gaygroyper100pct
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User ID: 1855
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
How do you propose to turn political twitter into an amount of money remotely proportional to the risk it poses to sports&celebs twitter?
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
re: my regex having lots of false positives, that's fine. You go to the bottom anyway. There's no shortage of people to populate the top of the replies to Tom Cruise and Drake.
I stand corrected on what western anime nerds like.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
I'm sure it is during the brief periods (presidential elections) when a spectacle is happening.
From what I recall of advertising analytics I've done in the past, it's even less profitable than the engagement numbers might suggest. Kellogs doesn't exactly love having Frosted Flakes associated with "Trump is the most raaaaacist guy ever", "Lock Her Up" or even "thousands dead in Somalia" and "plane crash" - it's just a negative mental association.
Tom Cruise, Aguilera and "Happy Hannukah" don't have this problem.
Of course engagement is up - it's the world cup and American football time! The top of my "For You" page from a logged out browser in India is #fifaworldcup, ronaldo, #sachintendulkar, golden boot, france 4-2, money money money and greatest of all time. The non-football related topics are #sachintendulkar (a cricketer) and money money money.
A logged out page in America has 8/10 on top being NFL, the last two being "Happy Hannukah" and "Twitter CEO". The top of the page is literally Patriots vs Raiders scores.
I will take the opportunity to re-up a comment I left recently, explaining how Musk can make twitter profitable again: https://www.themotte.org/post/229/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/42105?context=8#context
tl;dr; sports + celebrities. No one cares about paul graham or taylor lorenz, lots of people care about Brady, Belichick and Dicker the Kicker. If you don't know who they are, that's your bubble. The only non-NFL humans that twitter America seems to care about are Tom Cruise, Elon Musk, Lionel Messi and (way down the list) Christina Aguilera.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
I cannot reveal the anecdata on which I've based this without being either super vague or alternately revealing details which are likely traceable to a small set of people. The tl;dr; is that someone I trust was briefly involved in a situation of this sort on the periphery, hated it tremendously, but described the process to me.
Feel free to dismiss it as you see fit.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
I'm confused by don't shit where you eat. Isn't tinder, by definition, randos and not where you eat?
Out of curiosity, what is it you believe is awful about my hot nerdy friend's game? Women get the hookup with glorious glutes guy they wanted. Maybe a friendship develops, maybe not. But it seems like a good shot at everyone getting something of value.
How Elon Musk can unlock the value of twitter, you all live in a bubble edition.
Here's a theme I've been seeing in multiple comment threads here, the theme being the assumption that motte users and the leftist journalists they follow are typical twitter users.
Those are the type of users [10k-ish follower esoteric accounts like popehat] (unlike journo-s) that twitter can't afford to lose. Not sure if network effects will be that strong.
This is based on a totally false idea of what the heck twitter actually is. Go look at the top 10 accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_accounts
There are 2 celebrity businessmen (one of whom became a celebrity politician), 1 celebrity politician, more celebrities, plus Narendra Modi. If you go further down the list of top twitter accounts and drop stuff that's clearly the result of a well placed "follow me on twitter button" (e.g. @youtube, @pmoindia, @cnn), you discover that twitter is mostly celebrities and sports.
From a logged out incognito account on a US VPN, the top 10 trending topics are currently NFL (6), pro wrestling (1), NBA (1), happy birthday taylor swift (1) and business (1 topic about SBF). Of the UI tabs twitter has chosen to put on the trending page, they are "For You" (celebrities plus some tweets about TV shows, with a little news mixed in), "Trending" (celebrities and sports), "World Cup", "News" (which includes celebrity news), "Sports" and "Entertainment". (India is not much different.)
This even fits the anecdotal stories that have made it into our bubble - after Musk fired the moderators, twitter Japan was suddenly a bunch of anime, j-pop and k-pop.
Here's another hint that you're in a bubble: a significant chunk of the anime that's trending is stuff like "My Dress Up Darling" or "Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -Ultra Romantic" instead of the ninja stuff beloved by western nerds. I'm in a bubble too! I once looked up forums for an anime about cooking with the goal of recreating recipes from the show. What I got was a bunch of discussions about who male protagonist everyman diner chef should have sex with - texas A1 steak girl, high class french food girl and rural japanese cuisine good girl.
So here's how Musk can unlock the true value of twitter.
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Fire the moderators to save money and let everybody post a bunch of Happy bday taylor swift I :heart emoji: u.
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Downweight replies that match
n(.*[i1l].*)g+(.*e.*)rso you can only see them after digging through 10+ pages of "I :heart emoji: u Rihanna". -
Stop trying to put leftist cause of the week at the top, and allow twitter to fully exploit for engagement that which it already is: celebs and sports.
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Allow Apple and Ritz Crackers to place their advertisements between taylor swift birthday wishes (by anyone but Kanye, next year Kanye is probably fine) and discussion of how awesomely Asuka punched the heel of the week on WWE.
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Don't worry about the journalists leaving. Twitter matters to journalists, but journalists matter very little to twitter. Their excessive influence is actually mostly a historical anachronism - they were early adopters and spread it to the mainstream, but they are no longer very important. Also they can't leave.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
No one is bound by anything and no one claims they are. The claim is that the employees, current and former, become an influence network where it is in the interest of the participants to prioritize their reputation within the network over their fiduciary duties.
Moreover, this stuff is generally handled via implicit escalation. "Ok I'll crack down on the beheading videos and build a connection with people still on the inside." "Ok, I guess advocating for beheading is pretty similar." ... "Advocating for Trump is basically the same as the previous step."
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
The idea of using a hook-up/dating app for finding friends is... bizarre to me, to say the least, but well maybe it happens. I can see how maybe it's a thing in the gay community, but I still find it bizarre.
I am told by straight friends that they do this too. Many women seek social interactions on tinder with the lure of possible sex to rope guys in.
I also know of one very hot but socially awkward straight guy who does this. Step 1: display abs and do hookup. Step 2: friends with benefits. Step 3: some of the friends with benefits become genuine friendships. Or maybe he's just buff nerd bodybuilder with a harem, I can't tell.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
If 15 year old straight boys had a large population of pretty adult women who would probably fuck them if they could plausibly pretend to be 18, I guarantee that most of them would lie, cheat and steal to do so. Denial of these facts is denying basic observed male sexuality.
And of course this is a who/whom issue. Milo got cancelled for openly discussing his own experiences with this. Dan Savage did not. Now the media is defending Roth for the same.
I will also suggest - based on my own personal experience - that useful insights can be gained by reading old greek literature. In the locale I lived as a teenager, gay sex was illegal until 2018. In my view I benefitted from a relationship with a considerably older man - he was a bit of a mentor and taught me quite a bit about bodybuilding, sex and navigating non-PMC Indian life as a homosexual. This seems to have been common and accepted by the Greeks - it's a part of gay relations that I don't think has much of a straight analogue.
By "non-PMC Indian life", I mean that the experience of a civil service guy in what is now Telangana will be quite different from that of a techbro in Bangalore.
I also think Roth is just wrong. Provided there is a culture where older bodybuilder + teenage twink relations are treated as necessarily being a mentor/mentee type relation, they are definitely superior to two teenagers smelling each other's farts. However my general impression of gay culture in the US is that there's absolutely no way this culture could be built. It fundamentally conflicts with the leftist "anything that sounds bad is good" culture that has fully colonized gay America.
colonialism (or colonial-ish actions) necessarily being Actually A Good Thing.
That's not what we're discussing.
Scroll up a bit: https://www.themotte.org/post/221/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/39886?context=8#context
It was proposed that a distinction between colonialism and immigration is immigrants are "are invested in the success of their new home country". But if you take British India as a central example of colonialism, this distinction doesn't actually distinguish.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
Literate programming is also executable.
Take any jupyter notebook, click "restart run all" and it re-executes the code cells.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
Here's a very trivial and absolutely unclear case: literate programming.
Consider the style of Jupyter notebook in which one produces a document, intended for human consumption (i.e. full of explanatory markdown cells) but which also has executable code cells.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
First of all, the architectural style is Anglo-Indian. It's influenced by the British but with many local adaptations. If these buildings were in London they would look out of place.
In any case, I don't see why it can't be both. Victoria Terminus is a functioning train station that was build for the long term. It's not anything like what gets built by people solely focused on resource extraction - e.g. a logging camp or oil well. It indicates a long term investment in infra and human capital as opposed to simply a desire to snatch and grab.
You're also glossing over a non-trivial chunk of what British Colonialism involved: the idea that it was Britain's duty to educate and improve the places they colonized. Literacy worked for Britain, why not Bengal? If a negro sets foot in London he becomes free, so why is he not equally free in Dahomey? (Note: literal argument used by imperial abolitionists.) And given proper education an Indian can of course become as competent a soldier or administrator as a Britain - it is the duty of the colonialists to provide this opportunity.
That's the ideal, at least. You can read Charles Napier's biography to hear it expounded upon in detail, as well as a bunch of complaints about how it's not being lived up to. The British were not universally as awesome as Napier, of course.
As for the China example, I do not identify as American so perhaps the example is inapt. However, suppose hypothetically that China was a) far more advanced than the US and b) made a long term investment in transmitting some of that advancement to the US (even while imposing a China-style political system). I would consider that an investment, albeit one I perhaps resented or opposed for other reasons.
Note also that this stuff was not necessarily unwelcome to many Indians. Various princely states were closely allied with the British and more progressive ones treated Britain as a source of knowledge; for example, the Nizam of Hyderabad built Osmania University with assistance from the British. It became more British (e.g. language changed from Urdu to English) after India conquered Hyderabad in 1948.
If you disagree, name another English language book that covers the particular topic of English language and modern Indian class roles. I can't think of much; most English writers do not generally want to acknowledge it.
I didn't recommend it for the plot. I wouldn't recommend twilight for the plot either, but if someone wanted to understand western female empowerment-by-infantilization, it's a perfectly fine place to start.
I literally gave a principle a few comments up that lets me determine whether it's locals enlisting outsiders. I can't think of any cases where that principle fails to reproduce leftist views, though I can think of one edge case (and a fix, simply using the term "adjacent" as modern leftists do).
https://www.themotte.org/post/221/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/40194?context=8#context
Why do you feel the need to misrepresent what I said?
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
Nope. Please read more carefully.
tl;dr; you refuse to provide a clear principle by which I can determine whether it's locals enlisting outsiders or outsiders enlisting locals. This makes me question your good faith.
You said so yourself: "So basically, the theory is that an alliance between colonialists and domestic factions will result in political domination."
If colonialism is political domination at a level as low as that of the Nizam of Hyderabad or British Bengal, then Democrats and their Mexican allies are far past that point. I note you again refuse to state a clear principle. Odd.
I do agree that American Republicans want more control over my life than the British did, they are irrelevant to this conversation since they don't plan to make it happen by bringing in foreigners to help them.
You are also grossly misrepresenting their positions.
They want to say who you can marry,
No Republican has ever proposed a law saying I can't declare a man to be my husband, put him in my will and make him my medical proxy. They just said he can't get my social security benefits when I die.
or who you can sleep with,
This is not a mainstream Republican position and has not been for many years.
or whether you can have an abortion, etc, etc.
This last bit is true. The British also wanted control over whether I could burn a widow or keep slaves.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
outsiders enlisting (or hiring) locals to help the outsiders take over.
Re immigration, you are positing something completely different: Locals enlisting outsiders to allow those ** locals **to gain political advantage.
I understand now.
Assumption: non-whites lack agency.
When the Nizam of Hyderabad allies with the British for mutual advantage, this is outsiders enlisting locals since Indians lack agency.
When white American Democrats enlist Mexican immigrants to ally with them for mutual advantage, this is locals enlisting outsiders since Mexicans lack agency.
I don't know what you mean by "taking over". In terms of control over daily life that is demanded, certainly American Democrats and their Mexican allies want far more control over my life than the British ever did. All the British wanted was for my local ruler to send them some tax money, and maybe they'd build roads and schools.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
Probably deservedly so, but then also projecting some of that hatred onto contemporary Muslims who don't really deserve any of it.
Mughals - warlords who steal lots of stuff to buy luxury items.
Contemporary Indian Muslims - owner-operators of bakeries and non-veg restaurants.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
Left wing Americans routinely brag about how immigration will grant them a permanent majority. So basically, the theory is that an alliance between colonialists and domestic factions will result in political domination.
Or, if you are a right wing person and want right wing mood affiliation, take the same facts and attach the words "great replacement".
Is it your belief that a few thousand British managed to conquer India all by themselves? Indians may not be natural warriors but be realistic. (I know it is a bit difficult to square the Maratha empire with contemporary stereotypes of Marathis.) In all cases it is a story of small numbers of British together with considerably larger numbers of locals conquering a different group of locals. From what I understand of colonialism in the Americas, it was pretty similar - Pizarro certainly did not wage a 20 year campaign and conquer Peru all with only 180 people. He aligned himself with the right locals and tipped the balance.
If we're comparing the tyranny of the two empires,
We aren't, we're disputing the definition of "colonialism".
To be fair, positive effects of the British Empire are probably more noticeable now due to the fact that it was much more recent.
Not that much more recent. The British arrived in India about 80 years after the Mughals, 1610 or so. They built factories.
By 1781 they were building schools cause literacy was profitable. In 1837 the postal service was founded. By 1855 India had a telegraph system. The Mughal empire ended in 1857. All throughout this time they were creating new lines of business, for both domestic and foreign consumption - e.g. widespread chai cultivation.
What did the Mughals do during the time period of overlap? Keep in mind that they were far richer and more numerous than the British, particularly early on.
It's a bit different for the British Raj in that famines under the Raj were almost always direct consequences of the actions taken by the Raj's government,
"Carts belonging to banjaras (carriers) transporting grain from the more productive regions of Malwa were intercepted and supplies diverted to feed Shah Jahan’s [Mughal Emperor] royal army in Burhanpur, who were fighting territorial wars in the Deccan (southern) provinces." - Peter Mundy, a firsthand observer
Not so different. Here's another, this time caused by a combination of bad years plus Maratha armies devastating all the cropland on their way to Mysore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doji_bara_famine
That's the story of most famines around the world, at least since the early modern period - bad weather combined with bad policies, e.g. looting grain carts and trampling fields.
As for the Mughals, I didn't say they were less "oppressive" and I'm not sure what you mean by that. I said they were terrible.
They are generally accepted to have average tax rates on the poor of approximately 50%. That's a lot of money going into state coffers and significantly exceeded other empires, including the British. Where did the money go? Traveling as a tourist shows us many opulent palaces and tombs built by the Mughals, and history books also tell us of the opulence of their courts. History books also tell us of their many wars.
Put aside the historical romanticism - that's a story of warlords looting a nation, building very little, and spending the proceeds on luxuries for themselves. And it still wasn't enough - Shah Jahan's fundamental problem was that money spent on luxuries for the rulers was growing faster than the economy, and his empire was so corrupt that he couldn't stop it. Slapping a rainbow flag with a brown stripe on top of this - I mean a "we love hindus too" flag - doesn't change it. (Yes, I'm throwing in a western culture war reference since America is waking up soon.)
The British did not have that problem. Their stated goal, which they do seem to have acted on, was to grow the economy of India faster than the fraction they extracted. Kill the thuggees because the hurt trade. The Nizams of Hyderabad, with whom they were closely aligned, felt similarly. Hyderabad became so rich that India eventually conquered them to capture that wealth.
And if you travel to Bombay as a tourist you see this. There is no British palace, but there is a a British train station. It's nice and you don't need to be royalty to use it.
I don't see much evidence the Marathas thought things through at that level - there is certainly no Maratha equivalent of John Stewart Mill writing essays for them - but at the same time their culture did not seem as corrupt as the Mughals.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
Whether that happens via the application of gunboat diplomacy or not is at most an exacabatory factor. If Britain had signed sphere-of-influence treaties with the Princely States absent coercion,
To an extent this literally did happen to Hyderabad. I mean there was certainly violent coercion, but mostly from the Marathas - a voluntary alliance with the British worked well for them. But unfortunately the alliance led the Nizams to grow weak, and instead of building up an army they started building infrastructure and universities.
Hyderabad didn't lose self rule until it was colonized by India during Operation Polo in 1948.
gaygroyper100pct
1yr ago
I wish I had a good answer for this. A lot of Indian Literature runs into a problem where the only ones who are interested in translating it to English are English speaking white people or practically-white Indians. So you run into a Heisenberg's uncertainty moment, where the act of translating it makes it lose what made it special in the first place.
He should probably read Half Girlfriend by Chetan Bhagat.
::cringes in NRI::
It's about how English plays into modern class roles, quite distinct from caste. Chetan Bhagat is also the only famous person I've seen who is willing to discuss this.
You can't tie up a non-consenting woman up and have sex with her, so therefore doing the same to a consenting woman who is pretending to be non-consenting is settling for the next best thing (and must be illegal or wrong). Spot the flaw?
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