naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
It's very difficult for me to see this post as anything but bad faith apophasis.
We don't typically ban people based on their usernames (after all, what is in a name?) and yet yours is suspicious. Bare links are off-limits; you didn't post a bare link, but copy-pasting most of an article is a near cousin. So you wrote some commentary, but it hardly seems to be effortful commentary--just a dismissal: also suspicious. If someone said "tomorrow, a user is going to make a post that is 90% copy-pasted ZHPL, followed by 10% commentary that is at best a limp-wristed disavowal of the piece," what would I predict was the reason for the post? I would predict it was posted by a troll who either agrees with ZHPL but is pretending they don't, or disagrees with ZHPL but is fishing for damning and sneer-worthy responses from the Motte.
At minimum, this sort of thing is egregiously obnoxious. Please don't.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
I'm not going to dig up the post where you made this "joke," but one way to follow the rule requiring charitable interpretation is to take people seriously even when you're unsure about them.
I'm not going to dig up whatever post it was where you did this, but if I see you doing it, I'm going to moderate you for not speaking plainly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Uh...
You've gotten reported twice in the ten minutes this post has been up. I immediately recognized you from your mountain of AAQCs back in the old country, but this is apparently just your third post here on the new site, and it reads like artificially-breathless marketing copy, to the point that I immediately checked to see if this was copypasta. At minimum, even though you never outright say "vote for Vivek!" this seems like a pretty clear example of recruiting for a cause.
You're free to make your case for Vivek, of course, but phrases like "multi-disciplinary genius," "dazzlingly bright young maverick," and "young and daring patriot" are, in their own brightly-smiling way, egregiously obnoxious--it's pure, unapologetic rhetoric of the kind people use to subtly build consensus and conformity. I did hesitate to even say anything; given how often I'm forced to moderate a black-pilled flame-out, someone making a positive case is automatically a breath of fresh air. But this doesn't read like @Sizzle50 making a good argument, this reads like @Sizzle50 writing ad copy.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Does anyone know how old is Jim of Jims blog infamy is?
This is a fine "small question."
Even though I think the world would be a better place with him dead and he goes against basically everything I value I am begrudgingly astounded and impressed by the sheer volume of vitriol in his heart to be able to keep posting pure hate for 4+ decades.
This is unkind, unnecessarily antagonistic, and inflammatory. If it's exaggeration, then it's not plainspoken. If it is plainspoken, then it is too heated. You can say that you vehemently disagree with someone without all the rhetorical sneering.
And if this were your first rodeo, I'd leave it at that.... but in the last five months you've drawn four warnings and two tempbans for unnecessary antagonism. This time you're banned for a week.
I wish a one-state solution felt realistic — a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate, is a version of Israel that I would adore. But it seems less and less realistic with every new act of violence.
This sentence bothered me a lot, because I think it really hammers home that Ike Saul is drowning in both-sides-ism. There is a world where Israelis and Muslims and Jews live side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate: it's called "Israel." The 20% of Israel's citizens who are Palestinian Arabs are not the problem, here. Those Palestinians who turned their noses up at a single state solution put themselves (and their descendants) in the "box" Saul decries. Hamas does not want a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights. Only the Israelis want that. There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
Israelis will tell you that if Palestinians put their guns down then the war would end, but if Israel put their guns down they'd be wiped off the planet. I don't have a crystal ball and can’t tell you what is true. But what I am certain of is that every time Israel kills more innocents they engender more rage and hatred and recruit more Palestinians and Arabs to the cause against them. There is no disputing this.
It's amazing to watch people equivocate in their response to this single, incredibly hard truth. The reason Israelis tell you this is because all the evidence points to it being true. To say "there is no disputing" that Israelis killing innocents engenders rage, and yet mumble about crystal balls when it is pointed out that Hamas and their backers are fully committed to the extermination of Israel, is insane to me. Exactly one side of this conflict is openly genocidal, and it's not the Israelis. "Oh I agree that Hamas is evil but it's very important that we blame Israel even for that" is such a mind-boggling take, to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
And why would these two groups coordinate on this? Same question goes for: shutting of water/electricity. Why would Egypt help Israel with this? Why doesn't Egypt simply give the Gazans the water they need?
Downtrodden Palestinians are an important weapon in Islam's war on Israel--arguably, the most important weapon. They are the "victims" the Muslim world can hold up to show the perfidy and savagery of the Jewish state. If they stop being victims, then they stop being useful. The ~20% of Israel's citizens who are assimilated Palestinians are of no interest to the terrorists of Hamas (or their masters abroad).
None of the countries nominally "allied" with Palestine appear to give half a shit about the well-being of Palestinians. What they want is for there to be Muslims in Israel fighting the never-ending Jihad against Judaism. And better yet, for there to be disposable Muslims; certainly other Islamist countries are not in general keen on inviting Palestinian refugees into their nations, and there is no need for them to risk their lives fighting Israelis if the Palestinians will do it for them. The goal for Hamas is not, ever, peace--and certainly not anything like assimilation and coexistence.
This is also why there are so many advocates for Palestinian "right of return" under much broader conditions than have never been extended to any other ethnic group.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated and ugly (on both sides!) in so many ways, but it simply cannot be understood without first acknowledging the central truth that it is a holy war, being funded and soft-supported around the world by hard-line Muslims (and their political stooges in American government, naturally). This is not, at bottom, about colonialism, or apartheid, or anything like that. It is about the deep, abiding intolerance of Muslims for non-Muslims, especially in the holy cities of Islam, including Jerusalem. Treating the conflict as resulting from anything other than simple, religiously-prescribed Muslim bigotry has littered history with failed peace agreements, because the problems those agreements attempted to solve have never been the real problem.
If the Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If the Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
@FarNearEverywhere's original comment:
A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare
Speaking as a former minor local government minion, I recognise this person. No, not the blankface (though at every level in every job and situation in life, there are indeed little tin gods who love exerting whatever scrap of power they possess) but the person making the "appeal to facts, logic and plain compassion".
I don't have a fancy label for them unlike Mr. Aaronson (Dr. Aaronson? Professor Aaronson?) since I don't have the creative big intellect he undoubtedly possesses, but every bureaucrat in a public-facing role (indeed, every worker in a public-facing role) has encountered them at some time.
The people who rock up late after the deadline for submission, without the necessary paperwork or supporting documents, who didn't bother applying and want you to fill it all out for them, breathless because they dashed here at the last minute. The ones who want an exception to the "rules and regulations" because, well, they're just that special and exceptional and their case is unique and not at all like the other fifteen people waiting in line, that they are holding up for the past hour because they've been arguing - sorry, I mean "making appeal to facts, logic and plain compassion".
(I would also venture a lot of people here have been stuck in line behind such a person).
The fact that what they want is against the regulations, because they don't qualify? Irrelevant, and besides, have you no compassion for their special, unique case which should get an exception?
The fact that they had three weeks to get this done, and showed up half an hour after the cut-off? Not their fault! They have busy, important lives unlike you, minor official of no consequence, hence being such important people, they deserve an exception!
The fact that if I accept their application, I'll have to do the same for everybody else who also does not qualify? So what, that's nothing to do with them.
The fact that (1) this is against the regulations and (2) I will get into trouble with my boss, my boss's boss, and the department head? So what? That's not their problem. Why are you being so unreasonable?
The fact that I have explained three different times, in three different ways, why your application is defective? Ah, here we go again with the "same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare".
Clearly, the fault cannot lie with me, Important Busy Smart Person With A Life And Impactful Job. It lies with this blankface who is hiding a contemptuous smile as they tyrannically wield the power entrusted in them to make others miserable. Yes, that must be it!
As I said, I don't deny there are people who won't budge an inch because they like making others squirm. But the 'blankfaces', be it in public service or private businesses, often are not doing this to spite you. We'll like to help, we want to help, but we can't because (a) oftentimes the ability to exercise initiative has been deliberately stripped from fears of setting precedent (if you do this, then all the other applicants/clients will want the same, and will go to court to force us to treat them the same - and yes, this does happen) and in order to keep costs down (b) you are the one genuinely at fault because you don't have the necessary supporting documents. This may or may not be your fault, but if the regulations say "must have proof of identity", I can't take your application just because you show me a crumpled envelope with an address on it.
Often times, other people are at fault - I've mentioned on here before when I assisted in processing student grants, and one award was held up because the parents were in a pissing match after the separation and the father just would not provide three lines of notified statement that he was not paying child support. There's nothing I or anyone else can do there, much as we really do want to help.
Aaronson strikes me as the kind of guy who takes things personally - if there's a holdup, it's not because "well, there are screw-ups in systems all the time", it's because that official there wants to tyrannise him just like the Nazis against the Jews and he's going to be dragged off in chains if only that guy could do so, it's because he's Jewish, he knows it:
I almost wanted to say to the police: where have you been? I’ve been expecting you my whole life. And I wanted to say to Dana: you see?? see what I’ve been telling you all these years, about the nature of the universe we were born into?
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Treat life as a game, and you’ll build something real.
If you haven't read Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper, then... do, I guess.
It's hard to describe, but the thesis is something like "in utopia, all that will be left to us is games." But along the way he defines games (the consensual pursuit of a lusory goal through the overcoming of unnecessary obstacles) in a way that has been extremely influential on the philosophy of games, even though when he originally published the book in 1978 the world of board games, video games, etc. was much smaller than it is today.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
If states reign supreme, what’s to stop any state from stripping literally all of their political adversaries from their ballots?
I have heard many people argue that the current two-party system of "Republicrats" is already doing precisely that. Have you ever tried to run for public office? It's not always and everywhere completely insane, but certainly it can be a time-consuming and expensive process. Party machines grease the skids for you, so legislation is typically written with those machines in mind. But that means, if you are a political adversary of the dominant parties, then the laws on the books are overwhelmingly likely to work against you.
Fortunately, in many places Republicans and Democrats exist in small enough numbers that unaffiliated voters can occasionally drive legislation that places limits on the excesses of partisans seeking to strip their adversaries of electability. This is the most likely practical result: states that go overboard in stripping adversaries will face an angry uprising from independent voters. But in places with entrenched one-party rule, this is less likely to pose a meaningful threat.
More expansively: the main thing preventing this from happening in the past has just been good old-fashioned civic virtue. But the news media, education systems, etc. have been beating the "burn it all down" drum long enough that many, maybe most Americans now think that destroying their opponents is more important than finding a way to coexist with them.
"Humor" is often a tough moderation call. I don't know if you have many interactions with children, but "just joking!" is not an uncommon protest from kids who want to say something they know (or suspect) they shouldn't say, because it is actually unkind, or otherwise objectionable, but they understand that humor can sometimes help one speak more plainly than is normally permitted. Well, most of your joke was basically fine. This is the specific part that I found troublesome:
y'all are just misguided victims of radicalizing social media algorithms
This is something people actually claim in earnest about their outgroup, particularly when their outgroup is the alt-right or something similar. So "come on, I'm just joking" becomes a convenient cover for reinforcing a weak man stereotype. If you didn't mean it that way, like... great! Now that I've pointed out the problem with letting "I'm just joking around guys" tempt you to make reductive claims about this community, maybe you can avoid the mistake in the future.
And, I suppose, to take the meta up a notch--there is at least one moderator who has already raised an objection to my moderation here, so don't imagine yourself to be on the wrong side of the mod team or anything. Apparently a lot of people here think you are reddit user darwin2500, in part because you appear to have claimed to be darwin2500, even though on reddit darwin2500 implied (though admittedly did not outright say) that he had left this space and found it amusing that people still imagined him to be here. I do not know whether you are darwin2500; I am actually skeptical because you have yet to post anything approaching the quality and insight that darwin2500 brought to the old subreddit when he wasn't eating bans for various rule violations. But whoever you are, one way to get charity weighing more heavily in your favor in moderation cases is to post good stuff. It would also help if you developed a reputation for posting honestly, instead of a reputation for posting dishonestly. One reason your posts get so heavily reported is that you have taken on darwin2500's burden, whether you are actually him or not: darwin2500 was a notorious troll who repeatedly refused to engage honestly when it became clear that he was wrong about something. Whether you're him or not, that is a behavior you also appear to exhibit here.
In other words--the kind of self-critical humor that you were exercising was not, in fact self critical, as far as I could tell. If you'd been poking fun at yourself instead of everyone else, well, it would have been easier to let that slide.
ETA:
If certain mods have made up their mind or are going to be swayed by number of downvotes and reports, then there's no behavior I can take that protects me.
This is bullshit. No one on the mod team has it out for you; if anything, I think you have a couple mods acting somewhat protectively of you for "affirmative action" reasons. The behavior you can take that protects you is to follow the rules. In particular, I actually have very little time for moderation these days, so unless I see you trashing the community I'm very unlikely to moderate you. Stop imagining yourself to be separate from (much less above) the group, here, and you'll be fine.
Do you believe in any ‘supernatural’ stuff like ghosts or psionic powers?
Not as such, no.
What are the most convincing things you’ve seen/read one way or another?
The cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God are pretty compelling to me, especially when paired with arguments about living in a simulation. Why does anything exist? Why does reality follow orderly laws? Occasionally a physicist or astronomer will make a bunch of noise about how it isn't mysterious, here have some equations about quantum vacuums or some shit, case closed, but from a philosophical perspective that's no answer at all. If the laws of the universe are themselves responsible for the existence of the universe, you still haven't explained why there are laws. The answer "well we have to stop somewhere" is an admission that they haven't accomplished the god-killing mathematics they've been using to sell their book after all.
On balance these arguments get you a lot less than most theists appear to think, since it seems like an intentional being capable of creating at least one universe is probably so alien that treating it like a loving father figure who wants to help you find your car keys is a stretch, and more than a stretch. And maybe there are just "fundamental laws" that are how everything is and how everything always will be--how could I possibly know? I can't even begin to check. But in my experience, nothing comes from nothing, and infinities exist only in the realm of mathematics, so the fact that I nevertheless find myself existing in a finite universe is pretty damn surprising.
Arguably, then, the most supernatural thing I have any experience with is me and my conscious existence, which for some reason goes away for a while every night. Emergent properties are kind of spooky!
So, closer to home--leaps of intuition and the generation of new knowledge are often kind of spooky. Occasionally--not more than two or three times a year, sometimes every couple of years--I will realize something and at the same time know it is true. (Trivial things, usually--so-and-so is pregnant even though she's not showing yet, they fired that guy because next month the board of directors wants to do this other thing, etc.) Sometimes this involves the prediction of future events. These realizations are almost never mistaken, and they are always arguably discernible based on facts that I actually know, but that I hadn't specifically put together in context. This seems like good evidence that there is a part of my brain that is making connections or processing information without my conscious effort. But I can understand why some people might treat that "aha!" feeling as a revelation from God or something.
But that's not the spooky part. The spooky part is how this sometimes leads to weird coincidences like Leibniz and Newton inventing calculus at the same time. The obvious hypothesis is that there was enough overlapping knowledge accumulated in a particular place at a particular time to generate these ideas, so multiple people arrive at the conclusion simultaneously. But then I read about, like, Anaximander realizing the rudiments of evolution (but not natural selection) in ancient Greece and notice that it took thousands of years for anyone to really do something with that idea, and I find myself re-puzzled by where it is we actually get "new" knowledge.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
A number of users have reported this as "antagonistic" and I rather see their point. We've talked about your trolling before, and while I can appreciate its artfulness, even gentle sneering constitutes objectionable disdain.
You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. Or, if you prefer--you're not venturing into the lion's den, you're just another lion. I don't know if you and I have had this particular discussion before, but I've had it with many others: I will always enforce the rules more strictly when the target of criticism is this space and the people in it. That doesn't mean we can't be self-effacing and self-critical, but it does mean that such posts require maximum charity and effort. This post doesn't really cut it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
The fact that the first person to say "hey maybe the parents don't need to know" wasn't instantly exiled and nuked from orbit is, unto itself, a dog-fucking level offense in my eyes.
This is too much heat, not enough light. Please don't do this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
As a small follow-up, I found this article interesting. Even though all justices on the Colorado Supreme Court were appointed by Democrats, three dissented in this case.
The four Colorado Supreme Court justices who ruled Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot all attended Ivy League institutions or otherwise a top-ranked elite law school on the East Coast for law school.
The three dissenting justices, meanwhile, all graduated from the University of Denver's law school...
The "cognitive elite" strikes again!
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos
Let's not do this, please.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.
It's super consistent behavior, though; they like attention and they found a larger audience, or they tend to follow the crowd and the crowd changed directions, or, less charitably but perhaps more accurately, they like to bully others and they found a less costly way to be horrible.
I grew up in a religious community. I was always unorthodox, and was treated poorly by a lot of people who were regarded as "upstanding" for their piety. I expressed doubts about God as a kid, so no one is surprised to hear me say such things as an adult. But the same individual people who were most likely to mete out social punishment for my little heresies are still the people most likely to mete out social punishment for my heresies, only now they're various shades of woke and my heresies are political instead of theological.
Whether they've stayed in the faith or separated from it, basically all of them are ultra-orthodox woke advocates now (mostly for LGBT issues, but depending on their circumstances also for a rainbow of disabilities, with autism--or "autism"--and obesity being common pet projects in addition to the usual vapid strains of so-called anti-racism). The ones who haven't blocked me on their social media feeds are still the same bullies they've always been (I assume the same is true for the ones who took the step of blocking me, but I can't guarantee it). No amount of hair dye or piercings can hide the fact that they are still doing everything they can to punish independent thought or questioning of the party line. That it's a different party line is irrelevant except, perhaps, as a "born again" bona fide. As the Wizard sings--"the most celebrated are the rehabilitated..."
Freddie deBoer's "Planet of Cops" tells the story well, though I don't think he ever quite twigs to the shared identity of the conservative cops he complains about, and the woke cops he sees as imitating them. When he criticizes religious conservatives as natural cops, he memorably cites William Burroughs:
William Burroughs summarized the whole social conservative movement perfectly as “decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.”
And my response is: it's still the "decent church-going women" (and, often, men), they still wear mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. Often, literally the same actual people. They just left their old church and joined your new, political not-a-church.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs are some of the most internally consistent people in the world. If feeling morally superior to others and reveling in hating and even seeking the extermination of the right people is something you enjoy, the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Yeah, sorry, @ArjinFerman is correct, though I've certainly seen both versions. "Magic dirt" is a shorthand way of criticizing arguments that seem to be about places when they should be about people, on account of there being nothing magical about the specific dirt people live on.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
@Folamh3's original comment:
To be pedantic, these are AI-modified images. Twitch thots/OF girls are posting photos of themselves for public consumption on X, and the DignifAI account is replying with an edited version of the same photo. "Bob/Alice posts a public photo or video on a social media platform, and a bunch of people who don't know Bob/Alice create edited versions of said photo or video without Bob's consent" describes hundreds if not thousands of viral memes throughout the history of the internet (e.g. Now We are Homeress, Miss Teen USA, Chocolate Rain, Leave Britney Alone, Boom Goes the Dynamite, You Da Real MVP, the Trump mugshot, Yao Ming Face, Scumbag Steve). Occasionally Bob/Alice may give their blessing and say that they don't have a problem with said memes, but this is the exception rather than the rule (e.g. Kevin Durant made it quite clear that he did not appreciate people making his heartfelt expression of gratitude to his mother into a cheap joke), and generally happens months or years after people have been nonconsensually editing the original photo/video to their heart's content.
Unlike editing a photo of Trump so it looks like he's riding a skateboard or whatever, I don't think it's hard to understand why editing Alice/Bob's publicly posted photo to make it look more sexualised than the original is crossing a line: there's a significant possibility that people might mistake the edited photo for the genuine article, and Alice/Bob will take a reputational hit, as people will assume that they are the kind of person who shares thirst trap photos for public consumption. Even if the photos are obviously fake (as in the recent Taylor Swift "deepfakes", which look more like the kind of stylised fetish fanart which has been around for years before LLMs were a thing), I think it's still demeaning to reduce a real person to the status of a sex object without their consent. But DignifAI is the opposite of that - you're editing a photo clearly intended to titillate to make it look a photo which was not intended to titillate. It's easy to understand why people might be upset that their reputation has suffered as a result of strangers erroneously believing that they are the kind of person who posts thirst trap photos to titillate strangers - but if you are a person who posts thirst trap photos to titillate strangers, how will a photo of you edited to look like you're dressed more modestly affect your reputation at all? Taylor Swift saying "It's disrespectful and demeaning for people to create or edit photos of me which reduce me to the status of a sex object" is a legitimate complaint; a Twitch thot saying "I don't appreciate people taking photos of me which represent me as a sex object and editing them to make me look like an average woman"? Not so much - if for no other reason than, for most of her life, the Twitch thot in question is an average woman. The titillating clothing and makeup that a Twitch thot wears when she's performing is a kind of costume, and all DignifAI is doing is showing what she (might) look like without the costume. Is it wrong to distribute a photo of Corey Taylor without his scary Slipknot mask? I don't think so.
By analogy, if Bob posts a public photo of himself wearing regular clothes, and someone edits it without Bob's consent to make it look like he's wearing a swastika T-shirt, that's a shitty thing to do, and obviously created for the purpose of defaming Bob. But if Bob is an outspoken neo-Nazi who posts a public photo of himself wearing a swastika T-shirt, and someone edits it without Bob's consent to make it look like he's wearing a plain black t-shirt - well, so what? (None of the above is to imply being a neo-Nazi is morally equivalent to being a Twitch thot or OF girl, obviously - it's just to illustrate that reputational hits aren't symmetrical as some people seem to think.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Except I don't think "that bird has a Western, Anglo name" is what is keeping black, Asian, Latino etc. people out of birdwatching.
Yeah, this sort of thinking has always been puzzling to me--nobody studies biology without learning Latin names, nobody studies math without learning Greek letters. "Black people won't go birdwatching because all the birds are named Smith" is an utterly baffling take. That said--
Nol says she recently was visiting some salt marshes this summer and saw a common bird there that's called Wilson's Snipe, which has a long bill and engages in dramatic displays such as flying in high circles, which produces a whistling sound as air flows over specialized feathers. "And I thought, what a terrible name," she says. "I mean, Wilson was the father of modern ornithology in North America, but this bird has so many other evocative characteristics."
If "evocative" is the real goal, I suppose if they decide to start naming birds stuff like "Talonflame" or "Spearow" maybe I could get on board...?
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I think you are significantly downplaying the motivations for Civil Rights.
I think maybe you misunderstand my criticism. Most sources suggest the civil rights movement spans the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. You are correct that, during that time, a lot of people were motivated by genuine infringement on their genuinely civil rights. The story of desegregation is the one that is most often retold because it is, I suspect, the clearest case: state actors harming citizens by violating their rights directly, and state laws explicitly requiring private individuals and companies to impose racial apartheid whether they wanted to or not. But "affirmative action"--preferential treatment on the basis of race--was also demanded early and often.
I do not think preferential treatment is a civil right--to the contrary. And so almost from its very inception the movement was deeply self-contradictory. And maybe that would have been okay, but--slowly at first, and accelerating through the end of the 20th century--the demand for preferential treatment for black Americans became, by far, the most important, visible, influential, and imitated aspect of the civil rights movement as it extended beyond the goal of ending the oppression of blacks. Consider: segregation, voter suppression, and the like was limited to a handful of places, but affirmative action was not! Today, racial minorities demand segregation with some regularity. Fewer than 3/5ths of black voters bother to show up at the polls. So what is the true and lasting legacy of the civil rights movement, then, if not preferential treatment--which is not a civil right?
I think the civil rights movement changed American culture for the better in some ways--more in some parts of America than others. Abolishing state-mandated segregation was, on my view, purely good. State-mandated segregation was a huge and serious violation of many rights I regard civil. But the people to my political left do not appear to agree with me about that, not anymore, and they definitely advocate for preferential treatment for groups they regard as political allies. These are the people who most often claim to be the inheritors of the civil rights movement, and they appear to me the people most opposed to genuine civil rights.
If by "civil rights movement" you just mean Martin Luther King, Jr., then sure, I can drop the "so-called." But I'm not sure how to extend the motte and bailey metaphor when the people in the bailey clearly regard themselves as holding the motte.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
...is that sarcasm?
Nope.
I have to assume you are at least aware that Twitch isn't only for gaming, right?
I was previously unaware.
I know you said you don't watch it, but the idea that Twitch ... is just about gaming is trivially demonstrated as false.
Yep. No one had ever demonstrated that to me.
or even live-streaming in general
I understand that many things are live-streamed, though I basically never watch live-streams outside of oral arguments before appellate courts. But I always thought Twitch was a gaming service. I even have a login through Amazon that I sometimes use to get gaming bonuses, and I never saw anything there that wasn't someone else playing a video game.
I understand that the question is relatively simple to answer, but I'm pointing out that the question itself never even occurred to me. I've never had any reason at all to suppose Twitch was anything but a video game streaming service.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
A tangent, but the "Native American population" by self-identification has never been higher.
It is a tangent, but Palestinians and Native Americans have a lot in common, geopolitically. For example, in my experience there tends to be a lot of talk about the "ongoing genocide" against both groups, which are growing and have never been larger. That's a remarkable accomplishment in the face of "ongoing genocide!" To say nothing of their selective endorsement of ethnonationalism and feudal notion of binds between blood and land, but only for non-whites...
I also expect more people to repudiate their majority European DNA in an effort to claim these privileges for themselves.
This process is well underway. The so-called "civil rights movement" transformed racialism from a legal and social liability to a legal and social advantage. For those who lack a plausible race claim, novel takes on sex and sexuality offer an alternative. And yet in most places I've seen this pointed out, someone inevitably trots out the strawman: "you think someone would just choose to belong to an oppressed minority? Hah!"
Except that's exactly what the numbers seem to be telling us. People follow the incentives, and flee the costs. We've incentivized fracture and factionalism, so fracture and factionalism is what we are getting.
Well, now that we are actually having a substantive conversation about it:
The explanation cannot be merely that he won the 2016 election, since many of the other people you mention (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden) also won presidential elections.
I personally think the character of the 2016 election matters a lot to this calculus. Hillary Clinton's election was supposed to not only be a sure thing, but the ushering in of a new era: America's First Woman President. And post-awokening, people didn't just want this to be true (as they perhaps wanted it to be true decades earlier)--a large number of people (especially young, especially female, especially college-educated types) felt entitled to it. When Al Gore lost in 2000, the brouhaha over Florida was wild--and yet there was nothing like this happening, at least not where I could see it.
It made for a sobering contrast with 2008, when America's First Black President won his own anticipated victory. Even country music stars were singing his praises. In a nation that has become culturally obsessed with "firsts," with shattering "glass ceilings," and with otherwise celebrating people not for what they actually contribute, but merely for their membership in politically important minorities, 2016 was not a defeat--it was a heist. No less important a figure than former president Jimmy Carter said:
There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.
The much celebrated congressman from Georgia, John Lewis, skipped the inauguration, saying:
I don't see this president-elect as a legitimate president.... I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
No wonder there were peaceful but fiery protests come inauguration time. The list goes on, but the point is that Democrats did not respond to Clinton's loss in a normal way. Florida's 2000 problems were bad, but at least they were Florida's problems--they were not specifically cultural problems, or problems caused by one or both of the candidates seeking victory at any price. There was a legitimate dispute based on plausible evidence. What happened in 2016, though, was a defection; Democrats responded by abandoning even a pretense of respecting the rule of law. For them to lose was no longer a political setback, but a failure of democracy! Catastrophe! Devastation! Revolution!
The parallel case of 2020 simply cannot be understood outside that context. Reactionaries gonna react. When you slap the "defect" button in an iterated game, your opponent is all but guaranteed to follow suit, and in this case I think that is substantially what Republicans did.
Maybe Trump's personality makes this all worse, somehow. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if Clinton had lost instead to Rubio or something. But then again--would Clinton have lost, to anyone else? Trump's ability to rally disaffected blue collar labor and increase the Republican share of black and Hispanic votes proved important. So it's difficult to guess how things might have been different, absent Trump.
But it does seem to me that Democrats were much more interested in (and expectant of) a Clinton victory; until he won, Trump was, to them, a joke (at least mostly). Losing the election is one thing; even casting protest votes in Congress against certifying a presidential election has become old hat despite the breathlessness with which the media reported on it in 2020. But being denied the apparent moral victory of being personally involved in electing America's First Woman President was (for many) apparently so, so much more than just another loss. It was, one might say, a crime.
@gattsuru's original comment:
Mediated group hallucinations and consensus reality
There's a joking-not-joking post, a while back, from JonSt0kes. At the risk of pulling the setup apart from the punchline, the setup is what I'd like to highlight.
It's a bit of surrealism, and probably intended as foil to comment on more immediate political conflicts outside of the scope of this discussion.
There's certainly people who'd love augmented reality avatars, and while none would want to force them on others, well, tomorrow is another day. It's not even really possible right now. VTubers are a small genre focused on presenting a virtual avatar to their viewers, sometimes in surprising genres, but they generally depend on carefully calibrated cameras and nearly-ideal lighting conditions to correctly recognize precise pose details. Body tracking (and even estimation) works, sometimes, for incredibly controlled environments. Even the best augmented reality systems are too bulky and have too short a battery life to be worn around all day, or even for long parts of a day. And heaven help anyone who wants to implement a standardized communication protocol that works between different headset vendors without a ton of unreliable jank. Some of these technical limitations might not be solvable, period: modern tech has done amazing things with microlenses, but optics are a cruel mistress.
There's spaces where these technical limitations don't exist, or can be maneuvered around. Hence the many references above to tech driven by virtual reality gaming, primarily but not solely chatrooms like VRChat. You can control lighting, and have multiple calibrated cameras at set distances and angles, and have everyone in a room wearing multiple inertial measurement units all speaking the same language. There is little background noise that makes audio transcription and voice manipulation jank in the real world. Far fewer chances for reality to break the illusion, excepting when you find furniture the hard way.
In those environments, it's not only common to define how you and others are presented, and where. It's often unavoidable. In VRChat specifically, some clients ("Questies" and more recently cell phone users, as opposed to those using full-blown computers with connected VR displays) can't see more complicated avatars or even enter some environments, if they use too many resources to be practically implemented on their headsets. Individual users also have a complex system of less direct control through a privileged user system, as well as more traditional block/mute capabilities.
And that, if anything, is the low end: VR environments tend to think of a person's self-presentation as sacrosanct, and as a result, it's much harder to make someone into something they aren't than to hide them.
That's just not some fundamental part of technology.
As a comparison, Final Fantasy XIV is an (acclaimed) MMORPG. Like many MMOs, it officially prohibits third-party modifications. Like many MMO mods, they still exist, and unless you're cheating on a world first race or being incredibly obvious about it, there's not really a lot that the game-runners want to do. There's actually some fascinating technical work being done here; where earlier tools swapped references to asset locations on disk while the client is closed, modern tools can dynamically reload or redraw on arbitrary triggers at arbitrary times, and there's even a tool for synchronizing between users in certain configurations, even transferring mods from one user to another (with accompanying security concerns). This can quickly get bizarrely recursive: there are now mods that exist solely for the purpose of overwriting other people's vanilla glamours.
Some of this goes exactly the direction anyone who's seen Skyrim modding would expect, and there's no small amount of comically oversized dick and/or boob mods, sometimes even for different genders. Some of it's more subtle modifications down that path, as the default models are about as featured as a ken doll even above the hips, or to smooth things out when desired.. Sometimes it's weirder than you would expect [bonus for those willing to log into the site (cw: no genitals or female nipples, possible spoilers? SAN damage for those familiar with those spoilers?)].
But a good portion of it's far more expressive. Tired of Dark Knight being Shadow The Edgehog? Swap to Devil May Cry, floral, or light-themed. Instead of naruto-running as a Ninja, you can practice your gun-kata. A lot of design-space exists and revolves around fluffy tails, goofy dances, capes, bizarre accessories, even posture. And then there's pages after pages of hairstyles, or mods that just turning on hats. Want to get rid of Lalafel or replace every PC with their alternate universe Roe version? There's a tool for it!
Yet it results in a world that's not just distinct from the what the developers designed, or what some unaffiliated observer might see, but where multiple people in the same room might have wildly different worlds that they're interacting with, even when sharing some mods. And there's some easy objections, here.
Sex is the easiest. Someone running male nudity mods in FFXIV will find out the hard way (hurr hurr) that several comedic quest chains normally involve a very animated older gentleman running around in his smallclothes, who is now Very Happy to see you; someone aggressively doing so can change every single player and (humanoid, non-special model) NPC into their desired gender and species. And, of course, someone who wants to do something intentionally has far broader space available.
There's no small number of other ways to embarrass people, of course. If you think a three-foot dong would be a little beneath your standards, there's some political statements that could have far more impact. And that's at the low end of the discussion space, and going into video games is the lower risk environment. Trace has spoken about someone beaten as a nazi in part due to time spent with a (stupid) Garry's Mod avatar. It's easier to think of things that offend Blue Tribe sensibilities that can play that role, over Red Ones, but it's not actually that hard to come up with Red Tribe or more general offenses. As ironic as "don't misgender me" will be when it's some social conservative getting involuntarily catgirl'd, I'm not sure what'll happen if thirty people start passing around screenshots or video of a well-known person's character marching like a member of the SS, but we're probably going to find out eventually. And you don't have to be Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow to come up with heavy-handed approaches that these technologies could use.
From the other direction, this (cw: censored 'female' nudity) particular description of events could genuinely reflect someone with neither correct boundaries nor behaviors, and maybe that's more likely than not -- minors getting into adults-only spaces, and adults not acting responsibly in unsecured or insufficiently age-gated areas, have been genuine problems on the internet since usenet. But it could also have happened if the interviewer running default settings was the only person in the room seeing everyone there.
Of course, VR(/AR/XR/spatial computing) is doomed. MMORPGs are funny, but they aren't going to change society, and game mods, no matter how technically impressive, are even less likely to do so. Beyond that, there is an argument, and not an entirely wrong one, that these environments are 'fake' in some philosophically important way. People (mostly) exist playing VRChat, but they don't actually live in VRChat. FFXIV has a single source of truth on its servers, but they're probably stored as a mess of position information and arbitrary numeric values, and definitely not some litrpg virtual world. Even if this expands to other purely-digital or even digitally-augmented fields, why should you care if someone does the 2028-equivalent of a lazy photoshop? This isn't even as life-like as deepfakes, or as humiliating as a really dedicated adversary could go -- the possibility someone on the other end of a conference might be putting your camera feed on top of some nudes would be offputting, but the risk of someone Toobining it has predated modern telephony.
Who cares?
And, perhaps worse:
There's an old joke, by modern standards, about how once one could be certain that the man in a corner of a subway angrily shouting into the air at a person who wasn't there was a schizophrenic, until cell phones and bluetooth meant that could just be a businessman talking to someone you couldn't see. What happens when ten million people see something you don't? Can't?
To cut to the chase, quite a lot of things that you care about either aren't real (do you think your bank account is a bunch of coins in a safe?) or hasn't reflected the real thing, already. There are already tools, some of which you should already be using (get uBlock!) to filter what you see, in your normal usage of the web. An increasing and surprising amount of your world will be passing through these sort of mediators, unless you put increasing efforts into avoiding it.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this! The hallucinating cameras are just trying to get the picture you wanted to take. Blocking results you were never going to check in Google Searches can be one of the few ways to avoid the Dread Pinterest. There's a block function on this site, after all. I try to avoid blocking as a matter of principle, but there are definitely ways that has hurt, rather than helped, my ability to seriously engage with both reality and some political perspectives; it's not something I would recommend for everyone or even most people. And there are defiiiiiiinitely people and tags even I block aggressively in, say, the context of a certain furry booru.
The bare concept is not even new. Filter bubble was popularized as a term in 2010, with Eli Pariser writing a book on it. BlockBots date back to 2015, if not earlier, and filter lists to the usenet era. From the other political valience, progressive views on talk radio or Fox News as a conservative bubble aren't entirely right, but there certainly are a lot of people who even then only listened to (and later, watched) what they wanted to hear.
But I think we're going to see things no one thought anyone would want to implement in 1997, or 2010, driven by forces far more varied and far more subtle than anyone expected.
St0kes mostly highlights the filter bubble from the context of politics, even if he sees, rarely, where it breaks against him. Eli Pariser considered algorithmic (and business drives) toward the separation of filter bubbles. There's no shortage of modern-day writers discussing AI, and a Dead Internet where people find it easier to talk with carefully-tuned ChatGPT instance rather than fight increasingly-useless Google is definitely a possibility.
I think they all overlook the power of human meat and spite.
As far as I know, there is no tool that will filter your Google Map search results by the political donations and rumors thereof. Yet. There is no flight planning website that drops flights where layover or transfer involve states with undesirable gun or gender politics. Yet.
I don't know of a crowdsourced tool to check your phone contacts and Facebook friends for (alleged) criminals or bad actors or meanies. Yet. There's no way to crosscheck a dating profile against social media phrenology. Yet. No off-the-shelf tools to use Nextdoor to hide the neighbor with the yappy dog from my phone or doorbell. Yet. No headphones that noise cancel people you don't want to hear from. Yet.
And a thousand, thousand other things that could be possible, as we invite others have more and more influence on how we see the world in the most literal sense, and make it harder and harder to avoid doing so.
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