BahRamYou
19hr ago
So someone can be both hispanic and white, or hispanic and black, or even hispanic and Asian American Pacific Islander!
So? You can also be white, black, and Asian all at once. They're not mutually exclusive categories.
BahRamYou
20hr ago
I don't know how to take over an existent social media site. They uh, tend to have defenses against that sort of thing.
In theory we could create an infinite number of new social media sites, and present each one as if it was real and legit. Each one just has to lure in one sucker. Sort of like shitcoins in the crypto space.
BahRamYou
21hr ago
I had a crazy idea recently. What if we took LLM AI and, uh, scaled it up? Make a social media platform where you are the star of the show. Just you, or maybe you plus a handful of friends, plus hundreds, thousands, or millions of AI chatbots who all adore you and want to worship you as a celebrity. Finally, every single person on Earth can be the most popular person on the planet!
BahRamYou
21hr ago
Interesting. Was that just for skilled jobs, or for everything? And why couldn't they just get employees from other Eastern Bloc countries- was it the language barrier, or was travel for work just forbidden?
There is no “true” set of races that “falls out naturally” from genetic or cultural data, but the US government’s system was especially fake and embarrassing. they declared Hispanics to be an “ethnicity” that you could have along with a different race.
I've heard stuff like this before, that Hispanic is a nonsense category. But I actually think it makes sense, at least as far as anything makes sense in the US legal/cultural system of race.
First, just to state the obvious: this wasn't ever intended to be a rigorous, comprehensive, scientific system. It's just a quick and dirty way to classify people, in a way that any average person on the street can see and more-or-less agree on. You don't want to make up dozens of separate specific categories because that quickly spirals into confusion.
Second, look at the history. Hispanics, in the US, come mostly from Latin America (not from Spain!). And Latin America was colonized long before the US, and much more brutally. One of the very first things Columbus did was to immediately start taking slaves! And on the other side, explorers such as Magellan's expedition were, um, not exactly celibate:
The crew also found they could purchase sexual favours from the local women. Historian Ian Cameron described the crew's time in Rio as "a saturnalia of feasting and lovemaking"
This quickly led to a situation where Latin America was a mix of white conquistadors, indigenous slaves, black slaves imported from Africa, and mixed-race offspring who had grown up there. Pretty soon the Spanish realized they needed some sort of classification system for who was going to be a slave, who was trustworthy enough to rule, and who was somewhere in-between. Eventually they came up with a rather byzantine system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestizo#Mestizo_as_a_colonial-era_category
- Español (fem. española), i.e. Spaniard – person of Spanish ancestry; a blanket term, subdivided into Peninsulares and Criollos
- Peninsular – a person of Spanish descent born in Spain who later settled in the Americas;
- Criollo (fem. criolla) – a person of Spanish descent born in the Americas;
- Castizo (fem. castiza) – a person with primarily Spanish and some American Indian ancestry born into a mixed family.
- Mestizo (fem. mestiza) – a person of extended mixed Spanish and American Indian ancestry;
- Indio (fem. india) – a person of pure American Indian ancestry;
- Pardo (fem. parda) – a person of mixed Spanish, Amerindian and African ancestry; sometimes a polite term for a black person;
- Mulato (fem. mulata) – a person of mixed Spanish and African ancestry;
- Zambo – a person of mixed African and American Indian ancestry;
- Negro (fem. negra) – a person of African descent, primarily former enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Which made sense for their situation, but stops making sense once you abolish slavery and royal titles and all these people start to intermix with each other. So after a few hundred years of that, you end up with modern day Hispanic people. Some are mostly white, some are mostly black, some are mostly indigenous, but a lot of them are a roughly even mix of all three, to the point where it's an obvious group of its own. You still can't exactly call it a race- it's a mix of other races, and it's hard to tell where exactly is the border between Hispanics and one of the other races. But you can't just say "mixed-race" either, for something that's been so thoroughly mixed for hundreds of years. So they made up a new word, "ethnicity", and called it a day.
Of course all this is awkward to talk about in polite society, and most Americans don't really know the history of Latin America. In Mexico they call it La Raza which makes a lot more sense, but that sounds bad in English and the term hasn't made it here yet. So they decided to classify it on language, "are you from a Spanish-speaking area?" That's... weird, since it includes white people from Spain and excludes people from Brazil or Belize. But it works well enough for the US, where most Latin-American immigrants are from Spanish-speaking areas.
It's certainly not a perfect term, and I think we're moving towards changing it with weird postmodern terms like LatinX or Chicano, but it's good enough for 99% of situations to get the idea across. It's actually a lot less confusing than African (eliding the difference between North, West-sub-Saharan, and East-Sub-Saharan African) or Asian (it's a big continent lol) or white (are Arabs white?). It's also (like all racial data in the US) mostly self-reported. But I challenge you- find a person who self reports as "Hispanic," ask the average person to draw a sketch or select a picture, and see how well it matches. Most of the time, it's pretty close.
BahRamYou
1d ago
but where do us high-IQ aimless NEETs go to post? can I sue Blind for discrimination?
BahRamYou
1d ago
Are we allowed to do anything alone or do we need adult supervision at all times no matter what?
BahRamYou
2d ago
Hmm, I've never tried Urbit. Have you? Is it worthwhile, in your opinion?
BahRamYou
2d ago
I've been wondering if the dark web might ever become useful for that, just as something that raises the barrier to entry and keeps idiots away.
Alternatively we could paywall sites, even just like $1 to keep away spammers and low effort bullshit.
BahRamYou
2d ago
Its different though. Europe is all connected by the Eurozone, geography, and so many of them all speaking English. South Korea is effectively an island, walled off by the no-man's-land of North Korea, and no common language with any neighbor except really strange English
BahRamYou
2d ago
Someone told me once that Korea is a very trend-following society, perhaps more than any other country on Earth. Something comes along, it gets trendy, and then the entire nation gets crazy into it, for good or ill. Like, Kpop wasn't always a thing, it just exploded in the 2000s. They also have these weird food trends that seem to come and go like lightning (right now "salt bread" is a thing, with huge lines at popular bakeries. i have no idea why.)
This isn't a new phenomenon, and it also applies to religion. Buddhism spread to Korea in like 300 AD, and they immediately got super into it and it became the state religion in 372 and then was launched to other east Asian countries through Korea. Same with Taoism, and with Christianity in the 19th century, it just hits like a tidal wave. And, apparently, the same thing with Feminism and gender wars.
I would guess that it's just part of being a small, homogenous, tightly-knit country. Since they have their own language, they're a bit isolated from the larger Chinese and English speaking worlds. Culture just spreads and evolve really rapidly there. I guess it's sort of like how evolution happens fastest in small isolated populations, and much slower in larger populations.
BahRamYou
3d ago
OK but the two philosophers you cite are both dead, who social science is really a different field. I thought we were talking about humanities and continental philosophy here? Do you just want to dismiss literally all of modern humanities as nonsense?
BahRamYou
3d ago
I go back and forth. Sometimes I feel exactly the same way as you, that it's all just a gigantic tower of bullshit pseudo-intellectualism using big words to intimidate normies while not actually proving anything. Other times I think... there might something to this. I think the way it's supposed to work is like a big aggressively-growing business. They can't possibly explain the entire market/all of society, and they know there will be a lot of mistakes along the way. Still, they do their best to make a coherent plan, and muddle along through, and as long as it's more right than it is wrong it will make progress. It's a way to deal with incredibly difficult problems that are just too massive to handle in a simple, rigorous, step-by-step "scientific" way.
But that does allow for a lot of bullshit to get through too... it's hard to tell!
BahRamYou
3d ago
man this sounds weird out of context. I had to double check that that's a real place.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Man why are you even going there?
What we want to do:
- Visit Akihabara.
- At least one historical museum/feature.
- At least one bar with a "cool" crowd.
What we don't care for
- Weeb shit.
- History or culture. Not interested.
- Fancy stuff
All of this contradicts yourself. If you just want to eat sushi, curry, and ramen you can do that at home. Also uh driving in Hokkaido in winter, or in the middle of Tokyo, is... not the best. Whatever, just get drunk and go to Rapongi like every other 20 something male tourist does and then go skiing.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Another bad day for Ukraine: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1784291236188160441.html
This is... starting to look like an envelopment, at least at the local level around Chasiv Yar. Again I don't think the actual battle lines or territory matters that much, but it's another sign that the Ukraine forces are starting to lose their effectiveness and can no longer hold the line like they used to. Let us hope that the latest aid package gives them significant help.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Tons of people are influential in their day, but that doesnt mean we have to keep worshipping them forever. Rasputin, for example.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Im not really talking about freud at all, im talking about the people who continue to cite him and use him into the current day, despite him being widely discredited by his own field. And its the same people who are still unreformed Marxists.
BahRamYou
5d ago
In liberal cities, colleges are calling the cops because they don’t want to lose Jewish donors. I think if we have an in-part privately funded university system it’s fair to say “I’m not going to continue to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to you if you tolerate X” and then the university can decide if that matters to them. If it does, that isn’t blackmail, it’s how almost all charity works. If you donate a few hundred million to the NY Phil you can probably finagle some influence over what’s played.
It seems like you're not really contradicting @coffee_enjoyer but simply explaining how the influence works? It's not some shadowy cabal, it's money. An awful lot of the donations for universities comes from wealthy jewish donors. Especially the kind of donations that come in regularly, year after year, with no specific purpose (as opposed to one-off donations from someone who dies and wants a new building named after them- that's nice, but it doesn't really help pay the general expenses of the university). Those donations start off no-strings-attached, but you suddenly see the strings when they call up and demand a specific action.
I don't have any specific numbers, but it does seem like a hugely disproportionate amount of private university donations comes from these wealthy Jewish donors. Probably even more so in schools like Colombia and USC where we've seen the harshest crackdowns on protestors.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Makes sense. I can see how that might be the result of wishful thinking... "the world can't really be this awful, can it?" I've heard that burnout is a real problem for psychiatrists, since they have to listen to so many awful emotional problems all day every day.
BahRamYou
6d ago
but the prospect of playing them felt like work.
yeah, that's exactly how I feel now trying to learn some new complex game. I just don't have the spare brain energy to want to play it. The only games that I actually enjoy anymore are casino gambling games, where it's simple enough that I don't have to think about it, yet there's still a real stake (money) and a crowd of real people.
BahRamYou
6d ago
so, when i proposed building a literal walled city, and you say the homeless people will still get out anyway... are you imagining a gaza situation where they build elaborate underground tunnels? Or is it just the nature of homeless to manifest themselves inside of public libraries, by teleportation?
BahRamYou
6d ago
Can I ask what your background in philosophy is? How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?
I'm not any kind of expert myself- just a couple undergrad classes and what I've skimmed from wikipedia. So I'm not trying to do battle with you here. If you tell me that you've studied it extensively I'll believe you.
But, from what I've read, this really doesn't seem like an accurate summary. It seems more like you're talking general phenomenology/theory of mind stuff. Lots of philosophers have talked about that, and it goes back way before Freud. (I'm not sure what the first would be- at least Descarte, and arguably all the way back to the Greeks). Of course it's a hard problem. Still, psychologists have found ways to grapple with it. At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.
If anything Freud was the opposite. He seemed to believe that he could accurately diagnose people's subconscious minds and innermost desires, even better than they themselves could. Like he somehow came to believe that all his patients who came to him with horrific tales of being sexually molested as children, were in fact just lying and telling him a fantasy of what they wish had happened. Based on... ? nothing but "trust me, I'm a doctor". He made all sorts of really bold claims about other people's minds.
I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell. And even better, it's a perverted sexual desire, which most people aren't comfortable talking about. No one wants to have a public debate to try and prove that "actually no I'm not trying to have sex with my mother." So you can win a whole swath of arguments by tarring your adversaries with dark accusations. It's like the Oscar Wilde quote- "Everything in the world is about sex — except sex. Sex is about power."
Yeah... that does seem to be pretty much what I had in mind. Just need to add in the ability for a user to post and have the bots all interact with it and like it.
https://myshell.ai/ also seems to be working on this space.
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