greyenlightenment
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User ID: 68
There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.
I posit the greatest post-war cultural divide in America is along educational attainment, not race or ethnicity or even politics. College-educated Americans and everyone else may as well be distinct species for all practical purposes. They live in different neighborhoods, hold different values, their children attend different schools, etc. This is could be related to the so-called 30 point IQ communications gap, but also cultural capital and literal capital. Charles Murray has written a lot about this.
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems.
I cannot recall anyone ever believing this. From the onset of the virus it had a dividing effect as policy was split almost perfectly along political lines.
I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid.
I would depend on the initial message or response. 911 was an exception in that it had the effect of bringing people together of opposing ideological lines, but the over-politization of Covid policy had the opposite effect. Had the left not immediately defaulted to masks and lockdowns and was so unyielding or unwilling to compromise, maybe it would not have been as polarizing. This shows the importance of the initial message after a catastrophe. Bush and others were smart to jump on a message of unification right after 911 instead of "you must comply".
OTOH, a pandemic is multiplicative and sensitive to initial values, hence the need for a swift and rapid initial response, but this also makes people want to push back, too, at the imposition, especially when social distancing and masks may not work as well as initially advertised.
But large conspiracies are not impossible. Many conspiracies continue to exist even when all or most information is publicly available. For example, there was a large scale effort to convince the public that Covid had a zoonotic origin. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't. But evidence in support of a lab leak was deliberately denigrated by nearly all authority figures. There was no need to maintain a secret channel of communication. Once consensus was established, peopled picked up the signals to stay on side, and ones who didn't were punished. The best evidence in favor of a lab leak (that the pandemic started near a lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses) was never secret. It was just not spoken of.
Yup a notable example of a large scale conspiracy are the trading strategies used by Renaissance Technologies, which after many decades and hundreds of employees and considerable speculation online are still a secret. Not a single one of those employees spilled the beans to the public, thanks to NDAs and financial incentives to stay quiet. It is indeed possible for large groups of people to keep secrets for a long time.
greyenlightenment
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3mo ago
The remaining primaries and convention at this point serve as little more than a coronation for the inevitable Trump nomination. It was discussed last week the unlikely circumstances in which Trump is prevented from running. The questions now are:
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The likelihood Trump wins? Betting markets put the odds between 40-60%, which is not that useful but is what I would expect. The election will be very close and come down to the usual swing states like in 2020 and 2016. Biden's approval ratings are precariously low for an incumbent, especially given that the Electoral College works to Trump's advantage.
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What will a second Trump term be like? My guess is much like his first term. A lot of hollow populist gestures to his base but not much happens. I still don't understand these people who are otherwise centrist or middle-left like Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith, who predict or expect a foreign policy crisis if trump wins , but always fail to articulate what this entails. I guess they have to keep toeing the 'orange man bad' line even though he was not that bad, and the economy and other metrics did well under his presidency (until Covid, which was out of his control anyway). Key alliances were strained much, as commonly feared in 2016-2017. The leadership of allies like Germany and France begrudgingly accepted Trump, and not much else happened.
greyenlightenment
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2mo ago
However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again.
The left, initially blindsided by Trump, turned it their advantage in 2016-2020, starting with the explosion pronoun and gender issues in 2017 , impeachment and FBI investigations in 2019, and then ending with Covid restrictions and mass social media censorship in 2020. I don't think it will be as bad if Trump wins again. The difference now is the left no longer has as much control over the narrative, as seen on Twitter now with Elon's takeover. I think many of these issued are played out.
Trump to his credit does not flip flop too much on abortion. He has never been pro-life, and will not cave to this issue despite pressure from religious organizations. Trump is right to ignore this issue and focus on immigration and the economy, as is Richard Hanania that abortion hardliners turn off moderates.
greyenlightenment
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2mo ago
This would be fine if so many employers did not req. degrees. Employers love degrees because it's an effective filtering mechanism.
greyenlightenment
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2mo ago
I doubt even the most principled libertarian would be able to resist spending tens of billions of dollars forever.
Some of the most principled libertarians worked in academia or were writers, the opposite of or private enterprise or cutthroat corporate capitalism. So it does not seem implausible the most principled libertarians would not spend the money.
greyenlightenment
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2mo ago
They did know, but nobody spoke up because there is a culture of silence at Google.
It's not so much as a culture as the incentives encourage it. It's dream job. Imagine growing up poor or lower middle class and now being in the top .1-1%.
To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.
Except it's not at all like this. Sure, maybe only one finds a chemistry job, but they all eventually find decent jobs, if the stats are any indication. College grads have half the unemployment rate compared to high school grads, and make considerably more money too , especially for STEM. This is the problem with these theories of society. They start with the theory and then everything must bend towards it or viewed through the lens of it.
I agree about consulting. Same for the financial services sector, and also the advertising industry. There are large sectors of the economy in which people are being paid large sums of money to produce mediocre results, or in which there is no way to track or quantify results, like with ad spending. It's a problem of asymmetric information. The firm knows its overcharging or overpromising, and the client doesn't.
greyenlightenment
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3mo ago
Deep fakes have existed for a while now, but they tend to be easily detected . The moving or transposed parts tend to not align well with the static parts and audio, creating a weird effect. For enough money the quality can be improved. I imagine a well funded actor could create a deep fake which passes such scrutiny. There was a notable incident: $25 million stolen due to a deep fake. This will get worse, and likely will require better ways of vetting sources as deep fake technology improves.
greyenlightenment
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2mo ago
Intelligence is like opsec: you only have to be wrong once and the enemy only has to be right once. You can get everything right but overlook a key detail. A case could be made that 911 and the Iraq War were failures: in the former missing the threat of Bin Laden (an NBA player, of all people, warned of the threat of Bin Laden in 1996) or failing to stop the hijackers, and regarding Iraq, a garbage-in-garbage-out problem.
US intelligence publicly told everyone that Russia was about to invade Ukraine weeks before it happened
Given that they got Iraq and 911 wrong, this does not prove competence, rather that they are hit and miss.
Of course, as you point out, successful intelligence by definition being covert does not leave any footprint, whereas intelligence failures are public owing to the consequences of said failure.
greyenlightenment
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2mo ago
Who else finds the stupidpol people or position to be inconsistent? The premise sounds good in theory: disaffected leftists and Marxists who believe that identify politics distracts from workers' issues and protects corporations. Fair enough. But I have found that in the comments it's constant shit-tests and questioning the motives or loyalty of others, either as not being insufficiently Marxist or , being a covert liberal, etc.
Or, second, if you accidently slaughter one of their sacred cows, even if it's otherwise consistent with the idpol or pro-workers position. For example, I argue that climate change is a distraction from workers' issues, but this steps on the feet of leftists who believe climate change is equally important or a crisis. So which is it? If liberal elites use climate change as a pretext for power, all while the cost or responsibility of fixing climate change is placed on non-elites (elites will not be living in pods or having to reduce their footprint in any meaningful sense), much like identity politics, then is not consistent to oppose the climate change narrative too?
They come off overall as disagreeable argumentative people. It's like they want to be mad at someone or something, and no one can ever be good enough or live up to some unobtainable ideal of being correctly anti-identity politics. They have become the very thing they oppose. The experience is like walking on egg shells . It's like this with other political niches too, not to only pick on them.
Regarding climate change, I am agnostic on the issue, but I don't think the left is being intellectually honest. It's a fallacious argument, specifically, the argumentum ad ignorantiam, in that any deviation of 'normal' weather or temperatures can be interpreted as evidence of climate change, which makes it impossible to ever falsify it. The burden of proof is shifted to skeptics to disprove climate change, which is impossible to do if anything can be summoned as evidence of climate change. It used to be called global warming; when that failed to stick, it was rebranded as climate change.
greyenlightenment
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4mo ago
It was a big deal in 2015-2019 online especially, but like a lot of things of that era, it fizzled out. The peak was 2017 , before the ill-fated Unite the Right rally, as you mentioned. It has been replaced/subsumed by the civ-nat/trad people on Twitter, who tend to reject the paganism or secularity of the alt-right, while still being anti-left. This is higher status too. The alt-right was damaged by being low status and being associated with LARP-ing behavior.
Even when they got together at their biggest event with Unite the Right in Charlottesville, there were barely 1,000 of them and they were vastly outnumbered by counter-protesters.
That is typically what you would expect for a movement that is mostly online. Considering that attending such an event is not without risks (like being assaulted or loss of employment), this is an underestimate of actual support.
greyenlightenment
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4mo ago
What is the steelman for voting for Trump in the primaries?
He's not a true outsider anymore. He's not an unknown quantity. We know his temperament. We know his governance style. What does he provide over Desantis/Haley/Ramaswamy? He didn't build the wall the first time, why would he do it now?
Because he's better than the alternatives, and has the greatest odds of beating Biden? It does not have to be deeper than that.
Well, what do you know, Alabama has now actually implemented this “most humane” form of execution for the first time, and news coverage from the BBC and others have been almost exclusively negative. There’s little to no nuance, just statements that the UN and EU condemns this “particularly cruel and unusual punishment.” Where now is the context that the US is merely doing what it was previously criticized for not doing?
Obviously it's negative because they are opposed to the concept of a death penalty altogether.
Regarding Canada or other examples or scenarios, waaaay easier to put someone to death who wants to die and will comply compared to someone who does not.
It peaked but a comeback was still possible in 2023 , just improbable. Politics is full of surprises and comebacks.
The more republican primary voters got to know Ron Desantis the less they wanted to vote for him apparently.
I think it was more to do with being overshadowed by Trump, literally in the case of being physically smaller. Without Trump, DeSantis is competitive; in late 2022 he polled ahead of Trump for a few months or so on the anti-wokeness angle, which was no small feat. Regarding relatability ,is he worse than Romney, yet he was nominated.
greyenlightenment
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6mo ago
this pearl clutching by the ADL is the worst. it turns off almost everyone and frames them as being the victims, when they are not. disagreement about foreign policy is not hate speech.
This, combined with Nikki Haley's recent bizarre "Israel doesn't need the US, we need them" nonsense makes me think the GOP is trying to make some sort of push regarding foreign policy towards Israel. Or maybe it really is all one big conspiracy lol?
like 2003 again. the possibility of deployment cannot be ruled out if things get worse.
greyenlightenment
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3mo ago
It's been interesting watching this argument continue to unfold between Stancil and Sailer, and it's still going on. A couple weeks ago we had the CW thread about BAP saying that Sailer-style race-realism is a dead end and the right-wing should embrace the myth of colorblindness. This thread shows why that conclusion is wrong. HBD is not a mythological replacement for progressivism (and that is actually what we need), but this thread shows it's needed because it's incredibly disruptive to the liberal mind.
This is also proof that no press is bad press. Did Stancil lose? Yes, if you have to resort to calling your better-prepared opponent a Klansman then I think that is an admission of defeat, but he also got a lot of fans who agree with him. So both sides benefited. I think it shows how weak or ideologically motivated the anti-HBD arguments tend to be. Anyone had the opportunity to shutdown Steve but no one rose to the occasion.
How is it a glitch having access to new medicines? Expensive drugs but more drugs is better than options only being limited to Tylenol or Asprin, which is what you'd get if there was no profit incentive. No one pays out of pocket for life saving drugs anyway. I am perfectly fine with the makers of Ozempic and Mounjaro making billions if it means reducing obesity and making people's lives better. Americans have high expectations for healthcare; they want some cutting-edge drug that costs tens of thousands of dollars a month to add maybe a few months of life for terminal cancer. Much of healthcare is for end of life spending.
greyenlightenment
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1mo ago
Because "three-dimensional characters" are key, and I'm too autistic to get into another person's head well enough to write believable human beings
writing advice is useless, so do not worry about things like character development and the like. no one who writes a great story originally set out to check those boxes of what constitutes good writing, and following such advice will not make a story any good.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
4mo ago
People who commit crimes in welfare states are criminals either because of mental issues such as low Iq, low impulse control and psychopathy, or they want status
Or out of opportunity. lenient sentences creates an incentive to commit crime, too.
I wonder why Taylor Swift blew up over the past year despite having originally entered superstardom in 2010-2011. There was a decade cooling off period in which other singers like Lizzo, Katy Perry, and Beyonce held the mantle, and then she suddenly blew up. I think this shows again the power of Twitter to create superstars and affect news cycles. The Musk effect is real. Sure, Meta is a far bigger network of platforms and YouTube is bigger overall, but Twitter is where the discourse and culture are shaped.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
Standards of living overseas are not that bad. A low per-capita GDP is negated to some extent by greater purchasing power in dollars, so your ill-gotten gains go very far. Those countries have electricity, internet access, plumbing, cars, public transport, airport, etc. It's not like Somalia or something.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
I don’t think Trump is the kind of guy who does something unless he believes he has at least a chance of winning, and I think he does believe he has a chance of winning this year.
It's possible Trump believes it is rigged, but sitting it out is 100% chance of loss, vs a rigged election and some chance nonetheless.
The alt-right lost in the sense it has been subsumed overtaken by the trad/norm-core right and aesthetic on twitter, especially since 2022. The alt-right became associated with low status behaviors and mannerisms, like LARPing or the archetypical basement-dwelling keyboard warrior, and subsequently fell out of favor. Few things convey low status like neck-bearded neo Nazis bulging out of their uniforms out of breath as they plod down the street (even if this hardly describes every alt-righter, being associated with it hurt the brand badly). It also did not help that its members kept being arrested and its online communities, social media accounts, and payment processing accounts shut down, making it hard to raise funds or coordinate.
Elon's Twitter buyout and restructuring in 2022-2023 made the alt-right less relevant too, as everything became viewed through a woke vs. anti-woke lens. But the alt-right does not as readily fit within the woke vs. anti-woke paradigm, being that it also has intellectual roots in critical theory (e.g. Frankfurt School), fusionism, accelerationism, Durkheim theory and the like. The most popular accounts on post-Elon Twitter are more interested in owning the libs and posting viral clips of societal decay, like shoplifting footage or Apple store looting, than deep intellectual discussion or critique of society.
The norm-core right combines anti-woke and far-right trad values with 'normie' aspects of socialization, hence 'norm-core'. Whereas alt-right sought to subvert or exclude itself from mainstream society, the norm-core reconciles the contradiction between holding anti-woke views but ingratiating oneself and even thriving in a mainstream woke society, like good-paying careers, attentiveness to physical appearance (hence the importance of lifting and gym), civic participation (elections are very important) and family.
The norm-core right also tend to care much more about activism and political participation, in opposite of the alt-right that relies on memetic warfare like anonymous shit posting accounts on 4chan or twitter. The norm-core tend to use real names online and embrace civic participation and the democratic process, like voting for local elections and participation in school boards and meetings. Christianity is also very important, with a 'white pill' message of revival or hope, as opposed to the nihilism, secularism, or paganism of the alt-right. This also contributed to the norm-core being higher status.
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