naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
About 25 years ago, some elderly relatives of mine were victims of a home invasion. They had been living in the same house in California for 40 or 50 years, and the character of the neighborhood had changed dramatically over that span. Their children had a security screen installed, but the octogenarian parents never bothered to bolt it. One day someone knocked on their door, so... they opened their door! They were quickly overpowered by a couple of young men (very possibly teens, but no one was ever caught or charged so who knows) who tied them to chairs, pistol whipped them a bit, cleaned out their valuables, and left. One of their children happened to stop by later that day, by which point both had soiled themselves and achieved a number of wounds trying to get free from their bonds. Both lived a few more years, but neither ever really emotionally recovered from the trauma.
Daytime home invasions are exceedingly rare, but when they happen and are accurately reported in detail, they can seize the public imagination, particularly among vulnerable populations. I personally have occasional nightmares about answering my door to home invaders, even though I've never personally experienced such a thing (and rarely remember dreaming at all!).
This case in Kansas seems especially well-tuned for culture warring on both race and firearms, but depending on the shooter's mental and physical health, probably neither is the most salient feature of these events. I really think we would be better off if this started a conversation about filial piety, elder care, and the incredible benefits of cultivating close, supportive family, but I'm sure that is a hope in vain.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
goofy-ass Disney fight
I feel like this reflects a failure to grasp the best of what DeSantis represents. Now, the Martha's Vineyard thing was, I think, a mistake, most especially since the immigrants involved didn't even leave from Florida. But Disney came out swinging against DeSantis. It wasn't his "goofy-ass...fight," it was Disney's goofy-ass fight. DeSantis' only real choice there was to remind them that they are a corporation and tell them to get back in their lane. Anything else would have resulted in DeSantis looking like a bootlicker who caves to Woke Corporatism the moment his moneyed masters yank on the chain.
Disney owns (and tyrannically enforces) a lot of beloved IP, so there will always be some people who think "Disney hates DeSantis, so I hate DeSantis." But politically speaking, "there are consequences to getting politically involved" was exactly the right message to send to businesses in this case. As they say--if you're going to take a shot at the king, don't miss. Disney sticking its corporate neck out to object to a bill forbidding schools from exposing young children to sexually explicit pedagogy was a horrible, horrible choice. They missed their shot, and DeSantis had exactly the correct response: punish defectors.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I suppose if I want to get more of his view on a way forward, I should read his book, The Cult of Smart, but I don't want to just now.
Read my review instead, my review is substantially better than his book, and that's not my way of saying that my review is especially good.
It seems like kids need more physical, sensory experiences, but it seems like a hard pitch, perhaps something to do with laptopping being high status and easy on the body, as is mentioned in the thread on class.
Something else deBoer wrote recently really resonated with me, and seems relevant:
like all political movements, the woke political movement is captured by the urge to occupy elevated status within it
Most educators don't give half a damn about genuinely improving the minds of the children they educate. Sure, they'll performatively care, they can talk a good game because that's the kind of signaling they are expected to deliver. But if you released, say, an adaptive computer program that could deliver a K-12 curriculum to a child at their own pace, with as good or better results than the average K-12 in-person education, without the need to leave their house or pay for school buildings or pay teachers--you would not change American public education in any perceptible way. K-12 school exist primarily to provide free daycare, and secondarily to give teachers government jobs. The movement to "educate children" is entirely captured by people who are extracting resources from the public for their own personal and political gain. That doesn't mean there aren't teachers involved who genuinely care about kids! But their care is largely incidental, except as it improves their ability to signal "cooperate" to the people running the show.
And the show in question is anti body. It has been this way from the beginning--read Socrates complaining about sex and tasty food as distractions from the really important stuff, like pure mathematics, and then check the latest memes on horny jail or eating bugs to save the planet and tell me how far we've really come, 25 centuries later. Once we were promised transcendence through death and salvation; today we are hoping for transcendence through mind uploads. "Disregard body, elevate mind" has certainly gotten occasional pushback (e.g. Epicurus, or more recently the free-love hippies) but attending to the well being of whole humans is not, and has not for most of history been, the goal of the greatest thinkers. In fact many of today's purportedly greatest thinkers will pretend to be deeply offended if you suggest e.g. that being born "into" a geno- and phenotypically female body is in any way pertinent to one's personal, human identity.
In that world, looking for ways to give kids more "physical, sensory experiences" isn't just low-status, it's downright subversive (and indeed: self-improvement through physical exercise is often negatively coded, especially when it arises in masculinity-building contexts).
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
A peek at an alternate universe where I would like to live:
November 15, 2022
The Mar-a-Lago Club, Palm Beach, Florida
Donald Trump is at the podium. His eyes are as squinted as his lips. He waves.
"Tonight, you know, I have an announcement. It's a big one. The biggest."
Applause.
"As the President of the United States, I gave you the best economy. The best. I gave you the best Supreme Court judges. We repealed Roe.
More applause.
"Who did that? Me. Nobody could do it but me. I started building the wall. You remember the wall? Sleepy Joe Biden stopped all that. Did you know that an illegal immigrant hit Crazy Nancy's husband in the head with a hammer? You might think she would learn something. But these people, they don't learn. You know who learns? Me. Donald Trump."
Applause, somewhat hesitant.
"I stopped COVID. Operation Warpspeed? You remember? Sleepy Joe Biden says he did that. He's not well. He's not well. I made America well again. I made America great again, because that's what I said I would do. You're great. I'm great. We're great."
Applause, with renewed vigor.
"So tonight I have a big announcement. Huge. Huge. You think you know what it is? Who thinks they know. No, no. You don't know. You think you know, but you think I got where I am by being predictable? You don't know. I'm the best. Putin, he didn't dare touch Ukraine while I was President. He invaded during Obama, he invaded during Biden. But nobody invades Ukraine on my watch. You ever think about that?"
Perplexed applause.
"But I won't be around forever, folks. I know, I know--that's hard for you to hear. But it's true. So I have a gift for you. One more thing, because you know--I care. I do care. I care too much! Okay, okay. I know. I love you too."
Increasingly panicked applause.
"So here it is. I am now endorsing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the next President of the United States of America."
Silence descends on Mar-a-Lago.
"He couldn't become the governor without me. No way he gets to be President without my help. Well, I have some money, maybe you've heard. We're gonna kick sleepy Joe out of the White House, assuming he even lasts to 2024. We're gonna finish what we started. We're gonna make America great again. Thank you."
Pandemonium ensues.
This is pure fantasy, of course. A narcissist like Trump could never. Which is amazing, because just imagine if he did. A single, self-effacing moment of pure team contribution would win Trump a hundred times the accolades he could ever get running for a second term. Trump would go down as a legend (and probably win himself a useful pardon to boot). But that's the thing about narcissists--they don't seem to understand that all the attention and glory they so desperately want, is more often acquired by not doing the most self-aggrandizing thing possible. They fail to grasp that it's possible to get what you want by giving other people what they want--to win by being nice.
So I do not think this is even remotely a plausible scenario. Like, obviously, right? But it could be. Trump could make history, could absolutely cement himself as the craziest 5-D chess grandmaster in the multiverse. But he won't, because he can't. He can't choose any ending but the ignominious one.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This comment has received at least three reports, with some commenters saying they've reported this comment.
I am responding with a modhat to remind the reporters that this is a forum for testing shady thinking, which means that by default even shady thinking is allowed. While concrete threats of violence are in many instances illegal and would in any event violate our ruleset (at minimum by excluding the targets of such threats from the discussion), opinions regarding what might arguably justify violence are not the same as threats of violence.
From the reports, @Goodguy stands accused of being "pro shooting up schools" and sounding "really unhinged." From @NolanE's comment on the other reported comment:
It seems to justify school shootings (including young children) because of workplace toxicity.
But this is uncharitable and suggests an aversion to thinking charitably about the motives of violent people, which--if we actually want to prevent school shootings, or even threats of school shootings--it might be helpful for us to think about clearly and accurately. @Goodguy says that violence is "not necessarily a good reaction" but an "understandable" one. This is supported with a characterization of public education that many people disagree with (some, here in the comments), but not one that is presented as the only or even the correct perspective. Nothing about this comment "justifies" school shootings--only attempts to explain them.
There is a famous story about John Adams defending British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials. It has become the center of essays, books, television productions... Adams does not seem to have even been excessively sympathetic toward the soldiers, though he was certainly accused of such sympathies. Rather, he just regarded it as an injustice for the soldiers to go to trial unrepresented, and he had some rational doubts about the stories he was hearing. In the end, many of the soldiers were actually acquitted, because there was good evidence that they weren't involved or at fault, but this evidence would not have come to light had public opinion prevailed and the soldiers simply been lynched. Still, there were some people who continued to regard Jon Adams as "pro shooting up Americans" as a result.
In hopes of throwing reporters a bit of a bone, I want to say something like "@Goodguy's comment could be higher effort," but even that I think would not be quite right. If @Goodguy had written a higher-effort version of this comment, I think it would only have strengthened the objections; the comment as written does not excuse or defend school shootings, only explains (some of) them in a way that could potentially be probative of root causes. That it does so succinctly helps, rhetorically, to strengthen the idea that shooters are not being defended as, well, the "good guys"--just as humans responding to an arguably coercive environment.
If anyone using this website ever turns out to commit a serious crime, I will be very sad about that! But I'm not going to moderate people for trying to understand violence, on grounds that understanding violence might lead to violence. Because I think the opposite is at least as likely to be true--that honest attempts to understand violence could help us to prevent it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This seems like a troll to me. But if it's not a troll, then it's you wishing death on your outgroup without really engaging the argument in a plausibly serious way--for which you have already been banned once.
This is a discussion forum. If you aren't interested in engaging seriously and charitably with the thoughts of people whose views you abhor, then maybe this is not the place for you.
Banned for three days.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This forum is an offshoot of rationalism but it's a pretty distant offshoot. Yud-Scott-motte and now motte.org... I think this is a rightist forum.
It's probably worth noting that the people who make a habit of publicly sneering at rationalism have been accusing Yud-Scott-motte and now motte.org of being rightists, or at least crytpo-rightists, for years. The "rationalists" are furthermore in many ways the cultural inheritors of the cypherpunks--the community is overwhelmingly IT-adjacent by profession, or was last time we checked. The cypherpunk culture, in turn, was heavily libertarian, which is not the same as "rightist" even though libertarians in U.S. politics tend to get lumped in with Republicans more often than Democrats. The meme of libertarians who want gay marijuana farmers defending their private crops with automatic weapons is a much better description of the "tendencies" I see in this space than "rightist."
By curating a space where people can test their ideas in a broad Overton window, I do think we tend to encourage the discussion of political heresies, and since our U.S. cultural institutions are dominated by the left and/or the extreme left, the discussions here tend to be about things the left and/or extreme left would prefer to taboo--for the simple reason that other things can be discussed elsewhere, but many of these things can not. And I've gotten many great responses to my Fetterman thread that are clearly not pro-Republican, and I've gotten clear leftist pushback on the "groomer" discussion, too. That's a long way from what I see on genuinely "rightist" spaces.
Like many people, in the summer of 2016 I signed up for "Pokemon Go." I'd previously spent a couple of months playing Niantic's "Ingess" and though it got me out walking a bit, I lost interest in less than a year. I hoped Pokemon Go might help me re-gamify my preferred approach to light cardio. However, the game servers were apparently potatoes so after the first day, I never played again.
When the COVID pandemic hit, I took up walking again, and decided to give Pokemon Go another try. I was far from alone; the game's revenue went from $650 million in 2019 to over $900 million in 2020, only to drop off just as steeply in 2022. It did tend to keep me out walking longer than I otherwise might; I've now been playing the game for 30-60 minutes daily for a couple of years, in conjunction with my exercise regimen.
The game itself is aggressively mid. I've only played through one mainline Pokemon game (Diamond, if you care)--because I felt like I ought to have played through at least one Pokemon game, given their popularity. But I gather that if you're a real Pokemon afficionado, Pokemon Go ("PoGo") is borderline offensive in its implementation. The Pokemon formula is catch-and-brawl, but while the "catch" portion of PoGo is basically adequate, the "brawl" portion is genuinely terrible.
The explanation is, essentially, "Niantic." Ingress, the game on which PoGo was built, seems to have existed primarily to gamify pedestrian data collection for Google Maps. Niantic spun off of Google in 2015, but has kept its "data collection" DNA; one thing PoGo players can do to advance in the game is scan locations with their phone cameras and submit the info to Niantic. Publicly, Niantic is always talking about finding ways to improve the "get outside and gather with others" aspects of the game. Some changes made during the pandemic allowed players to gather more virtually, and these were hugely popular; when Niantic rolled these changes back, the playerbase revolted and Niantic partially restored the functions (while making them more expensive to use).
Well, this is all pretty boring corporate stupidity, so far. Not many serious culture war angles; it's a game targeted at Millennials and their kids, and it's barely playable outside of fairly densely-populated cities, and beyond that the company behind it had more "big data" DNA than "makes fun games" DNA. PoGo is successful, truly, in spite of itself. None of Niantic's other offerings have ever really taken off as they'd like.
And then today, everyone got new avatars.
Previously, the game had two base avatars--a male and a female. These had slightly different, but mostly overlapping, clothing options. Beyond that you could set hair, skin, and eye colors. You could freely switch between male and female.
There are several things I noticed immediately about the new avatar system. First, there is no longer any distinction between sexes. Rather, the system offers a number of body "presets" as well as a custom body slider. All of the bodies are monstrous; 75% are noticeably obese. The sliders do nothing to address this. All settings are vaguely androgynous; a slender female waist or strong male chest are simply out of the question. Many new faces and hairstyles are available (albeit none with facial hair), and all are creepy and doll-like.
Skin and hair color options have also changed. Most of the options are weird and strictly inferior to past options (avatars can no longer have striking red hair; a dull auburn is as close as it now gets). "White" skin comes in "pasty" or "jaundiced" only. But especially weird--the selection palettes appear to just be randomized. They do not cluster dark skin with other dark shades, or light skin with other light shades--it's just a mess of brown tones, in no particular order.
The clothing--most of which players must purchase using premium in-game currency--hangs oddly; every pair of pants looks like someone is wearing an overloaded diaper. Every shirt hangs like drapes. Previously "sexy" clothing now just looks ill-fitting; muscular male outfits are now vaguely flabby, curvy female outfits are flat or distended.
Discussion has raised a variety of points about Niantic possibly recycling assets to cut costs, or relying on AI conversions, or seeking to tap the Fortnite crowd with more Fortnite-esque physiques. Memes are dropping. Complaints are dropping. Waistlines are dropping. And dropping. And dropping.
I don't know what will happen next. It doesn't matter very much to me, except insofar as I have a distinct preference against the new avatar system. But the culture war angle just seems so glaring. Perhaps because of the target demographic, though, I don't see a lot of discussion of it. I kind of assume that Niantic is ready to deploy the "racists and transphobes hate the PoGo update" press releases, though I haven't seen one yet. But basically everyone hates the body updates, even if they are glad to have more hair options. I think my favorite comment on reddit was here:
"As a nonbinary player I always wished they'd remove genderlocked customization"
One finger on my monkey's paw curls inward
It would also be interesting to know more about what's happening internally at Niantic--like if the work here was done by AI, or by diversity hires, or what. I've heard completely unverifiable rumors that Niantic management is outrageously out of touch with reality but also petrified to kill their golden goose, so it is hard for me to imagine them green-lighting these changes without culture war blinders on. But maybe they really are just terrible at their jobs?
Well, there's your tempest in today's teapot. Such a small thing! And yet so clearly intended to make the game less pleasant to the San Francisco outgroup. Perhaps I will rethink my position on the possible existence of microaggressions.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
"Truth and Reconciliation" was the darling of progressive legal academics the world over back in the 1990s. I had one colleague who made it the center of a course he taught on "restorative" justice. He's been dead for a while now, so I'll never know what he would have to say about all this, but my impression generally is that academics are most comfortable absolutely ignoring the reality of what is happening in South Africa and continuing to blame colonialism for everything. The fact that they were dead wrong about "Truth and Reconciliation," and it failed, will not be taken as a lesson of any kind.
As much as I love to see jackass politicians hoist by their own petard, all any of this helps me to conclude is that the laws and regulations surrounding information handling in the United States are some combination of (1) retarded, (2) routinely ignored, and/or (3) disconnected from reality.
Somewhere, maybe in the old subreddit, I read a wonderful post by someone describing various levels of precaution that were supposed to be taken in labs doing "gain of function" research or similar, and then contrasting those levels of precaution with the actual levels of precaution likely to be taken by people who become accustomed to the environment by working in it day in, day out: much less precaution than required.
I have many reasons to believe that something similar is true of classified documents. Maybe some bureaucrats at the NSA or something actually take all the Mission: Impossible precautions of changing passwords regularly, air-gapping crucial secrets, etc. but I am confident that few (if any) elected officials even know what the damn regulations are--never mind actually taking pains to follow them. This goes double for the executive, particularly since it is arguably the case that the President (and even perhaps some others) can essentially just decide to declassify stuff (I'm oversimplifying, here, but the office of the President really does arguably have practically plenary power over many things under the Constitution, and national security is one of them).
This is really why Hillary's servers were such an annoying sideshow. Yes, I think she was probably guilty of a federal crime, but it's the same federal crime you could very probably pin on half the elected officials in DC, if you were sufficiently motivated to do so. Trump appears to probably be guilty of the same crime, more or less, and now we have evidence that Biden, too, appears to have basically done the same thing. Now, show me some evidence that any of these people were selling state secrets or something, and we could have a more lively conversation. And maybe I should be more angry about this kind of malfeasance than I am. But if you write enough laws, eventually everyone is always guilty of something, and laws that require you to be careful just in case, even though bad things almost never actually happen as a result of noncompliance, are almost always the first ones people grow comfortable ignoring. I doubt there is anything nefarious going on with Biden's lax document handling--but I feel the same about Trump, and Clinton.
What I don't like is giving the bureaucracy (like the Justice Department) a free hand to interfere with elected politicians, or not, as they please, based on rules the bureaucracy is paid to learn and know and enforce, but which elected officials can only, apparently, correctly interpret with the help of whatever Court they ultimately have to face on the matter. I don't like Biden (or Trump, or Clinton, it turns out I kind of hate all politicians) and part of me wants to just not care that his feet might get put to the fire on this, at least a little. But mostly I am suspicious of the frequency with which (what are probably in all cases entirely predictably) "mishandled documents" is becoming everyone's favorite "gotcha!"
Can we talk about Rebekah Jones? Should we? I'm honestly incredibly conflicted about these questions. One of the rules of the Motte is that we shouldn't weakman:
There are literally millions of people on either side of every major conflict, and finding that one of them is doing something wrong or thoughtless proves nothing and adds nothing to the conversation. We want to engage with the best ideas on either side of any issue, not the worst.
Discussing Jones feels like walking a tightrope (called "meaningful cultural and political issues") that has been strung over an open toxic waste pit (called "are my political opponents just mentally ill?"). Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any. The best I can do is to say, suppose you combined Marjorie Taylor Greene's extremism with George Santos' fabulism, then made the resulting chimera guilty of the things Matt Gaetz was only ever rumored to have been guilty of doing--that would get you pretty close to Jones, I think. Except that MTG and Santos and Gaetz aren't darlings of reddit and don't command fawning loyalty from major media outlets, which Jones also does.
As a refresher, I first learned of Jones back in the old subreddit, when someone posted about her COVID activism. I don't remember when I learned of her criminal activities, but to simply quote the Wikipedia:
Jones has had prior criminal charges. At the time the search warrant was executed, Jones was facing an active misdemeanor charge on allegations of cyberstalking a former student of hers who was a romantic partner and publishing sexual details about their relationship online. She was fired from her Florida State University teaching position for threatening to give a failing grade to her romantic partner's roommate. She faced prior charges including felony robbery, trespass, and contempt of court stemming from an alleged violation of a domestic violence restraining order related to the same ex-boyfriend, but those charges were dropped. In 2017, she had been arrested and charged with criminal mischief in the vandalism of his car, but the charges were dropped.
Jones faced criminal charges in Louisiana in 2016 where she was arrested and charged by the LSU Police Department with one count each of battery on a police officer and remaining after forbidden and two counts of resisting arrest after refusing to vacate a Louisiana State University office upon being dismissed from her staff position.
Jones went on to say she was going to run for office in Maryland (IIRC), but when that didn't pan out for unclear reasons, she returned to Florida. I don't know how much she has received in crowdfunding from the anti-DeSantis crowd at this point, but two early efforts pulled over half a million dollars. Jones has continued to hold herself out as a "whistleblower," specifically against the DeSantis administration in Florida, even though these claims appear pretty thoroughly debunked.
"Aha!" You might say. "PolitiFact leans left, and debunks Jones, so even the Left is willing to disavow this nut!"
Sure, maybe, to some extent. She went on to win the 2022 Democrat primary to challenge Matt Gaetz for his seat in the House of Representatives, so at least 16,000 Democrats still preferred Jones to someone with an actual legal education and genuinely relevant experience. And yes--by this logic, some 50,000 Republicans preferred the candidate who was under investigation for sex trafficking minors! It's baffling, I agree. But this is one of those "meaningful cultural and political issues" I mentioned--the only way I can make sense of any of this is to take a deep breath and remind myself that most people lack anything approaching coherent principles, they don't care about these details--they only care to win.
Anyway, that's all just the background!
This morning I woke up with this in my feeds.
If you don't want to read "WhitePeopleTwitter" (and I wouldn't blame you), it is a tweet from Rebekah Jones, followed by others, which I have partly reproduced here:
Today's events will tell a story so enraging, heartbreaking and brutal that I'm sure when I'm ready to tell it, no one will ever defend the Florida governor's actions again.
My family is not safe. My son has been taken on the gov's orders, and I've had to send my husband and daughter out of state for their safety.
THIS is the reality of living in DeSantis' Florida.
There is no freedom here. Only retaliatory rule by a fascist who wishes to be king
A week after we filed our lawsuit against the state, a kid claiming to be the cousin of one of my son's classmates joined their snapchat group. They recorded their conversations, and anonymously reported my son to police for sharing a popular internet meme.
They said they had to complete a threat assessment since they received an anon complaint, which both the local cops and the school signed off on as not being a threat. The kids were joking about cops and video games, which included this meme: [pic of a fat cop with text about waiting for a school shooter to commit suicide]
Two weeks later, bringing us to earlier today, an officer told me the state issued a warrant for my son's arrest for "digital threats of terrorism."
I asked on whose orders. The officer said it was the state.
They aren't letting him come home tonight. They kidnapped my son.
I had to get my husband and daughter out of here because CPS now interprets my home as dangerous because they've charged my 13 year old son with a felony for sharing a meme.
Naturally, Jones also provides links to her crowdfunding platforms of choice. The reddit "discussion" is... predictable? Outrage, occasional people (mostly, but not always, downvoted) asking whether this is legit, very few people posting actual information. Well, proles gonna prole I guess. But the headline in the Miami Herald?
13-year-old son of Rebekah Jones, whistleblower who clashed with DeSantis, arrested over memes
So, that sounds bad! But is it really why he was arrested? In fact it is not. He was arrested for posting stuff like this:
I want to shoot up the school.
If I get a gun I’m gonna shoot up hnms lol.
I’m getting a wrath and natural selection shirt so maybe but I don’t think many ppl know what the columbine shooters look like.
Okay so it’s been like 3-4 weeks since I got on my new antidepressants and they aren’t working but they’re suppose to by now so I have no hope in getting better so why not kill the losers at school.
Does your plug have access to guns?
I always keep a knife on me so maybe I'll just stab people idk
As this information was coming out, Jones added to her tweetstorm:
I've been in contact with members of the press whom I trust. They have the videos of the police at my house, of my son being put in handcuffs, of the officer refusing to let us give him his medication, of my 13 year old autistic kid who can't stand to be touched having to spread his legs before going into the back seat of a police car. All of it.
I haven't been given any documents from the state or police. I asked to take a picture of the paperwork and was told no. All they would tell me was the charge. They didn't even read him his rights when they arrested him.
I'm going to the courthouse today. When we're cleared to, we'll join my family out of state.
And aside to get our things, I'm only coming back to see these people in court.
It's not clear when these events are supposed to have occurred; Max Nordau shared video of Jones delivering her son to the police station. Rather, as this tweet suggests, it appears that "Rebekah Jones tried to blame DeSantis and RAISE MONEY off law enforcement stopping a possible school shooting."
I don't know what Jones' problem ultimately is. Narcissism? Paranoia? DeSantis Derangement Syndrome? That she is a habitual fabulist is well-established. That she has profited substantially from vocal opposition to all things DeSantis is a matter of public record. She is a sufficiently shady known quantity that most really big national news outlets seem reluctant to continue signal-boosting her, but the Miami Herald (by circulation, reportedly Florida's seventh-largest paper) still seems happy to run false headlines at her mere behest.
This seems discussion-worthy, and yet part of me wants to just not even post about it because it seems wrong, somehow, to even discuss Rebekah Jones. Giving her any attention at all feels a bit like encouraging a delusional person to persist in their delusions; she clearly wants notoriety, she doesn't seem capable of handling notoriety in a healthy way, surely it would be best to just stop paying attention to her?
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this? [CONTINUED BELOW]
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
It's a bad look, for sure, but how is this not just run-of-the-mill drunken disorderliness? "Racism" is not really the same thing as racial epithets. If you get drunk and repeatedly call a man a "dick" we don't generally run a story about a "sexist outburst." This strikes me as a wild exaggeration:
extreme racism can happen among the younger generations
Extreme drunkenness can happen among younger generations, for sure. And when your drunk brain looks for the most offensive thing it can say to someone, and your social milieu is one where a racial epithet is the most offensive word you can think of, then the more strongly we disapprove of racial epithets, the more often we're going to hear them from angry, irrational people. Calling that "racism" seems like rhetorical sleight of hand to me.
Imagine a student getting plastered and, noticing her RA's MAGA cap, calling the RA a "Nazi" two hundred times. I can't imagine students putting together a petition demanding the drunk person's expulsion--it would be ridiculous. The drunk girl clearly has some problems, but none of them appear solvable by either tarring her as a "racist" or by expelling her from school.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I don't have anything useful to say about this... I don't think Kanye is a mentally stable human being, but I'm not sure many humans at that level of fame can be stable. Existing on that scale is so far outside the ancestral environment that I suspect brain stuff just gets weird.
What immediately struck me about this case was how clearly it feeds Kanye's argument. When saying "the Jews are shutting down everyone who disagrees with their agenda" gets you shut down by organizations substantially owned and/or operated by Jews, like, what--you think he's gonna conclude "oh, I must be mistaken?" This is on the same rhetorical playground as the well-trod "canceling conservatives just gets them bigger book deals, 'left media bias' is obviously a myth."
I can't help but be reminded of Whoopi Goldberg's suspension over what sounded to me as mostly weird commentary--not anti-Semitic. The antipathy or even just skepticism so many black Americans have expressed toward Jews is remarkable. But I can imagine being a black person whose community openly expresses frustration at whites or Asians or Hispanics "keeping me down"--in such an environment, why wouldn't a statistically wealthy, powerful group of phenotypically white people be permitted targets of the same basic criticism?
It also seems related to stuff like this. Armed black militants demanding reparations and a closed border seems like evidence that some blacks, at least, have decided that they don't want to be pawns for either "Left" or "Right" politics. Not sure that works out for them, in a two-party left-right coalition environment... but maybe?
And yeah. Twitter delenda est.
I think there's a lot of stupid stuff happening in this article, but this may be the most egregious:
Whites of all economic classes are being displaced or prevented from moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Smart, ambitious, young whites are the ones who are hit hardest, and that’s traditionally who you want as a revolutionary class.
I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that smart, ambitious young people of any color face any truly objectionable obstacles to living a life of choice and value. This is probably one of my biggest annoyances with grievance culture and identitarianism generally: it is a philosophy of total Nietzschean ressentiment, a gospel of pure unanchored envy. "I want more, I deserve more" is a whinge that is just totally hollow coming out of the mouth of anyone with an IQ over, say, 95. There are ample opportunities to be pursued; people just don't want to bear the associated costs. They want things handed to them. Put every single white person into North America and Europe, expel everyone darker than Sardinian fisherman, and I would expect everyone to quickly settle to within a stone's throw of the socioeconomic strata they occupied previously. Nobody is keeping you down, but you.
And sure--anti-white racism is real, and can be every bit as virulent and destructive on an individual level as any other kind of racism. So let's not be racist. There are many interesting arguments for separatism. But right here in the United States people are already free to enjoy some amount of separatism, if they care enough to look for it. There are black majority colleges, Asian majority cities, whole damn swathes of desert owned by pseudo-sovereign American Indian tribes--what's to be gained from cutting ties with them any further? Wealthy, predominantly white suburbs with good schools and attractive amenities are a real thing, and if you're a white person who can't afford to move to them, that's because you haven't earned a place there, just like the non-whites who complain about the existence of wealthy white suburbs. The problem isn't that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists (though it is almost certainly true that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists), the problem is that people can't accept that their problems are almost never the result of systemic anything, and almost always the result of their own internal inclinations and capacities.
I have big, big complaints about the ways we deal with race in the United States, but I do my best to make those complaints from a place of principle--and the principle that governs much of my thinking is that attaching your self-conception or your politics to a group identity instead of to individual merit is stupid. My political enemies are wrong because they think that Blackness and Queerness and Whiteness are important. White identitarians are the poster children of "battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster." They embody everything they think they can destroy. They are often the enemies of my enemies, but the fact that I regard leftist identitarians as a depressing blend of idiocy and mendacity does not make me willing to abandon my principles to join hands with white identitarians. Theirs are not arguments I'm willing to support unconditionally, as soldiers; theirs are arguments I reject for the same reasons I reject leftism.
You can't convince me that white nationalists are right without convincing me that social justice warriors are right, too--and the reverse is also true.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This post is far too "boo outgroup" to pass muster. You may as well have written it about cardiologists; it would not have been any less on the nose.
Extraordinary claims demand meticulous evidence. While I appreciate you providing some evidence in support of your claims, it seems sufficiently cherry-picked, and your account overall insufficiently steelmanned for your outgroup, that you have failed to clear the threshold here. Furthermore, you have not written in a way that evinces a sense that you are writing for everyone and want them to be included in the conversation.
This is your third warning in about a month; keep it up, and these will start becoming bans.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I appreciated the article, but it is a little funny watching Millennials reinvent the Eternal September.
One thing that the essay suggested to my mind is that maybe I should think more about how the Internet and academia have co-evolved in the last ~50 years. The geekiness of American universities was eroded first by athletics, but later--and much more powerfully--by credential inflation in the job market. The essentially "democratizing" process of expanding college from perhaps 5% of the population to nearly 50% has had similar effects in higher education as democratizing the Internet has had in online spaces, with popularity crowding out capability as the primary measure of success. Increasing competition for "top spots" without proportionally diversifying the availability and character of what gets recognized as a "top spot" has injected all sorts of crab-bucket distortions into both systems. But the Internet's development arc has moved much more quickly; if the analogy holds, then watching how the Internet develops from here may be informative as to the future of academia. Which I do not find encouraging.
Guess I will just have to hope the analogy is bad...
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
When topline education funding takes a hit, I predict there will be no firing of excessive administrative personnel like diversity experts or secretaries or superfluous academic committees. The budge hits will be directly to education funding proper, textbooks and materials and the like, so the entrenched education interests can point to a shortage of textbooks and say "See what your ESA is doing to our precious children!?"
This reminds me of the other thing I saw about Arizona education over the summer. I guess a couple years ago there was a bunch of organized protesting demanding a raise in teacher salaries, and the governor and legislature allocated money to give teachers a 20% raise over the next few years. But the public school districts did not pass that money on to teachers as promised, leading to another round of demands for increases in "teacher pay":
The Arizona Auditor General released a report earlier this year showing the average teacher salary increased by 16.5% or around $8,000, less than the promise of 20% by 2020. That report shows that while most districts increased pay, only 43% of districts statewide actually met the 20% goal since there was no requirement that districts spend the money on teacher salaries.
(I do wonder how widespread salary increases of 10%+ contributed to Arizona's inflation...) Meanwhile, Arizona district superintendents are pulling down $200,000 annual salaries, plus stuff like this:
She was joined by dozens of other educators who had gathered before heading into the first Buckeye Elementary School District meeting since the Arizona auditor general’s finding that the district paid its superintendent $1.7 million in retirement credits and unused leave and then failed to note it in public employment records.
The amount of money being poured into "public education" systems in the United States is absolutely gob-smacking. I don't know who first said that "think of the children" is the root password to all government systems, but it certainly seems to be true. It will be interesting to see how things change as more parent groups catch wise to the scam. Something else I saw on social media somewhere, was that the biggest mistake Democrats made during COVID was turning "parents of school-aged children" into a special interest voting bloc opposed to Democrat policies.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
It's also worth worth noting that (1) the University of South Carolina canceled a two game women's basketball series in response to these accusations and (2) South Carolina lawmakers are asking why. So this has already gone further than just "did it happen or not"--there have been direct consequences of people drawing their own conclusions concerning unproven allegations.
While researching this story I was intrigued to see how much bigotry is directed at BYU athletes. If BYU canceled games over bigotry and slurs directed at Mormons, they might not have any games left. If they're now to have games canceled by others over hate hoaxes, maybe they should just get on with it and end their athletics program entirely.
One good technique is to put in characters that are politically sensitive and then just never call attention to it.
But even this is a culture war move--this is the classically liberal "color blind" approach. I think it's a great approach! But I am assured by the badly-named "anti-racism" crowd that the "color blind" approach is bad. We get this in the recent "Secret Invasion" scene where Fury leans on Rhodes for some color-based solidarity--using aliens as a stand-in wasn't enough, we had to get some explicit discussion of segregation so everyone knows that the only message that matters is (as Scott recently put it) "re-enacting the 60s civil rights struggle."
Can we, like, do something about that? Have some main characters who start out married, and end married, and the story is never about their difficulties in marriage?
Sometimes, yes, but I remember someone in the last ten years (Yudkowsky?) pithily observing that it is almost impossible to write an engaging story about mature individuals making responsible choices. Without conflict, where is the catharsis? In fact I have seen (and personally very much enjoyed) a growing number of counterexamples in recent years, mostly in anime, indie games, and Nintendo titles (especially stuff like Animal Crossing)--a sort of "comfort food" genre that (for probably obvious reasons) attracts more women to traditionally masculine media. I note that even, say, Stardew Valley does not quite meet this mark, given the pressure imposed by the clock and the calendar. But many "overpowered protagonist" anime titles do seem to hit this mark--Farming Life in Another World, for example.
Hammerlock is just a guy who likes guys, and he's worried about his old fling, and this is never turned into a Explicitly Political Thing, and that's cool.
I think Key & Peele's "Office Homophobe" helpfully illustrates the difference--except that there are real, fairly serious disagreements about this, often discussed under the heading of "visibility." The point of "Pride Parades" is often explicitly articulated as visibility. During the "sexual revolution," the winning legal argument for pornography as "free speech" was that pornography is a special kind of argument for a different kind of world--a world where people are less perplexed and uptight about sex.
I feel like you make some good observations here but you only seem to be thinking about one half of the discussion, namely, the half where you want to know how you are supposed to "decide what [human characters should] look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color." The other half of the discussion is, why do you need to decide that? Not in the trivial sense (you have to decide that because, if you're going to have human characters at all, they must be plausibly human), but in the deeper sense of how your artistic choices are going to be driven. Do you "need to decide so your game is marketable?" That will give you a different answer than if you "need to decide so you don't offend your development team," or "so your plot makes any sense," or "so your game meets your/someone else's threshold of realism," or whatever.
So if you want to include a "trans" character in a game, my first question is, "okay, why?" And to be clear--"I just feel like it" is perfectly acceptable as an explanation, if all you care about is art for the sake of art. But in most contexts, either your "trans" character is going to be "invisible" in just the sense you observe, or they are going to be so visible that your cultural milieu makes it a "thing." For it to not be a thing would require a world (either the one we live in, or the one in the game) where "gender markers" are slim-to-nonexistent. Feminist scholar Sally Haslanger once wrote, "when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race)." She (and many feminists) seem to really believe that the biological differences between men and women can be of no particular moment in an egalitarian world, to the point where we don't even have language to distinguish such things. Gender eliminativism, however, runs strongly counter to the gender essentialism expressed by most transsexuals today. To create a fictional universe where being trans is not noticeable, and yet trans characters are also not invisible, you can't create a universe where some characters are trans, you have to create a universe where there are no socially constructed gender norms.
I guess what I'm bringing myself around to is the idea that transsexuality just is a political identity, as surely as "Republican" or "Democrat." Either a trans character is noticeably violating gender norms (in which case, they are calling attention to themselves) or they are living up to gender norms (in which case, they are invisible). Just as you'll never know whether that background character is a Catholic or a monarchist or a /b/tard unless it comes up in the storyline, you'll never know a video game character is trans unless it gets advertised in some way.
But probably you should care about that approximately as much, and for approximately the same reasons, as you care about making sure there are enough Muslims or women or incels in your game (which, depending on your game, might matter anywhere from "not at all" to "a whole damn lot"). Depicting an in-game society where nobody cares about race is pretty easy, given the medium of video games; you see characters who look wildly different, and you see that nobody cares. Forget Uhura; check out the friendship between Han Solo and Chewbacca! But depicting an in-game society where nobody cares about gender requires you to build an in-game society where nobody cares about gender, which like... as long as we're a sexually dimorphic species for whom pair-bonding is (at least temporarily) necessary for procreation, that's probably flatly impossible. But in a transhumanist society where body-swapping is feasible and the act of sex has been obsoleted by an infinite variety of pleasure-generating technologies, basically everyone is going to be "trans" by contemporary standards.
I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.
In short: why? If you want to make propaganda, make some propaganda. If you don't want to make propaganda, then either non-attention-called trans people or an allegory for trans people will be varying shades of possible depending entirely on what else you're demanding from your game. A realistic 1920s noir thriller where one character happens to be openly and noticeably trans and nobody cares will fail to be authentic, and this will invite totally understandable criticism (in fact, it will obviously be propaganda, even if you prefer it not to be propaganda). A cyberpunk RPG where you can give your character breasts and a penis, by contrast, is unlikely to attract the same kind of attention (even though it will still probably attract some complaints).
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
There are a lot of writeups on the "1 in 4" claim. Here is a particularly critical one which concludes:
Now, much more could be said about caveats, but using just the information we have so far, we can see that a more accurate headline would look something like this:
Approximately 1 in 4 of 19% of a Non-Representative Sample of Women Who Responded to a Non-Representative Survey of 27 Colleges (Out of Roughly 5,000) Reported Experiencing Sexual Assault, Where “Sexual Assault” is Taken to Mean Anything from Being on the Receiving End of an Unsolicited Kiss to Forcible Penetration at Gunpoint, Regardless of the Particular Context
Most of the time when I have pointed this out to someone touting "1 in 4," they've been pretty quick to retreat to the rhetoric of "even one is one too many." Women have a lot more to fear from men, than vice versa, and very nearly all women have a story they can tell you about sexual mistreatment (that may or may not rise to the level of "assault"). So it is perhaps understandable why people might be susceptible to exaggerated claims on the matter--but also, the pattern is common across a variety of objectionable activity; police brutality is also far less common than people tend to believe, for example.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Still, I’m ambivalent on a ban unless the mods have better proof the poster is trolling or being sneaky.
The ban is short, and very much intended to communicate that Amadan's warning should not have been ignored in this way.
We don't like anyone doing top-level posting that is overwhelmingly copy-pasted, even when it's not on a maximally-inflammatory topic, but we also don't want to over-moderate, so when it happens occasionally, or comes from otherwise-well-reputed users, it's kinda whatever. But when one user does it repeatedly, in combination with other kinda-shady behaviors, and immediately after being warned against it, like--what else am I supposed to do?
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
You linked to their website, but there is nothing there about Catholicism at all.
...you don't think a panoply of wildly caricatured Catholic nuns is about Catholicism "at all?"
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
It's very hard to believe this question has been asked sincerely, but you're also getting a lot of questionable answers. White southerners were very often racists, in the classical sense of believing in their inherent racial superiority. But you're right that simple racism is probably not sufficient to support Jim Crow laws all on its own.
If you know anything about the history of the Civil War, though, you know that after the Civil War, the South was Occupied Territory. All the newly-freed slaves formed an enormous voting bloc, and they all voted Republican. This was a huge opportunity for carpet baggers from the North to break into federal politics, which were substantially dominated by a New England elite. If the Southern states were to have anything approaching self rule ever again, it was extremely important to disenfranchise the Republican-captured black electorate. And so: Jim Crow.
Once you've got the practical foundation of "we need to disenfranchise black Republicans" in place, then the rest of the stuff--anti-miscegenation, segregation, etc.--follows pretty naturally from the prevailing (racist!) worldview of the politically powerful whites in the "Reconstructed" South. But the New Deal starts bringing black voters over to the Democratic Party, and segregation becomes a regional issue rather than a party issue for much of the 20th century. After that, it was just a matter of institutional inertia.
Of course, people in the past didn't know many of the things we know now, but that doesn't mean they were stupid. The idea of a racially diverse nation had never really been tried; nationality and race were (and in most places still are) indistinguishable concepts. Native Americans are to this day allowed to (encouraged to!) live in racially segregated communities, and presumably some well-meaning individuals saw parallels there as well. So I don't mean to suggest that there were no plausible arguments (beyond racism) for Jim Crow laws. I just think that, in purely political terms, the desire of Southerners to cast off, if not the yoke of the Union, at least the yoke of the Republicans, is quite sufficient to explain their desire to disenfranchise black voters by whatever means necessary.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I'm posting this because I'm worried that I am more gullible than I thought.
Are there any simple heuristics that I could have employed here to better avoid falling for creative writing exercises?
Sure, you could practice being cynical:
cyn·i·cal /ˈsinək(ə)l/
adjective
- believing that people are motivated purely by self-interest; distrustful of human sincerity or integrity.
There's a reason rationalists are sometimes accused of being quokkas. There is also a reason why, at a certain threshold, open-armed rationalists can be seen transforming virtually overnight into hardened black-pilled culture warriors. The transition from Jedi to Sith portrayed in the Star Wars prequels is sometimes mocked as too abrupt, in a way that is arguably responsible for all the Jedi lore that has developed since (though it did give us a wonderful bit of flash rationalfic from Eliezer Yudkowsky). But the strongest counter is that George Lucas just had it right to begin with: the most sensitive are the most vulnerable. A mistrustful misanthrope who is constantly on guard against being tricked, lied to, and abused, is rather insulated against betrayal from the beginning.
By contrast, a tendency to simply believe what people say, until you have a reason to believe they are lying, is the kind of attitude that is difficult to maintain in the face of persistent exploitation. But if it is your "nature" (insofar as any of us has one of those) to be a quokka, you probably aren't going to change the first time you get burned. Instead, repeat burns are going to accumulate until it is simply no longer psychologically possible for you to ignore them, and then the whole quokka edifice is going to come crashing down all at once.
I would like to suggest that the question you've posed is complicated in part because there is a good reason for you to continue falling for creative writing exercises: that you fall for them at all suggests you still have faith in humanity, or at least in its potential. There are explanations for every objection raised; the story as told is not literally impossible (I think--I've never used Hinge--but any given lie may also be an exaggeration, or an attempt at infosec, rather than proof that a story is entirely false). And even false stories may communicate truth, else why ever touch fiction? Presenting fiction as fact is problematic, of course, but there are also times when a carefully crafted lie is instrumental to uncovering truth.
The question that has faced careful thinkers since time immemorial, then, is whether your love the truth is so strong that you are willing to be stripped of human experience as a result. Socrates died for the truth, and Plato preached the virtues of the solitary mind. The original Cynics, including Diogenes of Sinope, were ostracized from polite society over their commitment to the truth. But there are others--Aristotle, the Epicureans--who thought that socialization was crucial to human flourishing. They, too, were committed to truth, but the Epicureans at least recommended against participation in certain kinds of conversations (most especially, politics!).
It's probably good mental hygiene to maintain a healthy skepticism against anything you read on the Internet; anonymity and inaccountability present a different incentive profile than face-to-face interactions, after all. But "gullible" is not quite the same thing as "open and trusting." Aristotle might say that "gullible" is having too much trust, while cynicism is having too little. I don't know what the relevant virtue-mean is ("credulous?" maybe just "trusting?") but striking the right balance is probably the pursuit of a lifetime. Falling for a somewhat-plausible work of creative fiction is a far cry from, say, getting bilked out of your life savings.
I really enjoyed Chappelle's monologue. Viewed as a tightrope act, it was quite a spectacle. And really, which part of "wrongthink about Jews cost Kanye one billion dollars" is supposed to persuade us that Jews aren't somehow pulling society's strings?
Of course, in reality there are millions of Jews, and only a very tiny percentage of them have any sociopolitical clout at all, and the possibility that even a large number of those are colluding on such matters is infinitesimal. As Chapelle notes--"there are a lot of black people in Ferguson, Missouri, it doesn’t mean we run the place."
But the way Chapelle ends is trenchant nevertheless.
I think it would be very interesting to see what Chapelle could do with the Moloch egregore.
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