madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
4d ago
Alexander Wales wasn't impressed by the quality of the worldbuilding.
madeofmeat
5d ago
It's kind of sad that the socialization part is both maybe the most important of these and the one least solvable just by you acting in a disciplined and regimented way yourself. If the people around you aren't your people and they don't care about things that you care about and you don't care about things they care about and every time socialization happens it's around things they care about and you don't, at some point you just become too tired and stop going.
madeofmeat
6d ago
That's what the texts Christians are supposed to believe in say, but the reality is pretty complex. Educated people in medieval Europe probably could claim Christian metaphysics as the correct theory of reality and not get pushback, but at some point pretty long ago this stopped being a thing. I'm pretty sure things had moved from thinking this was literally true to lip service by the late 1800s, and by now the Christians themselves know this too. There's a lot of twisting your brain to apologetics-pretzels to keep things going, and everyone openly knows that apologetics-pretzels-work can be necessary even for the people on the inside and there's no deep exchange of ideas with people on the outside because outsiders will just point-blank reject essential premises of the religious worldview. There's also very long tradition of co-existing with religions you don't share, which relies on things being explicitly labelled with "this is a religion", which is only a thing if you're living in a cosmopolitan society where you actually need to routinely deal with multiple religions.
Progressivism right now is a lot more like what religions might have been like in societies before things got to the point of a cosmopolitan Roman Empire. At that point people weren't saying "this is our religion", it was just the shared understanding how to act in the society and what the world was like. Once you need to interact regularly with people who have a different religion who you can't just conquer and subjugate, your own religion has a new authority problem and you start needing words like "religion". Once the world starts being much bigger and more advanced than when your religion was formulated, so your religious dogma both looks absurd at face value and your clerics start getting curbstomped in public debates because people don't share their load-bearing assumptions about how their worldview works anymore, you have more problems. Progressivism is still new enough that it hasn't really run into either of these problems, while they have been undeniable reality for religious people for centuries now. You can say Christianity is the literal truth, but with the sociological support not being around anymore it will look like performing to everyone, and people will assume even you treat it as performative more than literal.
madeofmeat
13d ago
Like, okay, let's just focus on the problem then. We want a society where you go to jail if you do a crime and where you get a PhD if you write a thesis, with the same criteria for a crime and a thesis for everyone. Every time we set something like this up, we see outcomes differ by race. People will then use the outcome differences as a pretext to try to destroy the jail institution and the PhD institution and eventually dismantle any system of society setting up formalized expectations for behavior and rigorous standards to aspire to. How do we fix this and go back to being able to have standards that apply equally to everyone?
madeofmeat
13d ago
Yes, I know, they lie. And it's easy to prove - you just need to establish a principle of "do crime - go to jail" - which is obviously blind to the race, and enforce it diligently without regard to the race. Once you start talking about race, proving that you operate in racially blind framework becomes much harder.
Wasn't this pretty much what people said you were supposed to do from 1980 to 2010 or so? And then it fell apart in a concentrated program to dismantle it that most everyone just went along with for whatever reason where people started saying no, that's not what you are supposed to do, you're not allowed to do that. The system is fully tainted by structural racism, which you can infer from the different outcomes it produces, therefore it must be demolished and the structural racism (which we don't know how to fix because it's inferred from outcomes, not causes) be fixed before anything else. Before 2010, there was a tacit agreement not to talk about race. Then the wokes showed up, realized this lets them go wild with the disparate impact fallacy and started putting race front and center all the time to attack the system, and people couldn't respond to the criticism without arguments that were not permitted in polite society. So what's the next move?
No, not because of this. You don't need to sell the public that 50 millions of US citizens are subhuman (not sure what you'd do with Ashkenazi Jews btw - does every Jew automatically gets PhD at birth? I mean, if you do the negative side, you have to do the positive side too... if you advocated for somehow suppressing supposedly low-IQ populations, you necessarily would have to advocate to promote high-IQ populations... not sure how that's supposed to work?) to sell them the idea of punishment following the crime.
I'm not really sure why you keep pulling things this way. We want a society where you go to jail if you do crime and you get a PhD if you submit a thesis that makes an original contribution to your field. But also one where people won't succeed with campaigns that jails must be abolished because too many black people end up there and PhD programs must be abolished because too many Jews end up there.
How? The wokes would just switch from "you can't jail criminals because it's racist" to "you can't jail criminals because life's hard for them anyway, so you can not ask them to not be criminals, it's just cruel". In fact, many already do it anyway right now - the white progressive left is racist as hell, and many of them internalize a version of HBD very deeply, they just make different political conclusions from it.
Progressives have been doing this a hundred years, people dealt with it fine. The difference here is that now everyone agrees that the criminal did the crime and the criminal justice system is working as it's described. People can and will argue that we should have an entirely different stated purpose for the justice system, but then they need to make a case for that first. They don't have an option of campaigning for closing down the current system right now, because they're successfully making a fallacious claim that the system is fully corrupt, egregiously failing to work according to its stated mandate, and who knows the whole crime problem might just be made up because of structural racism everywhere.
madeofmeat
13d ago
Now the argument hinges on "cops police and sentence them harsher in the same situations" which you need to demonstrate as true without just pointing to the higher rate of black criminal convictions as direct evidence. This sounds like a much better situation than the one where you can't have an outcome disparity that makes minorities look bad without being blamed of racism. If you can prove that's true then sure, whatever actual thing you dug up is something we can look at as a problem to fix. If you end up getting nothing, then it's back to just arresting people who do crimes.
madeofmeat
14d ago
I am saying the practical way to solve the crime is to put criminals in jail. You are saying it's impossible because the wokes would interfere and thus we need HBD. But how HBD is helping you?
The wokes get their justification by claiming that disparate sentencing alone proves that law enforcement is racist and illegitimate, and having wide public agreement for this because HBD arguments are taboo and can't be uttered in polite society. If HBD became common knowledge, this would stop working.
madeofmeat
15d ago
At this point, I think Progressives need their own small army of Tim Kellers - public thinkers who are willing to endure the hardest critiques of the fundamentalisms of their movements, actually hear those critiques, and publicly endure the truth in them in good faith and engage with them.
I'm not sure I see how this would work. Progressivism doesn't have the sort of separate magisterium firewall we've been culturally evolving for recognized religions probably since the Roman Empire, where people agree to a game of partial make-believe around it. By its own lights, it's supposed to be the for-real, actual undistorted picture of reality, no myth-making or noble lies. So if it turns out there were noble lies placed into the foundation after all, it's not an idea you can entertain in a discussion, it's an existential threat, you need to set up a totalitarian system of suppression and taboos around them or risk your whole edifice crumbling.
madeofmeat
25d ago
Things were on a worse path around 2003 before we had digital distribution. Gaming had a great late nineties when computers were good enough to not cripple every complex game idea with technical limitations, but games were still small enough that a handful of people could get something cool and unique made and into shelves. A lot of the PC game franchises were visibly crippled by the mig-oughties because suddenly games needed to run on XBox as well, and XBox was lower spec than an average gaming PC and dictated a more simplistic user interface. Also the AAA expected quality creep had started going with mandatory voice acting, elaborate cutscenes etc., with bigger budgets leading to more design by committee and people playing it safe and making boring things. You started seeing lots of samey cookie-cutter action-adventure games filling the shelves, with little market left for the older simulator, strategy and complex RPG PC game market until Steam opened up the indie market floodgates.
There was some dark humor in Dishonored in that the nonlethal ways to eliminate your targets were stuff like them being sold as slaves with their tongues cut out or getting locked in a rape dungeon for life, that quite possibly left them wishing you'd just killed them instead.
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