gorge
9d ago
Why defend someone's speech?
- I might agree with the speech, think the speech was necessary and true, and that people should hear it.
- I might disagree with the speech, but think it close enough to something that I could say that I want it defended so that I don't want people overly punished for things said in the heat of the moment
- I might strongly disagree with the speech, it was something I would never say, I think the speech makes the world a worse place, but I am doing my part to defend a general culture of free speech, which is important because only by maintaining a general culture of free speech can we get a full hearing of arguments in order to decide on what is true and how we should run our society.
With the case of Kimmel getting canceled, 1 and 2 do not apply, so only 3 applies. But we do not have that general culture of free speech, and so there is no general principle to defend. Gina Carano never got rehired, the NY Times never apologized to Razib Khan and rehired him, Middlebury never apologized to Charles Murray and never brought him back, etc. etc. Like, if the right had said, "you should not cancel people" and then the Left had said, "You are right, we were wrong, we will rehire those people and stop canceling rightists" and then the right got into power and started canceling leftists ... ok that would be reneging on a deal and hypocritical. But that is not what happened. So what we are left with is that I am happy Kimmel got suspended because what he said was bad. Maybe it wasn't firing worthy, but he should apologize. Lot's of comedians have apologized over the years fro crossing the line. And last I heard the reason for the suspension was that he wanted to double-down instead of apologizing.
So essentially your argument has to come down to that for the right, a strategy of pacifism is better than tit-for-tat; that sticking to the cooperation corner even after the left has defected is ultimately going to be more successful. I don't think that would have worked, but I don't think tit-for-tat is going to work either. I expect things to continue to get worse.
gorge
12d ago
John Stewart (in his prime), John Oliver, Nikole Hannah Jones, David Hogg .... and historically ... MLK....
gorge
12d ago
No, in the full quote he specifically insulted Donald Trump saying he was grieving like a four-year-old mourning a goldfish -- https://www.themotte.org/post/3263/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/367826?context=8#context
gorge
12d ago
What's the point of an analogy if it doesn't work unless it's exactly the same? ... "Don't make jokes about deaths" wasn't really a standard until last week, and while people often got sensitive about such jokes, this wasn't a broad standard
There is a different standard for the jokes of a network television host, than there is for the jokes of a shock jock or a horrible person on South Park. With the network variety show, the implicit agreement with the audience is that "these are the kinds of jokes you can re-tell in polite company; these are the kind of jokes that good people can tell." So when he tells a joke that only Cartman or Howard Stern would tell, he is not doing his job correctly.
There is also a different standard for jokes about self-inflicted stupid deaths versus tragic deaths versus murders versus political assassinations. This is the most significant political assassination in the United Sates since RFK. I highly doubt any network comedian was making RFK jokes a week after his death. I remember Princess Diana jokes, but I highly doubt they were made a week or a month within her death on network TV.
Looks like a local sports radio host specifically mocked Halladay's death, and the stupidity of his actions, but he was widely criticized for this and forced to issue a public apology: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/nov/09/boston-radio-host-mocks-moron-roy-halladay-after-death-in-plane-crash-at-40
gorge
13d ago
I looked that it up at one point and its not so straight forward. IIRC, he stayed on the air the rest of the year and just wasn't renewed, and ABC claims that the non-renewal was due to ratings, not what he said. Bill Maher claims that he was canceled for what he says, but he would have an incentive to spin it that way, it looks better for him to be canceled for being edgy than for having low ratings.
gorge
13d ago
I'm not familiar with those cases, do you have an example of a high-status comedian cracking an insulting joke toward one of their friends or loved ones?
There also is a difference between a death due to a person's own recklessness/stupidity, which is often the fodder for jokes, and an outright assassination.
gorge
13d ago
They were making the case of tolerating so much more back in the late 2010s.
Find me an example where a TV host was canceled because they went on air and gratuitously insulted someone grieving their friend being assassinated, and the right saying the cancellation was unjustified.
I always thought "cancel culture" was a bad term and a misdiagnosis. The problem was people getting canceled for saying true things or for semi-private jokes, while lots of people were saying horrible anti-white things or pro-riot things with giant megaphones and not facing any consequences. Lot's of people should have been canceled who weren't. Lots of people on the left were awful saying things in 2020 that would have got themselves rightly canceled in 1995 or 1955. For example, I always felt that the NY Times should have canceled Sarah Jeong for her gratuitous anti-white statements, but kept on Razib Khan for his smart and truthful analysis. Nikole Hannah Jones should have been fired from the NY Times for endorsing the 2020 riots. Etc.
There is always an Overton window. And the Overton window of what can be said on network TV without getting reprimanded or punished by your boss is and ought to be smaller than the Overton window of what you can publish in your own pamphlet without getting punished by the state.
Yes. Kimmel's words were not a "micro" aggression, they were a full-on macro-aggression, legally, if someone said to your face they would be "fighting words" under classic constitutional doctrine. Imagine your friend had just been murdered, and one person asks you how you are doing but you don't want to talk about it so you say, "Great" and then change the subject and talk about an addition to your house, and then another person says in front of everyone there, "look at this guy, he's not grieving like he lost a friend, he's grieving like a four-year old who lost a goldfish." You would want to punch that guy straight in the face, and legally, the guy who said that would been committing incitement to a breach of the peace.
The quote above is the pre-amble for the actual "joke" -- https://x.com/suayrez/status/1968464780940673083 For those who don't want to watch, Kimmel shows a clip of reporters asking Trump how he is holding up and Trump saying "I think very good" then pointing to construction of the White House ballroom and boasting about it, to which Kimmel makes the actual "joke": "This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish,"
To judge whether this is appropriate, imagine this in a more politically neutral circumstance. Imagine the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys had just been murdered by a deranged Eagles fan. A journalist catches Cowboys owner Jerry Jones at some random moment and asks him, "how are you holding up?" and he says "just fine" and points to a new improvement to the football stadium. Would it be in the realm of appropriateness for a late-night comedian to take a shot at Jerry Jones for this response? No. People have all sorts of responses to grief, he might have just wanted to change the subject because he did not want to talk about it with the journalist, he might have been trying to put on a brave face. Telling a national audience that "this is not how an adult grieves his friend" and saying this man who just suffered a traumatic loss "is acting like a four year old" would be considered a terrible thing to say, far beyond the pale. Any broadcast channel comedian would have faced a suspension for a joke that off-base.
It was absolutely a cheap potshot by Kimmel, and it shows that Kimmel is a lot more concerned with taking potshots at Trump than he cares about the fact that the political climate is heated enough to produce this kind of assassination.
If I was in Trump's position, being publicly insulted and told I'm grieving like a four-year-old when my friend and ally was just assassinated would fill be with a hot rage and I would want to use every tool in my disposable to destroy the person who insulted me. George Washington had his seconds kill people in duels for less than this.
It is said that a republic requires a virtuous citizenry. Well, "don't make cheap and nasty insults at the leader when they are assassination the murder of their ally" is part of the virtue needed to maintain a republic where free speech exists.
gorge
13d ago
Trump was holding the steering wheel from 2016 to 2020 ... but the establishment had cut the cables connecting the wheel to the rudder and he hadn't figured out how to reconnect them. Trump 47 has leveled up their game.
hit some new lows
By saying "new low" he is making the fact that MAGA [accurately as it turns out] is characterizing the kid as non-MAGA appear lower than 1) leftists celebrating the murder 2) the actual murder itself.
But, I want Kimmel on air, and no one fired over Kirk. I really don't want the US going to the way of Europe,
Do you want the United States to return to the norms of the 80s and 90s? Because the type of one-sided vitriol exhibited by Kimmel and Colbert has no place on a broadcast network, broad audience, light-hearted variety show. They should have both told years ago to tone down the rhetoric and be more two-sided. The "cancel culture" meme has always been false, for the past 10 years leftists have been escalating rhetoric and attacks and anti-white sentiment in a way that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago, without getting canceled. If you want normalcy, there must be equal fear in straying to far too the left or too far to the right, especially when it comes to talking about political violence.
Personally, I think it is too late anyways to return to normalcy. The Democrat-Republican conflict is going to continue to escalate until one of the two parties is all but destroyed. Stay safe out there.
gorge
25d ago
This year, the difference between the men’s and women’s winners in Boston was less than fifteen minutes in a total time of just over two hours.
If we are looking at athletic differences in general, marathon is probably the endeavor most favorable to women. The male advantage in lower body is less than upper body; the advantage in endurance is less than in raw power. A marathon is not comparing each sex carrying a similar load, like a pack of 50 pounds of military ammo and equipment. And a marathon is only measuring a single dimension of ability. So a 4SD outlier for a woman in running, will be better than almost all men. But in most athletic endeavors require multiple dimensions of skill -- endurance and power and dexeterity and accuracy. It is very likely that a 4SD outlier in one areas is an outlier in a second or third unrelated characteristic. SO when you have a more well-rounded athletic activity it will be the case that the 99th percentile woman will be worse than the majority of men. When the Canadian gold-medal winning Olympic woman's team has done training in the past, they have played in a men's high school league, and been middle of the pack. Thus the best women in the world are basically slightly above average high schoolers. And this was with checking banned. Thus I think most people still substantially understimate how big the sex differences are in athletic activity.
gorge
25d ago
The other thing about lynchings, is that even if you believe that every one was actual murder, the total number of white-on-black lynchings for all of American history since the civil war, is far less than the excess number of black-on-white murders over the past fifty years. So if we are to focus on problems based on the size of the problem, the history textbook section on the problems of black crime should be many times larger than the section on lynching.
gorge
25d ago
But what Cooper also does a great job of is showing the racism that the Panthers and the People’s Temple and their supporters active and passive were all reacting against. He starts the work quoting extensively from Isabella Wilkerson on lynchings in the South, the resulting Great Migration to the North, and the racism faced by blacks in Northern cities like Chicago. The violence in Cicero against a college educated father trying to move his family into a better neighborhood, where he could pay lower rent and have room for the piano they bought for their daughter.** He movingly talks about MLK and Selma, and the violence that lead to the rise of SDS and the Black Panthers.
This is just basic party-line establishment liberal/progressive history that I got in high school and college 101 courses. The entire point of Moldbug was saying, "this is the history you have been taught, but here, read these actual sources from closer to the time, many from liberals or black people presenting evidence against interest, and you can see the mainstream narrative about racism in the 1950s and 1960s was just as crazy wrong as the BLM/NY Times narrative about race is crazy wrong in 2010" And myself and many other read the sources he recommended and was convinced he was right.
For an overview, you can try these classic blog posts:
https://devinhelton.com/why-urban-decay
https://radishmag.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/black-history-i/
https://radishmag.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/the-truth-about-lynching/
Or you can undergo the full treatment and actually read the books Moldbug recommends here, and then give us a book report: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/07/olxiv-rules-for-reactionaries/
The reality is that black people had something like 5X to 100X higher rates of predatory crime, and that there were many cases of white people doing the "right" thing and welcoming black people into their neighborhoods with gifts and open arms -- and often the result was that in a few years the white kids were getting beat up at the bus stop and elderly people were getting assaulted and the girls were getting their asses grabbed in the schools and overall the situation was intolerable. Given that, I do not blame white people not wanting a black family to move in. Maybe they are upstanding and won't create any problems ... but maybe not. And in a time before credit checks and internet searches there wasn't a good way to tell. Furthermore, maybe they have relatives who will be a problem, or their daughter is going to bring home a boyfriend and he and his friends are going to be a problem. Or maybe if you let in one family, then another will come, then another, and the entire neighborhood will flip and then your life will suck. That said, some neighborhoods did seem to have success with a "black a block" strategy where they allowed in just one or two high-quality black families to move in. But such a strategy was something required more sophistication to pull-off, your ordinary working class whites are not going to be able to do it.
The other thing people forget is that in a time before video surveillance and computerized criminal databases, phenotype-based discrimination ("you don't look like you are from around here, what is your business? who do you know?" was the only way to keep a neighborhood safe. All neighborhoods were heavily segregated, polish neighborhoods, Irish, Italian, Jewish, etc, and people from a different ethnic group could not just freely walk into another neighborhood. If you allow strangers to walk unmolested through your neighborhood, it was trivially easy for that stranger to commit a crime, slip away, and never be found again. There are tons of stories of Irish youth wailing on Italian youth or vice versa over territory, and blacks wailing on whites, yet mainstream history will only tell about whites wailing on blacks, making whites looking uniquely evil.
gorge
26d ago
And what we're seeing is instead that it's all more complicated than we thought it was, and definitely isn't traceable to US Census category levels of resolution.
Maybe more complicated than you thought it was, but Sailer and the HBDers have talking about these nuances and for a long time. IIRC correctly, it was from the Sailersphere that I learned about interesting racial differences even among the broad racial categories, such as the height advantage and athletic prowess of the peoples of the Dinaric Alps. Furthermore, it was actually sprinting and marathoning that Sailer used as the clearest example of racial differences. Sailer has always said nurture matters as well as nature for most things. But sprinting has far less room for nurture playing a role than does a high-skill and complex game like basketball. I also learned about the differences between East Africans and West Africans and Khosis, and then even among West African tribes, etc. There is a running joke that if a man knows what an Igbo is, he is probably a super racist.
gorge
26d ago
Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh America First, Nazi's filling Madison Garden.... I should have just said "rightists" instead of "conservatives". It's a tricky period because an older right (the Coolidge right) was being defeated and destroyed and new forms of rightism were splintering from the New Deal and trying to coalesce.
gorge
26d ago
If you read progressive histories, there is a lot of cherry-picking/nut-picking of the dumbest or vilest things conservatives said, and making that the representative of the whole argument. And as /u/sodiummuffin points out, some of that nut-picking is just straight up fabricated.
Meanwhile sometimes you read the best of the old racists and what they say is remarkably sophisticated, nuanced and time proven its accuracy. For instance, Francis Galton was down on blacks ever achieving a high level of development, but pointed out that the Chinese were actually smart and industrious but held back by bad government/environment. This analysis was remarkable predictive.
The other thing that happens is that we often underestimate how old political correctness is. Even in the 1920 and 1930s a certain set of elite liberals would exaggerate the achievements of women and blacks, and it was becoming politically incorrect in elite circles to talk about blacks being less smart. In such a climate, it is often easier to make an argument of the stor, "Integration would be bad for black people" than "integration would be bad because it hurts the interest of white people." Today this is the trope of "Democrats are the real racists" and conservatives making arguments along the line of "affirmative action is bad because it is bad for black people because it creates mismatch." Or Bush's argument that blacks were hurt by "the soft bigotry of low expectations." So moderate conservatives make a bad argument out of political correctness, and then that argument ends up proved wrong, thus discrediting the conservative, thus giving the liberals another chance with the ball.
Also, conservatives have been the populist party for the past 90+ years, they don't have institutions that do a good job at filtering for the truth, and so often the most famous conservative spokespeople and Uncle Roy say a lot of dumb things, even if they are more directionally correct than the liberals.
The point of the antiversity, thus, is to have a much, much more truthful version of rightism than what Uncle Roy can produce. The point is to create an actual credible, good alternative to the progressive institutions so we don't have to rely on Joe Rogan and right-wing twitter. So the Antiversity is supposed to be much, much better than Uncle Roy, and Uncle Roy, despite is flaws, is closer to the truth than modern progressives.
gorge
3mo ago
A babysitter quit because one of her "stuck ideas" was to get revenge on the sitter for some slight (didn't get the right color dinner plate, if I remember correctly.)
What was the punishment for this?
When I say the oldest is a handful, I mean that she is seven years old and has been suspended from school twice for running away from school and across a busy street without looking. ... she tried to run into the parking lot by herself but an employee stopped her.
What was the punishment for this?
gorge
3mo ago
I've always thought they had the exact same communication style -- they both constantly make low-effort lies and say things for the effect, not because they have carefully thought it through. In the Isaacson's biography there is the story about how Elon lied upfront about the number of users his company had when they were negotiating the merger to create PayPal. There are his constant claims that Tesla's car will be "fully self-driving this year." There were all his claims on X about finding some fraud that turned out not to be the case. Neither are Machiavelli types that careful plot high-effort technically true deceptions.
The other thing that comes up his biography is that Elon has never worked well under others, never gotten along well with a boss or controlling investors.
In almost all famous successful partnerships (Augustus and Agrippa, Washington and Hamilton, Jordan and Pippen, Jobs and Woz, Brady and Belichick), there is one person who takes to being the face, and one person being great at checking their ego and being a deadly efficient operator. Elon has too much ego to be the subordinate, deadly efficient operator. And Trump just isn't actually very competent and has a fragile ego, and so has trouble delegating to more competent people and sticking with that person's plans when the going gets tough.
gorge
6mo ago
Grammatically you are right, but my point still stands in that their is no person, group, movement or faction that is an actor with agency in these headlines. So in the two non-passive voice sentences "Anger turns" -- it's just disembodied anger, just a fact of reality, no particular person group or faction is responsible for, say, committing the sin of wrath. And then "Tesla faces." Who does Tesla face? Who faces Tesla? Again, no agenic actor. If you can think of a better term than "progressive passive voice" for these kinds of sentences, I'm all ears.
gorge
6mo ago
The "media ignore it entirely" is such a claim: CNN, CBS, ABC, and my favorite, an ominous report from the Washington Post. This story is obviously being covered - maybe more than it deserves to be - so why type something out you know to be a lie or something that 5 seconds of research would falsify?
Yeah "media ignores" it is wrong. Media spins the vandalism using what Cofeve Anon calls "progressive passive voice" is the correct critique. Notice these headlines:
"Tesla vehicles in Chicago vandalized in protest of Elon Musk's role in White House"
"Tesla vehicles destroyed, vandalized since Musk began role at White House, authorities say"
"Anger at Elon Musk turns violent with molotov cocktails and gunfire at Tesla lots"
"Tesla faces vandalism and protests amid backlash against Elon Musk"
Every single one of these is in the passive voice. There is no person or persons with agency that are doing these criminal acts. They simply ... happen... they are simply a logical consequence of "anger" and "backlash" at what Elon Musk is doing.
Whereas if the sides were reversed, the headlines would read:
"Republican temper-tantrum over Musk policies results in vandalism to Tesla vehicles"
"Far-right protest turns violent with molotov cocktails and gunfire at Tesla lots"
"Right-wing mobs unleash terror and destruction in response to Elon Musk's new policies"
gorge
6mo ago
Must meet all the reccommended Dietary intakes for micros/macros on Cronometer without exceeding the upper limit (Except for the carbs/fat). Note that cronometer has no EPA or DHA requirement and only has a total omega 3 category sadly....Why couldn't it get vitamin D or Vitamin E and why was the USDA willing to just give up instead of manually editing the diet to incude enough vitamin A/D? (pretty easy to do with canned seafood, sunflower seeds and almonds)
A lot of these recommended dietary intakes are basically yolo'd. They are sometimes based on typical consumption of healthy people rather than what people actually need, or are they are based on what people need in recovery but not in steady state, or they are just greatly padded. For Vitamin E for instance, U.S. says 15mg while UK says you only need 5mg. And for Vitamin D, you need much at all in your diet if you get a few hours a week in peak sunlight. There's also issues where meat and eggs might have lower amount of some vitamin or mineral, but much higher bioavailbility than a grain source or a vegetable source, but the RDA's are based on lower bioavailbility.
I typically eat 1.5 pounds of vegetables a day,...Fruit again was a deviation (as expected) I was eating a little over 1.25 pounds of fruit daily
You eat an usually high amount of fruits and veggies. I don't think you actually need that much.
At this point, I think any corporation that has employees with the job of "compliance" is de facto an arm of the state. There are always a million ways for the state to get you. After Elon bought Twitter and turned it into a haven for "right-wing misinformation and hate" suddenly his companies were under a half-dozen different dubious investigations. And don't forget the CIvil Rights Act, which has been twisted in a way that it basically mandates every corporation with more 50 employees police the speech of its employees! Was James Damore fired because Google was under pressure from various sex discrimination lawsuits? Impossible to know for sure, but it has to play a role.
I don't think we really have worked out how the First Amendment is supposed to work in a world where every significant organization with a "printing press" also has a compliance department. And really, the parties are simply too far part at this point to negotiate a truce over a new set of norms and boundaries about free speech.
More options
Context Copy link