popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
Predictions:
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95%: Reddit does not back down, defined as offering free API to Apollo and RiF
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80%: After two weeks, no top 100 subreddit is still blacked out. (99% no more than two are)
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60%: At least one case of admins stripping modding privileges from blackouters occurs
Bonus:
- 70%: Assuming my preferred app stops working, I personally will cave and still be using Reddit on my phone this summer despite it being the perfect opportunity to quit.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I suppose you could wonder about why they are doing this.
I think about this a fair bit. Here's a minddump of theories I've heard. (Yours is 3a-1)
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Intentionally creating controversy
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as a marketing device
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as a hedge against criticism
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Purity spirals in the writer's room
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because an oversupply of creatives is making creatives snipe at each other
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because "wokes" drove "non-wokes" out and cancer naturally gets cancer and dies
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Wanting to overwrite the classics
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because they can't create anything good of their own
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due to remakes being safe and lucrative, and raceswapping justifies remakes.
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due to a religious zealot/political commissar's mindset inhibiting creativity
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because they want to merge minorities into the western cultural tradition
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for the minorities, who feel no connection to our medieval, victorian, or western stories because they were slaves/tribesmen.
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for whites, who might otherize minorities if they're not present in popular classics.
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because they want to propagandize The Great Replacement, etc
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They hate you
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because creatives are blue tribe, and pissing you off pleases them.
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because they see certain genres as watering holes where undesirables gather and want to colonize and disrupt those spaces
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Why focus such greyness when, with the magic of the internet, I can enjoy insane 1980s fantasy works or batshit mythology from all over the world?
Eventually, cultural differences between CurrentYear and the 1980s will grow too great for most to enjoy its media. How many books do you read from before 1920? If social justice envelops the institutions that produce popular culture, their values will become difficult to escape. In the past few years I've seen even novelists, who should be most insulated from institutional takeover, kowtow. And I've heard grumblings about something needing to be done about media from Japan, etc.
I have a completely opposite view of the Reddit /r/jailbait saga. Places like /r/jailbait and /r/coontown did not exist because the Reddit admins at the time secretly liked it, but because they had a legitimate ideological commitment to only ban things that were explicitly illegal. Reddit used to have all sorts of maximally offensive subreddits at the time, like communities dedicated to images of rotting kid corpses. Are you going to say the admins liked those too?
In my opinion you are projecting today's culture war lines onto 2012 culture wars lines, which were not "LGBT+ vs social conservatives" but "Tech libertarians vs anyone who wanted to impose minimal standards online". In a sense, the tech libertarians really were right. Banning legal but universally reviled places like /r/jailbait and /r/coontown did start the slippery slope which continues to this day.
popocatepetl
3mo ago
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. [...]
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
To maybe point out the obvious, a TFR below 2 doesn't hit uniformly across a population. If Lebanon, Israel, or the US for that matter are magically reconfigured into ethnostates and their borders sealed tomorrow, those countries will not have the same genotype in a hundred years with half the population. The type of person who succeeds and breeds in the modern environment is of an unusual temperament, and their characteristics will sweep the board and change the character of the country.
the violent and angry responses from conservatives
....? They're not buying beer. One guy shot a case of Bud Light and posted it on social media. It was not a case with Mulvaney on it, just a blue box.
now are asking me to find a way for a political pundit to express gay and trans hatred at a pride parade to prove... something.
Your core argument is that your side is morally superior because conservatives are welcome in gay spaces if they're not "political", but gay people are not welcome in conservative spaces, regardless. This is not some pedantic nit I'm picking. Please demonstrate that a legible conservative can enter a gay pride space and not get a hostile reception. I've tried to demonstrate it's possible for legibly gay people to enter a conservative space in the same way.
I love it how our female commentariat is so easily identifiable.
Strongly disagree. Every long-time contributor who flames out and gets a lengthy ban follows a similar arc, male or female. They're fine discussing [X monstrous idea] and [Y monstrous idea] from a cool remove. Then one day, someone brings up [Z monstrous idea], and it hits a little too close to home. Suddenly, themotte.org playing nicey-nice with prevaricating evil is unacceptable.
It's a reaction for which I have negative respect. That said, no one has found my [Z] yet.
The core thrusts of this article strike me as "galaxy-brain takes", in the sense of throwing Occam's Razor to the curb and going with the most dramatic rather than the most plausible interpretation.
A wise sage on /r/themotte once said that @KulakRevolt is always wrong, but he's always wrong in a fascinating way that's rewarding to puzzle apart.
You read a lot into normies' discomfort and inability to watch the movie for any length of time, but the straightforward explanation there is that the unapologetic racism of the narration is extremely far outside the Overton window and this is just a standard human reaction to having well-internalized language taboos violated in front of them.
Yes, it was more dehumanizing narration than the sight of a man pooping on the beach that made me turn off the video before the title card.
As usual they're gerrymandering the claim so they can get the sticker result they want. Pfizer "were hopeful in spring/early summer 2021 that vaccines would be effective against transmission" but "transmission was not a study endpoint". "Prevention of transmission (and asymptomatic COVID) were not primary endpoints of these trials and were never a claim of the pharmaceutical companies in developing these vaccines"
So the vaccines were developed and tested for preventing severe disease. Fair enough. But the "point" of this story is that vaccine mandates were sold politically as preventing transmission, while that was never actually the aim of these vaccines and was not scientifically demonstrated, as admitted by the FDA in their emergency use authorization. Whether Pfizer technically collected some data on transmission while researching symptom reduction is besides the point.
@Skylab's argument stands completely.
There's nothing the military could really do. While tempting for my own biases, "recruitment is down because woke institutions alienated poor conservative whites and catered to effete progressives" doesn't eat like a full meal to me. The woke ads didn't help, sure. And it also doesn't help that the current ruling ideology of the USA skims close to condemning the USA's very history and existence.
But fundamentally, the nationstate is past its expiration date. People need to belong to a tribe. Historically, the local church, one's birth neighborhood, and the ethnic nation filled that void, but now the internet exists. Globalization happened. These forces have channeled people into particularist tribes which are divorced from their geographic location.
So today, you can find people who would be willing to fight and die for LGBT rights, the white race, or classical liberalism if such armies were recruiting. Not so many willing to die for their hometown of Mobile, Alabama.
I expect militaries to regress to a pre-Napoleonic model in the future: an elite professional core with mercenaries who are in it for the cash and prizes.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
It accelerated existing trends: the security state, government regulation of social media, political polarization, the decline of small businesses. I don't see it as turning point in any area.
We accidentally stepped on a scissor statement.
If her pitch/approach were twenty percent more cringey and she were four years older, everyone would agree this a sad and sympathetic case of someone with unrealistic expectations who missed the boat. Move in the other direction, and no one would think to remark on it — an everyday case of a career-focused woman settling down.
But it straddles the line just so, leaving room to get outraged that other people are binning her in a category you think it's ridiculous to bin her in. Accusations of misogyny go to accusations of white-knighting go to accusations of I-bet-you're-no-prize-yourself-partner etc etc.
So others have written the obvious reactions to this poll (including pointing out that the stats are massaged). But to go a bit lateral: a common take I hear from the dissident right is that the West declined into tyranny as the franchise expanded. I often see tweet threads from @KulakRevolt implying that the cause of modern ills is that people without a fixed interest in the system started getting a say in its regulation. In other words, they side with the Grandees in the Putney Debates.
What the hell happened to European civilization? Getting rid of Aristocracy was a fatal mistake. Whether its democracy or communism the landless have no business in the governance of the land. (link)
This idea sounds plausible on its own, but it co-exists in the DR with a ravenous hatred of "elites" and "globalists". How does that make any sense? For all its faults, this poll does expose a fundamental truth: ideas like racial/gender quotas and open borders are coming from the top of society, the "aristocrats", not the middle. If you were to limit the franchise to the modern equivalent of the Second Estate, a far-left social and economic planning program would be implemented by Thursday.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
The viability of standardized tests, colorblind policy, and merit-based immigration vetting all depend on either their outcomes being race-neutral, or HBD being at least tacitly accepted. The strong belief that all racial groups are equal, combined with the demonstrated fact that they are not, means you have to give up or distort standardized tests and merit-based immigraiton vetting, and discard colorblind policies.
This is what's frustrating about talking to "roll the clock back twenty years" temperamental liberals. Let's say you manage to return to a norm of colorblindness and implement effective tests for merit in immigration, education, and criminal justice, all while keeping HBD a studiously quiet truth only known to geneticists and a few internet edgelords.
What is your answer when the black professional class all but evaporates? Or when the AP math and science classes at your local inner city school are entirely asian and white? Or when the black arrest rate increases after a 'fair' new colorblind policing reform?
The answer is that your fancy meritocratic tools get torn down and replaced with racial quotas again.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I've seen clips. Not much to say really, except that I'm surprised he consented to show up for the debate. A senator doesn't need charisma or even intelligence to vote the party line, which is what a lot of voters are looking for. He could be inanimate carbon rod. The story of a TV personality and a stroke victim duking it out for senator will be a droll anecdote for the history books though, in a chapter about the political dysfunction of the late second period American republic. I can almost here Wanda McCaddon narrating.
We didn't change that much. The jump from being a thread in /r/slatestarcodex to being /r/themotte was much sharper. /r/themotte started from the beginning as "the portion of the community that was willing to platform HBD", which was what the other side most strongly objected to, so using pro-HBD sentiment as evidence of how we changed seems lacking to me.
I mean, even Scott was a racist all along, he just being esoteric about it.
I anticipated there would be a lot of rebuttals
The position "whites suffered as a response to the civil rights revolution" is an unimpeachable fact that even people on the pro-CRL side agree with, just with a positive valence. Justice for the robbed implies stripping goods from the robber. Why should you expect a rebuttal? Perhaps the word "suffering" implies sympathy for those injured? But even mass murderers and child molesters suffer.
and that the solution obviously can't be segregation.
I'd certainly contest that this is obvious. You seem to be asserting this on moral rather than empirical grounds. Even morally, the weak form of segregation is "allow people to self-select their own communities as they like", which is a proposition most people agree is moral unless you specifically rephase it in the race context.
EDIT: While we're here, "don't let black people watch your kids" is an uncharitable rewording of @RandomRanger's post. He says it's bad to send your children to a mostly American black school/community, which is quite compatible with "letting black people watch your kids" in the case of a black acquaintance, peer, or credentialed teacher/pastor/nanny. The point is that a large group will tend to the population average, not that every member of that group is the average ― this is a standard anti-racist motte and bailey.
Billions of people around the world would kill to be in a situation where they are an American citizen making $16 an hour and owing $100k.
Happiness is a function of relative status, not absolute economic utility.
For the billions around the world, $16/hour in an unglamorous job would increase their status relative to their neighbors. For an American, $16/hour in an unglamorous job feels perilously low status compared to one's (fictional, learned from advertisements and social media) neighbors. You criticize them harshly as wanting special privileges, but in their mind they are mainly seeking to clear to a respectability threshold.
The problem underlying a great many problems in society — education, purchasing decisions, family formation — is the dangerous gap between the popular perception of average and the reality of average.
Do people on both side of the debate actually care about women's sports, or is it just an excuse to wage the culture war?
Why do crocodiles ambush prey crossing the river instead of coming on land to snatch them?
Sports is where the weakness of the "trans(wo)men are (wo)men" is most visible, and where the apparent moral highground of progressives defending the weak against bullies is reversed. It's the ideal terrain for conservatives. So that's where they choose to fight, hoping victory there translates to victory elsewhere.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
You're continuing to demonstrate my point. A conservative has to display specific political speech in liberal spaces to have his presence politicized.
Putting aside that you consider "wearing a police uniform" a political statement, what do you propose as a clear way for a conservative to self-identify at a pride parade to see whether or not he'd be threatened?
Could we raise some money and get Ben Shapiro to attend a pride parade, just attend, with no political statement of any kind? I'd be willing to wager money people would get up in his grill, if not literally attack him.
I wrote this entire post without chatGPT, to prove something I guess. It took hours. I had to look up some new concepts, read enough to understand them, revisit old essays I read, and review them to refresh my memory. After all that, I had to use my dumb fingers to tap buttons on my dumb keyboard, over and over again.
I'm the idiot holding the hand axe. I'm the imbecile mangling my shins with rock debris. Why bother?
This feels premature. Your post is still more interesting than anything I've read that I know to be generated by GPT. Just look at the paragraph above this. In about a hundred words, you spontaneously generated and peppered in about a dozen evocative analogies and metaphors that GPT is terrible at. And that's hardly the only place GPT struggles.
You may be useless eventually, but for now LLMs are a labor saving tool. The better comparison for now is that you need to pick up and learn to use the chainsaw. It doesn't know where to point itself, yet.
We may in fact be entering a golden age of hobbyists creating art/mods/open source software projects. Many times in my life I've thought "Wow, I have a really cool idea for X", but to actually implement X would require me spending 100+ hours mastering some boring technical skills like obscure markup languages or a certain style of pixel art. With AI image generation and LLMs? You'll be able to marshal your special (for now!) human creativity and intuition and let this fancy chainsaw cut through all the boring wood for you.
That's just what mainstream democrats believe is happening. Search "Rosa Parks" on Reddit, where a story is making the rounds that textbooks in Florida are scrubbing all references to race in the Rosa Parks story. (Some side-by-side examples are included in this article.)
The real story is that the editors on the textbook publisher's staff went way overboard in interpreting the law (I suspect intentionally), which only forbids teaching that "any group is inherently racist, implies a person can be considered oppressed because of their race, or infers that one should feel guilty because of actions committed by members of their same race." This sort of nuance does not make the main articles, let alone the headlines, so most people will never see it.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
"Cool" (high status) people are usually exceptionally well-mannered and tolerant, they don't have much to prove, let alone waste time shitting on the personal attributes of a random online. The stereotype that high-status people are mean and catty is one of the stupidest copes/fantasies ever.
Especially in the schoolyard, bullies are usually members of the social precariat. Kinda dumpy girls. Kinda awkward guys. Sociopathic bullies also exist, but bullying is usually best understood as an attempt to shore up social standing through asserting dominance over an outcast. The bullied will inevitably be a safe target with some mark of cain on their forehead.
The failure of popular culture to grasp this dynamic is why I think interventions against bullying have proved mostly ineffective, despite so much energy being marshalled against it.
It's even sadder that people bully for an imaginary audience that doesn't even see them, as on Reddit.
Many of us would strongly prefer Rat Park be true. The moment I heard that explanation I adopted it as my default view of addiction — the idea is too good to check. And it's one of those rare too-goods-to-check that transcends political faction. Are you a bleeding heart progressive? Rat Park morally pardons the downtrodden. A small government libertarian? Rat Park makes drug repression and imprisoning people for bodily choices unnecessary and barbaric. A political extremist of any variety? Rat Park condemns our current society as dystopic and in need of correction.
Sadly, it seems I (Party B) must admit that true bodily autonomy does actually create a class of useless junkies, who must either be supported or left to die in the street. It's a hard pill to swallow.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
As much as I'd like to make an Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte joke, I don't think this is a case of an earnest nerd space getting coopted by trend-chasers. Most of those comments don't read to me as saying "Like, yikes. NERD", but rather, they want his arguments taken seriously and wish he'd present himself better for the normies.
My thoughts on this: Much words, little heat, little light. I suspect you'll be modded for "phalanx against the marauding hordes spilling across the Sahara and the Darien Gap."
Why do you think these "concentric circles" of whiteness are categories worth maintaining and considering morally relevant? I'm sympathetic to The Great Replacement hand-wringing because a group of people (both white and not) are going extinct. This process is, as far as I can tell, being defended because addressing it would gore sacred cows. As for other downsides, it's possible that the nature of replacement will cause institutions and culture to change unpleasantly.
Besides those two issues, why do you care if natives are being replaced by slavs or mestizos or han chinese or sikhs? They're being replaced, the same. The human organisms who live in the West (I mean by broad definition, including Japan) are endangered one way or another. And their culture, if you care about that.
To wit, you want to form an alliance with the "fourth circlers" to prevent "nineteenth circlers" from taking over. Why was it worth fighting with fourth circlers to begin with?
I'm imagining an alternate universe where you are posting about how people with Type I Diabetes must not burn bridges with people with Hypothyroidism to defend themselves from the rising Type II Diabetes menace.
the overwhelming stance of the hard Right is that the JQ has not only been answered in the negative, but is one of the most important questions - if not the single most important question - that one must answer when considering geopolitics today.
I've never seen any coherent evidence that the over-representation of jews in powerful positions compared to anglos/germans/latins/slavs is any different from the whites being over-represented compared to blacks. The far-right, in a way, forms a carnival mirror to BLM. They search for a conspiracy, ingroup bias, or systematic oppression to answer what boils down to simple capacity.
Decently. Graded:
Vibes-wise, I've been surprised by how full-throatedly dissident conservative Elon Musk has been in his tweets. And while "hate speech" is still against TOS, I've been subjectively impressed by how much far right accounts have been able to test the limits without being deleted, banned, or throttled from at least my feed.
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