popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
This seems to me a quite bad refutation of white nationalism. The meat of your objection is that wignats would have to use violence to achieve their policy goals, but apparently you've never had a frustrating conversation with a libertarian. That's true for every political movement ever. Whether we are talking about ethnic cleansing of hispanics or civil rights laws for blacks or motor vehicle registration for your SUV, the enforcement of policy ultimately rests on an escalating sequence of consequences that end in non-compliants being gunned down by police in the street.
Yes, making an ethnostate would require reprisals on people who don't want to obey. This is equally true of patrolling borders. China, Korea, and Japan are not "naturally" homogenous today. They are homogenous because they have continued to enforce a threat of violence against border crossers who do not meet their preferences.
This post could be rewritten to condemn any political movement that is not in power, save ancaps.
Because the prevailing sentiment here is that anti-semitism is stupid but not particularly threatening.
It's not unthreatening, I just don't put it in a different category than other grand narratives about who/what is really responsible for modern woes, and I find it faintly disgusting that it is elevated to a special dais by tastemakers. Ideas are dangerous. That's the nature of the beast. Communism will be the obvious whipping boy here, but it wasn't too long ago Jacobins flew into a bloody frenzy over ideas we today consider utterly banal.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I don't find it valuable to engage with arguments I consider silly, nor do I feel that occupying a website with silly thinking sullies me, nor do I find it onerous to collapse uninteresting comments, nor do I think the average person here is too unintelligent to spot fallacies, nor does their existence on the motte seem to cry out to heaven for redress. Antisemitic conspiracy theorists do not seem evil to me. For the most part their reasoning is just poor. Also, there are a few arguments the mainstream calls 'antisemitic' I find convincing, and that will be true for thoughtful liberals/leftists too.
The rules here do a good job keeping this space pleasant, at least for my preferences. I acknowledge there's no accounting for taste.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Your breakdown of the motivations and rhetoric of both factions seems accurate.
I feel like the ultimate result of the controversy was probably a marginal pro-GG victory. Anti-GG got to control the narrative, to the extent that e.g. the Wikipedia article on GamerGate is pure anti-GG propaganda, but that control didn't translate into success because the traditional video game journalistic scene that anti-GG had their base in was becoming irrelevant. If I think about the movers and shakers who get to define gaming as a subculture now, it's all much more crowdsourced - it's streamers and YouTubers and content creators. If I think about the people with privileged access to gaming companies whose feedback changes the way games are made now, it's, well, it's content creators. It's not journalists.
I don't play many video games these days, but of the few recent ones I bought, Elden Ring seems celebrated in GG circles for being especially non-woke. Its character creation uses "Body Type A / Body Type B" rather than a gender option. Another celebrated non-idpol game, Hogwarts Legacy, apparently lets you play as a black male witch in the female dormitories in 19th century England, and has openly transgender NPCs.
Yes, traditional gaming journalism is a shadow of its former self, but that's just social media killing the legacy press. The culture of AAA games shifted with everything else. Calling the situation a pro-GG victory seems like telling a 1924 Russian white that he won the civil war because Lenin died.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
My personal experience is that attempted child molesters face extremely minimal legal and social consequences. His family members say, “I’d never defend what he did,” then minimize his offenses and keep inviting him to children’s birthday parties. They give him plenty of opportunity to try again. Their acquaintances all go along with this, because it would be too socially awkward not to.
There's more to "legal and social consequences" than your family. Frankly, you can never expect family to hold their kin accountable for serious crimes. Violence, robbery, corruption, false testimony, rape – family will offer every possible excuse, and when excuses run dry, every opportunity for rehabilitation. Blood runs thicker than morals.
For legal consequences, criminal abuse gets an average of 16 years, while statutory rape gets 3.6 years (source). It's hard to parse where "child molestation" fits between these two, since the latter probably includes a lot of non-central examples like teenagers dating adults. I'll acknowledge I really don't know how I could recalibrate my intuitions on this. The only time I hear about child molesters being sentenced is when there's a news story about the penalty being shockingly low. But if I trusted this heuristic, I would believe tens of thousands of unarmed blacks were being killed by police officers, or that shark attacks are rampant, and a hundred other false impressions.
Socially, outside the family, I'm not sure what universe you live in if you think chomos don't get serious social consequences. Perhaps your cultural milieu is different than mine.
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.
"Low Status Secret History."
You nailed it. @ymeskhout and many others in this thread are searching for the rationalist equivalent of the philosopher's stone — a meta-criterion for determining whether a position is reasonable without reference to the facts. I too have been beguiled by such a formula. That I could tell whether someone's claims are worth evaluating, just by their posture and disposition in the debate. That I coud tell the difference between a "framework" and an "epicycle" without learning the theory. That I could separate "motivated delusions" from "suppressed truth-speaking" without knowing the facts. I can't.
The reason I don't bother investigating whether interdimensional aliens built the pyramids is purely because my social sense tells me that people who make those claims are not worth entertaining. Progressives do the same to people like me when we talk about HBD or cultural marxism.
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.
I'm not a foreign policy expert but a pair of catastrophic outcomes come to mind.
- A coalition of neighboring Arab countries declares war on Israel, as you predict. All progress towards normalizing relations with Muslim countries in the last fifty years resets, and the atrocity is remembered for hundreds of years. The US likely stands on the sidelines for the war.
- The Arab citizenry of Israel instantly radicalizes. All Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem instantly radicalize. Whereas once Israel had terrorists living behind a wall in a containment zone, now they have terrorists dispersed in their population and ready to act as fifth columnists in the invasion. Unless Israel is willing to genocide those people too, which would spark a civil war, terror attacks ramp up dramatically.
It seems like a very bad idea to yours truly.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
- 0% of women want to sleep with your average incel (definitionally)
- Some percent, say 5%, of women want to have sex with a dog.
It is not ~0% of all women who don't want to sleep with the incel, it is tilde 0% (Zorba fix markdown escape pls) of all women he ever met (more plausibly, approached).
He probably haven't met any dogfuckers, either.
To demonstrate the problem a different way: Go to an incel forum, select a thousand incels. Go to a dog competition, select a thousand charming, beautiful, intelligent, expensive male dogs with female owners. Which group do you think will have more sex with female humans in the next five years?
The "incels are less fuckable than dogs" doesn't hold up unless you redefine "incel" much more narrowly than anyone actually does. Your average unemployed 5'6" recessed chin guy on those forums is still more sexable than a chocolate lab.
Reading people's personal accounts on Hacker News and elsewhere lends credence to the existence of bad genetics, such as men who consume far fewer calories predicted by calculators but still obese or overweight. Metabolism varies greatly among individuals even controlling for factors like age, height, sex, lifestyles, etc.
Anecdotal, and people are terrible at estimating their own consumption unless they're weighing everything they put in their mouth. The variation of metabolism is not completely insignificant, but not enough to explain the obesity crisis. An extremely cursed person in the 99th percentile might have to consume about 400kcal/day less than average (assuming 160kcal stddev) which does not explain the obesity crisis. Your run-of-the-mill unlucky person complaining of a "slow metabolism" has to consume the equivalent of two fewer apples a day.
The main way in which obesity is genetic is behavioral. People with a satiation reflex that does not activate as quickly, whose hunger is stronger or self-regulation is weaker, who are inclined to sedentary activities and don't walk as much. But these factors of genetic variation often reflect poorly on the character the obese person in question, so they prefer to focus on a supposedly unbelievably efficient metabolism.
Bad genetics can explain a fixed proportion of the population being obese even in the 70s, 60s etc.
A new environment can expose genetic variation that was invisible before. Vulnerability to drug addiction is also genetic, but there were no fentanyl addicts in the 60s or 70s.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
+1 on the 12 Miles Below rec.
I enjoyed 12MB, but mostly because of the unique setting. The protagonist lucks into all the things that give him power progression, as opposed to planning, training, or using his own unique cleverness to problem solve. IIRC, despite being characterized as a brainy engineer, his major contribution to his own success is using a few Bash commands.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Could we be seeing the beginning of the end of the Chiefs dynasty?
As a Patriots fan I certainly hope so. It would be very annoying in retrospect if we secured consensus for Best Dynasty of All Time, Best QB of All Time, Best Coach of All Time, etc around 2017 only for the title belt to be lost the minute after the band broke up a few years later.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
It's true I rarely give him much of a response anymore because he always posts the same things and when people do tackle his specific claims, he fades and comes back a short time later with the same arguments pretending the previous conversations never happened
I think this would be the reason to ban an account rather than single-issue posting. Posting gish gallop manifestos and then retreating into the shadows when someone takes the effort to debunk, only to reappear when the coast is clear, is bad faith participation. Focusing on a single issue, on the other hand, is something you could accuse many people here of.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
It's a very entertaining video but the logic of the multipliers and their weights is poor. A data scientist or even just a reasonable person would look at the results that the most cowardly punts resulted in a win, realize they fucked up and recalibrate. Instead he just plows ahead with a dumb model based on nothing but his gut and acts like it's a huge mystery he got dumb results.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaic. Very good overall. This is the first time I get the appeal of rational fiction. The premise is recognizably Harry Potter, but with infinitely better worldbuilding, and Harry Potter is a useless jock so Hermione uses her looper watch to counter Voldermort instead.
Pro: The protagonist unravels a single fantasy mystery puzzle over thousands of pages, with each step being purely logical. Minimal asspulls. Despite the web novel origins, the author seems to have planned clockwork details from the start. Side characters are funny and have surprisingly heartwarming backstories.
Con: In the early chapters, the protagonist acts like a teenager. A real one. He's not as bad as the fandom warned, but you'll have to overcome a cringe curve here.
Neutral: There's an almost total lack of descriptive language. If a character pulls into a impressive train station, the author just says the character is impressed; he doesn't describe how the benches have Baroque Rococo gold-trimmed marble or whatever. To my surprise, the straightforward delivery doesn't bother me, and more paragraphs of scene-building would just distract. If you like buttery delicious prose, you won't find it here.
Yeah, I don't think the dialogue was particularly good, but the world-building was. The quests, the books you could find, all the little details scattered around the map... it was all very well done.
Seconded. The purpose of NPCs in Morrowind is admittedly to be walking lorebooks and direction-givers. The only character you can have in any way a dynamic conversation with is Vivec. (Which, hey, he achieved CHIM, so...) But Morrowind didn't focus on character relationships, so judging it by this rubric seems to miss the point.
Morrowind's writing is good in the same way of Dark Souls or Outer Wilds. It isn't about the interaction of characters. It's the process of collecting shards the backstory in your mind, and eventually piecing together truth out of fragments.
Please, for the sake of ideological diversity, do not downvote well-expressed opinions you disagree with.
What is good for goose, is good for the gander. I support free speech of those who support free speech. Those who support censorship, deserve to be censored. "Pronoun policy" which penalizes people for speaking what they perceive is true, amounts to censorship.
The Motte also has a code of manners that others find stifling. Is that censorship? Many an outsider has come here and said "@some, you're a nazi" or the like, believing honestly that you're a nazi and thinking they had good factual reasons for thinking so, indeed, feeling a moral duty not participate in the social fiction you're not a nazi. They got modded. Instead they had to rephrase their ideas in an abstract, motte-friendly way.
"Mr. Elliot Page, all transmen are women" is perfectly comprehensible.
Of course, places with pronoun policies also tend to censor the ideas themselves. But in principle requiring he/she is no more censorial than what we do here.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
My impression from talking to older people is that the severity of, and violence involved in, school bullying has declined significantly over the past hundred years.
Like @jeroboam, I suspect there's a important difference in the way we're using the word "bullying". Let me share an anecdote from Rachel Simmon's Odd Girl Out: The hidden culture of aggression in girls which I got via Joyce Benenson's book on male v. female friendship.
Brianna and Mackenzie were the queen bees, and they presided over the seventh grade. Brianna was the prettiest, Mackenzie the best at sports. Their favorite hobby was having a boyfriend. Jenny [a transfer student] wasn’t really interested in a boyfriend, but she still like hanging out with the guys. Mostly she liked to play soccer and basketball with them after school. She liked to wear jeans and T-shirts instead of make-up and miniskirts.
She had barely introduced herself when Brianna and Mackenzie gave her a code name and started calling her Harriet the Hairy Whore. They told everyone Jenny was hooking up with the boys in the woods behind the soccer field. Jenny knew that being called a slut was the worst thing in the world, no matter where you lived. No one was even kissing yet. It was the lowest of the low.
Brianna and Mackenzie started a club called Hate Harriet the Hore Incorporated. They got every girl to join except two who didn’t care. All the members had to walk by Jenny in the hallway and say “Hhiiiiiii...”
They made a long sighing noise to make sure she knew they were sounding out the initials of the club: HHHI. Usually two or more girls would say it and then look at each other and laugh. Sometimes they couldn’t even say the whole thing, they were laughing so hard. It seemed like Mackenzie and Brianna had suddenly made it their goal in life to ruin her.
[...]
There was no way she’d tell her mother, and certainly not her father. She felt nauseous just thinking about telling her parents she was such a reject.
Every day was an endless battle. She was exhausted trying not to cry, stiffening her body against the hallway attacks, sitting through lunch after lunch alone. There was no one else to be friends with in the grade because everyone, the few that there were, was against her.
One night Jenny’s sadness left no room for her fear, and she picked up the phone. Jenny called Brianna, Mackenzie, and a few other girls. She asked each of them, “Why do you hate me?” They denied everything.
“But why are you doing the Hate Harriet the Hore club?” she pleaded.
Their voices were light and sweet. “We don’t have a Hate Harriet the Hore club!” each one assured her, as though they were telling her the earth was round. They were so nice to Jenny that for a second she didn’t believe it was really them. Then she could almost feel her heart surging up through her chest. The next morning, she actually looked forward to getting out of bed. It would be different now.
Then she got to school.
“Hhhiiiiiiii...!”
To me this is bullying, and the psychological content received by Jenny is equal to that if it were 1923 and MacKenzie and Brianna instead took her out to the woods, stuck a bonnet in her mouth, and strapped her with a branch. Or if it were 1963 and they circled around her and screamed SLUT to her face. Social disapproval and assertion of dominance, when it comes to bullying, are the essence; violence and open confrontation but delivery mechanisms.
So, yes, we have created rules that limit beating a kid up or yelling slurs in their face. That doesn't mean bullying has decreased, it's just become harder to measure.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I disagree with your premise that childhood bullying is less than before. Bullying is a universal feature of children's culture (and arguably, human culture) where low status outsiders are ritually demeaned and excluded by the mainstream. If violence is allowed, violence will be used; if not, the bullying will express in other ways. It's just that the people you think should be bullied are no longer outsiders; they are the mainstream, doing the bullying.
I also see a small spike around May 2020. I wonder did this coincide with the "protests are bad because they'll spread Covid (unless they're pro-BLM, in which case they're fine)" flip-flopping from public health officials?
This would be a good explanation if the spike didn't peak the week before George Floyd died. I think it must be general disdain for Covid conformism, or for democrats becoming the most strident proponents for NPIs after opposing anti-Covid measures as xenophobic up until February.
The 2020-2022 period was full of these sorts of War with Eastasia/Eurasia heel turns from the tastemakers, which is why the meme emerged then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme) the term was first used in a political context in 2018, it predates Covid.
I checked the Google Trends data. "NPC" had a spike in 2018, returned to baseline, and then was revived in late February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and has been double to triple baseline since.
It's a bit like how "gaslighting" originated from a 1938 play. The term was lying around dormant and picked up later. In the case of NPC, it was the mass fast turn of online progressives from talking about covid vaccines to talking about Ukraine.
INTJ, I would guess it’s INTJ’s that are overrepresented in here. Judgers are more systematizing than Perceivers, no? But the last letter isn’t as relevant as the first 3 anyway.
I'd be surprised if this forum weren't half INTJ+INTP, if not more. A Scott poll from the good old days had us 10x overrepresented in his readership IIRC.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Yeah. I'm sure you've heard this before, but you're overfocusing on negatives to the point of insanity.
From the tone of your writing, you'd think you were a middle-aged castrated cripple living under a bridge in a small town where everyone knows you as a registered sex offender. The facts of your situation that bleed through your wellness posts do not agree with the level of despair, at all.
Given this, improvement in your life situation will not improve your emotions. They're unmoored from one another. Seek help and/or try new medications.
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.
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