rallycar-jepsen
No bio...
User ID: 694
(First of all, thank you for the informative and honest reply - and I apologize for my relentless edit-preening of my own posts - luckily I'm pretty sure I didn't add or remove anything of substance while you were replying, just streamlining phrasing and other minor choices.)
The bold part is the second-most important piece of information I'm using to determine how you or I can identify like. You don't consider yourself to be the same race as the woman who gave birth to you, which is baffling to me. I understand it, I suppose, in the regular way that something odd you've lived with your whole life is normal while still remaining odd.
This is interesting. I see your reasoning here completely. In a vacuum, I think a world-naive version of me would happily claim that I'm both white and black, because my parents are white and black. If my parents were Korean and Mexican I'd be both asian and hispanic.
The non-naive me understands that this would run directly counter to just about all messaging I've ever seen about what it means to be white in America, in the historical record through my childhood and into the present, from white people and from black people, from segregationists and from integrationists, from people who are firmly opposed to race-mixing and from people who are a little overenthusiastic about it.
My impression is that claiming whiteness for myself would be widely seen as not only incorrect, but essentially fraudulent - whiteness, as it exists in the American perspective, is about not being mixed-race. It's what I understand the point of whiteness to be. I don't mean to point this out in a way that implies that it's unjust or that I feel that I deserve entry into whiteness and that it is being denied to me - it is what it is, value-neutral.
I concede that I might be wrong about this, and that say, Barack Obama could've been welcomed with open arms into the 'white' (or 'American') racial ingroup had he simply chosen to, but I am skeptical.
(Maybe one difference between the traditional 'white' ethnic group and your 'American' ethnic group is that biracial people can opt-in to the latter and not the former.)
Neither of my parents ever explicitly called me anything but "mixed" -- that was the terminology of the day, I think "biracial" has superseded it, I don't really know or keep up either. Neither side of the family ever called me white, but interestingly, neither side of the family ever called me black, either. That I picked up afterward, from friends (white and black and otherwise) calling me black, then later sampling the broader world for clues about what I ought to call myself. It always boiled down to "If you're half black, you're black. And, if you're half black, you're not white."
So, I don't know on this point. Like I said, in a vacuum, I agree with you that it should be equally appropriate for me to claim the race of either or both of my parents.
Which brings me along nicely to your last point. In your experience people tell you what race you are and you say OK. In my experience what I'm expected to call people changes frequently. I've gone through several iterations of the euphemism treadmill in just my lifetime, and I can see how it worked in the past.
Yeah I'm more or less with you on this one, although I also think the treadmill is inevitable. I can't tell you the last time I heard someone unironically call themselves "African-American" in a casual context. To me it sounds impersonally clinical and weird, like when someone says "females" instead of "women" in a casual conversation.
But I'm on the back end of the treadmill, too. "People of color" has always been a very clunky phrase to me, and makes me feel bad for how disorienting it must be for people who had to unlearn "colored people" within their own lifetimes. Plus it's too broad, since it just means "not white people" it implies a coalition or community that doesn't exist for any practical purpose. I'll take it over "BIPOC" (black people, indigenous people, and people of color), which I don't see having a lot of mileage outside of identity activist spaces, but hey, I've been wrong before.
In actual American black communities, people don't say "people of color" unless they're specifically doing race identity coalition activism, which they ... usually aren't. And anecdotally, the very small number of people I've ever heard say "BIPOC" out loud have been white terminally online leftists. We're ... safe from that one I think, fingers crossed. My condolences to all the Latinxs out there.
The good news I bring is that it's fine to say 'black', it's fine to say 'black' if you're white, it's way simpler than anything else, it seems pretty stable as an identifier, and it's what the vast majority of black people in the US talk about and think of themselves as.
Personally I think 'mulatto' should be allowed back and should bring fun hyperspecific terms like 'quadroon' and 'octoroon' back along with it, but I don't control these things.
Yes, unequivocally. If you specifically think that you do not share your race with your mother, then I am not going to argue with you. If you want to lay claim to her heritage, you need to lay claim to her heritage. And yes again, picking a side is critical, which is why I'm trying to choose my own, and I'm doing it in response to what I see as blacks, mostly, but increasingly other minorities in America, choosing a side that doesn't include me, and doesn't include your mother, and doesn't include Robert Lee. Self-identification is a necessary condition
I'll give it to you that your perspective is self-consistent from where I'm standing. I think it's an unusual method of identitycraft, but I understand where you're coming from and why you want to do it and see it come into being. I was thinking at first, is there any particular reason you don't think of your new ingroup as "White American" or "Anglo-American" (vs. just "American") if American blacks and indians both have comparable and non-exclusive claims of ethnic primacy on the American continent? But I am assuming "American" in this sense has to do with the specific founding stock of the American colonial project and specifically its state system and cultural institutions, and has nothing at all to do with people who are white or European who weren't part of the country at the time of its founding or soon after. I can also see why there is not really an intuitive term for that.
Your position made a lot more sense to me once I understood that you are defining the bounds of a new ethnic group based on ancestral proximity to a particular series of people and events at a particular place at a particular time in history, and are not defining terms of entry into an existing political or cultural class, or defining what US citizenship should mean (at least not inherently, I'm sure you separately have a perspective about that).
From that perspective I understand completely why Robert E. Lee is within the bounds of that group - his ancestors were part of the founding settler stock of the United States, and that's what it means to be within the bounds of the group. (I don't actually specifically know anything about Robert E. Lee's genealogy but I assume you know this to be the case.)
I think your project is understandable and worthwhile, and I don't know how I would solve your terminology problem (what I see as a terminology problem) any better.
Btw, I read about the NFL anthem thing while looking into the matter to reply to your post, and I'm as disappointed as you are in that use of it, and I also believe it signals the thing you think it signals. I don't think the people who agitated for that to happen are as representative of the views of the average black person in America as they believe they are, and I think the distinction is important, but there's no way around conceding that that contingent does exist and they are apparently making things like that happen.
rallycar-jepsen
5mo ago
Have you checked to make sure your property isn't built on any old Indian burial grounds? Maybe you should try obvserving Unthanksgiving Day next year and see if your outlook turns out any better.
I think it can be simultaneously true that:
- Greta holds favorable views of a population that contains a substantial percentage of people who have been shown by word or action to support or excuse brutal acts of terror against Israelis.
- Greta holds certain unfavorable views about the Israeli state common among far left anti-colonialist activist types.
- The TeeTurtle reversible Octopus plush, which went viral on TikTok sometime before January 2021 [ https://sports.yahoo.com/tiktokers-using-reversible-octopus-plushie-174529042.html ] specifically for its utility in helping people communicate their emotions, is in fact a personal item that Greta owns because she finds it useful in communicating her emotions, and it appears in the photo for this reason alone.
I disagree with others who have conceded that she "accidentally used an antisemitic dogwhistle", as if she wore a number 88 sports jersey or waved her hand in a way that looked like a Nazi salute. To me, the crux of the issue is that a chibi octopus is simply not an antisemitic dogwhistle. Assertions linking it to the sprawling octopus/kraken political cartoon trope seem to me to be an incredible reach and a transparently post-hoc construction invented for this specific case at this specific moment. I obviously can't prove it, but I have a very strong impression that at no point in history has anyone ever surreptitiously included an octopus in a piece of content in order to subtly signal antisemitism to fellow antisemites. When the sprawling octopus trope is occasionally made use of as a representation of Jewish power or conspiracy, it's explicitly not as a 'dogwhistle', it's necessarily the central feature of the work. Political cartoons aren't subtle about what is supposed to represent what. There's nothing inherent about octopuses that's antisemitic, or at least there wasn't until October 21st, 2023. It's the sprawling octopus visual trope that's been considered potentially antisemitic by some, and the plush is about as far away from an example of the visual trope as you can get while still being an octopus.
It seems like there's two different discussions happening here - is Greta potentially an ideological enemy of the state of Israel, whose general support for the Palestinian people as a whole necessarily implies she supports some people who wish to see Israel destroyed and are themselves supporting or engaging in violent acts to further that goal? Sure, potentially, logically you can get there. I'm no fan of Greta, so I have no aversion to any of that being true. Does the potential truth value of that make it any more plausible that her TeeTurtle reversible Octopus plush is inherently, or was being used in this context as, an antisemitic hate symbol? No, I don't think it does, and I apparently am willing to die on the hill that it doesn't!
(The discussion about the terminal moral implications of pro-Palestinian activists' rhetoric is probably the more important one, but the plush thing is what the comment thread is about, so.)
A lot of coverage has made it seem like the IDF is simply choosing to starve everyone in the hospital of supplies under the assumption that Hamas has a position within it, but has been extremely light on details.
This NY Times article from within the hour describes IDF troops 'battling Hamas fighters nearby' the hospital, but otherwise simply paints a picture of the terrible situation the people in the hospital are in, and reproduces a statement from the hospital's director, Dr. Salmiya, where he says that there is no truth to the idea that Hamas is operating beneath the hospital.
Apparently Netanyahu personally told CNN directly yesterday that:
"There’s no reason why we just can’t take the patients out of there, instead of letting Hamas use it as a command center for terrorism, for the rockets that they fire against Israel, for the terror tunnels that they use to kill Israeli civilians."
According to this Nov 14 article from the Jerusalem Post, make of that what you will, the IDF is going out of its way to offer assistance in evacuating patients from the hospital, which apparently a publicly released phone conversation shows the hospital leadership is eager to accept. The article also prominently mentions and provides footage of incubators being loaded into vans that the IDF is apparently rushing to get to the hospital as fast as possible. (Isn't the problem that there is no power for their incubators, not that they didn't have enough incubators? How are these new IDF incubators meant to be powered? Or delivered?)
The article reminds readers:
Previously, however, Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have said that Al–Shifa has refused Israeli assistance.
"We just offered Shifa hospital the fuel; they refused it," Netanyahu claimed on Sunday.
Earlier this month, a Gaza health official stated in a phone call intercepted by the IDF that Hamas takes fuel provided to Al-Shifa.
Another intercepted call recorded a health official saying that the director general of Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry, Yusef Abu Rish, had prevented a delivery of fuel from getting to the hospital.
The linked reporting there, from Reuters, Nov 12:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday his country offered fuel to Gaza's Al Shifa hospital, which has suspended operations amid fierce fighting with Hamas, but that the militant group refused to receive it.
"We just offered Shifa hospital the fuel, they refused it," Netanyahu said, without providing details.
The fuel was offered to the hospital, but "the militant group [Hamas]" refused to receive it. How was it "offered" and how was it "refused"? Physically, verbally? Why wouldn't Hamas have accepted the fuel in this situation, and just taken some or all of it for themselves, as the IDF has made clear many times is what it would expect them to do?
liveuamap.com reporting from 4 hours ago has the IDF still surrounding the hospital complex, with heavy gunfire and artillery shelling taking place there.
So ... yeah, it's a little hard to build in my mind's eye what the situation is on the ground. The IDF's messaging here seems to want me to believe that it is fully capable, ready and willing not only to provide supplies directly to the hospital in person, but also to begin evacuating patients, and they could and would immediately do this if only they could get close, which Hamas is preventing. If Hamas is fighting the IDF around the hospital perimeter and not letting them give the hospital anything or take anyone out of it, how are the hospital staff still able to insist that Hamas is not meaningfully present at the hospital? Are they just being held more or less at gunpoint by Hamas and forced to keep saying Hamas isn't at the hospital even when they plainly are?
But also, if Hamas is deeply entrenched in and around the hospital, to the point that it has maintained enough perimeter control around it that the IDF can't or won't enter it and evacuees can't or won't leave it, have the IDF only been surrounding it for days because they simply don't think they could take the hospital by force at this time? Or that they shouldn't for optical reasons, or something?
I'm not a combat strategist and I also can't claim to be able to model the minds of any of the actors here, but yes, I am also confused by the situation.
rallycar-jepsen
5mo ago
It depends on how intermixed they are, first of all, but anyone who has been ethnically distinct for three generations in America gets little sympathy from me and can be deported to where their grandfathers came from.
Not to tread old ground here, but I once again find myself curious about the tricky edge case of the old-stock American black.
(I'll take the former Georgia colonial territory circa the 1770s if you're offering it though.)
He/they user here, it just means either pronoun set is fine. "She/they" is just shorthand for "She/her/hers or they/them/theirs", usually in the sense of "She/her/hers or they/them/theirs, dealer's choice."
If they're anything like me, it's probably because they honestly consider themself nonbinary but they aren't visually readable as gender-nonconforming, have a deferential/non-confrontational habit, don't find absolute pronoun correctness a particularly critical part of life, and/or are averse to policing other peoples' language on principle.
That said, there also do exist a (probably small, but memorable) set of people who will see "She/they" in a bio and do their damnedest to rotate between the two mid-sentence like "She felt their day was going exactly as she hoped it would when they walked out of her door" which is absolutely alien to me and I cannot fathom wanting that or wanting to participate in that. I have to wonder whether that's actually what anyone is truly asking for or if it's just misinterpretation all the way down and nobody in-ranks wants to ask or clarify.
Even when people ask for "any pronouns" (which ... I have a personal and probably irrational aversion to) I always assume what they mean is "pick one set, whichever, and then use that one" not "all text and speech referring to me must be indecipherable".
I do think most people who do it just use "She/they" or "He/they" to mean "Use whichever of these causes the least friction for you, neither one bothers me."
It at least definitely never means "She walked they dog in she front yard."
I notice what you're noticing, but apart from some extreme outliers, it never actually affects my ability to understand what the person writing is saying.
I think I have a different opinion on this depending on the day or the direction of the wind - one day I'm cringing to myself because a friend keeps using "than" when she means "then" in private text messages between the two of us that no one else will ever read, the next day I'm defending on principle that "ain't" as a replacement for both "isn't" and "am not" is perfectly reasonable, comprehensible, has long-since achieved its legitimacy, and that anyone who would judge someone negatively for using it is a nitpicking pedant.
At the edges of this, my instinct is to say that lots of the examples you brought up, on their own, seem minor to me and don't seem like signals of a linguistic descent into madness and incomprehensibility. I do the question mark thing sometimes, for example. There's a certain threshold for variation that I can tolerate just fine if the actual intent remains clear. But, like I said, I come from the viewpoint of someone who's almost always able to understand imperfect English writing without any fuss. Maybe a lot of these deviations would make the intent much less clear to someone who speaks English as a second language.
At the core of it though ... I'm with you. I wish people considered it more important to try to write well. I wish more people wanted to write well in text messages, facebook posts, youtube comments, magazine articles, newspaper columns, job cover letters, classified ads, yelp reviews, and birthday cards. I wish more young people, middle-aged people and older people wanted to write well, and I wish they wanted to do it without other people telling them they should want to. I think my standards for "writing well" are probably much lower than yours. I don't even write particularly well, from an objective standpoint. But I do have standards, and they do mean something to me.
At the end of the day, maybe it doesn't amount to more than just a strong aesthetic preference. I feel like I'll be able to easily comprehend any writing shifts, trends, degradation, or shortcuts for efficiency that may lie ahead. But is it enough to just be able to literally understand people?
Can anyone point to any 3D CGI media that does something really well, that elicits an emotional response that traditional 2D animation could not?
The example du jour of technically masterful, visually beautiful 3D animation right now (well-deserved, IMO) is probably Fortiche Production's 2021 Netflix series Arcane, surprised nobody's brought it up yet. I wouldn't hesitate to put its visual design, character animation and acting, and general execution up on par with a Prince of Egypt or a Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind or Akira or whatever your high-water mark for excellence in 2D animation might be.
My impression is that even people who didn't connect with the story or characters still generally praise the visual style and animation as noteworthy. It's a pretty striking departure from what people have come to expect from big-budget 3D animation - with heavy use of a non-photorealistic rendering style, hand-painted model textures, key effects like fire and smoke actually animated traditionally in 2D and composited in, and other creative ways of sort of "bridging the gap" between 3D and 2D animation, with a result that ends up taking on a distinct character of its own. One of the most common things people say about it (which I agree with) is something like "every frame looks like a piece of traditionally painted concept art", and I think it achieves things that would be technically very difficult or prohibitively labor-intensive if it had been a fully 2D-animated production, particularly in character acting and environment, that strengthen the emotional beats and storytelling.
Is it funny to me that my personal high-water mark for 3D animation is a TV series set in the universe of the video game League of Legends? Yes, a little.
The "kids/family-friendly animation" equivalent to that approach would probably be something like TMNT: Mutant Mayhem (2023), which is also trying for that kind of 'Expressive 2D/3D Hybrid Painting' look. Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (2022) also did this to an extent. The initial positive reaction to Enter the Spiderverse (2018) might've actually kicked off the trend (on groundwork laid by things like Disney's 2012 "Paperman" short film). I can't really speak to the overall quality of any of those movies as stories, but they all strike me as visually interesting and inspired compared to the larger catalogue of 3D animated family movies of the last two decades. If everyone starts leaning into this kind of look and milking it on a superficial level without any of the creative vision that's supposed to come with it, it might start getting tired fast, but as it stands, these kinds of heavy stylistic experiments are pointing in a good direction to me. It's expressive in the way that stylized 2D animation can be expressive. High Photorealism, now that we can do it well reliably, is ... kind of boring to look at, it turns out.
All that being said, yeah, I can point to a couple examples of studios experimenting with the medium in interesting ways, but broadly, neither the high end (incredibly expensive photorealistic CGI lions that communicate 1/10th the emotion that a cel of expressive lineart overlaid onto a cel of color communicated in 1995) or the low end (Walmart clearance DVD rack or straight-to-youtube Disney Tinkerbell series #48) are particularly pushing the envelope of what's possible in the medium. Nothing Pixar has put out in a long time has really blown me away in a visual sense that I can think of offhand, and a lot of popular 3D-animated children's TV or web programming is just depressingly sparse, sterile, and unemotive.
(late edit: on the Pixar point - After thinking about it more I've remembered Wall-E, which I think actually does really owe a lot of its charm and emotional depth to the realism of the hard, mechanical robots and the contrast between a photorealistic dirty, dusty earth and clean, ultra-curated colony ship. I don't know if the stark divide between the two story settings could've been achieved as well in traditional animation, and I think the machine characters really do benefit from the fact that they're models and not drawings.)
I do think you're right that cost is a driving factor once you get below the production budgets of major studios. Honestly, in terms of bang for your buck, a lot of modern economical 2D animation techniques produce an arguably lower quality product than the equivalent cost 3D animation. Low-cost 2D animation doesn't look like The Magic School Bus (1994) anymore, it looks like The Magic School Bus Rides Again (2017). Or Star Trek: Lower Decks, which appears more polished and is 'for adults' but to me just looks fundamentally offputting. No amount of fancy lens flare and bloom in post can save that. That's not to say there's not also some great, traditionally-principled, technically-masterful 2D animation happening out there right now, but to my eye there's just as much slop and creative poverty in 2D productions as there is in 3D right now.
rallycar-jepsen
5mo ago
It's nice to feel included! Thanks @some.
I don't know if it makes you feel better or not, but my life is very much a product of, and continues to be oriented around, the same rugged individualism, family structure (to some extent), emphasis on the scientific method, work ethic, written tradition, etc that you are pointing toward here. Those are strong values that I hold and respect, and I am grateful to those before me who established them.
(I'm not a Christian in any real sense but I share both your edgy atheist history and your coming-around to view it as a net positive.)
This does not really factor into the equation for me in terms of my racial identity.
There have been people in my life who have told me that I "act white" in a pejorative way because of how I speak or write or what kinds of things I like or don't like, especially other young people growing up, but I never really gave that too much weight, and those people were few and far between. I always wrote it off as inconsequential.
It's unfortunate that it seems like there is in fact a growing current of thought that really does seem to resent and push back against those values as inherently suspect and unwanted. I think it's a real problem and I worry that a lot of young people are growing up right now being told that it's racist for people to want you to do well on standardized tests or to ask you to be polite. That was not happening while I was growing up at all, it would've been borderline if not completely offensive, but I think it's clear that the kind of kids who would've told me I "acted white" pejoratively have in fact not grown up to be inconsequential at all and apparently have captured the messaging of institutions like the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
But this type of mentality is not what I mean when I say that the world has made it clear to me that 'white' is not a word that's accurate for me to use about myself. My impression of what whiteness means as a racial identity, and what the boundaries of it are, mostly come from people who assign a positive or neutral value to whiteness.
The values you consider 'benefits of whiteness' here, I would maybe describe as 'benefits of western civilization'? I have no problem thinking of myself as a beneficiary of, product of, and cultural heir to, western civilization. (That terminology is complicated by the fact that I can point to non-western cultures who also can claim many or all of these virtues as a people, but I still think 'western' is at least a better proxy for what you're pointing at than 'white' to me.)
To reiterate, I don't think any of the virtues that you associate with 'white' here are in any way not available to me, and I hold and value the majority of them exactly as I suspect I would if I had two white parents or two black parents. It's the specific racial category 'white' that I don't seem to fall within the accepted bounding conditions of, not any of the values I (or the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) might associate with whiteness.
I expected to fall farther to the right than I actually ended up, although I suspect I'm still farther to the right than most people close to me would figure. I think that's probably common. I went on to take her actual survey, I found it interesting. I also read several of her write-ups about her insights about the data on her substack.
I do think you should probably look at the "past 4" section before being confident about telling people you're in there.
An opportunity to be a datapoint? Let me at it!
Extraversion - 29th p.
Emotional Stability - 81st p.
Agreeableness - 40th p.
Conscientiousness - 18th p.
Intellect/Imagination - 80th p.
It pretty much comports exactly with how I understand myself and so isn't offering me any fresh or striking insights, unfortunately, but what can I really expect from a 50-question personality test?
(I do think 'Openness to Experience' is a better label for their Factor V though - I don't know that I would consider myself in the 80th percentile of 'intellect', or if I were to, it wouldn't be based on anything this test asked me.)
That makes me curious though, has anybody here ever gotten a result from a test like this that's very surprising or counterintuitive, in a way that offered you some grain of insight or cause for reflection?
edit: Oh cool, several responders here did get such a result. Interesting!
I've been very loosely intrigued by the advent of phone-based lidar systems like the one that's apparently now included in modern iPhones. Do you (or anyone else) have experience using these lower-end lidar systems? How big is the gap between that system and the next highest price tier of specialized lidar equipment for a casual user who is not surveying professionally?
We have a small (2-3 acre) rural property that's very non-uniform in shape, elevation, orientation of structures, etc ... is it within the realm of possibility that I could use one of the lower-end iPhone systems, paired with e.g. a smaller DJI flight-programmable quad drone, and wind up with a scan that, if not inch-accurate, would be broadly useful for planning or visualizing new constructions or modifications to existing ones? (I have the 3D/CAD experience to get the rest of the way once I have a point cloud.)
I have the impression that even the low-end lidar might be more dimensionally accurate than doing a traditional, camera-based photogrammetry session with, say, the same iPhone + drone setup. Is this correct?
A reasonably-accurate scan of our property and the ability to do it for others would be helpful and fascinating, but not five-figures helpful or fascinating. Maybe four figures if the first figure is a 1 and if it's also equipment I can do aerial photography with. Depending on how usable the scans are at what scales, I could see myself getting into scanning for all types of projects of smaller scope once I've got the equipment.
For something as large as a scan of the property, though, would I be better off trying to find someone locally who I could hire to do it once with very good equipment?
rallycar-jepsen
5mo ago
Update: they raided the hospital earlier today.
UN agencies, the WHO, and the Red Cross have all strongly condemned the raid.
Meanwhile the IDF is releasing plenty of photos and pretty extensive walkthrough footage showing all of Hamas's stuff that they're pulling out of hallway closets and out from behind MRI machines, as they walk down corridors that have had their security cameras disabled or obscured.
All the reporting I'm reading ... describes the hospital staff being very afraid during the raid, "because of all the fighting", but ... again, written like the hospital staff and patients are having to take cover while the IDF comes in and fights no one.
Al-Jazeera also helpfully relays a witness' statement that the IDF "have tried to kill anyone moving inside - no one has done anything, we don't have any kind of resistance inside the hospital", and also reports, in a bullet point immediately prior, that the IDF evacuated people from inside into the outdoor courtyard to be interrogated - even though it was raining.
Well, I ended up taking the test three times.
The first run through was entirely vibes-based and I tried to really weigh out what felt like a triple-immoral vs. a double-immoral vs. a single-immoral, and vice-versa, usually trying to pick a direction one way or the other. This one was also probably the most influenced by the order I got served the questions in, because I think I got less decisive over the course of it.
That run matched me to Left-Liberal:
- Care - 83%
- Fairness - 67%
- Loyalty - 36%
- Authority - 28%
- Purity - 17%
- Liberty - 64%
The second run through I tried to keep with a strong preference for "neutral/not applicable" and only give any affirmative push either way if something about the situation particularly moved me strongly.
That run also matched me to Left-Liberal:
- Care - 63%
- Fairness - 58%
- Loyalty - 31%
- Authority - 28%
- Purity - 31%
- Liberty - 58%
For the third run I went maximalist and selected (three thumbs up) if I would fight for someone's right to not face legal consequences for the action, (three thumbs down) if I would fight for the threat of legal consequences to be imposed on someone for the action, and (neutral) in all other cases.
That run matched me to Libertarian:
- Care - 33%
- Fairness - 50%
- Loyalty - 8%
- Authority - 0%
- Purity - 0%
- Liberty - 83%
To me the scale itself is a little confusing. I can get an intuitive sense of what three different levels of morally wrong should feel like. But, I had trouble imagining what it means for something to be a little morally okay, quite a bit morally okay but not fully, or extremely morally okay.
I didn't interpret any of the options as communicating "this is a morally good action" so I wasn't really confident about my choices on that side of the scale.
In all three attempts I ended up giving a lot of "this is morally okay" answers to a lot of actions that would absolutely negatively impact the way I thought about a friend, colleague or stranger if I knew that they had done the action. I don't know if that means I've missed the point of the exercise or not.
(Sorry for the deletion of the previous iteration of this comment, I'm on mobile and replied as a top level instead of a comment accidentally.)
"Too many birds are named after white people and we have to take action about it, says the American Ornithological Society" is ... not one I had on the bingo card for this year.
There are of course many, many hundreds of thousands of people in the US who aren't white who have these same first or last names, so it really is just plainly about whoever is agitating for this not wanting these specific white people and people like them to have birds (or anything? medical terms? physics theories?) named after them.
I sincerely hope that the traction the news about this decision is getting online is mostly thanks to it all sounding like a ClickHole bit.
(Points if you can guess roughly how far into the linked NPR article you can get until the author writes the sentence "That really started to change in 2020, when police officers killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.")
I don't like it, but I just swallow the little bit of poison. I mostly watch YouTube on mobile, where it's already more trouble than it's worth to try to get around the ads.
The biggest point of friction for me is that the "skip" feature effectively guarantees I have to be constantly ready to interact with the screen while watching long-form content, since there is seemingly no limit on the length of advertised content if it's skippable - I'm routinely served videos 30 minutes or longer. It's inconvenient when I have something on in the background while doing housework and I'm not near the phone, or occasionally if I'm watching or listening to long-form content in bed.
The straightforward solution is just to pay the $9 a month for YouTube Premium. I pay more per month for streaming services that I spend many fewer hours per month watching than YouTube. Like you say, it's an incredibly valuable platform in terms of access to information and breadth of content. The fact that I haven't paid up is all the evidence I need that the inconvenience of the ads is minor, and fleeting.
I'm sorry in advance that I don't have anything more interesting to respond with here, but I just wanted to say this is a good reply and I'm glad you replied. I actually think most of your intuitions here are basically directionally correct and I share a lot of your frustrations at a lot of the current conventions surrounding gender identity. As you say, much of it is, at best, not useful for human connection, and at worst, detrimental to it. Maybe I'll write more deeply on it here someday.
rallycar-jepsen
1yr ago
I share your general outlook about political engagement. I've been all across the board politically chasing truth and meaning since I was young and the older I get the more hollow the whole playing field feels. Even outside of the coming ... changes.
Do you have any interests that you could find very niche old school style forum communities for? A lot of the idle internet browsing attention I used to have pointed toward social media with has been redirected toward very specific small communities with very specific expertise banks and, on average, for the good ones, usually majority older members.
Try as it will to claim it does, GPT-6 won't have 40 years of experience doing mechanical work on the same model of tractor I have.
Best of luck. I don't know you, I don't really know anyone here, but I wish you success in parenting and being the person you want to be for your family and those close to you. (Also success with your D&D campaign. Being a truly good DM is a lifelong journey.)
rallycar-jepsen
1yr ago
... You didn't happen to finish the story, did you?
This premise is ... fascinating.
I'm neutral on the current image being the favicon or not, but I will say I do like it as the site's header image, especially with the current header font and style.
(It's a subjective aesthetic feeling so I'd be hard-pressed to explain why. To me it's a nice look. It feels stately and sharp but modest and grounded. 100% subjective here.)
rallycar-jepsen
1yr ago
Imported lurker who was always just invisible before, here to confirm we're here.
I never committed to making an account on reddit, but I've been reading and keeping up with the Motte for quite a long time now. Came through the usual slatestarcodex route (is it even the usual route these days?) but I was never too engaged with the SSC subreddit's general flavors of discussion.
It's a challenge to imagine myself as an effortposter by any stretch, but I'm really keen on what this community is all about and I'm happy to be here anyway.
rallycar-jepsen
5mo ago
Would a fursuit satisfy Islamic requirements for female modesty?
This question has painted a picture in my mind of a very different world, and I have to thank you for providing me that vision.
I'm not intending to derail the point you're making in this larger thread, but I come to you with open curiosity.
I am an American of mixed race; my mother is white, my father is black. My mother's side of the family has been in the US since the 1700s, her genealogy contains Revolutionary and Civil War veterans. As descendants of American slaves in Alabama, presumably my father's side of the family has been in the US since some date before it became illegal to import new slaves (1808 officially, though illegal smuggling continued into the 1840s and 50s).
When forms ask me for race information, I select "black", "multiple races", or some combination of those depending on what the form allows, but in general, I do consider myself "black" and I don't consider myself "white". If it's relevant to you, I have the complexion of a Lenny Kravitz or Barack Obama. That I don't consider myself "white" was not a choice I made and imposed on myself - I've never heard a definition of "white" that doesn't exclude me. Generally, my experience is that other people tell you what racial category or categories you belong to, and you say "okay, thanks".
I grew up around black and white (and biracial) kids. The neighborhood I grew up in was mixed, the public schools I went to were mixed, and the social circles I keep in my adulthood are not self-segregated by race. None of the black Americans I have ever known, even the ones at the radical ends of the political spectrum, have given me the impression that in their day to day life they think of themselves as part of a separate, distinct black 'nation' in the way you describe. Maybe this was more broadly true in, say, the late 19th and early 20th century? I don't want to imply the perspective doesn't exist period, just that I don't think it is a predictive way to model the modal black American experience and viewpoint.
I have always primarily considered myself an American. (For the purposes of this discussion, I mean -- 'human' comes strictly before 'American', but you know what I mean.)
Would you say that's factually wrong? (And does this hold true for my descendants? Would the race of my kids' mother dictate what their fate as potential unqualified Americans would be - does it change if my lineage bends toward 'whiter', toward 'blacker', or becomes further diluted by another race?)
Would the answer change based on whether I did or didn't think of myself as "black" or "African-American"? Is it more about self-identification than about actual ancestry? Do I have to "choose a side" so to speak? Can I choose?
Again, it isn't my intention to derail here, and I hope I haven't pulled too far off the topic of Civil War statues (I think opposing Confederate public monuments is not morally imperative, but not morally damning - my perspective on that isn't very interesting). This is just the first time I've come across this particular viewpoint re: black Americans not being full Americans.
Btw, I have no idea what the black national anthem is.
EDIT: Oh, Lift Every Voice and Sing? Well, I won't lie, I know the song and I've always thought it was beautiful. We sung it in our (mixed) elementary school choir in the early 1990s. I knew it was a black Christian hymn written in the early 1900s about liberation from slavery, and that it was a go-to hymn during the Civil Rights era. It looks like the NAACP said it was the 'black national anthem' in 1919. That's news to me, but okay.
More options
Context Copy link