guy
1d ago
Yeah, I'm not saying I advocate for this program. Just that in the world where wee decided meal kits were something the government offered, better to use an existing market company than to build it from scratch as a government institution.
guy
1d ago
Nooooo! At least Hello Fresh is building something aimed at passing the profit/loss test. Why rebuild it asa government agency?
guy
9d ago
Gamergate, thankfully, occurred during the period where I was less online than I had been both before and after. Like many, I was a New Atheist during it's heyday, before the split of Atheism+. Thankfully, the split just made the space boring to me, and I avoided joining either the proto-alt-right or the proto-woke factions that emerged.
The impetus for the split really was Elevatorgate. At the time, I remember being sympathetic to the feminist side (and was very much a feminist at that point). In retrospect, I still think they were right on the object level. It involved one female atheist blogger (Rebecca Watson) sharing a video talking about her experience at a recent atheism conference. She recounted a story in which a guy (with whom she hadn't really interacted with) was in an elevator with her at the end of the night and invited her back to his room for coffee. Her message was (I believe I'm quoting directly) "Guys, don't do that." And, at the end of the day, I think that's perfectly good advice. It is a pretty lame move, and while not worthy of strong social sanction, I think it's worth telling a bunch of guys (many of whom are nerdy, maybe autistic, and too-online) that it's not a great way to get a girl to like you or to invite women into your movement.
As the feminist side tells it, this spawned a surge of hate mail and complaints from guys, threatening sexual violence etc etc. Who knows how profound that was, but the fact is the internet did seem to react pretty strongly to what seemed to be like relatively mild chastisement.
However, the feminist side pushed back hard (irrationally so, imo). I remember eyerolling at the essay "Schrodinger's Rapist" asserting that, due to rape being a statistically male-dominated practice, any guy in an elevator was potentially a rapist, and thus making a proposition/move in a confined setting like that understandably triggers a woman's fears of getting raped. The other side had a lot of fun writing a parallel essay about black people and crime-- which, to be clear, was trying to show that such statistical discrimination was unfounded.
Like Gamergate, the event spiraled into a discussion about whether/how this male-dominated subculture treated women poorly, and whether/how entryist women were ruining the culture. Richard Dawkins even chimed in with his satirical letter "Dear Muslima", mockingly comparing the plight of an American woman being asked for coffee to the brutally patriarchal culture of Islam.
Soon after that, Atheism+ was explicitly founded, with a number of the popular blogs adopting the logo and claiming that reason not only tells us to disbelieve in God, but furthermore should guide our behavior on other aspects of life and society (read: social justice). For me, the blogs just became boring at that point, but I was still feminist/SJW enough that those who dug in their heels on the other side didn't really resonate with me either. By the time Gamergate rolled around, I was still online but just not that into it. Several years later, a friend sharing a Scott Alexander post brought be back into the world of online discourse.
Despite the similarities, I think it's really important to see one crucial difference between Elevatorgate and Gamergate: Elevator Guy remains anonymous to this day. The goal of Watson's video was not to punish this guy in particular. Whereas Gamergate, to my best understanding, involved lots of doxxing on both sides, and aimed to hit people where it hurt: in "real life." This is why I'd say there is a strong case to be made that Gamergate is a time to flag as the starting point for modern culture war. Before then, internet conflicts were internet conflicts, and insane level to which flame wars could be taken was a humorous badge of honor for nerds. After Gamergate, the stakes started to become real.
guy
11d ago
Yeah, I wonder how much of this is just parents not being good at what they do.
It's hard to say-- I do think kids come into the world with some fairly strong personality tendencies, and some kids are just more prone to tantrums than others. But I also know a lot of parents who get caught in the "ineffectual pleading" cycles.
I've found that a little bit of enforcement of punishment (simple stuff like a time out, taking away a toy, etc) up front can prevent a lot of those embarrassing moments when your kid needs to be on their "best" behavior. For most of the situations in which they are in public, they needn't be quiet or particularly polite. Kids will be squirrelly and that's fine. But if they're throwing a tantrum... well, yeah, it's really a shame that it turns off all the non-kid-havers.
guy
12d ago
JEDD does take over the world, but his new constitution is to just make some minor tweaks on the existing system, none of which seem like they obviate the need for O. S.
Yeah, this bothered me.
Thanks for all your other thoughts, no particular comment on them.
guy
12d ago
Is your reading that all of the supernatural stuff is in Mycroft's head?
I kind of love the "Ada Palmer is weird, yo" aspect of the whole thing. It's like she had a list of interests:
- 18the century France
- Sex and gender
- Enlightenment metaphysics
- Utopian technology
- Novel political systems
- Ancient Rome
And decided to throw it all together in a book. And, idk, my take is that she did it quite well! Some it is a little hard to believe, but I still think it's a world that "fits" and makes sense. What aspects of the hive system do you think are underdeveloped?
guy
12d ago
accelerating the rate at which the dumb money loses the ability to influence signal
Don't you need the dumb money in order to get the liquidity for the smart money to buy in? Especially if the smart money requires costly knowledge discovery.
guy
13d ago
This is the plot of the Terra Ignota series. It's quite good.
I mean... it's not exactly "because we're the most oppressed people ever" but it's about how war arises in an approximately post-scarcity society.
guy
15d ago
Is authoritarianism just whenever the executive isn't constrained from doing things?
/shrug, that's not so bad a definition. If all the power is concentrated in a single authority and is unconstrained, yeah, that's authoritarianism. Our constitution (both the written document and the actually makeup of our government) work(s/ed) so well because political actors had lots of constraints on them. Most formally this is the other branches of government but is also affected by governance norms and public outrage.
guy
16d ago
By almost every definition we are likely the farthest we have ever been from living in a fascist dictatorship.
I think you're directionally correct about how close we are to disctatorship relative to what the average redditir thinks, but do you really think we're doing better than we've been in recent years? I'd allege that we're closer to fascist dictatorship than we've been since... WWII maybe?
I know the executive branch has been growing in power my whole life, but Trump II really has a YOLO attitude about it and is really just willing to do whatever shit he wants. E.g. blatantly unconstitutional tariffs that the Supreme Court won't even rule on. The weaponization of the justice department without even a pretense that things aren't political. Politicization for previously apolitical administrative roles, including firing people for not stroking Trump's ego enough. The expansion of ICE-- it's not like the public didn't vote for more deportations, but similarly it's a force being used for Trump's political/personal vendettas. You really think Minnesota is more of a hotspot of illegal immigrants than, say, Texas? (Actually, I'd be curious to see data on this.)
A lot of this is about the fuzziness of how our laws are applied. Of course the executive can fire people, but when you brook no disagreement and surround yourself with yes-men, you are certainly taking things a step closer to authoritarianism.
Augustus never disbanded the Senate; he didn't just disband everything Star Wars style and declare himself emperor. But nonetheless he ran over previous norms and altered the constitution of Rome forever, becoming the quintessential (pre-modern) authoritarian.
guy
16d ago
I don't put a lot of stock in the government publishing a press piece that says "We're doing great!"
guy
1mo ago
Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood, inspired by the simple notion that if all the black people have abortions, then in a generation or two there just won't be any more black people.
I don't know how serious you're being, but Sanger was explicitly anti-abortion. She lumped it in the same basket as infanticide, and wanted widespread contraception in order avoid those things.
I just read Woman and the New Race. Though she praises eugenics, she's more a Malthusian than anything. She really thinks it's the problem of too many kids, or that unfit people shouldn't breed because they can't offer care. Really, her understanding of genetics is pretty vague. She's just as concerned with contraception for those with Tuberculosis as for those with any heritable condition.
guy
1mo ago
The first shot went through the front windshield.
I admit to not keeping up with this as much as most mottizens. Would you link me a timestamp or screenshot of when this?
guy
1mo ago
producing an entire generation of women "readers" who struggle with, or fail completely, to parse the meaning of third-person prose.
Damn. As a commenter on one of those reddit threads mentioned, I always thought first-person was the "weird" way of writing a story. Haven't these women read anything in school? Or even Harry Potter? Or... oh, shit! Hunger Games is first-person!
This is a bit of a blackpill.
guy
1mo ago
If an aspect of American culture is non-functional, then it should be replaced. His opponents in the comments are overwhelmingly essentialists. Americanness is an ontological property that is good because of it's essential nature as American. In this context, the idea that someone might choose to discard prom queens or jock sports fandom is a threat to America itself.
I don't think that's what's going on here. There may be some root value differences that are due to different cultural backgrounds, but the Boy Meets World fans don't think "I don't care of Cory's life sucks; it's ontologically American so I support it!" No, they think that living a good life (functionally) is not just about being valedictorian and going to the best college. I think a big part of why America is so successful has to do with values such as individualism, experimentation, exploration, personal integrity, and kindheartedness. That's what Western "mediocrity" narratives teach.
guy
1mo ago
Oof guess I missed this. So Wicks was the son (and grandson) of Prentice? What are the beats that suggest this?
I loved Knives Out. It definitely came from a particular worldview, but at least the out-of-touch liberals were a target of fun-poking in addition to the alt-right teen and conservative assholes. Plus the plot was really quite brilliant, a truly novel twist on the genre (I think?).
Glass Onion was much less good. The plot was more convoluted and less satisfying, and the characters were over-the-top culture war stereotypes. As faceh pointed out, they really just make sure that the bad guys are 100% bad and worthless with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
I enjoyed Wake Up Dead Man, more than Glass Onion but less than Knives Out. A fairly interesting plot with explicit homages to the genre. The religious protagonist really is a good man, and he represents what is supposed to be the mainstream religious worldview, so Christianity does not come off as being mocked.
But despite the "moral clarity" that Rian Johnson tends to demonstrate in these movies, Jud's behavior at the end of the movie leaves me a bit confused, but can be explained with a boring CW angle.
[ MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE REST OF THIS POST] Near the end of the film, Grace, the Harlot Whore, is reframed as a "poor girl." Prentice's decision to hide her inheritance (and everyone's judgements of her?) are played up as a grave mistreatment, with multiple characters muttering "that poor girl."
But then... Jud does the same thing to Cy. He hides the insanely valuable jewel from its rightful inheritor, and this is played off as a "booh yah" because that smug prick deserves it. Jud is definitely supposed to be a good guy, so first off it's wild that a priest just decides to keep a lie for the rest of his life and there's no moral conflict presented. But furthermore, this is the exact same behavior Prentice had taken vis a vis Grace, and we're all supposed to feel bad for her. I was genuinely confused about what I was "supposed" to find to be good.
The boring culture war angle is: she's a harlot whore, which is something that is treated positively in Johnson's worldview, whereas Cy represents right-wing political aspiration, obviously a bad thing. Who/whom.
guy
2mo ago
I guess I see Molochian incentives create bullshit jobs. Sure, locally speaking, I value hiring a super expensive lawyer to defend me in court, but only because the guy suing me hired his super expensive lawyer. We could take away those two jobs and be in the same place.
guy
2mo ago
I mean on the dad question in particular, which something to the effect of "did you grow up with racism in your household and if so, do you think it affected your current outlook." (That's not actually a quote, just my remembered paraphrase.)
guy
2mo ago
going after some dude’s dad
I don't know, I thought Fuentes was doing the pearl clutching here. All the "low blow" faux-offense. Nick never gave a straight answer.
I think the interview made it clear that Fuentes is, well, actually racist. I think most normies will be turned off. But maybe GenZ really is that different.
guy
3mo ago
Budapest Memorandum
Can you give me a brief case against the Budapest Memorandum's relevance to this issue?
guy
3mo ago
I think centering this on taxes (though understandable in this context because we are talking about government subsidies) misses a big part of what productivity is about: value provided to others who utilize your outputs. You could run a business that makes a great product that serves millions of people and just squeaks by breaking even, paying no taxes. That is still highly productive.
This is why, even if the "Amazon pays no taxes" meme were true, this would not make them a leech: they provide so much value to millions (billions?) of consumers.
Holy shit I'm sitting in a bus station in Mexico city and on their little advertising screens hanging from the ceiling --from which they apparently also show tiktoks-- they just showed a short about Therians.
Edit: https://imgur.com/a/kYsv68B
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