Suppose instead, after first going viral, Mr. Beast had decided that "looks are the most important factor in achieving positive social outcomes" and doubled down on that, rather than his 'stunt' focused avenue. Would he have ended up with better social outcomes? No.
On the flipside, Liver King's hard-earned clout immediately evaporated when he broke kayfabe and admitted it was all based on a contradiction and he was full of shit.
MrBeast's gimmick is basically inviting you to watch a Youtube nerd recreate Fear Factor with some additional consumerism for that fantasy element. So long as he can find some new wrinkle in that formula (or new people) he can get attention. Not sure it's the same for people like Clavicular.
How can society better support the men who sincerely look up to Clav as role model?
Ban social media.
I don't see another way to square the reaction to the recent articles about female radicalization (where most people seem to think the internet/ideology caused an unjustified reaction) with this post (where we seem to take it for granted that men are reacting to some objective fact about their circumstances). The internet is the common factor. We can't control when people feel oppressed but you theoretically could ban the internet.
Of course, a lot of us don't consider this feasible or wise in practice.
Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?
No, they all seem crazy.
Seriously, who is the best adjusted streamer? It seems to select for the most dramatic. Going down the list of streamers I know something about:
- Destiny, of all the recent left-wing influencers probably one of the best political streamers because he's autistic enough to read sources and then disagree if he thinks it something doesn't make sense (which let him get shockingly far in recent Israel discourse with "experts" like Finkelstein) but has an incurable addiction to crazy white women that inevitably destroys whatever career he's built up since his last relapse. May have also blown Fuentes.
- Fuentes, may or may not have been blown by Destiny.
- Hasan Piker, the least masculine masculine role model who has drama continually. Honestly, you might as well put Ezra Klein on TRT and he'd do a better job of it.
- Clav, overdosed on stream.
- Johnny Somali, ran into Korean justice because he was stupid.
- Vitaly, ran into Philippines justice because he was stupid.
- IShowSpeed...okay, he seems pretty cool. I only see him doing a) implausibly athletic things or b) visiting various countries and actually being well-received cause he's not going to do some bullshit.
Spending untold billions to get a terrorist who really annoyed you is something which some people might think is worth establishing as a precedent, but I would hardly call it necessary.
Bin Laden's attempts to harm Americans overseas were "annoying". His attempt to harm America on 9/11 and get its attention was simply "successful". He made it clear that he had no intention of just being another annoying nemesis nestled in the Outer Rim.
Other countries had to suffer evil men who committed mass murder against their population enjoy their freedom, and yet they survived.
Something can be necessary and not an existential matter. Nations that have the wherewithal and are expected to respond to aggression globally can only be so circumspect.
Packing up and leaving other inconvenient battles may have been what emboldened Bin Laden in the first place.
It's not a problem unless you're the SOB born at the exact wrong time to benefit from either family support or welfare (or AI)
The country/ethnic group will survive but it's not gonna be fun for you personally. Which is a major incentive, in people's eyes, to not fight immigration or the dominant pro-immigration parties.
Tanista
5d ago
Unfortunately, the last two factors only work if the state is significantly stronger than the corporate entities, and willing to regulate them. When social media companies become big enough to sway public opinion though, they get the power to significantly reduce the will of the population, whilst lobbying for politicians to deregulate.
Chinese social media sites already tried this to stop the sale of TikTok. That's my real problem here: this doesn't prevent this happening, it just prevents you from having your own companies (which do respond to US government pressure, e.g. with the pressure over "misinformation" or the Hunter Biden story).
So only jobs are left. This is important of course, but I would argue that mega corps are not necessary for this. After all, several countries exist without mega corps and still manage to have low unemployment.
The countries that don't have megacorps are basically buying their services from the US. The EU doesn't have its own social media sites and the solution is to just take US ones and regulate them. Of course, this only works if the US doesn't respond badly (which it is now). All of this seems strictly inferior to just building your own.
There's also the fact that these more regulations focused states are simply not doing as well as the US and arguably leech in some fields like pharma where the US spends more. I don't think wanting to control social media companies caused this, but maybe the mindset may apply elsewhere and be damaging.
I've always found it an irrelevant point. At one point you could also say that the US didn't want to get involved in the world domination business and wanted to just make money and control its near abroad.
Tanista
6d ago
I am essentially asking for policies that would prevent individuals and companies from getting this big in the first place, and to break up the existing monopolies into smaller, competing groups.
Is China going to reciprocate?
I don't think that we can assume that American champions are just going to continue to be massively successful without the economies of scale or that even less accountable foreign companies won't take over. This, I assume, is Nybbler's complaint about wanting upsides with no downsides.
What do they actually want?
Marxism, or the leveling they expect it to provide.
It's just the labour theory of value conveniently cut off at such a point that it doesn't apply to anyone they know (or could conceivably be) or their favorite allied rich people (culture-producing left-wing celebrities and athletes ), though even some of those will breach the generous cap.
Halo does NOT depict a racial struggle at all, it is portrays a religious struggle.
Yes, you might as well say that Stargate is fascist and about racial struggle.
In fact, both stories aren't really a religious struggle but a struggle of science against blind superstition and plain lies. The stories don't really grant respect to the opposing side as theories or moral systems.
The Covenant are just provably wrong because they've sacralized what are scientific instruments and their credulity has led them to not only kill their own gods but get used as tools by the Prophets (who know some of the doctrine is false but refuse to collapse the business model).
The Jaffa/servants of all of the Goa'uld in Stargate are also just wrong (and terrorized into submission): their gods are not only technologically advanced aliens masquerading as such, they're not even the original inventors of their technology! The actual inventors are, while effete, durably in the scientist-humanist camp.
(Stargate did have to wrestle with the inevitable power creep taking them to a place where their enemies could make a good case for being gods and their religion was at least somewhat efficacious though)
It’s a common argument, and not just among SJWs, that white-on-black racism in the American South was mostly just a result of white men’s suspicion that many of their women are susceptible to getting seduced and boned by big black studs. To the extent that such fears really were there, I’m guessing they were overblown, because we know that white women are the social group least likely to engage in exogamy
This doesn't actually require you to believe that white women would broadly be willing. (Though people also didn't like the willing ones).
The closest modern analogue is the fear of refugees in Europe, the claim is not actually that they're especially attractive to Western women but that they won't let that stop them.
"We need to violently check these people who're prone to rape" would probably be categorized as racism rather than sex-based insecurity by most. If anything, the claim is that the inferiority complex is on the other side.
Even in that fight Halmich got caught in a grapple.
Most realistic version of the Hollywood fight is (a taller) Black Widow kicks him in the leg until he can't fight back. Never Back Down did it and it was perfectly cinematic (and accurate, it really would take only a few), it just isn't as cool as acrobatic jiu-jitsu.
Presumably that youth players often rise to the full team when very young (I think Walcott got in at 16?) but no woman has. And then we can look at their relative level of competition to see if it's just bigotry
Why dont more MMA fighters get to those powerlifting numbers?
Opportunity cost. MMA fighters also have to be technically skilled and have a gas tank and be at the best weight for their professional prospects . All of that takes training time and conflicts with being as strong as possible.
And at a certain point height does just matter. Jon Jones comes from a family of athletes. MMA fans joke that he's actually the worst performing of his entire family. He has a horrible vertical and just can't seem to put muscle on his legs. But he had the perfect body type for light heavyweight because he was a great wrestler and out-ranged everyone. Daniel Cormier was an Olympic wrestler and he couldn't get past the height difference to take Jon down.
And maybe that is the other thing: MMA simply doesn't attract top talents as easily as other sports. Jon Jones - one of the greatest of all time - is essentially a fuckup who ruined his wrestling career which is why he jumped into MMA so young.
Tanista
20d ago
I'd say that intelectuals in general were considered high status historically.
How far back are we going here?
If we're going very broad, I'd say the advantage intellectuals have is that their achievements are still legible today, preserved as they are by other intellectuals. The conquering noble (who may legitimately be illiterate) may have been higher status in the past but we only see him through the eyes of historians.
Modern era? Sure.
The Sailer line is "progressives don't believe in IQ but know they're smarter than conservatives". And progressives do in fact cite studies that say right wingers have lower IQ (and lower openness), the only time I've seen this permitted without comment.
A cynical person might say that how people inveigh against sexism/racism/otherism is meant to demonstrate higher learning and intelligence. Think about the increasingly arcane examples of racism, backed by scholarship inaccessible to the public.. Think about the claim that most people are basically blind because they haven't figured out the underlying structures that shape society. Think about the defense of trans activism: sex is way more complicated than you think prole - you're not qualified to have a take. And oh god, the fucking jargon, that old shortcut to appearing smart.
Intellectuals are arguably the highest status people in progressive spaces, even if we think that the fields they love are not particularly rigorous or g-loaded.
Obviously he's achieved atypical things and is talented. The point is that they're not the same sort of achievement as Musk's.
b) the (usually correct) fear that any men's movement or space will rapidly become anti-woman.
There was a story not too long ago about Men's Sheds, an organization for men to get together to combat social isolation. These were not young incels. These were not redpillers. Many were married older men.
If any institution wouldn't need to be feminized in order to avoid sexism, you'd think it'd be this. And yet...
I think it's just zero sum thinking on the part of ideologues + an obvious realization among others that society makes it easier for people to force entry into someone else's organization rather than being forced to do their own thing. The Men in Sheds women were not really nefarious or trying to maintain their gender's power, they just wanted to spend time with their husbands. Once upon a time, it'd just be accepted that men can have a little corner to themselves. Now it's more dubious (since we know men and women aren't really that different), so some people push in.
I don't think that trans-identifying males barging into woman's spaces is because of a real sense that women would be otherwise sexist (though that sort of neuroticism can be encouraged as a pretext). Society has simply corrected for past sins by moving towards a suspicion of allowing groups to determine their own affairs if it cuts against certain protected characteristics. If Ibram Kendi is right about anything, it's that these legal norms then spread out to the rest of society.
Men & Women are judged and valued by society differently. Men are valued based on their ability to climb up social hierarchy to obtain status.
This cuts no ice with gender abolitionists because they're social constructionists and their response to something like this is simply to demand society change this judgment.
You're actually falling into the same dynamic that causes the the quoted post. I doubt that no one has given them an explanation of why they think male roles are valuable. They likely reject those explanations because a)most are seen as sexist/essentialist and b) they find what remains to essentially be content-free because no one can make a substantive defense of actual gender roles (precisely because it is sexist/essentialist). Which makes sense: we have changed a lot of gender roles. Appealing to how society treats people without explaining why those things are anchored in biology or dynamics we can't or shouldn't change is useless.
There's no way out of this new folk religion without recreating the old, it's just hard between technological and social change. But that's where you're gonna have to go.
Women don't grow up thinking about how to be woman, because much of what defines femininity is there by default. You are simply born a sexy girl - you simply gestate a fetus - and then give birth to it. There is little to no skill barrier required in comparison.
And yet societies put a lot of effort into controlling the transition into womanhood. Conservative Muslims start training their women on how to be at puberty, Westerners had finishing schools, etc.
He's a success because of the failure of the system. It's not a novelty, it was always the criticism of democracy that it would allow charismatic demagogues to claim political power. The miracle was supposed to be figuring out a way to either keep them at bay or check them
Trump is clearly skilled at moving the public. He's not skilled in some sort of objective domain like someone like Musk who we can say is more impressive at that than the bulk of the elites.
(And I think that Musk also failed at government).
The UK is careening toward authoritarianism, but it's hard to predict what flavor it will take
Is it? Looks like authoritarian multiculturalism with none of the redeeming qualities Singapore has.
Looking at the political, demographic, economic, and fiscal cliffs the UK is teetering upon, it's hard to imagine that this wasn't by design.
Really? I suppose you can say this about Blair's changes but they legitimately seem to have sleepwalked into fiscal issues like the triple lock. Which sounds insane but if it was just expected that you could do nothing about the elderly's benefits Labour wouldn't have been forced into humiliating retreats on something much less essential like the winter fuel allowance. They would have just let the train run.
Like many people they just promised more than they could deliver.
Both the US and Apartheid South Africa demonstrate that the economic conditions of a country are largely detached from immigration/demographics. In right-wing UK circles, I see a lot of "cope" around the plans of Reform/Restore, in which the major factor for productivity collapse is entirely low skilled immigration, and once they are kicked out companies will be forced to pay much higher wages. It's an oddly left-wing viewpoint, one in which greedy companies are keeping all the money for themselves, and you just have to force them in order to get that money to the wider public.
The argument, as expressed by Mark Carney below*, is that cheap labour functions as a good enough solution that doesn't force companies to become more productive and thus able to raise wages for those they do hire (and doesn't force the government to figure out how to create incentives towards this end). Why bother?
I don't know that this is particularly "leftist". It's about as stereotypically leftist as claiming that companies faced with higher goods prices they can't pass on will either shrink the item or stop selling it. The left wing answer (that we saw post-COVID/stimulus) would be to deny that the business' options are limited this way in the first place, and that the companies are using it as an excuse to be greedy.
It can totally be the rational decision for UK employers until something changes without it being pure greed.
*
Yes, that's absolutely right. There can be short-term, and you're familiar with it.... Mr. Macklem was just in Fort McMurray, and I'm from the area as well, so we're familiar with the kinds of gaps you get there. One doesn't want an over-reliance, certainly, on temporary foreign workers for lower-skilled jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages, but also so that firms improve their productivity as necessary. We don't want to mask it, and the intent of the government's review is to ensure that this is used for transition, for those higher-skilled gaps that exist and can hold our economy back.
I think the spirit of the program and the spirit of the government's review is to ensure that this program is concentrated on higher skills, number one, to fill gaps, and to recognize that those are temporary gaps, so that we are ensuring that Canadian businesses are providing Canadian solutions—the training—and that we're working together to ensure that Canadians can meet those gaps. For the lower-wage jobs, it is important over a reasonable time period to ensure that the market adjusts and that those market wages adjust; then there will be productivity and other adjustments that ensure that Canadians are paid more, but also that we're a more productive economy as a whole. Getting that balance right is what is necessary.
Tanista
22d ago
It's funny because, arguably, the winning left-wing critique is that Israelis act like Middle-Easterners, which is unacceptable for a Western nation.
Tanista
24d ago
the PLO are not as willing to die as Hamas.
That's a problem too. It allows the more radical element to drive things.
Almost certainly just a conflation of the revisionist fascist states of WW2 with ethnostates in general to better discredit the latter. At least, that's always been the purpose this criticism has served when I run into it.
Which is why the murderous and expansionist nature of the Soviets doesn't discredit propositional nations, nor is the theory debunked by the also-common criticism of the empires in WW1.
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