appreciate the link. I've been listening to Huberman a bit lately because I'm starved for good advice about how to deal with an alcoholic family member, and it's been very hard to come by a trustworthy assessment of his podcasts (like Ritchie).