sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
Mocking someone's beliefs or taboos does not mean you like the thing you are mocking, even though if it vanished that would remove the assumed context for your work. Making Postal 2 doesn't mean you want people to believe that violent videogames cause violence, rather the fact that they already believe that is part of the premise and context. Chris Ofili can make The Holy Virgin Mary and sell it for £2.9 million regardless of what his own views might be on taboos involving pornography, dung, or christianity.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
The term as a whole is stupid because almost every single person who operates a charity or is a large scale philanthropist sincerely believes they are engaged in “effective altruism”.
I don't see how anyone can closely look at real-world charities and believe this. The charity world is full of organizations that transparently don't think about effectiveness at all. The Make-a-Wish foundation doesn't run the numbers and decide it's better to grant a wish for X dying first-world children than to save Y first-world children or Z third-world children from dying, they don't consider the question in the first place. Yes if you dilute "effectiveness" to "think they're doing good" they do think that, but they don't actually try to calculate effectiveness or even think about charity in those terms. And that's by many metrics one of the "good" charities! The bad ones are like the infamous Susan Komen Foundation or (to pick a minor charity I once researched) the anti-depression charity iFred. iFred spends the majority of donations on paying its own salaries and then spends the rest on "raising awareness of depression" by doing stuff like planting flowers and producing curriculum that nobody reads and that wouldn't do any good if they did. Before EA the best charity evaluation available was stuff like Charity Navigator that focuses on minimizing overhead instead of on effectiveness. That approach condemns iFred for spending too much money on overhead instead of flower-planting, but doesn't judge whether the flower-planting is effective, let alone considering questions like the relative effectiveness of malaria treatment vs. bednets vs. vaccines.
Even within the realm of political activism like you're focusing on, such activism is often justified as trying to help people rather than just pursuing the narrow political goal as effectively as possible, opening up comparisons to entirely different causes. As EA discovered, spending money trying to keep criminals out of prison is less efficient at helping people than health aid to third-worlders even if you assume there is zero cost to having criminals running free and that being in prison is as bad as being dead. You can criticize the political bias that led them to spend money on such things, but at least they realized it was stupid and stopped. Meanwhile BLM is a massive well-funded movement despite the fact that only a couple dozen unarmed black people are shot by police per year (and those cases are mostly still stuff like the criminal fighting for the officer's gun or trying to run him over in a car). Most liberals and a significant fraction of conservatives think that number is in the thousands, presumably including most BLM activists. It would be a massive waste even if it hadn't also reduced proactive policing and caused thousands of additional murders and traffic fatalities per year. That sure sounds like a situation that could benefit from public discourse having more interest in running the numbers! Similarly, controversial causes like the NGOs trying to import as many refugees as possible aren't just based on false ideological assumptions, but are less effective on their own terms than just helping people in their own countries where it's cheaper. The state of both the charity and activist world is really bad, so there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for those that actually try and any comparison should involve looking at specifics rather than vaguely assuming people must be acting reasonably.
Yes it is.
That's 1000 for $9.99, 999 pills for 1 cent each and then 1 extra. Now, if you buy a smaller quantity it is more expensive, since you're paying them to make and ship around a smaller bottle, and there's probably also a bit of a premium for name-brand Tylenol if you don't know about generics (some of which is you paying them to advertise the existence of Tylenol to you), but here's a smaller quantity of brand-name Tylenol for something like $0.15 each.
https://www.amazon.com/Tylenol-Acetaminophen-Extra-Strength-Count/dp/B000052WQ7/
Not exactly an onerous burden.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
A lot depends on how much of a filter immigration is, immigrants who go through a highly selective system are obviously going to be better than refugees or illegal immigrants who don't. Due to geographical proximity Europe has more unfiltered Muslim immigrants, and correspondingly has more problems with them. That said, I suspect that even for unfiltered immigrants a lot of the difference would disappear if you controlled for race.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
If you control for race do muslim immigrants and their descendants assimilate and secularize less than christian immigrants? Or is it just that they are disproportionately arab and african? Intelligence correlates with economic success, low criminality, and atheism. I'm not saying that the actual content of islam must not be relevant, I genuinely don't know, but it's not something you can compare by just assuming other variables are equal.
You could blame them for commenting on immigration policy without taking HBD into account, but that is pretty expected for anyone close to the mainstream. The fact Sam Harris has discussed HBD at all makes him a rarity for a commenter of his prominence, even if he either didn't consider it in this case or thought it wasn't sufficient to make the policy a good idea.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
Turns out that they were a migrant population that displaced hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, developed agriculture, and smelted iron:
ones successful in the most similar to European fashion
I think that's part of why it gained use among white supremacists in the first place, because it complicates the mainstream african colonization narrative. For instance they like to talk about how the vast majority of black people in South Africa are Bantu but there were few Bantu in the region prior to Dutch colonization, mostly the region was inhabited by Khoisan. So they can argue that the Bantu pushing decolonization in South Africa are themselves colonizers barely more native than the Dutch.
More generally, since the majority of sub-Saharan Africans are Bantu I'd guess it's a way to refer to the main African population without having to say "sub-Saharan" and without including smaller groups like the Igbo (often claimed to be the most intelligent African ethnicity).
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?
The part where a bunch of prominent anti-GG figures lined up to cover it up, despite clear proof. Anti-GG communities like GamerGhazi too, where the moderators set related threads to only show posts individually approved by moderators, not letting through any posts linking proof that the accusations were true. It is not a matter of a single semi-prominent individual being a pedophile who groomed an 8-year-old and shared pictures of her with other pedophiles online. It is the strong tendency in the SJW community (and SJW-aligned organizations and media outlets) to defend or censor mention of bad behavior by those with the right identity and/or enough SJW ingroup affiliation.
This is a tendency among many groups, but with social-justice it seems much stronger than normal, and they have more power to do so. The exception of course is violation of SJW taboos, so there tends to simultaneously be a witch-hunt atmosphere for harmless, trivial, or unproven behaviors even as worse and more proven behaviors are denied or excused. An unproven accusation of sexual harassment made decades after the fact against a white male non-SJW is damning, but someone like Donna Hylton can become a well-regarded activist despite having spent days torturing, raping, and murdering a man. This is part of it being a totalizing moralistic ideology, in which adherence to the ideology takes precedence over all other concerns. This was the root cause behind GG itself, the drive to cover up or defend the bad behavior of Quinn/Grayson and SJW-aligned game journalists in general. But we also see this tendency at work in countless other areas, from UK police being more concerned about racism than shutting down rape gangs to scientific journals and dataset providers adopting censorious policies that prioritize the censorship of ideologically-inconvenient research over the pursuit of science.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat".
I remember Nyberg also shared pictures of Dana with other pedophiles online.
Conversation with #ffshrine at 2006-06-04 18:04:46 on Roph@deep13.xelium.net (irc)
(23:48:28) uranus: thx for giving my cell phone number to alpott
(23:48:33) uranus: and sarahs
(23:48:38) uranus: and giving out danas pics~
Conversation with #ffshrine at 2006-06-30 22:20:25 on Roph@deep13.xelium.net (irc)
(01:18:13) Minty: sarah, have you actually posted pics of dana before
(01:18:23) Sarah: privately, yes
(01:18:29) Sarah: and once when I was drunk I linked to her in the chat
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
Anyway, I have literally never seen this mythical Western pro-Palestinian pro-Hamas "liberal".
He might be thinking of polls like this Harvard-Harris poll:
In general in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?
48% of those 18-24 said Hamas. Of course siding with Hamas more than Israel doesn't necessarily mean approving of Hamas or of the attack. However there is a question about the attack:
Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?
51% of 18-24 year olds (and 48% 25-34, and 24% overall) said it can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians. That said, I am suspicious of these poll results and wonder if they might be because of the specific wording of "can be justified", if some interpreted it as meaning "someone could theoretically make an argument trying to justify it" rather than "I personally think it was just".
It's a bit of a stretch, especially because it corresponds to the general lower level of support for Israel among the young. But some of the other results also call it into question. The prior question had a lower percentage siding with Hamas over Israel. 54% of the same age group (45% overall) answered "Should law firms hire or refuse to hire law students who supported Hamas and the attacks on Israeli civilians?" with refuse to hire, indicating at least 5% who would support blacklisting themselves. (It's pretty striking how support for free-speech in younger generations is so low that support for blacklisting rises even as support for Israel falls.) Or I guess some people might interpret "support" as people donating money to Hamas or something. 62% of those 18-24 say the "attacks on Jews" were genocidal.
I don't know if there's a poll asking about support for the attack with better wording. Best I could find with a quick search was this one which didn't make Hamas/Israel support a binary choice:
22% of college students say they sympathize with Hamas and 26% with the Israeli government
And this one which asks about the attack but again in a potentially ambiguous way, and just college students again:
The poll finds 86% of college students saying they’re aware of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. And of that share, 67% describe the attack as an act of terrorism by Hamas, versus 12% who see it as a justified act of resistance by Hamas. Another 21% describe it as something else other than an act of terrorism or resistance.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
That's a big part of how the ADL does it at least. Of course others might use other methods to get the results they want. Here's a Reddit comment I wrote some years ago about the ADL's report "Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2018". This methodology is then used to justify splashy graphics about how "Almost all of the 2018 extremist-related murders were committed by right-wing extremists." (page 13), a claim echoed in many headlines citing the report.
Check out the actual list of murders on page 23. No actual ideological or racist motive is required and it seems any murder by someone involved with a white prison gang is counted, but murders by people involved with black or latino prison gangs are not. I started listing ones that seemed obviously dishonest to include but ended up with the majority of the list:
Robstown, Texas, July 27, 2018. Richard Starry shot and killed four relatives at a local nursing center and at his home in an apparent act of domestic violence before killing himself. According to local media, Starry had been a member of a white supremacist group while in prison.
Sumter, South Carolina, August 11, 2018. Demetrius Alexander Brown, a self-proclaimed Moorish sovereign citizen, was arrested for the fatal shooting of Sharmine Pack following a dispute about a vehicle sale at an auto repair shop.
Camden, Michigan, June 30, 2018. Anti-government extremist Joshua Daniel Miller was arrested for the shooting death of Eddie Coleman Heathcoe. Miller allegedly got into an argument with his ex-wife at the home she shared with Heathcoe. Miller was involved with militia and Three Percenter groups.
Dothan, Alabama, June 4, 2018. James Mathis, a member of the Georgia-based white supremacist prison gang Ghostface Gangsters, and his wife, Amanda Oakes, allegedly killed their six-month-old son and put his body in a freezer in a hotel room. The couple fled to Florida where they were arrested following a carjacking attempt.
Renton, Washington, September 19, 2018. White supremacist Jeremy Shaw, who owned a small roofing business called Aryan Enterprises, was arrested along with his wife, Lorena, in connection with an alleged plot to murder Steven Morphis and steal his property through an adverse possession scheme. Morphis was beaten with a blunt instrument and his throat was slashed. Detectives who searched Jeremey Shaw’s home found a number of Nazi- and white supremacist-themed items. He was charged with homicide, burglary and arson; Lorena was charged with burglary, arson and rendering criminal assistance.
Athens, Georgia, May 11, 2018. Following a family argument, Malachi Qaadir Dorns, 19, stabbed his mother and older brother multiple times, wounding his mother and killing his brother. In an earlier arrest, Dornss told police that he was a sovereign citizen.
Abingdon, Virginia, May 4, 2018. Roger Melvin Tackett was charged with first degree murder and other crimes after fatally shooting an acquaintance following a dispute. According to police, Tackett has multiple white supremacist tattoos.
Nashville, Tennessee, April 22, 2018. Travis Reinking opened fire inside a Waffle House, killing four people and wounding or injuring four more. Reports from co-workers and police officers who had previously known or encountered Reinking stated that he was a sovereign citizen. However, Reinking also has a serious history of mental illness and the shooting appears to have been non-ideological in nature; he has been ruled incompetent to stand trial.
Parkland, Florida, February 14, 2018. Nikolas Cruz launched a deadly shooting spree at his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 people and wounding 17 more. According to CNN, Cruz, 19, belonged to a racist Instagram group and hated blacks and Jews, even claiming Jews wanted to destroy the world. Cruz also allegedly referred to women who engaged in interracial relationships as “traitors.” A South Florida Sun-Sentinel article reported that Cruz had racist and Nazi symbols on his backpack and that he had etched swastikas onto ammunition magazines left behind at the school after the shooting. However, little evidence has so far emerged to suggest that the MSDHS shooting spree itself was conducted as a white supremacist attack
I remember that last case, keep in mind Cruz also had Soviet and satanic symbols on his stuff and told authorities he was ordered to commit the shooting by demons, his interest was more towards anything edgy than towards any particular ideology. In any case, the list of cases seems drastically different from what most people would expect after seeing the graph or hearing the supposed percentages.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
I don't know of a single piece of animated media for kids that is not anymore.
Keep in mind that the old Disney films kept selling VHS/DVD copies long after their release, and today are available on Disney+, so it's unclear how well new releases correlate with their media consumption.
Putting that aside, any anime for kids would be the obvious exception. It's just that, other than a few examples like the Pokemon anime and the subset of Studio Ghibli films that are child-friendly, they are mostly only watched by children in Japan. The reasons for this are pretty obvious - young children aren't seeking out their own media, aren't good with subtitles, etc. I think it used to be more common for (dubbed and often heavily edited) anime to air on children's cartoon television networks, though even then the target audience was older than the stuff for really young children that stayed in Japan.
Even western 2D animated series are invariably actually animated in various asian countries (and Japan itself often outsources some of the animation work to Korea or China). The grunt-work of animation also gets subsidized by the fact that a career in anime is a dream for many in Japan, people put up with horrendous hours and wages trying to make it. In western countries that doesn't happen, there's no native 2D animation industry so nobody tries to get into it and there's no pipeline teaching new animators.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
"Bowdlerize" has had strongly negative connotations for more than a century. And that's despite the fact that Bowlder's editions were meant for children, rather than trying to push them on everyone or replace the original.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right.
Yes, I remembered that passage because it seemed prophetic. But of course both denying citizenship based on race and his later discussion of the black-white intelligence gap are now outside the mainstream overton window, something to be cited as proof of generic racism and justification for tearing down statues but not actually engaged with. Including by those who simultaneously find it obvious that Israel can't give palestinians citizenship. The point is that resorting to the "obvious" lets incongruous views pass by completely unexamined. The intent of anti-zionists in comparing Israel to other ethno-nationalist projects is that Israel should be opposed, but other outcomes of taking that idea seriously would include becoming more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism in general or thinking more rigorously about what you think separates Israel from the others. It's not that those views can't be reconciled, it's that people should have to at least realize they're doing so. And perhaps become more understanding of the views that they currently view as cartoon villainy, whether those views are "racism" or the people who think there is a moral mandate for Israel to give up on being a jewish state and give citizenship to the palestinians in the hope that this will result in living together in peace.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe. Saying they want to ethnically cleanse the jews just gets denial because it's not true, arguing that a one-state solution would inevitably result in ethnic cleansing might result in an actual conversation.
Furthermore unthinkingly dismissing "obvious impossibilities" is lazy thinking that tends to just make people slaves to their local overton window. There are plenty of people to whom it is obvious that historical opponents of racial integration were just racist villains with no motive besides hate, while simultaneously dismissing palestinian citizenship as an impossibility and never even considering that those historical figures might have had their own well-thought-out reasons. Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:
It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others...
The point isn't that the situation with the palestinians is necessarily the same as those historical analogues. It is that actually considering the matter leads to understanding and perspective based on something better than what your social environment considers "obvious". If the anti-zionists win and Israel becomes yet another failed post-colonial state but doesn't have actual ethnic cleansing besides largely voluntary "jewish flight", "the zionists were right" could easily become the unthinkable opinion even as events validate some of their concerns.
For an unrelated example, take the following question. Which of the following exist as "real" distinct and inborn traits and which are just social phenomenon: transgender, non-binary, demisexual, otherkin, plurality? (And of the ones that exist, are the "real" cases currently outnumbered by the social ones?) It can be very frustrating to watch someone act like the answer is obvious based on an overton window popularized in their community a handful of years ago when I saw how the sausage got made.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
My hypothesis would be that anti-White statements of this magnitude and timing aren't nearly so common (or perhaps even existent) among people in the "head of a broad public first-world organization" category.
Off the top of my head some of the public statements about the race-motivated prioritization of the COVID-19 vaccine would seem to contradict this. Not to mention it actually becoming U.S. government policy and killing many thousands of people. There are probably closer analogues, but I remember that particular one well and wrote this post about it at the time:
The most overt quote mentioned in that post would be this one:
The New York Times: The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?
Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
Or from the same article a quote from a member of the ACIP committee (the people responsible for writing the CDC's recommended prioritization):
Historically, the committee relied on scientific evidence to inform its decisions. But now the members are weighing social justice concerns as well, noted Lisa A. Prosser, a professor of health policy and decision sciences at the University of Michigan. “To me the issue of ethics is very significant, very important for this country,” Dr. Peter Szilagyi, a committee member and a pediatrics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said at the time, “and clearly favors the essential worker group because of the high proportion of minority, low-income and low-education workers among essential workers.”
I think even the dry language of ACIP itself would be beyond the pale, like when they list "Racial and ethnic minority groups under-represented among adults >65" in red as a reason to not prioritize them. If it was instead "Whites under-represented" or "Jews over-represented" I do not think they would have remained in charge of writing the CDC's recommendations, nor do I think states would have adopted those recommendations.
You could argue that the issue is just that killing tens/hundreds of thousands through healthcare policy is much less dramatic that killing thousands through direct violence, even when the healthcare policy is explicitly racially motivated. That is the main reason I said the analogy is not particularly close. But at the same time saying "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life." is less extreme than actually saying that loss of life is a good thing, let alone using your position in the U.S. government bureaucracy to deliberately cause that loss of life and being permitted to do so.
Regardless of exactly where the line is for anti-white statements and (more importantly) anti-white policies, it is obvious that they would not and could not have done something like this in the name of increasing black or jewish deaths instead. It is the product of explicit institutional racial bias. (Note that their policy actually did kill more black people because of how much more vulnerable the elderly are, it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. And naturally it killed more jewish people as well.) Of course, that doesn't prove anything about the ordering of favored groups against each other like the OP was arguing. It just shows that social justice disfavors white people and is influential enough to shape the decisions of institutions like the CDC/ACIP and the states that followed their recommendations or prioritized by race outright.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
The highest position on the progressive totem pole is being Jewish, not black or trans.
This would only follow if, for instance, there was a massacre of black people and jews could make similar remarks about the massacre without being fired. Obviously white people are lower, but that doesn't tell us anything about the ordering of the favored groups, or whether they are ordered in any sort of consistent way to begin with.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
Given that this transition would be pretty expensive and the main benefit is getting to invest in the private market, the counter is: why not just let the government invest in the private market?
I'm not an economist, but doesn't this just amount to increasing the money supply in a way that makes the government responsible for more direct investment decisions? The government (and Federal Reserve) already control the size of the money supply, what makes it better than increasing investment some other way like lowering interest rates or qualitative easing? The linked article talks about higher returns, but money doesn't create wealth, investment of actual resources creates wealth and money decides where those resources go. Right now the money is forcibly invested in government treasuries, which seems identical to the money ceasing to exist for a period of some decades. Since the money is simultaneously collected and paid out, and the amount paid is currently larger, this represents money creation, as well as obviously trasfer to the elderly. If in between it was also invested, this would constitute a lot more money creation, which in general can be done in other ways and right now does not seem like what the economy needs. I guess the main other thing it would do is change the ratio of investment and consumer spending, is that currently desirable in the U.S.? The linked article doesn't say, instead it talks about monetary "returns" to the entity that already prints the money.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
How many music videos actually have written or scripted reviews? Reaction videos have a lower barrier to entry than a blog post or scripted video, since you just have to watch and say what you're thinking, but a higher barrier and probably more detail than a Youtube comment. So if someone wants to hear what someone else thinks of a particular music video, they might be pretty much the only choice available. Also if a youtuber or streamer already has an audience they might be interested in what he has to say about something, even if they aren't very interested in the actual subject matter and it's low-effort content.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
Seeing what other people think of a work of media can be interesting and entertaining if you're interested in the work, in commentary from those people, or both. People read reviews and analysis of works they have already seen. Sites like Reddit and 4chan have discussion threads when an episode/movie/etc. comes out, and people read those threads even if they have no interest in commenting themselves or long after the thread is dead (for 4chan the threads expire but there's sites like desuarchive.org).
It's not that weird that people like reading Scott's review of One Thousand And One Nights, right? You could say that it is "parasocial", in some sense it is playing the same role as a two-way conversation on the subject with an entertaining friend, but that isn't normally how you would describe the appeal. Well, Scott isn't going to write a review for the latest episode of anime you watched, likely no writer of his ability will, but it might still be interesting to see what people have to say on /a/ or /r/anime or one of the few surviving anime blogs. Reaction videos are another variant of the same thing - generally more in-depth than an internet comment, with the moment-to-moment commentary of a live-watch thread or chatroom, but generally without the more thorough analysis of someone writing about the work in retrospect. (Though there are reaction videos that will spend over an hour going back over and talking about the work after it's finished, like an impromptu blog post or review.)
That isn't to say the low-status reputation of reaction videos doesn't have justification. Unlike earlier psuedo-reaction videos like MST3K, they have a very low barrier to entry and are unscripted, so naturally quality is typically low. (However the combination of the low barrier to entry and more detail than a typical internet comment may mean they are the most detailed commentary that exists for a particular piece of obscure media.) They appeal to people who prefer video to text, and while there are various reasons for such a preference one is that some people struggle to read, so when they appeal to the lowest common denominator that is often lower than the lowest common denominator for writing. Video is much less time-efficient than text (mitigated by running concurrently with the original work, so it also functions as a rewatch). Less time to think than reviews or literary criticism means commentary is often more shallow. (Though it can be more detailed and unfiltered, watching someone play a videogame can tell you a lot more than some 3-minute scripted GameStop video review.) Of course high-status media commentary is no guarantee of quality either, academics at English departments or writers for magazines like the London Review of Books churn out plenty of garbage. The very element of status often makes this worse, such as by incentivizing viewing everything through the lens of a currently high-status ideology. This is especially bad for professional writing about pop-culture, like video-game reviewers, which often aims for the ideology and pretentiousness of academic writing with less intelligence or knowledge. In any case, the point is that reaction videos are just another subset of media and cultural commentary with various advantages and disadvantages over the other kinds, rather than some alien psychological phenomenon.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
Well, it happened because you couldn't keep it in your pants and took a risk, and now the risk has happened.
There is a large difference between something being a bad idea that carries risk, and those risks being a good thing that the rest of society should make worse. There may be cases where it's better to leave people to their fates, but only when the actual costs of doing so are high enough, like if putting up more safety fences or warning labels is too costly compared to the benefit. The obvious topical comparison would be that, if a woman gets raped because of choosing to keep questionable company or choosing to date an abusive man or walking down a dark alley, we still put the rapist in jail if feasible. We certainly don't help domestic abusers on the basis of "you took that risk when you chose to date a crazy person, so society will punish you on the abuser's behalf". Not even feminists creating policies that help female abusers who use accusations of abuse/rape/etc. as weapons generally do so on purpose, they are just biased enough to genuinely think that such accusations from women must be true.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
What does it mean for an organization to secretly know something? Is the idea that organizations like the ADL have internal emails and fundraising plans where people write "Here's what we're doing to make people more anti-semitic so that our fundraising goes up"? But if there was such communication it would be leaked. Is the idea that this is instead a plan kept entirely secret within the minds of key leaders? But not only would that make it difficult for the plan to perpetuate itself across generations of leadership (as those in on it are replaced by true-believers), why would those leaders have such a goal? You mention that it benefits ADL fundraising, but the ADL doesn't have a mind and doesn't want things. People act in the interest of organizations insofar as they want it to succeed or are incentivized by the organizational policies/structure, but if nobody is writing "Fundraising by creating anti-semites" fundraising plans and promoting/firing people based on adherence to them it's hard for that sort of coordination to function. Meanwhile there are people who want the ADL to succeed independently of organizational incentives, but mostly as a subgoal of promoting their ideological goals.
Now, it's more plausible that individuals might hit on a strategy like "troll the Nazis to show how much we're needed" because they think this helps their ideology. But they aren't going to do it to "increase ADL funding by increasing the general level of anti-semitism" because that's not a goal of the individual people who are inclined to join the ADL. At most some fraction might believe that increasing anti-semitism encourages Jews to move to Israel and thus ultimately makes Jews safer. And while it's possible for evolutionary forces on organizations to shape them in ways that their individual members aren't aware of, the ADL is old and one of a handful of prominent Jewish groups, that doesn't sound like very strong evolutionary pressure.
Similarly I am always skeptical about claims like "[Company] is cynically doing [controversial culture-war thing] as a secret profit-maximizing strategy, nobody involved really cares." Even when they openly claim it is a profit-maximizing strategy this is often bullshit reasoning backward from ideological demands, like companies citing dubious "Diversity improves decision-making" research as an excuse for affirmative-action policies. Culture war is strongly driven by true-believers, not cynics weaving intricate plans to maximize corporate profits or non-profit fundraising. When subversion happens it is almost always members of a formal organization subverting it on behalf of their memeplex, not the other way around.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
The way you're grouping and valuing people seems fundamentally nonsensical. What does it even mean to talk about cleaners hypothetically vanishing? If you need a cleaner and don't have one then you put out a job ad, with the wage increasing as necessary until someone accepts, until you add cleaning duties to some other job and find someone willing to accept (perhaps yourself), or until you have to go out of business because you can't afford to get it done. People who have some job are not a fixed group with fixed properties, and they certainly don't have fixed wages, fixed value, or fixed levels of unnecessary employment across different societies.
The value of low-skill labor varies widely based on the opportunity cost of accomplishing it some other way in your society. If a job has a low skill floor and a low skill ceiling it tends to hire the less competent members of society, but that is relative competence. If there was a mass genetic-engineering/eugenics program such that the least-competent bottom 10% of society had an average IQ of 130, high conscientiousness, and low rate of mental or physical illness, and that society hadn't completely replaced cleaners with robots, then presumably you'd be hiring those people as janitors since that would be a lower opportunity cost than hiring from the other 90% (so they accept lower pay). The only differences are that they would do a somewhat better job (such as less incidents of janitors destroying cell samples, to reference a post linked here a while back) and you would have to pay them much more because the overall prosperity of society would have increased and even the bottom 10% would have better options you need to compete with. Of course, the overall prosperity of society increasing generally also means you can afford to pay them more. They're only going to vanish if there are alternatives preferable to the additional expense, like how personal servants have largely vanished in first-world countries.
If he made the references out of indifference towards those who find those references taboo, then that is even less reason to believe "The point of the jokes was to make leftists think he was a Nazi!". Same thing if he made those references without knowing that some people would consider them proof of Nazism. My point was that, even if he deliberately transgressed the taboo because it was a taboo as a means to mock those who find it objectionable, that does not mean he 'wants to be viewed as a Nazi'. As tends to be the case with people engaging in deliberate transgression, he does not actually support the existence of the taboo he is transgressing. Like most 4channers, he would probably prefer the internet of 15 or so years ago when people made Nazi references and jokes all the time and nobody of relevance tried to harm them over it.
Incidentally this inspired me to look at the KYM page for Downfall memes. The meme dates back to 2006 and the first controversy mentioned was 2010:
The interesting thing is that if you look at the linked Huffington Post article from 2013, the most left-leaning source linked, there is absolutely no mention of the idea that sharing Hitler memes (as part of your job in the official newsletter for an investment bank!) is offensive or creates a hostile work environment for minorities or is dogwhisting by making light of Nazism or anything like that. In fact even the company's argument quoted in the Bloomberg article is just that it “insulted in a quite humiliating way a competitor and business partner”.
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