I have an idea for an invention that will revolutionize the fashion industry in the Northeast. It's a garment that women can wear underneath their shirts that will support their fleshy bosoms. This invention would have the benefit of further concealing the breasts, but making them appear firmer and fuller, and preventing sagging when women approach old age.
Seriously, I feel like the modern urban world has forgotten about the bra. When I'm in big Northeast cities riding public transit, I rarely see a single woman wearing one. What's with this development? Is it some feminism thing? Is it fashion? Is it just that it's hot these days? Was the bra always worthless but women wore it out of modesty, but now there's no more modesty? I would guess that is some feminist notion that bras are a relic of patriarchy, and that has influenced fashion over the last decade to make it less fashionable. And that this has enabled the more lazy women out there to just not bother wearing it, and in turn, the link between bras and female modesty is disappearing (along with maybe the modesty itself, or the idea that women should be modest).
haroldbkny
8mo ago
Why not? It was an emergency that people were willing to give up their individual liberties for. It'd be easy for a dictator to pull a Palpatine and grant himself emergency powers to do all types of mischief.
I'm acquaintances with many of these pearl clutchers, so I see what they say. Once an allegation comes out, there's no evidence talked about, no consideration about whether the behavior is actually okay, or which side should be believed, nothing. Just a constant high pitched glee at getting to call these people rapists or villians or "literally the worst". The whole thing basically seems like the thing that the people did wrong was to be noticed, because once you're noticed, no one cares about the situation or evidence. Once you're caught by the eye of sauron, you are guilty.
haroldbkny
8mo ago
Seems like you just contradicted yourself. The president has nothing to do with the economy, but Trump is going to print money and make the economy worse?
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I'm glad you posted this, because I wanted to rant about this, since it's the most irritating feminist trend I've seen since 2017ish, but I didn't know how to phrase any of it in a way that would be "leaving the rest of the internet at the door".
I do think that, like other commenters have called out, the trend is childish and virtue signaling, and no one is being sincere. I think takes like this:
If a bear attacks you, people will believe you, if a man attacks you, people will not believe you.
do more to show exactly what feminists think about men, as opposed to how women are actually victimized by men in society.
What is the difference between a bear and a man? Maybe that men are people and bears are not? Men have other people who love them, and trust them, and care about them. Is that perhaps the reason why people may give men the benefit of the doubt in the case of an ambiguous he-said-she-said situation, but not give such benefit to a bear? Do men not deserve such a benefit over bears, because, you know, they're actual people and bears are not?
haroldbkny
8mo ago
Agreed. Not to mention, absolutely anyone in her position would get swept up by visions of grandeur, and start to really want it badly. I mean, she probably really thought she had a good chance of going down in the history books as the first female president (the sort of representation I'm sure she cares a great deal about), but now it seems rather that she'll be relegated to being the second woman who failed to become the president.
haroldbkny
8mo ago
I do feel a little bad for artists. I mean, if you had a decent side hustle charging $50 to draw D&D characters, or a more lucrative side hustle drawing furry porn, AI is going to replace you.
Me too, but I don't really know what is to be done about it.
I agree with your assessment, it probably is all about money and fear of replacement at the end of the day. But it really is coming for all of us. What are all of us going to do? I merely hope that either we have time to learn new trades that won't get replaced again within our lifetimes, or I hope we will enter a post scarcity society where AI has made everything so cheap that money is meaningless.
I'm a pretty firm believer that the only thing that keeps life so good for so many people is that technological progress keeps making things cheaper and better. And really, I don't even know if I can say that I think that efforts to stop technology through the use of social stigma are bad. Instead I just feel like they're simply doomed to failure. People are going to follow the money. Maybe nuclear power is the one big exception I know of.
For 1, I also want to ask what costs of living are like in each place, because that is as relevant as your salary. I feel like costs of living here are astronomical near cities, which is where most people want to live. But I don't know what it's like in the UK. I would have assumed that the socialized structure makes things cheaper to match the lower pay, so I'm curious to hear your take on it.
For 3, I think the climate sucks here too. But I've always lived in the northeast. Here the skies are gray 3/4 of the year.
6 is interesting. I feel the opposite, but maybe it's because I've lived here my whole life.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
This is quite the thread. I won't watch the video since I really don't want to see a video where someone dies. Depending on how it's shown that sort of thing can be horribly haunting, and I wouldn't expect real police bodycam video to be pulling any punches.
So all I have to go on are people's descriptions from this thread, and I keep going back and forth. People can't seem to come to consensus on whether it's extremely obvious that she was just joking and thus did not deserve to be shot or whether it's obvious she was acting weird and threatening. Same for the timing of the water being thrown vs the shots fired. Then, on top of all of that, there's more philosophical disagreements about whether it's more or less okay to endanger officers, or the degree to which officers should defend themselves.
If the mostly reasonable people here are this split on the interpretation of events, then I'm afraid it'll be 100x worse in the general public.
I don't know if I can fully articulate it, but there's something I don't like about that kind of argument. Humans will learn by stealing from other humans, and sometimes that results in humans putting each other out of business. If it's just about the fact that AI can product more quantity of art, easier and cheaper than humans, well, our entire history is one of newer, better, cheaper replacing older and more expensive. Some people spend their lives learning antiquated art forms, and well, that's kinda the breaks, and I don't really believe any amount of cultural outrage could or should change that.
Think about how diminished the role of musicians is in our society since the invention of the record player. Previously, if you wanted music at your event, or you even just wanted to hear music, you had to hire musicians. But we are well over a century of that being not the case, increasingly so as time goes on and recorded music became the norm. Musicians barely earn squat making music these days. It's sadly the case that almost all trained musicians make their primary living teaching other musicians, unless they're one of the lucky few who won the lottery of having an album go platinum.
My guess is that Jack Black knows he has more at stake then Gass. Black stands to be recast in the inevitable Mario sequel, and lose whatever other acting opportunities he has. Black is probably playing damage control with his own career, for fear that Gass's comments are cancellable, by trying to seem repentant and distancing himself from Gass.
Overall, it seems like this particular incident has given some power of cancel culture to the conservatives again. Which I guess is a somewhat positive development? I'd prefer that no one cancels anyone, and no one weilds that super weapon, but maybe it's better to have both parties have the power to some degree. I don't yet expect that this is a long-term development, but we'll see
My social media is full of leftists who are openly saying that they wish Trump was killed, and they're not going to pretend otherwise. I haven't personally witnessed any level of cancellation or even any light scolding for them from saying this, but of course, these people are not celebrities, just people on social media, and they probably are posting to an almost exclusively blue echo chamber.
I'm also really surprised that we still have no real clues about motive of the assassination attempt released yet (as far as I've seen). This has led to the aforementioned leftists in my circle to chip in their own wishful speculation as fact. I've seen a few saying things like "Wow, it's been confirmed that the shooter tried to kill Trump because he wasn't far right enough. That's hilarious" in response to the info coming out that Crooks was a registered Republican.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
but it likely cost Dems the 2016 election
I wasn't fully tuned in back then (nor am I now), but I don't remember the Dems going high back then. "Basket of deplorables" comes to mind. But maybe my perception was skewed because back then I was listening to a lot of conservative outrage bait.
I don't know if men in our society would have a problem with having more responsibility than women, provided that women admitted this. If the messaging was "men need to protect women because men are stronger and have more agency", that might be acceptable. It was acceptable for almost all of recorded history. That's the tradcon way.
The problem is that feminist messaging refuses to say this. Instead they say that women are just as capable as men, except for the fact that men are holding them down, and therefore it's men's responsibility to help women, in order to apologize and make women more powerful. It villainizes all men, most of whom have never wanted to hurt women and have always wanted to protect them.
FWIW, I'm not a tradcon, I probably think something in the middle. But mostly, I think women are strong, and need to embrace this and take responsibility, and actually act as such, and stop blaming men for their problems. How does that look for rape situations? Dunno, maybe they should start carrying around guns so if they find themselves in compromising situations, they have the actual firepower to overcome the man's brute strength. But that's for more of the violent rape situation. For the "I'm too drunk for my decisions to matter", I think the solution is for women to actually take responsibility. And I think that feminism's focus on victim-based empowerment isn't helping them.
The correct responses from the Bio-pilled segment of the political sector should probably still be accelerationism.
I understand where you're coming from, and I hope you're right. But the black pilled part of me makes me think that accelerationism will just accelerate the denial. That's what I tend to see.
When I wrote The Science doesn't support the bigots who think XY chromosomes makes someone a man, it was paraphrased from several people I saw writing about this. I can't actually ask these people what actual biology and science support the notion that being a woman is distinct from the presence of XY chromosomes, and how that was determined by these biologists and scientists for fear of outing myself as a heretic and being yelled at by people who probably don't really want to explain it anyhow. I really am curious, because it seems if I'm being charitable, "being a woman" is a social state that they're arguing for definitionally. And definitions like that are neither provable by biological science nor disputable. As Scott says:
I can’t argue with this. No, literally, I can’t argue with this. There’s no disputing the definitions of words. If you say that “racism” is a rare species of nocturnal bird native to New Guinea which feeds upon morning dew and the dreams of young children, then all I can do is point out that the dictionary and common usage both disagree with you. And the sources I cited above have already admitted that “the dictionary is wrong” and “no one uses the word racism correctly”.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
There's nothing that says a woman wouldn't be able to choose to get an abortion after the legal paternal surrender, knowing that the man is choosing to not be involved. The man surrenders, and then the woman can then choose what she wants to do accordingly. If she chooses to have the baby at that point, knowing that there's no father, then she would be the one choosing to do the irresponsible act.
haroldbkny
9mo ago
And it's possible Bush was only incoherent when he wanted to look folksy.
I forget where, but I remember hearing some anecdote about how Bush was really smart and eloquent in private, and he'd talk about how he was usually just stammering when speaking in public because he was terrified and nervously choosing his words, because of how much could go wrong if the POTUS said something incorrect or damaging.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I've known a few people who knew little about the specific internet subcultures, who at one time or another have cited RationalWiki to me as evidence that Scott Alexander is an unhinged neoreactionary rightist, or some other such nonsense. These people trusted RationalWiki mostly by virtue of its name alone (i.e. "well, it's a wiki that's trying to be rational, isn't it?").
haroldbkny
2yr ago
I live in a very very progressive part of the world, and I went to a small local craft market event today. Near the event, there was a 65ish year old woman waving around a GOP tote bag at cars and people passing by. Everyone was ignoring her, but I went to talk to her.
It started out just fine. I told her (in a friendly way) that she's unlikely to change any minds here, and she replied that that she's just trying to show people that there are others out there who have had enough of the progressive orthodoxy, citing CRT, transgenderism, etc. She felt like maybe this might just convince some young people to even question whether there's another viewpoint out there, or convince those who are hiding their views to speak up more. I definitely respected and agreed with that.
Then, her stream of consciousness-style insane ramblings started coming out. She went on for like 7 minutes without pausing, about so many topics I couldn't even keep track, jumping from one to the other. I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs, and somehow she started talking about slavery and pre-civil war America, waving a book around trying to show me underlined passages trying to liken the practice of slavery to what progressives are doing today, maybe implying that leftists want to return to pre-civil war America in some way. It was pretty hard to manage to get away.
This comes in the wake of being at my wife's family event where her crazy uncle kept bringing up conservative talking points apropos of nothing, shoehorning them into conversations which everyone tried politely to ignore, and was a total conversation killer. I'm usually only used to leftists doing that.
These experiences were pretty disheartening to me. I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true. I guess a lot of conservatives really are in their own echo chambers just as much as leftists are. Probably a good number of them really take seriously the conspiracy-style theories of talking head personalities in the style of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. The true disconnect on both sides, from each other and probably also from reality and the true values of most people, is a very sad state of affairs.
I truly believe that the way we tend to talk about things on the Motte and in rationalist-adjacent spaces makes sense, and seems like far more logical discourse than I can find anywhere else. But of course I would, I'm part of this specific world. Any leftist would say the same about their progressive reddit subs, and most republicans would say that about the comments section in the Daily Wire. Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?
haroldbkny
1yr ago
Sneaking in new definitions while still maintaining the previous emotional attachments of those definitions is necessary? In rationalist communities, I think we have words for things like this, such as motte and bailey. And I think that most of us are in agreement that such tactics are sneaky and underhanded, and make it unnecessary difficult to argue against, and very easy to turn into mob mentality and moral panics.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Yeah, I've never seen Song of the South, but this is making me wonder if it deserves the criticism it gets. I know little about it, but is the problem once again mostly that it depicts black people acting like black people of the time?
For example, you'll never see certain episodes of the original broadcast of Tom and Jerry because many of those episodes feature a sassy black maid who doesn't take any shit from Tom. Why was that deemed worthy to never be broadcast again? I don't know. I guess because we are not allowed to ever see a black maid on TV. In certain broadcasts, the black maid was even replaced with a white teenage girl. That's representation for you!
haroldbkny
8mo ago
I like this post. Would you be willing to post it on the ACX comments section? I would like to hear what Scott himself would have to say to this. I'd also be curious what he'd say in response to most of the comments here, as well.
Oh, I guess that makes sense. Do doctors work their asses off in the UK like they do in the US? Whenever I talk to my doctor friends, their lives sound miserable, almost like they're being hazed by a fraternity for years on end. I don't personally know anyone who became a doctor who wasn't pushed into it by strong family expectations.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
Replying to @falling-star too
Well, I can say that's not the way it works in my company, which may not be quite the norm. In my company, individual teams drive the hiring process, including finding candidates. Recruitment does a call, but it's mostly to prep candidates in what comes next. If they narrowed out a candidate during an intense hiring period for reasons other then serious flags, there would be hell to pay. Managers have a difficult enough time getting candidates through the hiring pipeline as is.
Only partially related, but I'm still so mad at the covid collective insanity that took place. Can you believe there was a time when the Canadian CDC actually recommended that people use gloryholes to avoid spreading covid? And I've actually argued with pro-lockdown people who defend that recommendation as legit instead of denouncing it as insanity and bandwagon jumping. Multiple people I've argued with have said something like "well, just because you're sucking dick through a hole doesn't mean it's unsafe sex with anonymous partners". And this flabbergasts me.
In what world would people use a gloryholes that's safe and not anonymous? Gloryholes exist in adult bookstores. Did any people go modifying their houses, drilling holes into their walls saying "gee, I sure would like to have sex with girls I'm seeing, but I don't want to violate lockdown and be in the same room as them"? Did any guy tell the new girl he's dating (the one that he is not yet seeing steadily enough such that he would just include her in his covid bubble) that he wants to meet her at the adult bookstore so she could suck his dick through the filthy hole there without him looking at her face-to-face, so they don't share the same airspace? Women love being asked for non face-to-face sexual favors, while being in a separate room, being done through disgusting holes where random guys stick their dicks regularly, that never get cleaned, right?
To me this is up there with "racism is a bigger public threat than the pandemic" and promoting mask wearing when getting up from your restaurant table to go to the bathroom as terrible apologism to justify their own side's horrible behavior.
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