voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
No bio...
User ID: 3622
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1mo ago
Nah, this is actual psycho behavior. If you told me my most hated outgroup influencer or politican got shot my immediate, gut reaction is "Oh, no! They're going to be insufferable after this."
Yeah, this is me, in this thread, going "Damn these reactions are insufferable". But Kirk was far from someone who I would describe "most hated outgroup influencer" (I don't think I would ever use those words) - I just found his style extremely grating.
I haven't interacted with anyone in person whose reaction was more extreme than "how ironic".
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1mo ago
The amount of handwringing in this thread as if this is the moment that we've passed some sort of threshold as a society makes me really believe that a lot of people here are quite desperate to witness an event that allows them to declare that a threshold has been passed. Accelerationism and extremism. We know nothing of the shooter, or their motivations. Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota? The red tribe does not have the moral high ground, and some sort of grim moral imperative, simply because a red tribe figure was assassinated. Hysteria.
Also, I mentioned it elsewhere in the thread. Don't rely on the algorithms to feed you the opinion of those who you believe are your outgroup. The algorithms have two focuses: (1) create a bubble for the ingroup to feel comfortable, and (2) create ragebait for the outgroup to feel enraged. Reflect on how you've interacted with social media in the past 24 hours with this in mind. Touch grass and talk to a human - because I definitely know you haven't had the chance to talk to more than a few people since this event happened.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1mo ago
Grandparent comment is clearly just a reflection of opening whatever ragebait algorithm (like Reddit) and thinking that the content that they see their represents the outgroup's median opinion.
People fail to realize that algorithms don't just generate bubbles for ingroups, but also ragebait to keep outgroups engaged.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1mo ago
Most hinged take in this thread. Charlie Kirk was pretty low on the totem pole of the right wing, which includes many people for whom Charlie was basically a mouthpiece.
My bet is that the shooter had a very specific bone to pick with Kirk, and it wasn't just a general lash-out against right wing politics - for which there are significantly more meaningful targets. Kirk was very vocal about some very specific topics, and that might attract attention from particularly crazy people.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1mo ago
I bet the assassin waited for a question about gun control/gun violence.
Maybe it was a father whose children were killed in a school shooting. Reminds me of the famous video of the father who was pretending to use a payphone and then killed his child's rapist.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1mo ago
I was referring to Alligator Alcatraz, and how much of the most public support is brazenly transparent about how the current push against immigration is about race and genetics - and not just illegal immigration, but immigration of all types.
stop creating a dependent population with excessive charity
This seems to be a bedrock of how you feel about this topic. How did you first form this opinion, and what keeps you feeling this way?
I personally don't think that many people create much value for society. Big David Graeber fan over here. Furthermore, I think a lot of people who think they create value for society are in the best case simply leeches on the public welfare, and in the worst case actively harming society. I see eye-to-eye with many of the posts on Hacker News lamenting that an entire generation of our greatest engineers were gobbled up by big tech in order to serve hypertargeted advertisements - with a sprinkling of all the negative externalities that the attention economy creates.
It's funny, actually, as I think some of the work that (illegal) immigrants do create the most directly positive value for society, like harvesting fruits and vegetables and building and improving housing stock.
I don't really see much difference between Reagan's welfare queen and the Walton family, whose business is only viable because the government enables them to pay below-livable wages with their welfare programs. Both parties simply exploited a bureaucracy.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1mo ago
Is there a law mandating that women-owned businesses must be X% of businesses?
Yes / no. In the YIMBY / NIMBY realm that I'm active in, a housing project will only receive funding (tax breaks, grants, etc.) if it can prove that a certain number of its contractors are women-owned businesses. So while it's not a law per se, it's the direct result of legislative action. You will miss out on business if you're not female-owned, which leads to the cliche loophole of wife-owns-husband's business.
My point is that this^ type of legislative action is different than creating scholarships for women that help them get the credentials that are seen as barriers for entry into leadership positions. Ends vs. means. Grouping all of it together as DEI is too broad of a brushstroke for me to not argue against it.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1mo ago
How is this different from general misanthropy?
I could also define my own measure of utility for a person a declare anyone under a certain threshold as "dragging us down". My measure wouldn't be by skin color, of course, so it would be a lot harder to implement punitive measures for anyone below that threshold. E.g. I could say that all obese people have an extreme negative impact on the public welfare, but that doesn't trigger our tribal primate brains so no one is out there blackbagging obese citizens to alliteratively-named concentration camps.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1mo ago
Modern India, modern South Asia are completely dysgenic hellholes with terrible human capital. India of all places, stands out here because castes ensured clusters of higher IQ people in the elites which is also why you see many Indians doing well.
Whenever I read wholesale dehumanization of groups of people who live in squalor I think to myself: maybe it's the empathetic part of the human brain becoming overloaded and the response from the rest of the brain is to rationalize it as "Well, they're not humans like me.". Yes, words like "dysgenic" and "caste" and "elite" qualify as dehumanization for me, even if they don't for everybody.
The alternative is the empathetic part of the brain continuing along in pain from the knowledge that humans no different from itself are living in abject poverty and destitution. It could cry out, "Why do you do nothing for your fellow man?" - but it would be simply silenced by the retort "They are not my fellow men." This dovetails nicely with some of the alt-right "empathy is weakness" messaging that's been floating around.
But maybe it's more along the lines of prosperity gospel, "I deserve this because I am special / chosen / of higher genetic quality": a defense mechanism against self-doubt that the only thing separating you from such a life are a coin tosses of fate. It would be crippling to spend every day contending with the possibility of living that way due to random chance, and so it's better to destimulate the brain and rationalize it away with a convenient belief system.
Not that it's been solicited, but my take is that the world changed too fast for India, and India grew too fast for how the world has changed. I see a similar story in the favelas in South America. Some peoples had the joy of riding the wave of modernization like surfers, and others were hit in the face by the break - like a Maxim gun nest firing on charging Ndebele warriors. To your main point, could the sociopolitical structures that Hinduism built play a role in India having not been prepared for modernization?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
My immediate social circle and the benefit of social media allowing me to keep some distant tabs on people from high school and college. Seeing a good number of women I thought had good heads on their shoulders go off some deep end and regress to behaviors I recognize from when they were younger.
I'm not trying to dismantle your argument, as I think you made it well. But I do want to point out that, at least in my circles, there's a strong correlation between "actively using social media" and "not having your shit together". In other words, if your sample is just social media, then you're missing out on all the well-adjusted individuals who are keeping to themselves.
And partially through my job where I interact with people of many ages, and one of the more common and frustrating genres of people I encounter is "neurotic woman in her 40s or 50s who still has the demeanor of a teenager."
Do you work in inside sales? Mostly making a lighthearted joke, here. Maybe even healthcare or aviation?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Late to the party I started, but spending money to incentivize a change in outcomes in my opinion is categorically different then legally enforcing those outcomes, and the latter is what I interpret to be the modern form of "DEI" that most people (especially on this forum) rail against.
i.e. if you want more women in leadership roles (regardless of motivation):
- Spend $1,000,000 as e.g. scholarships to women to help them acquire credentials seen as barriers to leadership roles
- Pass a law that every board needs to have at least one woman
the former is not strictly DEI imo, whereas the latter is.
If your position is that we do not as a society need to incentivize any change in outcomes (e.g. because you already believe we're perfectly egalitarian), then fine. But to paint it is as DEI is imo aggressively retroactive because the west has a century of history of programs that attempt to bring about positive social change through funding, but the phrase DEI only recently came into the lexicon.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
So the difference between dating a 21-22 year old and a 28-29 year old on a maturity level is often negligible.
What's your sample? As a highly social individual / serial dater between long-term relationships, I've noticed that are shocking differences in maturity between even a 26 year old and a 28 year old. To be clearer, when I was 29-ish I found nearly every 26 year old that I dated (n=6ish) insufferably superficial and indecisive, but I found much more success the further into late 20s I went. That's when you usually get your first biggest pay raise, graduate from post-secondary education, change jobs, move cities, etc. These are all highly formative events that may afford you different privileges or even humble you. As a woman, you may even shift your dating priorities from "want to find love" to "want to find someone suitable to raise children with".
But, my bias is urban and at least the "some university" bullet option on the census form - i.e. since high school, I haven't dated anyone who only has a high school education.
And yeah, a lot of dudes don't mature much through their 20's either.
My bias is also that most people who do not seek complexity in their life (not a value judgment, just an observation) beyond the age of 22 also do not tend to develop personalities beyond the age of 22 - they are essentially frozen in time. In comparison to individuals who do stretch themselves, those "frozen in time" tend to appear less emotionally and socially mature. Those groups also highly correlate with people who chose to (or accidentally) have children "early" (< 22) - but I don't personally believe that's necessarily causal in either direction. It also brings to mind the insult "peaked in high school" which I think has some classist / blue-tribe-on-red-tribe undertones.
Sometimes those emotionally or socially stunted people have a midlife crisis or some sort of later-in-life mellowing that causes a shift ("Barry really got his life together!"). In sadder scenarios, they may fall into alcoholism or other crippling addictions that are associated with an underformed prefrontal cortex. In the worst case they get elected to congress because they manage to get other like-minded people to the voting booth just by screaming and tweeting about complex problems having simple solutions (populism).
Personally speaking, I had some major shifts in maturity around the ages:
- 12 (puberty)
- 17 (parental independence)
- 21 (humility through a challenging experience)
- 24 (first big job / no longer a "broke college kid")
- 27 (end of first long-term relationship / lots of dating / big pay raise)
- 30 (mortgage / no longer talk shit at pick-up basketball)
I was an insufferable asshole at the age of 20. I'm still an insufferable asshole, but in a much different way now.
Aside, as I didn't want it to detract from the thrust of my main statement:
Most women don't take bad experiences and learn from them and improve... they become more bitter about it, and it makes them less appealing overall
This sounds like a character problem, not an estrogen problem. I've met plenty of bitter men who never learn from their bad experiences.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
The point is to ensure students know that there are opposing viewpoints, and that they are mainstream and not "alt-right propaganda". And to do that, the university should break through its own departmental balkanization.
Like many arguments about the liberal bias of college graduates, this is doing immense work of denying those college graduates agency in their own process of academic discovery. But, I guess this is like the "nature" vs. "nurture" debate, except "reality has a liberal bias" vs. "higher education is liberal brainwashing". Maybe somewhere, someone is begging that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Every political dialogue I had in college, often frequently with people who I had very little to agree with, was emphatically more informed and nuanced than any YouTube gotcha shitpost (Charlie Kirk) that tries to paint college students as some misinformed monolith. It was a period of rapid opinion changing for me, and I only took one or two "woke" courses. I guess maybe my foreign language classes could be considered woke, as the literature we focused on was mostly from the times of massive political upheaval in those nations thanks to radical reactionary politics (I didn't study Russian or Chinese)...
Most of my opinion changes came from the fact that I went from a town where we could see the stars because there wasn't enough light pollution to drown them out, where people still used the word "Jew" as a derogatory verb, to a college campus where I met (and even dated) a Jewish person for the first time, and realized that I actually wasn't 10% as smart as I thought I was even though I was at the top of my class. Humility and worldliness liberalized me, personally. If I had stayed home I would've continued to be one of the smartest assholes in my hometown, and probably would've made a good chunk of money doing some regional white collar work. I didn't, though.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
various DEI labor requirements
As far as I'm aware, most of these are (1) self-imposed by HR departments and not actual regulation and (2) falling out of favor. The regulation that I'm most aware of actually pisses everyone off, which is "Woman-owned businesses", where everyone just registers their wife as the proprietor of their business and simply acts as a hurdle for building more housing.
hate speech laws
I've not heard this specifically referred to as "woke" yet, because "hate speech laws" go back at least a century in the West, and "woke" only goes back to ~2012 at the earliest. Speech laws in general are abused by both leftwing and rightwing movements (in my personal opinion, I guess).
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
This is actually worse because the woke are not a monolithic entity.
I mean I have to say thank you, because this is my point entirely throughout this entire thread.
Ask 40 contemporary social liberals what their top 10 concerns are and you'll get 400 different things that should be addressed.
I'm not saying this as some defense of the movement. If I'm being honest, I'm frustrated by that as well because I don't feel like there's meaningful progress to the things that I think matter most.
It's greatest "strength" is also it's greatest weakness.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Many movements don't have leaders, or if they do most of their own members probably couldn't identify them. Was GamerGate a movement? Tea Party? 99%ers? BLM? Are all of those words useless and should be dispensed with?
I mean, all of these are deeply different examples of movements that can't really be compared, apples-to-apples:
- GamerGate - grew out of relatively minor scandal, capitalized on a specific set of disillusioned individuals; may or may not have been significantly bankrolled and astroturfed by figures like Steve Bannon
- Tea Party - Anti-establishment movement within the Republican party, lots of younger blood; perhaps a knee-jerk reaction to Obama. Definitely had a lot of centralized planning and coordinated efforts, but paled in comparison to what the democrats were doing at the time and what Trump is doing now.
- 99%ers - response to a specific economic event, fizzled out as soon as the engine started running again
- BLM - initially a grassroots movement as a reaction to some very publicized injustice; later co-opted by a specific organization that seemed quite a bit like a grift, which probably contributed to it fizzling out.
The reason I bring those up is that I do judge those "movements" based on more than just "what they're about". The actual structure of the movement is just as important. That's why we care about grassroots movements more than ones bankrolled by PACs - we at least believe that the former represents the will of the electorate, where as the latter is just astroturfing.
It seems to be the consultants, focus groups, and corporate America that are guiding these decisions - not some National Wokism political action committee.
In other words, college-educated people.
Is the implication here that anyone with a college education is woke? I have a laundry list of counterexamples... My point is that profit-driven individuals and organizations probably overcalibrated to what they thought would sell to their target demographics, rather than some conspiratorial effort to inject woke ideology into our economy. I mean, the opposite probably happened in the 20th century where a certain concept of masculinity was sold to the masses, and we ended up with a John Wayne generation despite all evidence pointing to John Wayne being a pretty poor role model no matter your political tendencies.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Even so, my assessment is that above a certain threshold of "freeness", really existing free markets tend to do better than centralized or relatively unfree markets.
Agreed. Something something Boris Yeltsin visits an American grocery store.
Ideally, I think we should have the minimum number of regulations and laws necessary to prop up a functioning and trustworthy market, along with things like pigouvian taxes and legal nudges to help the market avoid market failures.
Agreed.
But I'll grant that some forms of these are not directly or indirectly propped up by government, and I'm not against light touch, effective regulation that minimizes the damage to society without radically limiting the speed of growth and innovation.
Agreed.
I guess the nuance is what requires the most attention right now. On the regulatory capture side, probably healthcare. On the market capture side, to be "on-topic", maybe Visa / MasterCard - although regulation certainly plays a role there, their competitive moat is network effects. It'd be a bummer to see my "credit card rewards" kickbacks disappear, but I also know that all of my purchases are 1-2% more expensive (at least) because Visa and MasterCard have to have their cut.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Woke people have their own ontology of what is man and a woman, what is justice, with their own prescriptions of how society should work with their own sins such as racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia or homophobia.
To be fair, people who are violently anti-woke also have their own ontology of all of those things. Man is John Wayne, woman is kitchen appliance / baby incubator (/s).
I agree though, generally, that the parallels are there (re: the content of your 1st paragraph) - but they'll be there for literally any ideology that posits that classes in society are arbitrary and not meritocratic. What makes this distinct from Marxism, to me, is that none of these things are centrally defined. It's a consensus-driven ideology, not a top-down prescriptive ideology. And there's quite a bit of infighting as well, which elsewhere I point out, kind of prevents it from leaving the fringes of the leftwing. Does Nancy Pelosi give a shit about transgenderism beyond the token "statement from the office of"? She certainly doesn't fight against it, true, but I don't think she's ever been claimed as an "ally".
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Who said it had to be a single theory?
Freddie's title:
Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand
I guess maybe I'm being uncharitable by interpreting this as "Please associate with each other as a cohesive, organized political movement so I can attack the principles of your group rather than deal with the 17-headed hydra that is contemporary social liberalism". Maybe I shouldn't have use the term "single theory".
You and Freddie both are painting contemporary social liberalism as a monolith, with the implication that it's a coordinated effort with offices and political committees. Maybe there's a reason that it's so hard to wrangle these disparate movements together (and why they seem to cannibalize through debates on intersectionality):
"What idea? I'm not suggesting anything other than being a decent person and teaching history!"
This, but unironically.
Cherry on top:
There are several people out there who say there are not enough [insert non-white-male group here] in [industry, fictional story or type of art, etc.] and flat-out state that they are selecting for or wanting to select for said group. What is this group or idea called?
I've actually seen the pendulum swing way harder in the past couple of years, with many more complaints of too many non-white male characters. It seems to be the consultants, focus groups, and corporate America that are guiding these decisions - not some National Wokism political action committee.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
The criticism from leftists is that:
I actually think that United States has already hitched itself to an economic system (capitalism) and a political system (classical liberalism) that by their nature tear down power just by existing.
does not square with:
I think that the hard part is getting all strata of society to embrace the creative destruction of capitalism. Most people are economically illiterate, and easy targets for bad economic thinking.
Either humans are capable of toppling non-meritocratic structures (e.g. ladder-pullers, by your example) in "free" market societies by design, or there is a "tragedy of the commons" and it's a first mover's race to the top that devolves to oligarchy or feudalism. My take is that there is no such thing as a "free" market, just like there is no such thing as objective absolute individual liberty. "Free" tends to be defined by whoever happens to be winning the market at that point in time. To that point:
eliminate fair competition through regulations and laws that make it harder for a new competitor to enter the fray and take them down.
are we going to ignore things like cartels and monopolies that exist in absence of regulations and laws? I'm willing to cede that there are bad actors who rent seek through regulatory capture, but are you willing to cede that there are bad actors that rent seek through market capture?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
When you say "almost everyone", who would you exclude? I agree directionally, but where we probably disagree is on who is included or excluded in "almost everyone".
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
FWIW, the opposite extreme ideology is easily dismantled as well: that the West in perfectly meritocratic and there is no need to study or even acknowledge power structures that affect and influence socioeconomic conditions. I suppose I could call this "right-wokism" and attack it as a strawman.
Woke, when I was first introduced to the concept from a leftwing perspective, would be the middle ground: an acknowledgement that arbitrary[1] power structures exist that continue to exacerbate adverse socioeconomic conditions. To be "awake", or "aware" of those power structures. It wasn't a call-to-arms, but more of a sly-wink of "Hey, be kind to one-another, because things don't have to be this way."
But now, woke as it's used from a rightwing perspective, is an extremism as you've described: that all socioeconomic conditions are due to perverse power structures that benefit only white men (self-victimization), and they are therefore thieves and exploiters.
My personal take, before anyone tries to paint me as a believer of a specific ideology, is not necessarily that government needs to play the role of dismantler of those power structures, but that it definitely should not continue to enable them to fester as open wounds in the social fabric of our society. E.g. don't test nuclear bombs near the indigenous peoples, but maybe also don't shoehorn social justice concepts into every bit of middle school curricula (just read a link from the Freddie de Boer post linked downthread).
[1] arbitrary, in the sense of an opposite of meritocratic
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
There have been various attempts at defining "wokism", but for me the distinguishing characteristic is the set of tactics it employs and not just its goals.
Pulling at this thread more - wokism isn't (strictly?) an ideology, but a set of tactics to bring about social change. I agree that many of these same tactics are being used - or have been historically used - by the right. And, might I add, for every tactic to bring about social change "the left" has that "the right" doesn't, there also seems to be one "the right" has that "the left" doesn't, e.g. evangelism.
That does make its comparison to Marxism interesting, though, if one views Marxism as an ideology to bring about revolutionary social change to end the class struggle under capitalism. But apart from self-described leftwing revolutionaries, I don't personally know anyone "woke" who desires revolutionary change rather than incremental change, because incremental change seems to have been working pretty well over the past ~60 years or so. Someone recently posted "capitalism, but nice" in this thread and that's pretty much the extent of "woke" that I experience. Otherwise we would just call them communists. But if we're saying that woke = communist then we're back to the original strawman position.
Freddie's post sounds like ravings of exhaustion from having to fight a broad and deep set of ideological concepts that all have shared roots in 20th century social liberalism (feminism, civil rights, etc.), and his solution is to pigeonhole all those ideological concepts into a single overarching theory that can be attacked directly without having to get into the weeds and nuances of any individual ideology. But also, he says that it's not his responsibility to perform this abstraction, but that all of these separate ideologies must bring themselves under a single banner? For his convenience?
I don't see the appeal of his writing, either. This is the only snippet I've read, but I've stumbled across his name.
Edit: I've read more of his writing. This post seems to be written in an intentionally exasperated voice.
Haven't seen anyone else link it (not too surprised), but the same blogger who leaked the Mangione manifesto (unrefuted) and dug up some Discourse screenshots for the Kirk shooter has also released a blog post interviewing some of the "Anti-ICE" shooter's associates.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-ice-shooters-motive
Based on what I've learned in this blog post (and not from hysterical Xhit posts from what should be the most measured and deliberate people among us, the US VP and director of the FBI) - this looks and feels like a school shooting to me: no apparent motive beyond causing mass hysteria, which judging by this thread, was very much achieved. Maybe we've moved beyond a point where our disaffected 20-somethings commit acts of terrorism against children, and are now committing acts of terrorism against those in power. All, of course, powered by a mass media machine that causes something to click in the heads of these disaffected and nihilistic 20-somethings.
School shootings don't even make headlines anymore. But I'm sure everyone here is keenly aware of what caused everyone to go absolutely bonkers in the past couple of weeks.
Finally, as someone who moves through leftist circles, which are mostly extremely disorganized and very dedicated to specific issues (climate change, homelessness, worker empowerment), the foaming at the mouth here that there's some grand leftist move towards violence is hilarious. I would encourage you to attend some leftist meetings and be absolutely floored by how ineffective and leaderless they feel, especially in comparison to something like the Whitmer plot.
Edit: Reviewing this thread and FoxNews over the past few days has made me realize that the red tribe has gone full retard and will believe anything the retards and losers in the White House say. Guess I'm just going to become a normie and hypernormalize like the rest of the people in my life. Been nice commenting here. Your boos have always meant nothing to me, because I've seen what makes you cheer.
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