drmanhattan16
No bio...
User ID: 640
drmanhattan16
11mo ago
(Side note: since we live in the clown world, I feel compelled to add a disclaimer that the word "barbarian" is used in purely descriptive, not pejorative, meaning - as "somebody who is not part of the imperial culture" - and, in fact, for the purposes of this definition, I am a barbarian myself and many of my friends are Barbarian-Americans)
It has nothing to do with "clown world", you are straight up analogizing the US to older empires that were far more explicitly formulated on a racial or ethnic basis, likewise analogizing illegal immigrants as less-civilized. You are free, of course, to idiosyncratically define "barbarian" as those who don't belong to the culture of the US (insofar as such a thing exists). But let's not pretend that this is some "clown world" shit, and that everyone in a "saner" world would understand that you weren't trying to insult those who are the "barbarians" here. It was an insult long before the advent of the "clown world".
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Hlynka and all the people supporting his QC confuse me.
It's confusing because it seems like there's a great deal of people who think the fact of the matter is that the 2020 election was unfairly stolen by Trump. They argue the facts and think their side is correct in a verifiable manner. I understand this perspective, even if I disagree on the facts.
Hlynka's post and subsequent comments aren't about this. It's about how election deniers have to be persuaded by the non-deniers that there was no ultimate theft. He interweaves this with references to attempts to suppress investigations into election fraud, but his subsequent comments in that thread make it clear that he assigns the election deniers no obligation to evaluate their own motivations.
If I talked with a person who disagrees on the facts, I know they would be willing to publicly state that the facts are the only thing that should determine the conclusion. Whether there was fraud or not, a stolen election or not, the facts are the sole method of determining this. But Hlynka isn't arguing the facts because his revealed preference is debates over policy. And no, elections are not the same thing as debates over policy.
I will ask anyone here who supports his view the same question I asked him - do you actually care about the facts of the 2020 election, or are you just interested in negotiating over policy? Because if it's the latter, just be honest and we can avoid debating a topic which doesn't actually touch upon your real concern.
drmanhattan16
7mo ago
The discussion is how important Twitter was in suppressing right-wing boycotts. Whether you want to point to human moderation or tweaks to the algorithm, you're still talking about ascribing agency to Twitter. My point stands.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
I think it’s the buying people. Child trafficking in adoption is a serious problem that all sorts of people put effort into avoiding, albeit not particularly successfully. On the other hand, the homosexual men using surrogates are blatantly buying a child.
What? This gay couple compensated a woman for use of her womb, why are you comparing that to child trafficking, which involves a child already born and taken for typically immoral purposes (sex, forced labor, etc.)
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
You should be careful to not talk broadly about academia unless you actually mean it in its entirety. If you have a problem with specific fields, then you should say that instead. To tar all of academia would require a great deal of evidence, of which you haven't posted any.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
You say "false advertising", but I wonder how far this goes. Suppose we get to a point that with minimal effort that all trans people undergo, they all start to pass as the gender they identify with to the point where, as far as hooking up goes, you fundamentally could not tell if they were cis or trans. Is this "false advertising" still?
This sounds like an argument that attributes what it means to be a "real woman" to something non-material in nature.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Eyeballing it, it looks like it went from 14/100k to 18/100k. 30%, yes, but doesn't seem that big overall.
drmanhattan16
5mo ago
I find it so hard to want to support the the Palestinian cause even if they have legitimate grievances, because their tactics are so deplorable
I don't think we should conflate Hamas with all Palestinians.
drmanhattan16
9mo ago
Rufo himself declared CRT to be wrong on everything. Robinson was challenging him precisely on the question of what they had gotten wrong when they described the Founding Fathers as racist. How is Robinson supposed to engage with Rufo on the validity of his claims about CRT if not by challenging something as basic as this?
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers.
So who is one of these young novelists who is a man that isn't being recognized?
An accusation of "We genuinely just searched for that which is great and good that fit the market and it happened to be comprised mostly of X" cuts both ways, y'know?
It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books.
So you acknowledge that the whole medium is not as cool to men, but then you insist that if upcoming authors' lists are dominated by women, it can't be because they're the ones who comprise most of the market?
The only way to make your argument is to say that, in general, the great men authors of the past were recognized independent of the markets they were a part of. Which you can certainly argue, but I want to see evidence of that claim if you're going to make it.
Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.
How do you square this with your own admission that literary fiction isn't superior to other, newer forms of media?
If a man today enjoys reading manga, watching YouTube and Netflix, plays video games, etc. but doesn't read a book, why is this a consequence of publishing houses promoting women and minorities instead of just a conclusion of where his interests naturally lay? The engagement from playing Ace Combat is probably higher to many than reading a Hemmingway novel.
drmanhattan16
6mo ago
I'm shocked that the most obvious explanation for why this fiction is so popular was missed - it's literally not something most people have experience with! Of course people are interested in stories about that which they know nothing about, because reality is mundane and you have to actively seek out the interesting things in what you are familiar with. Rare is the story that is interesting even while historically accurate, and even then, it's typically because the audience isn't familiar with such things. Shows like White Collar, movies like Avengers, books like Twilight or Hunger Games, etc. are pieces of fiction that the reader has no experience. Why wouldn't they be fascinated at how these could be imagined?
Secondly, look at Tanner's examples of older heroes explicitly seeking out power.
This was not some new ideal in Shakespeare’s day. For the sake of name Athena spurs Telemachus away from home; for the sake of rule she spurs Odysseus homeward bound. Yudhishthira gladly leads his brothers on the path of dharma, but it is a dharma of kingdom and acclaim. Aeneas, Sigurd, Gawain, Gilgamesh, Rama, Song Jiang—search the old epics and annals for the modern distrust of heroics, and you find it in none of them.
Notice how frequently divinity appears. Yudhishthira and Aeneas are the progeny of gods, Rama is a god, etc. Indeed, this should not be surprising - when the hero is given a form of divine mandate, that mandate is often moral itself. To obtain power to carry out this mandate cannot be immoral. These gods are not The Corporation from the Waifu Catalogue or some evil ROB.
In contrast, Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, Divergent, etc. are not given such a mandate (I haven't read the last one, but from what I've heard, I don't recall any mention of gods in the Greek or Abrahamic sense). They are products of minds raised in a far more secular society.
This is not a rebuttal to Tanner, to be clear. I have not grappled totally with how one would rank the reasons he and I have listed, or any other reasons people come up with. But I would encourage at least some skepticism towards Tanner's case that this is so obviously an example of how Westerners have been rendered impotent and conforming.
drmanhattan16
7mo ago
But in the real world: Zelensky has no path to realistically expelling Russia from the land they want, short of dragging the rest of the world into WW3.
Making it a financial drain is all you need. Russia only has so many tanks, planes, etc. in storage that can be re-activated. While there are efforts to step up defense production, it's not easy and Russia is a thoroughly corrupt nation whose government hemorrhages money into the pockets of whoever holds it at every step.
Zelensky, meanwhile, gets the financial, material, and ideological support not only of many different powerful nations to keep the war going, but their populations as well.
As far as what is a nation: The United States is a nation too. It is not in our vital national security interests to escalate a regional conflict to the point where we are sending our children to their death.
It is 100% in the US' interests to ensure the world order isn't realigned to favor Russian tactics. Every country planning on doing something similar is going to realize that going to war against the combined power of the Western order must be done with far more care.
If you only care as that your own nation isn't invaded, so be it, but much of the prosperity America enjoys stems from America's export of security to the numerous smaller players. Take that away and you've got a poorer America. Those players each contribute to that defense in their own ways as well, even if they don't spend enough directly on their own militaries.
drmanhattan16
7mo ago
Assuming this is true, it still wouldn't get you to Twitter suppressing right-wing boycotts. It would get you to Twitter suppressing non-verified boycotts. Those are not the same thing and they shouldn't be treated that way for the reasons I outlined above regarding verification.
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
That sounds like a Russel conjugation. "I show reality as it is, you show a vulgar political display." Hardly that convincing, nor do I think it requires a hatred of white consumers.
Race matters in Tolkein in a way that white progressives, by virtue of their white upbringings, simply cannot grasp. Ignorance is not malice.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
This sounds like one of Stevenson's Persuasive Definitions i.e changing the meaning of a word without changing its elicited feelings. If this is trafficking, then trafficking is now not inherently immoral, as is typically implied (no one talks about traffickers as ethical people). For you to get to that point, you would have to demonstrate that surrogacy was immoral. Which is your view, I realize, but no one in this thread has put forward a convincing argument for that.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
That might be your null hypothesis, it isn't mine. I want to see evidence of the problem permeating all of academia if that's the claim the OP wants to make.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Twitter Files 12 and 13
My apologies for not posting about these earlier. So I thought I'd wrap both new releases up in one post.
12: Link
13: Link
12 is by Taibbi and tied deeply to release 11. He writes the following.
-
Twitter was flooded by requests from US intelligence agencies in 2020, to the point they couldn't keep clear who was sending what and what was supposed to be acted upon.
-
A new entrant, the Global Engagement Center (part of the State Dept.) was also trying to get into these discussions and calls between social media platforms and intelligence agencies.
-
This, however, was not taken well. Yoel Roth defended the work with the DHS and FBI, seeing them as trustworthy, but Twitter's officials were hesitant to let the GEC enter the conversation (there is an emphasis on this being retroactive, the GEC is said to be trying to get in as if they had always been there) and the reason might have to do with Twitter's perception of GEC as "Trumpy".
-
Call it turf wars, call it the Deep State, but the end result was that the FBI advocated for and ultimately won the right to be one of two pipelines to Twitter along with the DHS - all others would only be on the industry calls.
-
There's also more about the strategy being used by researchers and intelligence agencies (including the GEC) where they went public before consulting with Twitter over any list of provided accounts.
13 is by Alex Berenson. This one is super short and just covers how weak Scott Gottlieb's requests to get some Covid-related accounts suspended were. Gottlieb is one of Pfizer's board members, and Alex very much accuses him of being financially motivated in requesting that certain tweets and accounts get removed, including Berenson's own.
Overall, 12 was more substantial and engaging, though mostly a repeat of 11. 13 was a bit newer, but I'm not quite sure if I trust Berenson's summarization of the medical research being that natural immunity is better than vaccination.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Hasn't the official narrative for the past couple decades been that the reason schools in the U.S. underperform is due to lack of funding?
I don't think the argument has ever been "all schools everywhere that are underperforming need funds", it's "all public schools...".
drmanhattan16
9mo ago
"The Founding Fathers were racist" is not a trivial statement in this case. It is very much an important idea that both sides grapple with in their critiques and rebuttals of said critiques. I don't know how you can say that this is a case of "Internet literalism" when it's a crucial point in the CRT edifice. Hell, this is literally one of the basis facts of the 1619 project. Rufo would 100% deliberately trash this because it constitutes a major attack on his stance.
drmanhattan16
11mo ago
Nope, not at all. This change is uniformly impacting everyone, and there is no reason to think "powerjannies" are likely to leave and get replaced by people who are more sympathetic to the average person here.
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
I want to eventually get some grasp on feminism as a whole. While I can find pro-feminist writings and arguments easily, I find myself unable to find anti-feminist arguments of a suitable quality.
Therefore, I'm asking for recommendations on anti-feminist arguments, books, etc. Ideally, these should be as evidenced, charitable, nuanced, etc. as one would expect from the older SlateStarCodex posts. They don't have to be perfect, but I'm going to be less engaged with someone trying to tell me the feminists are all stupid or evil or some combination of the two.
drmanhattan16
5mo ago
If God wanted shapes rotated he would have oriented them differently in the first place.
Which way did he orient the circle?
drmanhattan16
7mo ago
To the degree that Hamas is the legitimate government of the Palestinian people, the people bear responsibility for their international diplomacy (such as it is).
It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
Thirdly, any analysis where you conclude that the average person holds non-negligible responsibility for something like government of all things must explain what exactly the analyst thinks is okay to do to that person with said responsibility. Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
See, I have to wonder about this kind of thing. What other flag could they possibly have in mind that they wanted banned? The Nazi flag? Unlikely to be flown there. The Gadsen flag? Probably not very salient politically to Muslims.
I won't deny the possibility that this really is some "Pride is not for the government to approve or disapprove via flags" principle, but I think this ban has a good chance of having been crafted specifically with the intention to ban the Pride flag from being flown. I legitimately cannot think of another flag which many Americans know the meaning of on sight.
More options
Context Copy link