popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
Wokeness — I refuse to use scarequotes as if it's not a real and easily definable ideology — took over all the real institutions of power over the last 30 years, and in a sudden rush in 2020. Major companies without DEI goals, universities that don't act as seminaries for wokeness, and media and information sources that don't assume wokeness as a foundational premise are as rare as hen teeth.
2024 Republicans (who include several anti-woke ideologies under their tent) have seized the political organs. This is because public office is the only part of the American power structure that takes input from the dalit and shudra castes, or to some extent even the vaisyas.
Whether political power will translate to real institutional change is yet to be seen. I predict that unless Trump is willing to be a Red Caesar, that is, to step out of the bounds of his legal constitutional authority and dare anyone to stop him, it will not.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
"Communism" in the sense of "enslave rural populations to produce grain at gunpoint, and then use that wealth to centrally plan heavy industrial development" does indeed work. For a while at least.
However, there is a sense that certain factions or cultures of conservative men (of varying races and ethnicities) have created defensive silos of culture against the encroachment of gender non-conforming men. These places could be certain gyms, certain sales teams, certain blue collar unions, or certain bars. The shared sentiment is that there's enough spaces for gay or trans people (these men can't tell the difference) and so they need to batten down the hatches and keep their exclusionary spaces free from the taint of homo (no pun intended).
Then the conservative men start literally shooting cases of beer, and it becomes apparent that it's not really about protecting women and children, it's about establishing cultural silos of hatred towards gay and trans people.
Consider that there are semiotics to LGBT representation on a Bud Light can that go beyond the semantic meaning. Gay rites are civil rites. The red tribe can recognize a blue tribe religious ablution when they see one. Why do you think the red tribe failed to raise a stink about Milo Yiannopoulos, when he was a gay invading their "silo"?
Democrats used to get quite surly about Americana imagery and music in sports, brands, and media back during the War On Terror. This isn't because they "hated America" or "hated freedom". They correctly perceived extreme displays of the Stars and Stripes as a gang marker for the red tribe.
I'm willing to entertain the notion Alissa Heinerscheid didn't know what she was doing, but it looks a hell of a lot from the outside like a triumphalist blue tribe elite planting their flag on the reddest of red tribe territory. Imagine conservatives buying the largest mosque in Portland and erecting a big George W Bush statue on top of it. Are they doing anything wrong? What do you think will happen to the statue?
Is it possible to salvage a non-trivial version of the DKE?
The observation that low-skilled people overestimate themselves and high-skilled people underestimate themselves survives this criticism. Yeah, that's trivial. It doesn't reveal the psychology of skilled vs unskilled, just that, like @rae says, misestimation by the worst will be on average an overestimate, while misestimation by the best will be an underestimate.
The reason Dunning-Kruger feels so real to us is that dilettants outnumber experts by a ludicrous margin. It feels like "history buffs" on the internet are always running their mouths with questionable takes on the Roman Empire. In reality, specialists talk a lot more. There just aren't that many of them.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
How have your predictions fared?
Decently. Graded:
- ✅ 99%: Trumps Twitter ban has been lifted
- ✅ 95%: At least one case of Twitter moderation has happened for which the NY Times or WaPO has written a story highlighting hypocrisy
- ✅ 90%: Hate speech rules for protected classes remain, neither being retracted nor expanded to cover everyone
- ✅ 70%: Misgendering and deadnaming no longer fall under this category, however.
- ✅ 70%: Payment processors, cloud service providers, banks, and the US government have NOT taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (This one is tricky to adjudicate so I'll leave it to you.)
- ❌ 70%: The EU HAS taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (Same.)
- ✅ 60%: Twitter's medical misinformation rules have been modified.
- ❌ 60%: Twitter's election misinformation rules have been modified.
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.
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
2yr 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
1yr 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.
I've been looking into this guy. Peg me as shocked that, if only superficially, neoreactionary thought has penetrated the highest levels of GOP politics. Vance cites Curtis Yarvin as one of his influences and follows BronzeAgePervert and Steve Sailer on X. He advocated for dismantling the federal bureaucracy and ignoring legal challenges to it in a 2022 Vanity Fair interview — which they correctly characterize as a coup.
All this feels like nothing more than watching 2012 Tumblr ideas leap into the Democratic platform overnight. Whether Vance's NRx ideas are sincerely held or not, it's fascinating. As an NRx favorite, Mosca, said:
In reality the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one.
So a tiny gaggle of too-online neoreactionaries triumph and take command of MAGA, quite ignoring the mass of tens of millions of boomer normiecons.
Now that it's been 10 years I realize that the whole point of my Ivy league education was to meet people and that dating would have been a better use of my time than doing my homework. But at the time I didn't understand.
It's the usual stuff. Your parents assumed that it will, like, just happen.
People don't waste mental effort analyzing things that work. It's why no one can draw a bicycle even if they ride one regularly.
It's a curious phenomenon. When I was a teen, I made an effort to seek out the best arguments against gay marriage, in favor of traditional gender roles, in favor of Christian sexual prudery, etc. The apologists I found were hilariously bad at this, and they melted into a puddle of "it's not natural" and "things have always been done this way". I did not find them convincing.
Now that dating and marriage are broken, cogent defenders of these position can be found. The clock was taken apart, and people see how it ticked.
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
2yr 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.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
Wild take: Right-wingers don't dislike Kamala.
Not wild. I'm as opposed to DEI and representationalism as anyone. Here's (what I'll try to make) an unvarnished report of my feelings.
I feel no animosity towards her. From the catbird seat, she will doubtless say things to make me dislike her in the future. But for now, I see her as a minority actress who was chosen to play the wife of an rich white guy in an insurance ad, except instead of playing wife she was playing vice president, and the rich white guy wasn't her husband but Joe Biden.
My animosity is for the people who put her there, both on the supply and demand end. That animosity is fairly strong, more or less whenever I see a BIPOC/gender-nonconforming minority in a leadership position now.
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
1yr 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
2yr 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.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
His segments were largely about dishonest media, cancel culture, GOP politicians betraying their base, and the administrative deepstate. You can call this "carrying water for Trump" because the people who vote for Trump also complain about these things. To me, it was "accurate political commentary".
newly-arrived grandparents
It's insane to me that this is allowed. The justification for immigration is that these are net contributors and we need them to prop up the social safety net but instead actually we're letting in people who will never work again (or not for long) and will almost immediately start collecting benefits.
Mass immigration as a policy rests on a tripod of supporting interests: 1. disinterested economics and demographic realism (or academic dogma posing as such); 2. ethnic hate of/guilt by native populations combined with charity towards foreign populations; and 3. high-middle-low factionalism to gain votes/a client class for the current ruling elite.
In different parts of the online right, it's fashionable to speculate that one of these is the "true" reason, and the others merely a facade or pablum for useful idiots. In reality, the technocratic center-left is not a monolithic. Each leg is true reason for different parts of the governing coalition. The current policy is a negotiation between their interests, and its "illogic" is an illusion born of your assuming a primary motivation.
I quite like Scott's analogy of dating dynamics and being a well-dressed white tourist in Varanasi, India. In this parable, "street beggars" (males) and "tourists" (females) both have unflattering but mostly accurate insights into the psychology of the other. Game theory determines the shape of their interactions, more than the pre-existing personality of both parties. Any street beggar who is too reticent or tourist who is too open handed is sabotaging themselves. (The one flaw in the analogy is of course that our "tourist" is actually looking for a particular "street beggar", and the tourist:beggar ratio is more balanced, but I quibble.)
It's a failure of rationality, though, to be unwilling to concede that negative generalizations of both sides do, in fact, have a basis in reality. This goes for both the beggars and the tourists.
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