drmanhattan16
No bio...
User ID: 640
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Oh, I forgot about those Endnote videos he made. I was unaware they were still ongoing, but I guess it fits his narrative about the alt-right.
To be honest, Gamergate is one of those things I suspect will be the equivalent of the awkward and non-narrative-conforming facts regarding the AIDS crisis in the 80s. Someone might have the link because I can't find it, but I distinctly recall there being a faction of gay men who refused to stop having sex after being diagnosed because they saw it as rebellion against society.
You're probably not going to convince anyone who isn't interested in a good-faith discussion over the facts of the matter, but I appreciate your efforts at disputing Danskin's argument. I only watched his Alt-Right Playbook series and realized he was just a culture warrior who didn't seem to understand why that isn't actually a good thing.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
How does the joke go?
Two Jews are sitting next to each other one day. One of them sees that the other is reading a Nazi newspaper. "Why are you reading that? Don't you know they hate us!"
The other responds, "Friend, if I read our papers, they tell us that our people are being harassed and persecuted. If I read a Nazi paper, they tell me that we are in control of the world!"
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
That churro definitely swung my positive valence for all things Hispanic by 5%.
Now, is this additive or multiplicative? If the cost of ending anti-Hispanic bigotry is buying everyone 20 churros...
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Consider my sister, who is a staunch activist in the domain of climate change, yet recently bought a new gas guzzling car, has never given any serious thought to reducing her meat consumption, and takes 12+ international flights a year. Or consider my dad, who says extremely negative things about Muslims (not just Islam), yet who has a large number of Muslim friends who he'd never dream of saying a bad word about.
I'm curious if you've ever asked these people about this disconnect in beliefs. How they rationalize these things might cut away at the perceived contradictions. For example, your sister may believe that her consumption is a drop in the ocean compared to the emissions of large manufacturing corporations or states with industrial policies. Your father may say that he's vetted the friends he has, but Muslims as a group are generally not good.
This can be a dangerous activity - your sister may decide that climate change actually doesn't matter, or your dad might decide to abandon his friends. Fully consistency was not made with humans in mind.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
I don't see how this is caused by "DEI/LGBTQ/BBQ movements". Payment processors already had rules about not wanting to be associated with online sex/porn websites. If anything, this should be seen as an extension of existing prudishness along with a refusal to look in any way like they're associated with things that aren't "family friendly".
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
I've been introduced recently to AI-generated line synthesizers via Youtube. Basically, you can get an AI to create a soundclip that sounds like a person of your choice. This is obviously something people have discussed in the context of faking evidence, but did you know people are using them to have the last four presidents play Call of Duty Zombies?
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
We should've kept the masses happy with bred and circuses, while a trained aristocratic class a la @2rafa quietly keeps things running in the background.
Be very cautious of endorsing an unaccountable set of leaders, for they may very well decide you and yours are next on the chopping block.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
If those quotes are said every day, they are monstrous, because they are setting up an expectation that students should be active collaborators in shielding teacher behavior from parental oversight.
It can be humor and text doesn't work very well at capturing this.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
What I can't decide is whether that means the "Great Awokening" really is on the wane, or whether it has become so integrated into our culture that it is now impossible to excise--something on its way to becoming so boring and broadly accepted that no one bothers to challenge it.
My disagreement with the "on the wane" argument is that it misses why we call it the culture war, not culture battle. Battles are a part of war, but war encompasses a much larger phenomenon. I agree with your second explanation - "white-coded institute does something that can be used as progressive outrage bait" is so commonplace a story that it doesn't do anything anymore. It's like a car crash - sucks but just a fact of life.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
That's entirely fair. I keep assuming that people would conclude, like me, that "the government is trying to tell private actors what to censor" to be a maximally red flag and all following evidence just icing on said flag, but I shouldn't doubt that there are people who unironically would say that there isn't anything inherently wrong with that.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
YouTube allows you to delete comments from your videos. They probably have someone doing that.
A new Jonathan Chait piece: How to Make a Semi-Fascist Party.
The piece details his experience at the National Conservatism Conference where a bunch of conservatives (politicians, intellectuals, etc.) get together and try to articulate a vision of conservatism's future.
Some parts are unsurprising. Ron DeSantis is hailed for supposedly bringing Disney in-line, and there's a unified theme as to what the real threat to America is. Three guesses and the first two don't count.
Almost every speaker repeated a version of the following: The “woke” revolution has captured the commanding heights of American education, culture, and even large businesses, from which positions it is spreading and enforcing a noxious left-wing ideology. This poses an existential threat to conservatism, culturally and politically. Conservatives must therefore fight back by using state power to crush their enemies on the left — a notable break for a movement that, in the pre-Trump days, had at least pretended to stand against “big government.”
Chait points to rhetoric which, on the surface, suggests the right may drop its support for economically conservative policies, but he argues that it's tailored for dealing with the specific things these conservatives don't like, as opposed to some general/coherent economic policy or policies.
The National Conservatives’ statement of principles is vague on economics, denouncing socialism while attacking “transnational corporations” for “showing little loyalty to any nation,” damaging “public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits.” This is a moral critique, confined to a trivial percentage of businesses — very few of which, after all, are engaged in content moderation or the sale of drugs or pornography — and implies very little change to the traditional Republican pro-business stance.
...
National Conservatives consider corporations to be “woke” enemies, or at least potential enemies, and see the power of the state as a lever to compel them to endorse conservative positions or at least refrain from endorsing liberal ones. They propose to pressure tech companies like Twitter and Google to drop content-moderation policies like bans on disinformation or hate speech. They wish to pressure corporations to not take positions in defense of voting rights or against forms of social discrimination. And they view investment funds using environmental, social-welfare, and good-governance criteria as a mortal threat. On all these issues, the National Conservative position is essentially identical to The Wall Street Journal’s editorial line.
Of note is the new fusing of an old talking point with a new one. Chait writes the following of the "Securing the Integrity of American Elections" panel.
The overarching theme of the panel was that Democrats routinely engage in widespread voter fraud and that Republicans have failed to gain power because they have shied away from the hard work of rooting out this allegedly endemic cheating. “You’re not gonna get anybody elected unless you’ve got an honest election system in which they’ve got the ability to get elected,” said Spakovsky. “There’s obviously going to be fraud; we know there will be fraud,” said Jessica Anderson, a former Trump budget staffer now working at Heritage.
None of the panelists are willing to affirm if they think Biden won the election fairly, which Chait takes as proof that their private views will not get in the way of them trying to use the energy the 2020 election provides.
Then there's what amounts to a very foolish, but understandable strategy.
Christina Pushaw, whose official title is director of rapid response for the governor but whose role could be more accurately described as minister of propaganda, held forth at a panel on marginalizing independent media. The challenge, she explained ruefully, is that many older Americans, such as her parents, still give some credence to old-line outfits like the New York Times. This reputation, she believes, comes from the perception that they have access to both parties, so the correct response by Republicans is to freeze out the mainstream media. “If they have no access to any Republican elected officials, they are seen for what they are,” she proposed. Pushaw stressed that Republicans should not even concede that reporters are journalists at all. She instructed the audience to call them “activists.”
Pushaw told the audience that Orbán’s government gave her inspiration for this tactic. “The New Yorker wrote to Orbán and asked for comment on their hit piece, and they received a response that was just perfect. It said, ‘We are not going to participate in the validation process for liberal propaganda,’ ” she recounted, “and I don’t think we need to participate in that validation process either.” Instead, she noted, DeSantis gives access to conservative sites, which then get quotes and scooplets they can use to build their audience.
While Chait argues that, as bad as left-wing news might be, right wing news doesn't even try to be objective, I'll make a different critique.
Suppose Pushaw's point are her earnest belief. She succeeds and we get conservative news sites that get exclusive access to conservatives. What happens?
Answer: Nothing changes.
All that will occur is that left-wing sites like the NYT or whoever else will report whatever those other sites say and add a note "Person X refused to comment."
Chait argues that Pushaw wants to eliminate the idea of a journalist altogether - there will instead be "left journalists" and "right journalists". This is idiotic, because there are going to be people who synthesize the materials and present themselves as objective journalists. Both sides would do it and nothing changes. CNN will tell you what DeSantis told his favored journalist and continue on without pause.
This isn't even something like "we're going to create right-journalists who will directly contest every claim the left makes, thereby nominally preventing anyone from knowing truth", it's quite literally "go here to find our words". Scott Alexander doesn't stop existing just because the NYT can't directly interview DeSantis.
That previous idea, however, comes from Hungary and Victor Orban, who were positively featured at the convention. There was a lot of praise for Orban as someone who had used state power to fight fake news.
At one panel, The Federalist’s Sean Davis asked Balázs Orbán, an adviser (no relation) to Viktor Orbán, how his government is preventing the fake-news media from poisoning the minds of the youth. “Just as is done in Florida,” Orbán replied, explaining that the Hungarian regime used state power to prevent the left from indoctrinating the country in its ideology.
Chait concludes his piece by noting that as time went on, he was in an increasing hostile environment. People insulted him to his face and tweeted out that he looked like a goblin. Amber Athey certainly suggests so.
Aside
Okay, so Athey went beyond just an accusation of being a goblin and claimed the following was evidence.
The linked complaint is...hard to judge. DeSantis most definitely said what he did, so we're left to judge if Athey is referring to the actual words spoken or Chait's claim that the governor is courting anti-vaxxers.
Edit: it's not unclear, Athey is clear that she objects to Chait's view of what DeSantis is doing.
Certainly, there is a great deal of frustration on the vaccine-skeptic side (or whatever you wish to call people who distrusted the Covid vaccine(s) but not necessarily others for whatever reason) in how anti-vaxxer changed from "deny the science altogether" to "question any part of any vaccine". An important question is if Chait is intentionally using the new definition while trying to convince people DeSantis falls under the old one.
That said, there is a logic in pointing out that political groups often given a guide to the various enemies they have on who to collaborate with. Unless the skeptical-about-covid-vaccine-but-not-all crowd is virulently against the old definition anti-vaxxers, a strategic coalition can be formed and the more palatable rhetoric will probably draw in the ones who are more shunned. I cannot be the only one to have noticed this.
I'm willing to buy that DeSantis is more concerned about "woke elites" than he is about actually staking out a position on the covid vaccine, but I don't know enough about him to say whether it's deliberate or not.
drmanhattan16
9mo ago
I notice that all your examples don't affect you. Just to be clear, would you tell yourself to act the same if you were the victim of those things?
It's easy to point to greater suffering in quantity and magnitude in Ukraine or Niger, and I'm not sure what's the point of thinking about that either.
The point is to do better. It is to insist that those with the power to affect change do better. I understand that you personally cannot alter the course of events in Ukraine. But an ocean is a trillion drops of water, an avalanche is a trillion snowflakes, and likewise, the world gets better with each successful individual act of doing better.
I'll go one step further. A great many things would improve if people didn't try to insist on some "nature" equivalent of the just world hypothesis. Humans have remarkable ability to not only learn morality, but to implement it in their own lives. The fact that some have a predisposition towards doing unjust things is not a defense, because if your urges to act immorally are so strong, then you have forsaken some claim of being a wholly reasonable person who is due the rights privileges given by default.
drmanhattan16
11mo ago
Thanks for sharing. But I'm nearly as tired of Holocaust-themed morality plays as I am of the Civil Rights Era-flavored ones. Has anyone under age 70 not been bludgeoned through their entire lives with "Prejudice is bad!" and "The banality of evil!" and "Never again!" etc?
You mistake the process of cultural moral education as an attempt at saying something novel. If I tell a young boy to not throw trash on the street every day, it is no flaw for my lesson to be repititive.
Hitler, for the foreesable future, remains an important figure in the West's cultural history - he is the ultimate evil who must be known so that he and his followers can be rejected. Likewise with the Civil Rights Movement - it represents an important step in moral progress, so it is taught to people.
These films should be recognized for what they are - an attempt at recreating our ancestors' feelings about these things in ourselves or our descendants.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
For another, the timing and differences across cultures is interesting to me. I have always kind of assumed that the Great Awokening was something that happened in the U.S. and then caught on elsewhere, to varying degrees, but while that may in fact be true, it doesn't seem to show up strongly in this data. I guess one question might be whether this just shows that the Internet has really flattened the world in surprisingly strong ways.
Even before the internet, there would have been conferences, books, publications, movies, etc. It shouldn't be forgotten that people have and will travel to the colleges of powerful nations because it's a fairly good path to doing better paying work. Basically, the Great Awokening was when it burst into the mainstream, but the ideas had existed for decades before that. Sensitivity and DEI training in the private sector has research papers from as early as the 1980s.
We should really be asking why it took until 2014 for it to happen since this began in the 1960s.
I can't say exactly why it appeared then, but I suspect it may have simply been inevitable. Basically, there had to be some point where what people were teaching in colleges was going to set the political agenda of millions of people, and 2014 ended up as that time period. The internet probably played some role, however, since social media facilitated a very fast way to organize with one's digital identity.
While I appreciate such papers, I kind of have to wonder how much it matters. Most discussions about wokeness aren't over whether it has or has not spread to the rest of the world, everyone just takes this for granted.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
I think you're ignoring a major problem with how YouTube is set-up in the first place.
They have a Kids version of the platform - why are they insisting that the normal platform adhere to those rules as well? "Think about the kids!" is fine here, parents want to know that their kids are not watching material traditionally deemed "inappropriate" (we haven't quite updated for the kid-friendly influencer plague). But YouTube wants the now theoretically kid-free platform to follow the kid rules as well.
It's not surprising that YouTube wants less risk, but there's no need for them to assume responsibility for a parent's failure to control what their kids are seeing.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Twitter Files 6
I thought we were done with this, but it seems not. Link
TF6 is written by Taibbi and covers the relationship between Twitter and the FBI + DHS. The arguments in order:
-
Twitter's senior/important staff were in constant contact with the FBI (Evidence/Example: 150 emails between Yoel Roth and the FBI from Jan 2020 to Nov 2022)
-
The FBI had a task force centered on identifying alleged foreign interference in our elections. This was made in 2016 and grew to 80 people eventually.
-
The FBI and DHS had separate entry points into Twitter's reporting system compared to other people so that Twitter knew it was the federal government requesting moderation, not just some randoms.
-
There were a great deal of requests made, with Taibbi alleging that humorless people must have been doing the ground-level collection because many of the flagged posts were obviously jokes (or, not obviously serious). Supposedly, the requests weren't that completely partisan, with a few left-wing jokesters getting flagged by the FBI as well.
-
Many accounts were tiny, with some having follower counts below 10. It seems whoever was collecting all this from the government's side took no chances and combed through everyone, something even Twitter's staff noted.
-
State governments were also involved, with one incident involving California officials asking Twitter why no action was taken against a flagged tweet.
Taibbi closes with the following:
The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.
I've said before that not every TF release is equal, with several coming across to me as limp and very much known to both sides beforehand. This is no exception, The Intercept had thoroughly covered attempts by the DHS to remove "misinformation" from social media a few months ago. I'm genuinely unsure what Taibbi or any of the other TF reporters think was revealed here. More evidence to throw onto an argument is always good, don't get me wrong, but there's nothing here that wasn't provable prior to this.
That's not to say what was going on is acceptable, I outlined my rejection of this state of affairs here. Only that none of this was even unknown or outside the mainstream.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
I think there's also a perception of how best to spend one's energy.
Attacking a social conservative or anyone to their right gets you nowhere if you're a social progressive. They'll just say YESCHAD.jpg and move on. You accuse them of hating gays and they'll shrug because ultimately, they don't care and find homosexuality evil. There was never any hope in a progressive's heart that these people would change their tune.
A liberal? A liberal cares about the same things a progressive does, meaning it's much easier to scold them for failing to live up to shared ideals. Engaging in purity spirals with a liberal might them towards progressivism in a way impossible with the conservative.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
The problem is that DnD has not accepted the modern progressive line on race - that it's completely arbitrary and has no impact or meaning in any way that might possibly be contorted into looking like something in the real world.
Kimchi said he was disappointed to see the word ‘race’ used, especially since it’s something that a lot of people have complained about and sought to remedy. “It seemed like the most basic change they could have done so that everyone could move on, but they didn’t go that far,” he said, describing the shift from ‘race’ to ‘species’ as “low-hanging fruit.”
And even if WotC did change from the word race to the word species, Isa said, that would still be a problem, “because there would still be a lot of racial coding.”
The people pushing for this change are not inherently wrong. Changing the term "race" to "species" would probably fit better with modern usage of those terms. But their goal is not to see DnD modernize its vocabulary, it's to effectively see their own beliefs reflected in the media they consume.
drmanhattan16
6mo ago
No, I mean why do you endorse a position in which technology and civilization have such value that they can balance out moral obligations? Most people would say that morality comes first, always. In a sense, that's precisely what morality is, the rules that hold utmost importance and must be obeyed should there ever be any conflict. You don't even dispute the idea that what Israel is doing is immoral.
You say that technological innovation and civilization creation are aspects in which Israel does so well that its immoral actions can be ignored. Would you say the same if the costs or consequences of those actions fell on you or those you cared about? If the cost for Israel's success was the death of your parents, your wife, your children, or even you, would you still make the same argument?
Now, you could argue that your human responses are irrational. Feelings are stupid and gay, after all, there's no reason your chemical reaction to seeing your family killed by a drone should dictate the actual morality you hold to. But talk is cheap. I've debated people who struck me as incapable of separating the reality we all inhabit from any hypothetical world I proposed. It's easy to bite bullets about what you would accept when the only one biting actual bullets are your adversaries.
I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust.
If Marx Marxism is responsible for those deaths, do leftists have a point when they say that X millions were killed by capitalism?
Edit: Marxism, not Marx
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Your posts often have an effect where they play fast and loose with facts in service to some vibe or message. The message is often good, but there's a sense of being intentionally averse to things like 'analysis of opposing viewpoints' or 'ways in which I might be wrong' because that's not with the vibe.
That's Kulak in a nutshell, really.
There's an oft-repeated line about how institutions are run counter to how society is. For example, corporations don't constantly rely on contracts for every little thing, but run as a command economy of sorts. I think of Kulak in the same way, and if this was an ideologically diverse space with a more relaxed environment, I wouldn't mind because he provides a similar thing - a strong idea which can be walked back from in the discussion around it.
But given the space we have, it's just annoying to see more of the same ideas without discussion of their flaws.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
It's in the process of becoming one, not already one. A repeated conflict is the government nationalizing private enterprise.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
The mod in question was removed after a strong campaign against them for the banning of the artist. It's a high-profile case, but we shouldn't claim it's proof of a broader trend.
It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are. I explicitly use mods that many others find discomforting or crude because I don't ultimately care. But I wouldn't turn it back around and ask "Why are these people criticizing me????" The criticisms are coherent, I just reject them in the end.
Stardew Valley has had mods that turn the sole canonically black character and his half-black, half-white daughter totally white. I very much doubt this is because people thought he didn't fit in organically, he explicitly has an outsider background (comes from the city to the town). It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.
I say this as someone who agrees with your position on such mods. I truly don't give a fuck about someone making everyone in a game white or removing LGBT flags from a game, and I think mods that allow you to do those things are ultimately fine, just as mods that do the opposite are equally fine. But I'm not going to pretend the criticisms are invalid - I just don't share the values of those critics.
Probably because there's a lot of people who seem to think this man had a valid point. But what do I know, maybe all the people making a stand against indoctrination are shaking their heads at a man complaining about the expansion of an option that he could have gotten through in seconds.
By all means, I'll march alongside you when you want to complain about "pale, male, stale" is a thing. But I'm going to look at you quizzically if you also want to defend the idea that games shouldn't even try to be inclusive to people who aren't like you.
More options
Context Copy link