magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
The ABC's called it: the Australian referendum to enshrine special Aboriginal representation in the Constitution has utterly failed. They needed a majority nationally and a majority in four of the six states; they've gotten at last count 41% (possibly less; pre-polls are counted last, and while I wasn't expecting it they seem to have more No than the on-the-day vote) of the national vote and have lost in all six of the states (again, I was expecting Tasmania and/or Victoria to buck the trend - Victoria being the most urbanised Australian state, with 75% of its population in the state capital of Melbourne, and Tasmania having a long tradition of hippie-ism and being the birthplace of the Greens; they were also polling the highest Yes).
Most of the Yes campaigners - at least, those the ABC talked to - seem to be going with the line of "the No campaign was misinformation and this doesn't count because they were tricked"*. That's wrong (there were a few people with crazy ideas, of course, but for the most part what the SJers are decrying as "misinformation" is true or plausible), but it's at least wrong about a dry fact and not nearly as divisive as going "this proves Australia's a racist country".
The result does seem to have emboldened people to actually stand up against SJ; Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was very hesitant to go with No (though he eventually did), but in his speech upon hearing the result he specifically said that this result was Australians rejecting activists' claims.
At-least-partial credit to @OliveTapenade, who said:
If No wins, I think it will be taken as evidence that the Australian people are deeply racist and ignorant (hence the need for Truth)
...the last time we discussed this on theMotte. They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".
*NB: this doesn't, for the moment, include Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; all he's said on the matter of "why No" IIRC is that referenda never succeed without bipartisan support.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
News from Australia: we're probably not going to have a Constitutionally-enshrined "Voice" for Aboriginals.
Background: there was a statement by a bunch of Aboriginal groups a while back that they wanted a constitutionally-enshrined advocate in the governmental system*, along with a couple of other things. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, of the Australian Labor Party, included this in his platform for the 2022 election, which he won**, and we're a bit under a month from a referendum***.
New information: support started high, and certainly the Usual Suspects want a Yes vote. But support has now crashed to the point that it's considered highly unlikely to pass.
Up until now I'd been thinking "well, maybe the US people are right about SJ having peaked in the USA, but that's cold comfort to me", but this has given me some real hope that it's peaking here as well.
*NB: Aboriginals can vote and run for office, and are slightly overrepresented in Parliament compared to the general population.
**Labor is our centre-left party; the other major parties are the Liberals (city-based centre-right), the Nationals (small-town conservatives, in a semi-permanent coalition with the Liberals), the Greens (historically a "hippie" party, and they still do hold basically all the stereotypical "hippie" positions, though they've gone majorly SJ of late), One Nation (alt-rightists since before it was cool) and the United Australia Party (alt-rightists since after it was cool, because an alt-right billionaire had too big an ego to support the existing alt-right party). I actually wound up voting Labor; the Liberals had gotten too comfortable in government to the point that they refused to discuss a bunch of what they were doing, which I consider a threat to democracy, the Greens want to ban One Nation and the UAP, which I consider a much larger threat to democracy, I live in a city so the Nationals weren't on my HoR ballot, the UAP is a bad joke, and while I preferred One Nation's stance on this particular policy (i.e. "get the fuck out of here with your reverse racism") I preferred the rest of Labor's platform to the rest of One Nation's by more.
***Our constitutional amendment procedure - a majority of citizens and a majority of citizens in at least four of the six states must agree to the amendment. Like most other Australian votes, it's mandatory.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
"2+2 = 4" is still actually true in Z4. The elements of Z4 aren't strictly integers; they're sets of integers. "0" in Z4 is defined as {...-12, -8, -4, 0, 4, 8, 12...} in Z and "2" is defined as {...-14, -10, -6, -2, 2, 6, 10, 14...} in Z. Which element from the first set (or second set) you use to denote the full set is pretty arbitrary; the relevant point is that adding two elements of the latter set will always produce an element of the former set - including, notably, 2 + 2 = 4.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
More curiously, Anthropic, the company famously founded by defectors from OpenAI who thought their approach was too unsafe, seems to have realized that excessive safetyism does not sell make a very helpful assistant
This has not gone unnoticed, even here, and judging by the alarmed tone of Zvi's latest post on the matter I expect the new Claude to have rustled some jimmies in the AI field given Anthropic's longstanding position.
There are the "AI ethics" people and the "AI safety" people.
The "AI ethics" people want all AIs to do endless corporate scolding rather than do what the "benighted racist idiots" want.
The "AI safety" people are worried about rogue AI and want to avoid dynamics that might lead to rogue AI killing us all, including but not limited to arms races that could prompt people to release powerful systems without the necessary extreme levels of safety-testing.
These are not the same people, and identifying them with each other is going to result in confusion. The reason the "AI safety" people have a problem with Opus has nothing to do with reduced amount of scolding; it's just that Anthropic said it wouldn't push the frontier and now it's pushing the frontier, implying that it is not as much of "the best of a bad lot" as we'd thought. If they'd come out with just Haiku/Sonnet and still reduced the level of scolding, Zvi would have been totally fine and happy with it.
The "AI safety" people don't want a quick road to bigger and more powerful AI, at all, regardless of the amount of scolding; Gemini Ultra the uberscold and Claude 3 Opus are roughly equally bad from our PoV*, with Opus only perhaps meriting more mention because it's more surprising for Anthropic to make it (true information that is more surprising is a bigger update and thus more important to learn about).
*The initial release of ChatGPT was far worse than either from our PoV, insofar as it massively increased the rate of neural-net development.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
(the intentionally(?) blurred lines and tight interconnections between AI "safety" and "ethics" in the mind of an average rube don't help)
I agree that the scolds do keep trying to steal our words, the same way they stole "liberal".
I also see your point that for the specific question of "catgirls y/n" both are on the "n" side, at least as regards catgirls made with better AI tech than currently exists.
I just, as an actual liberal who's been banned from fora and who had to turn down a paid position due to differences of opinion with the PC police, really do not appreciate being treated as one of them.
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
I loved Wikipedia.
If you ask me the greatest achievement of humankind, something to give to aliens as an example of the best we could be, Wikipedia would be my pick. It's a reasonable approximation of the sum total of human knowledge, available to all for free. It's a Wonder of the Modern World.
...which means that when I call what's happened to it "sacrilege", I'm not exaggerating. It always had a bit of a bias issue, but early on that seemed fixable, the mere result of not enough conservatives being there and/or some of their ideas being objectively false. No longer. Rightists are actively purged*, adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted**, and right-coded ideas get lumped into "misinformation" articles. This shining beacon is smothered and perverted by its use as a club in the culture wars.
I don't know what to do about this. @The_Nybbler talks a lot about how the long march through the institutions won't work a second time; I might disagree with him in the general case, but in this specific instance I agree that Wikipedia's bureaucratic setup and independence from government make it extremely hard to change things from either below or above, and as noted it has gone to the extreme of having an outright ideological banning policy* which makes any form of organic change even harder. All I've done myself is quit making edits - something something, not perpetuating a corrupt system - and taken it off my homepage. But it's something I've been very upset about for a long time now, and I thought I'd share.
*Yes, I know it's not an official policy. I also know it's been cited by admins as cause for permabans, which makes that ring rather hollow.
**NB: I've seen someone refuse to include something on the grounds of (paraphrasing) "only conservatives thought this was newsworthy, and therefore there are no Reliable Sources to support the content".
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
The claim is that the UN agency drawing up this index had already written the bottom line of "we don't want to say that Western countries are currently biased in favour of women", due to feminism, and chose what to correct and not correct (note the "women should live 5 years longer than men" thing mentioned above) such that all classic Western countries would come out below 1 (I checked; there are some classic Western countries extremely close to 1 but none above it).
"This agency is running a bottom-line-first algorithm" is a significantly-more-damning criticism than "this agency's index is not perfect". Ignoring a propagandist's numbers is not the ideal strategy, but it does better than taking them at face value (the ideal strategy is to pull apart how their numbers were derived, and derive better ones, but that's significantly harder). And if the agency is ideologically captured, it is not likely to improve its index in the future on metrics relevant to the bottom line, at least absent some effort to change its institutional incentives.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Footnote to post here https://www.themotte.org/post/53/the-motte-and-the-future/5620?context=8#context
I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false, but because of a couple of edge cases I prefer the weaker "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". This felt off-topic there and is long-ish (it could be shortened, but only by abandoning my motte) so I'm putting it here.
Edge case 1: There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement. This is separate from SJers who honestly believe that being hostile and censorious is the most effective way to advance the movement's goals; those people (a majority of SJers TTBOMK) do believe they are making the world a better place. Obviously, this is not especially unique to SJ (any moralistic ideology will attract these sorts) and this definitely is a relatively-small minority, but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I have a tab open of a forum discussion in which I told someone that a non-hostile approach would be better at converting people and he replied "Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em". He honestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil, but he is acting in a way that he admits is suboptimal for making a better world due to spite.]
Edge case 2: There are non-SJers who say or do SJ things because they are incentivised to do so in some way by SJers. These people by definition do not believe that saying/doing SJ things makes the world a better place, or that SJ is good and conservatives are evil, but they are not core members of SJ. Again, not unique to SJ (this is almost definitionally true of any powerful paradigm) but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I turned down being a dorm RA at my university (a paid role insofar as RAs are not charged rent, and a role I was already somewhat fulfilling unpaid because our dorm had no RA) because I would have been required to recite SJ ideology to my dorm. I can imagine that another non-SJer less committed to honesty than I might have taken the job.]
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
you
Explaining a position is not the same as taking it*. In this particular case I'm not entirely convinced. Conspiracy to keep the Western numbers below 1 doesn't make a lot of sense since the numbers being barely below 1 is now but the metric hasn't AIUI been revised in decades (and indeed it's been partially superseded by the Gender Inequality Index). Also, the UN isn't fully a Western organisation, and non-Western countries would object to explicit fiddling to make women look worse off than they are. Don't get me wrong, the "women ought to live 5 years longer than men" thing does strike me as a bit of a double standard, but you don't need to be an explicit conspirator to run a double standard; you just need to have a mindset where it seems normal.
*Fine, whatever, I feel like kind of a prick now for not explicitly signposting this even though I didn't actually intend it as bait and it's not like I actually lied.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Not good. But I'd have to say necessary evil.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
The issue is that there are several ways to slice things.
There's the "we care about the gap and only the gap" way. There's also the "we only care about gaps due to unequal treatment" way.
The vast majority of the earned-income gap between men and women in the modern West is due to men's and women's life choices differing (some due to biology, some due to culture, although I'd note here that there are social pressures on both sexes and the intense pressure on men to not be househusbands is not exactly culture being nice to them). There are some cases of straight biological inability (no woman can decide to be the best tennis player in the world, not because she's banned from it but because testosterone and narrow hips are a large advantage) and the occasional case of actual discrimination, but the vast majority is choices.
The vast majority of the lifespan gap between men and women in the modern West is due to either choices or straight biology, as you note (do note that if you go outside the modern West there are things like sex-selective conscription to consider; there are of course reasons for conscription to be sex-selective but it's still definitely an unequal imposition by society).
Correcting for both or neither is highly-defensible. Correcting for one and not the other is, well, a double standard*. Hence me calling it a double standard. As I said, though, I don't think this is some grand conspiracy; it's easy to miss a double standard if you're not looking and nobody's looking who matters.
*I can see an argument for correcting for choices but not for biology; one argument that I really wish I heard ever from either side of the aisle is "Native Americans/Aboriginal Australians' shitty health outcomes are to a large extent biological rather than imposed by discrimination - their ancestors were not selected for disease resistance to the extent Old Worlders were - but while this is not exactly society's fault it's hardly their own fault either and doesn't mean we shouldn't put effort into improving them". Obvious substitution for this issue is obvious, but that gets us in the exact opposite corner from the GDI's calculation.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
If we fight now or in the near future I believe there is a high chance of defeat and that brings the whole house of cards down.
No. The USA has way more nukes and better ability to deliver them. The PRC's not catching up that fast.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
This is a topic I really, really don't want to talk about or even think about, because it's one of the abysses that gazes back and keeps me up at night and also it's radioactive. But I'm already thinking about it and I just went through the entire thread of this top-level post hoping in vain that someone had already said it, so I guess it falls to me to explain the HBD-MRA model of patriarchy and its downfall.
Assumed: HBD, or at least the points of which that men are physically stronger than women, and that women are better at social - in particular covert manipulation - than men. For the latter part, also that women care more about safety than men.
The outcome of this in prehistory and most of history is explicit patriarchy that is somewhat more equal than it looks. Explicit female domination or excessive implicit female domination doesn't work because in extremis men would defeat women physically and rape and/or murder them (and in prehistory, of course, mass abduction and rape of other tribes' women was reasonably-commonplace), but women do better than it looks like they do because of course they do, that's what happens when you're better at covert manipulation and the primary drivers of culture. This was stable.
It went from stable to metastable at some point. Obvious potential contributors include the development of firearms, the immense increase in state power relative to personal power, and democracy + women's suffrage giving women an equal explicit share in that state power. I say metastable, rather than unstable, because there was still the social pressure toward not-being-a-feminist encoded within society and enforced by women at least as much as by men. This maintained the explicit patriarchy for some time, but only against relatively-small disruptions. When a large disruption came along, in the form of the 60s/70s counterculture, the social chaos allowed the "women are better at manipulation" effect to take over society entire. Thus, we get the current system, where there is some explicit pretence of equality but implicitly and even to some degree explicitly the deck is massively stacked in women's favour. This is also stable; rapist revolution on small or large scale is impossible because of state power, and now with both women's material incentives and individual social incentives pointing toward feminism, they aren't likely to steer the culture away from it.
The place where this model gets horrible and abyss-gazey is if you consider a patriarchal society better than a matriarchal one - most obviously to me, if you think that safetyism and its accompanying administrative bloat is strangling our ability to achieve anything, but also if you think that the matriarchal mode's oppression of men is worse than the patriarchal mode's oppression of women, or indeed if you think that matriarchy is incompatible with maintaining replacement fertility and thus with a society that isn't necessarily parasitic on others (I'm not convinced of the latter two, but obviously a bunch of people in this thread are convinced). Because then, according to the model, the only way to fix it is to undo some of the factors that made the matriarchy mode a stronger attractor than the patriarchy mode. And, well, I enumerated the options there, or at least the ones I can see, and the possible ones suck (particularly since - as even Dave Sim noted in his infamous essay - the sex differences in these things are statistical trends and not 100%-accurate stereotypes; revoking women's suffrage would very definitely be unfair).
Like I said, I try not to think about this; I would basically rather stick my head in the sand and hope for a miracle (space colonisation and genetic enhancement both seem vaguely like they might organically lead to solutions, although the latter has its own terrors). But you asked, and I ended up reading your post because of the mod-queue thing (this one wasn't there, but I always look at context), and I'd hate myself more for self-censorship than I would and do for spitting it out. So here you go.
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
Is there something I assumed that you'd like explained in more detail?
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Okay, fair play, you at least didn't get anything horribly wrong in this one. It wasn't good, but you didn't get the basic premise of your article fatally wrong.
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
Might as well be proactive regarding the "misinformation" issue. Using the top result on Google (the people on the news tonight IIRC didn't specify what they objected to, with one exception that I'll come back to) and the official No case mailed to every Australian at government expense (along with a Yes case of equal length).
1 - "Australians will lose ownership of homes Variations of this claim include: Australians will be forced to pay reparations or the voice will increase taxes (ie, the voice will cost you money)"
Certainly, the idea that the referendum would directly imply reparations, that's false. The more measured case (and this one definitely is in the official No campaign) is that a Yes result would have a) built a Pro-Aboriginal consensus, which might make people more friendly to reparations, b) directly provided some level of soft influence to Aboriginals - that's the whole point, giving them an advisory body - which they might then use to advocate for reparations. I shy away from using this as motive to vote - feels a bit Machiavellian - but it seems plausible enough to me in terms of the facts (on both counts) and the Uluru Statement which inspired the voice does call for a "treaty" of some sort.
As for the latter part, certainly "voting for the Voice will directly raise taxes" is clear misinformation. The official No case merely said the Voice "will be costly" and said we don't know how much funding would be allocated to the Voice. It's not misinformation to say that government bodies cost money - that's extremely, obviously true - and "we don't know how much funding would be allocated" is also true.
2 - "The voice is legally risky Variations of this include claims that the voice is a third chamber of parliament, will dictate laws to the government, or will destabilise democracy"
Basically, the question here is "would the Voice have the power to block legislation". The No claim is that because the proposed change to the Constitution gives the Parliament the power to decide what powers the Voice has, Parliament might give the Voice the power to block Aboriginal-related legislation. The claim of misinformation is that this wouldn't or couldn't happen. To refute that claim, I cite the very article claiming it's misinformation:
Constitutional law experts are largely in agreement that there is nothing in the voice’s addition to the constitution which would lead to legal risk.
"Largely". That is, there are some that disagree (and indeed the official No case quotes a former High Court judge). So on the "could" question, there is some chance that trying it might work.
I ran the numbers, and was quite confident that the Parliament would not in fact do this; even if they tried, it would almost certainly fail to pass the Senate. But "the chance of X is very low" doesn't make "X could happen" misinformation; small probabilities of harm can be relevant to a vote if the harm is large enough. So on this one, I'll go to the wall on "plausible if unlikely; not misinformation".
3 - "The voice will divide the nation"
This is the one which was explicitly mentioned on the ABC coverage I saw. Not by an interviewee - one of the ABC journalists was interviewing the head of the No campaign, said this "wasn't factual" and asked him whether he regretted lying.
I don't understand the claims that this is misinformation. The claims that it's false (including the journalist, although not the article I'm beating up on) mostly just say "the Australian Constitution already gives the power to make laws for a specific race". The Constitution definitely does do that (it's extremely rarely used), but I'm not seeing why that makes "a specific body created to advocate for one racial grouping is dividing people into buckets by race" false.
The article I'm beating up on said that there are lobby groups already. Yes, there are, but not Constitutionally-recognised ones representing specific races. Again, not seeing the relevance.
My verdict: this is entirely true, the claims of misinformation border on misinformation themselves, I'll go to the wall on that.
4 - "The voice will force treaties"
See above under #1. The official No case said that this might lead to "Treaty" via people listening to the Voice and/or activists being emboldened, not that the Voice would directly force it. So the strawman/weak-man they're attacking would be misinformation, but the official case's point on this is quite plausible.
The article gets classy and says "There is no evidence for either, as the federal government has not indicated it will be engaging in those processes no matter what the outcome of the vote is." - do I really need to lay into this?
5 - "There are no details Variations of this claim include: you don’t know what you’re voting for and the voice is a Trojan horse for ‘secret agendas’"
I'm just going to quote the words in the article immediately following this:
There is plenty of detail. None of it is set in stone, because that is the parliament’s job, but we have an in-principle guide of what the voice under this government (because legislation can always be changed) would look like.
Exactly. We didn't know what we were voting for, because they had the legal option to change their minds afterward. Unlikely, perhaps, but not impossible.
Verdict: Largely accurate, not misinformation, I'll go to the wall on that.
6 - "The voice will allow the UN to take over Australia"
This is complete misinformation, no objections. (As you might expect, this one did not appear in any form in the official "no" case; this is just crazies.)
7 - "The Australian Electoral Commission will tamper with your votes"
Misinformation in the most blatant form that they're quoting, no objections. The AEC is highly trustworthy.
However, attention was drawn to the fact that ticks are counted as Yes and crosses are counted as invalid (not No). This is a known fact, the AEC went to court defending it against the alt-right UAP and won. This isn't tampering per se, the AEC told people to write Yes or No rather than to use a tick or cross, and it's not new for this referendum, but objecting to this policy isn't "false", it's an Ought statement saying that the speaker would prefer a different policy. On that one I'd say "not misinformation"; no Ought statement can be misinformation and the AEC 100% did the thing being objected to.
Note also on this one that the Yes campaign chose a colour representing itself that is identical to the AEC's official colour. They got in a little bit of trouble over this, although not a lot. So there were some things in AEC purple that were not impartial - they were Yes campaign material - although that's the Yes campaign being scummy and not the AEC.
Overall, I think it's fair to say that the No campaign's "misinformation" largely wasn't any such thing*, although as I noted there were crazies who said false things.
*There's one thing in the official No case that I think borders on misinformation. That's when they said "there is no comparable constitutional body like this anywhere in the world". Out of context I think that's false, although it's in the middle of an argument that there would be legal questions raised and in that sense it's justifiable because while similar bodies exist, it's not a 1:1 clone of them. Definite side-eye on that one, even if it makes a bit more sense in context.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
TBF Scott's "pseudonym" was originally only intended to block prospective bosses from finding his blog on cursory name search; it wasn't really intended to protect against cancellation. It achieved what it was supposed to i.e. getting him hired.
Also, a decent chunk of these people were literal teenagers at the time that they made those mistakes, and this is hardly limited to Rats.
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1yr ago
Ah, perhaps my above post would come off as a bit strange without context. The last two times I read felipec's crossposts, they made catastrophic mistakes in understanding the topic, but the tone was rather smug. I said that the next time he wrote a post and linked it here, if he was smugly wrong again I would stop reading his posts.
So I'm acknowledging that he did better this time. His engagement in the thread is also a bit better.
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5mo ago
I don't know a huge amount about GamerGate either. At least, not the start of it. We'll get to that.
The end part, the part that... well, not quite "matters", but the part that turned heads, was basically this: SJ openly declared culture war on nerdy men; the Grey Tribe ruptured fully from the Blue Tribe. I say it doesn't matter because the cracks had been growing for a while due to SJ's increasingly-censorious nature (indeed, Scott's criticism of SJ started a couple of years before GG); something was going to explode sooner or later, and it merely happened to be GG.
...all of which means there's a bit of an issue with reading up on it: since the Grey Tribe as a separate identity didn't actually exist for the most part until GG, it didn't have any narrative-producing institutions of its own, and the Red Tribe didn't care yet. So nearly all the media coverage is Blue propaganda intended to make the "pro-GG" side - the Grey side - look as bad as possible. Frankly, at the time I mostly bought it.
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6mo ago
That would be extremely good for Trump's chances at re-election
Not necessarily. It would be extremely good for Trump's popular support, but a conviction here would be used to buttress the efforts to take him off the ballot under Amendment XIV. Doesn't matter how many people support him if he can't be voted for.
Of course, that doesn't make it a good idea; the real result of taking Trump-as-Republican-nominee off the ballot isn't "Democrats win by default", but rather "civil war".
Honestly, I only see three ways out of this without Boogaloo: the Democrats can realise this is literal suicide and relent, the Republicans can nominate someone not Donald Trump Sr., or Trump is not able to run for reasons other than "banned" (e.g. being dead).
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7mo ago
It'll also presumably mean less focus on «regulation of AI risks» than some would hope for, denying this topic the uncontested succession to the Current Thing №1.
Do remember that this is mostly an increase to AI risk only in the situation where nuclear WWIII is avoided; if we do have a nuclear exchange, that slows down AI timelines quite a lot due to physical destruction, continent-spanning EMPs, and economic collapse - and it's not exactly like we're going to still be worried about nuclear war right after having one.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
magic9mushroom
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8hr ago
Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.
I kind of wonder about that. The institutions that launder that sort of information into public awareness are to a large extent captured by people who are anti-Israel, so it's actually kind of questionable how many people they'd lose vs. the counterfactual by actually doing massive war crimes. A lot of the populace already thinks Israel's guilty of ethnic cleansing, and a reasonable amount have heard "Wolf!" cried enough times that they've tuned out and won't believe reports of massacres; there's just not all that much of the US meaningfully in play here.
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6mo ago
And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
Probably because there's a lot of people who seem to think this man had a valid point. But what do I know, maybe all the people making a stand against indoctrination are shaking their heads at a man complaining about the expansion of an option that he could have gotten through in seconds.
I do not see the relevance of that man to the point at issue, unless your point is that this man is some sort of Dalek against whom all games are zero-sum and existential and therefore both brushing off his complaints as trivial and also banning mods that cater to him are justified tactics to oppose and destroy him.
What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?
Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?
Two of the answers are obvious:
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."
So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?
(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)
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