popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
Do you think Google's attempts at ideological sculpting are effective, neutral, or counter-productive? Why are they doing this?
Search for any social topic or event that a conservative cares about, and Google will list progressive news sources and fact checkers denying its validity or, if this is impossible, condemning political weaponization of the facts. Google's information sculpting seemed to reached its apex mid-2022, when PM of Hungary Viktor Orban made a speech with inflammatory takes on European history and EU policy, and Google would not give a link to the speech. Trying all sorts of keywords, one could find page after page of thinkpieces with two-word scare quotes about what a horrible Nazi speech Orban had made, but it was impossible to read what he actually said. (Yandex gave an English transcript as the second result.)
Putting aside the morality or fairness of this: Do you think Google's efforts prevent people from being radicalized? Do they increase political capital for the establishment left? The recent Gemini AI debacle shows a hilarious tin ear for the company; no one could fail to see the tight ideological corset around the image generation squeezing the AI's intestines out its throat. And personally — though I am not normal — the information sculpting I get from search results doesn't make me accept the sources as presented; it just makes me angry.
The three broad explanations I see for Google's approach are:
- It makes you angry, but ninety percent of searchers don't notice. The sculpting works.
- It's very stupid, but a culture of fear inside the company prevents anyone from dialing back. The sculpting is counterproductive.
- The purpose of propaganda is not convincing people but demoralizing them, etc. The sculpting works.
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
popocatepetl
1mo ago
'Given that african savages are manifestly, transparently incapable of civilization and self-rule, it's dishonest to say that enslaving them is a racist policy'.
If you mean to imply that "the average male is stronger and faster than 99% of females" is as obviously ridiculous an assertion as "African savages are incapable of civilization and self-rule" - well, I don't know what to tell you. That you're wrong?
I think you're missing the point of her analogy. A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is. Likewise, a law that restricts blacks to chattel status is an "anti-black law" regardless of whether it's actually true blacks can't govern themselves. Trying to say "A law that restricts X group isn't anti-X, because X should be restricted" is incoherent.
Misconstruing the focus of an analogy is a failure mode of debate I'm glad not to see too often here.
popocatepetl
9mo ago
Ever since Scott ran an article on social contagion in anorexia and how anorexia wasn’t common at all until females herd about it.
He didn't make the connection explicitly, but transgenderism was surely on his mind when he wrote it. "Looking back on the debate, it seems as if acceptance of neurasthenia had been so successful that psychiatrists felt obligated to restigmatize this mental disorder in hopes of limiting its adoption. [...] He who has ears to hear, let him listen."
It's disappointing how chickenshit Scott has become in his ACX days. He's effectively cancelproof so there's no need to be this cagey.
I think my problem with the hobbit mindset is that Hobbiton will not be left alone. Hanania seems to have a deep-seated disdain for mundane domesticity and, as the Zoomers say, "vibing". I just don't believe the hobbits will be allowed to vibe. If the ring doesn't get to Mordor, the Shire will be perfected by Sauron; if it does, the Shire will still be scoured. The hobbits' complacency only allows Saruman to sweep in and turn it into a police state virtually unopposed — and I don't believe for a second Tolkien didn't have an allegory in mind when he was writing that.
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.
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.
popocatepetl
3mo ago
By the by, this guy is rapidly approaching mid-10s Scott-tier for me. Scratches almost the same itch. Almost every time he releases a podcast essay, I end up re-listening a few times, and it lingers in my mind for weeks. (The interview podcasts are less interesting.) I recommend "The Frontier Was Always Closed (To you)", "How the Taliban Won", and his review of Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.
It's a shame he's not anywhere near as prolific.
(EDIT: PDF version from ToaKraka for people with bad internet.)
Which of the following would you rather have? CYOA - In general, people pick Comfort or Power. But the Motte is built different (laughs). As a fun exercise, pick your option and predict what the Motte will choose.
Me:
YOUR CHOICE. The motte: Pleasure 20%, Adventure 20%, Comfort 20%, Good Works 20%, Power 20%
Wrap this part in || to spoiler, please. (And try to pick your honest choice rather than the socially desirable one if at all possible)
Predictions:
-
95%: Reddit does not back down, defined as offering free API to Apollo and RiF
-
80%: After two weeks, no top 100 subreddit is still blacked out. (99% no more than two are)
-
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.
Does anyone here actually "believe" Plato/Aristotle's theory of forms, material/formal/efficient/final causes, and hylemorphism? Or is at all basically nonsense, dreamed up for a want of robust physical science, with 'ball', 'sphere', 'man', 'dog' being just human oversimplifications for matter arrangements?
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.
Now that we have vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and microwaves, what need for men to marry at all? They can just do those five minute tasks in between coming home from their Real Jobs and settling down to have fun with online porn, online gaming, and ordering drugs and booze online.
This, but unironically. Especially since men's standards on those tasks tends to be considerably lower than women's.
I often think of the economic ramifications when I see memes about single men's apartments. You can see the outlines of the pod, but the pod seems to be arriving quicker than AI will fill in the role of the mediocre men with their tedious infrastructure-maintaining jobs. If a third of young Gen Z men will never marry, and another third will end up divorcees with their wages garnished, and they're happy with a $499 gaming console and a $249 TV, what happens to the economy?
I guess the answer is the state will have to find some way to expropriate a larger portion of these men's wages to ensure they can only afford the pod if they provide a lot more surplus value than they used to, ensuring that incel pod guy must still seek technical certifications and work 40 hours at his lame construction job. Will they be able to squeeze blood from that rock is a salient unanswered question.
There was a good motte post awhile back about the ancient Mesopotamian origin myth of women luring wild men playing in the mountains down into the cities to farm. But in the 21st century, the wild men are slovenly gamers and the women are preaching harpies.
If forced to confront knife-kun with a bat, my strategy would to be lob it at him before he enters melee range. Perhaps the surprise would make him drop the knife or at least nonplus him enough for me to deliver a disabling punch before he stabs me.
As for you guys arguing the bat is better... come on eggheads. Try swinging versus stabbing motions. Even if your opponent has the combat reflexes of a teletubby and can't dodge/disrupt your telegraphed swing, you'll have two fatal wounds in the gut before landing your first blow.
It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't want it to be true...I don't want it to be true. It's so unfair
A common, characteristic-of-our-time response is "Why should you care? You're an individual. If the portion of your tribe doesn't apply to you, what does it skin off your back?" This is @BurdensomeCount's answer. I think that's fine, but it only works for certain people. The reality is most people do care about their tribe. We're not atomized. The heat map of our moral concern goes from family, to self, to tribe, to confession/creed, to human. We care about tribal welfare only one degree less than ourselves. So it is with you.
So. Let's talk about me. While this may be a luxurious piggyback on your own problem, I'm also dour on my tribe recently. My tribe is a superset of the puritans in Albion's Seed — it doesn't include all 'whites', but neither is it just white americans who descended from those guys with buckles on their hats. It is the group on whom the terrible weight of God's judgement presses. I am talking about blood rather than confession to be clear; this feeling can and has been channeled to a million creeds. How do I know who's in my tribe, then? I just do.
My tribe is currently willing itself to subjugation. They want the destruction of our history, the destruction of our communities, and they're eager for genetic replacement: I don't think we're actually willing ourselves to extinction, as anti-progressives (usually cavalier or borderer white) accuse us. Rather, our tribe wants to place ourselves, we horrible fiends, under a yoke of penance to the fargroup. In practice, this might lead to tribal extinction, but that's just my prediction.
On the dissident right, there are attempts to blame this on (((a certain group of people))). And while it may be that jews are exploiting their curious situation as whites-allowed-to-be-racist to the hilt, on the whole, this explanation is just an offramp. The hard truth is puritan-adjacent whites have a will to self-destruction, and this is probably fundamental to who we are. It's not going away.
I could pray for God (or more effectively CRISPR) to remove this trait from my tribe. (This is what @campfireSmoresEaten just suggested.) But that would be genociding us beyond the wildest dreams of the activist holding an "Abolish Whiteness" sign. We are the people under God's weight. What's worse, the narcissism and greed one centimeter underneath that facade is also who we are.
For you: it may be your tribe's doom is to be a lekking species, wild, stupid, violent, and feral, and that you as a non-central member must watch them destroy themselves. Any attempt you might make to "fix" this problem would also be genocide.
A few thoughts on how to cope:
- Aim for better rather than perfect. Lots of people have noticed that black communities used to be more functional. At the very least, they had two parent households and much lower crime. What were the features of this world, and how can you get closer to it?
- Look for optimism in history. Your tribe exists for a game-theoretic reason. While it may be maladapted and flailing here, it thrives elsewhere. In this sense, doomerism is a counsel of hope; when the current system either eats itself alive or revolutionizes, there will be another chance for your tribe to flourish.
- Focus your mind on eternal or "spiritual" matters. I'm not a christian but this is what they mean when they talk about fallen man and the love of God.
Watering holes with similar discussion norms: DataSecretsLox, /r/theschism (slowly dying)
Blogs: I interpret 'similar to here' as trying to understand the cultural moment at least one layer of abstraction deeper than Current Thing, and making observations besides the most obvious talking points from their political perspective. AstralCodexTen (obviously), PSmith's bookshelf, Ecosophia, Scholar's Stage, EXIT podcast, Richard Hanania's Newsletter.
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
8mo 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.
Noone needs to face anything, just increasingly automate weapon systems and let the peasants die. If they're not needed and can't use violence to effectively overthrow the system then why would anyone need to pay any attention to them whatsoever?
The forum is replete with obvious violations of the rules. The mods obviously won't mod comment like this, because then they'd be modding like 30% of all the comments here.
"Elites", "AI companies", and "governments" are not the outgroup. They're stand-ins for Moloch. "Progressives", "woke PCMs", or "democrats" are the outgroup. If @Azth's were writing about them in this way — or implying anyone reading this forum or talking to him thinks it's fine if peasants die — he'd be modded within a few hours.
For an alternate example from the left side of things, it's possible to write extremely mean things about "capitalism" or "corporations" without getting modded.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
But a supremely benevolent being would give all his creations at least of a chance of accepting grace. This is a chink in the armor of the theodicy, because Christians' omnipotent benevolent God did not lift a finger to give 100s AD Malaysians even a shot at accepting grace — they could not have heard Christ's ministry. Nor, indeed, does God give us moderns the benefit he was willing to extend to 20s AD Near Easterners, who saw tangible miracles to guide them to God's kingdom.
popocatepetl
8mo ago
Someone whose views are the average of the media they consume or the friends they keep. They do not seriously evaluate a given topic or problem and come to their own conclusion on it, instead preferring to delegate to trusted figures of authority.
This definition is inadequate because it describes everyone. Do you think it's an accident that 99% of your objective beliefs and moral opinions are those of a 21st century educated westerner rather than, say, an 8th century BC Scythian herdsman? Did you personally validate your belief that Jupiter is a gas giant with several moons or did you trust an authority figure? Are you an NPC because you did?
IMO the litmus test of NPC is receiving "updated information" from trusted figures that contradicts previously received beliefs/values, and not experiencing any kind of cognitive discomfort. 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.
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. From those who have much, much is expected (and the corollary, from those who have nothing, nothing is expected, explains Grant's Pass). Blessed are the poor. Etc. It's a slave morality.
You're passing a progressive or nietzschean interpretation of those elements as their true, indisputable meaning. Consider the possibility those teach self-discipline ("bearing the cross") rather than as statements bashing those high in status.
Blessed are the poor. [...] from those who have nothing, nothing is expected
The beatitudes describe various hardships as the blessings of God. "Blessed are the X" is not to say the status of poverty/mourning/persecution intrinsically grants righteous status — that is, "poor people are good" — but that poverty/mourning/persecution are blessings from heaven to mortify the evil in you. In this reading, being rich, happy, and safe carries the dangers of you becoming self-satisfied and thus not seeking God. To the contrary, in another context of Jesus's ministry, the poor person who receives only one talent is cast into hell for sitting on his laurels. The two richer servants are praised and the master grants them greater dominion in his service (AKA puts them above the lesser servants).
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven."
The lesson here is that the rich man does not value God higher than his own material status. When challenged on the point, he prefers money; his mouth says "I want God" but his mind says "I want earthly passions" — this lesson holds for the beggar with his bottle just as much as Scrooge McDuck with his gold swimming pool. At other parts of scripture, Jesus meets well-to-do people and does not demand they pauper themselves for God's kingdom.
To be clear, it's very questionable that Bezos can be saved, because he is chasing money and status above all else. But is not at all clear that Jesus categorically condemns money any more than he condemns enjoying marital sex, food, or earthly luxuries such as come to you in your service to God.
There is a true need for an alternate Wikipedia at this point. Future generations will see Wikipedia like we see Herodotus's "Histories" - flawed but ultimately the core upon which historical knowledge is built.
This slams into Neutral vs. Conservative problem. Much ink has been spilt trying to model the core value that splits progressives from conservatives, but I'll piggyback on Richard Hanania and say the central difference is pretty banal — the left has causes they really care about advancing, while the right would mildly prefer to not be pushed off their spot, please. Any time a new faction has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric, they get automatically slotted into the left coalition, and the political theory bloggers have to do midnight brainstorming on how this group's ideas are a logical extension of progressivism.
The conservative right definitionally cannot summon the passion to create a rival Wikipedia. Arguably, the conservative right cannot even summon the passion to have its own political party. Here in the US, the GOP has repeatedly been parasitized by some passionate heretic progressive faction, like libertarians or then neocons or most recently the NRx inspired alt-right. These groups do not reflect the values of the baptist truck driver or stodgy civil engineer dad who wants lower taxes, but they have passion, so they out-ground-game mere conservatives.
Is "white people aren't allowed to run red lights" an "anti-white law"?
Certainly, if it removes the right of red-light running to whites specifically.
Would it become an anti-white law if it was overruling a lower level of government, like if some municipalities were allowing white people to run red lights and the state government passed a law saying they couldn't make racial exceptions?
Still anti-white, because it's legislation that removes a previous privilege from that specific group.
but nobody describes the lack of such an exemption as anti-white, not even white supremacist
In a hypothetical universe where whites had a historic go-on-red privilege, its revocation would certainly be seen as anti-white by white supremacists. And they'd be correct. Even though such a change would be a good idea by my books, removing a specific white-held privilege is an "anti-white law". Likewise, restricting MtFs from female sports where they previously had access locally is an "anti-trans law", even though I agree it's a good idea.
Notice that guesswho didn't describe segregation of sports by sex as anti-male, despite men and boys being the overwhelming majority of those restricted, likely due to believing that the segregation is reasonable except for when it applies to people who identify as transgender.
When the system of female-only sports was first created, the restriction against men joining was definitely an "anti-male rule". Identifying which groups a rule targets is different from condemning the rule.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Why did no one tell me about Obsidian before 2024? It's like Evernote but actually good. The one downside seems to be you'll have to pony up $8/month for sync if you don't know how to use git or some other VC for the plaintext files.
Other lifechanging programs or apps? Anki is another one for me, for specific types of memorization and study.
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.
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