daezor
15m ago
I do agree that Buddhist dualism is problematic. Unfortunately the vast majority of Christians nowadays accept dualism implicitly anyway, so I think this is a sort of tilting at windmills type thing.
Okay, maybe you can explain this because I've never really understood what the Christian position on mind-body dualism/monism is. If one is a monist, then it seems that one has to accept that the dead are well-and-truly dead until the final resurrection, and that nobody goes to heaven or hell until the Last Judgement. But I don't think any Christians accept this. But also, many Christians insist that they are not dualists.
daezor
13hr ago
There's plenty of outgroup-homogeneity-bias to go around. I realize that I may have been committing some of that myself in my comments here, in framing "accusing people of being government operatives" as the central example of organizational dysfunction, when in fact it is a peculiarly right-wing tendency, just as "oppression Olympics" is a peculiarly left-wing form. Each side can look at the other, see the lack of the particular type of dysfunction they're most familiar with, and assume the grass is greener.
But still, we can step back and look at concrete results. Whatever's going on behind the scenes in left-wing groups, that's not preventing them from opening up scores of retail shops in every city nationwide, whereas the right wing has a lot of catching up to do.
daezor
18hr ago
An example of a fairly small, low-cost-to-entry organization is an indie game studio. These can be so small, in fact, that they can be done as one-man-bands, but then can scale up from there. Why don't we see more right-wing indies?
Strangely, harassment, death threats and literal home invasions of a popular celebrity did not draw support for that celebrity, nor condemnation of such tactics, nor broad discourse that online toxicity was a serious problem. The Dev did not receive wall-to-wall coverage portraying him as a saintly victim from a sympathetic press, who oddly failed to coordinate broad-spectrum condemnation for the internet trolls and other deplorables engaging in this horrifying behavior. The Dev was not invited to speak at the UN.
Being slightly cheeky, what this story shows is that it is not, in fact, possible for a one-man indie studio to make a game. In addition to 1 developer, you also need a legion of supporters ready to condemn harassment / death threats / home invasions directed against the developer, a bunch of sympathetic press outlets, and 193 state-level actors. The left has this organizational apparatus and so they are able to make indie video games; the right doesn't, so they don't.
In other words, Why did you force me to do this? I just wanted to play video games.
In the years since Gamergate, has the right made any progress on this front? Maybe, but it seems like most initiatives in that direction are continually stymied by lack of interest (or outright condemnation) from other right-wingers.
daezor
20hr ago
I don't think you should get to say things that are flatly untrue as you making your broader point.
I wasn't intending to make any claim with the word "supposed" about the underlying truth of the supposition, only that there are some people who are supposing. If that word is unclear, you can substitute "alleged" or "claimed".
daezor
21hr ago
No, the very real, and not at all supposed hoax, was that Trump called white supremacists "very fine people" by saying there are some on both sides of the Charlottesville controversy. You're trying to rewrite history.
The point I'm making is independent of the truth-of-the-matter of what Trump actually said about Charlottesville. The point is that the way the narrative played out shows that there is no united right-wing movement equivalent to that on the left. If there were, you would've found that the dominant right-wing narrative was one of the following:
- President Trump actually does secretly support us; he just can't come out and say it just yet. But I have contacts on the inside who know what Trump really thinks. Trust the plan, eyes on the prize.
- How dare President Trump say that there were "very fine people" on the pro-statue-removal side? We call upon President Trump to unequivocally condemn all the subversive anarchist elements bent on destroying our proud heritage and civilization.
- We are disappointed that President Trump has not full-throatedly endorsed our movement. We will not support him until he does.
(In fact, a handful of people did say this, but they were relegated to the fringe on the right.)
contributions to science, art, philosophy, or culture generally, which is what comes to my mind when someone brings up "creating things"
Where are the right-wing institutions for these things? All academic faculties (with the possible exception of economics) are left-dominated. Same with art museums and film festivals. Maybe if you're right-leaning you'd denounce such things as "not real art" - maybe so, but then, who is preserving the "classical" cultural heritage? Where are the right-wing symphony orchestras and Shakespearean theater companies?
daezor
22hr ago
From where I stand, almost every leftist space inevitably ends up doing witch hunts, cancelling people for benign shit (recently DHH and Ed Sheeran, and I can imagine a gorillion other examples), essentially harming their own in the name of the greater good. There's a danger that is, to me, more urgent than COVID: a large portion of people in the West have a culture that incentivizes and perpetuates the same pattern, the outcome of which will inevitably be that no one finds it worthwhile to try to create anything.
The idea that this is a "left-wing phenomenon" is wildly at odds with my experience. I can go to any US city (big or small) and find a virtually bottomless supply of left-wing bars, coffee shops, and bookstores just like the one featured in this exposé. Meanwhile, when was the last time you've come across any such establishment that is as right-wing as this place is left-wing?
(Maybe you'll point to shooting/hunting clubs as the right-wing equivalent, which I'll grant, but still, there's a strange asymmetry here. Gun stuff is right-coded because that reflects the demographics of the people who own guns and use them regularly; but meanwhile, there is no particular political tilt in the demand for coffee, alcohol, or books. So where are the right-wing social spaces for those products?)
What about churches? Yes, there are right-wing churches, but there are left-wing churches as well, rainbow flags and all. Maybe not the majority, but enough to show that the "church" as a form of social organization is not the exclusive purview of right-wingers.
But political organizing is where the rubber meets the road. Any attempt to stand up something like the right-wing equivalent of the DSA or Antifa is immediately torn apart by infighting and ideological purity-spiraling. What ever happened to the "Unite the Right" movement? Last I checked, ~every organization involved in that event has fallen apart. In fact, the dominant narrative on the right is to deny that any such organization is even possible. Right-wingers talk about the "Charlottesville hoax"[1] and denounce Patriot Front and January 6 as "fed ops" or lately "SPLC infiltrators". Meanwhile I walk out my door and find no shortage of Pride parades and anti-ICE protests, all seeming to go off like clockwork, with no subsequent chorus of left-wing influencers asserting that these events are "false flags" or whatever.
[1] ICYMI: The supposed "hoax" is the claim that Trump supported the Charlottesville protesters. But if the Right were actually United, you would not find right-wingers saying this; if anything, they'd be motivated to manufacture the opposite hoax, i.e. claim that Trump supports them even if he didn't really.
Sure wet markets an all that, but now we're chaining together multiple things that have to "go right" to create Covid. The lab leak theory on the other hand seems quite straightforward.
I think this is a statistical fallacy of the same sort as "John Q Public just won the lottery! But the odds of that happening without him cheating were only 1 in a billion. Therefore we know with p<10^-9 that John Q Public must have cheated." This only makes sense if we had some prior reason to focus on John Q Public; but if he was just the person that happened to win the lottery of the millions who played, then this cancels out the p-value, leaving us with no particular reason to believe that he cheated.
Similarly, if we assume natural origin, whatever sequence of events ends up creating a successful virus is going to seem fantastically unlikely, but we also have to consider all the plasmids that didn't go viral (i.e. the losing lottery tickets). We had no prior reason to focus on any particular combination of human/animal interactions; that was just the ticket that happened to win.
(I don't actually know where the idea that pangolins were involved came from. Maybe they weren't. But if the reason for the scarcity of pangolins is because they're all being hunted for sale at the Wuhan wet market, well...)
But then, naively, wouldn't we expect diseases to form almost exclusively in places like India or Africa where density is high and medical treatment is poor? Why haven't we seen more diseases?
Off the top of my head, Africa gave us HIV and Ebola. Can't think of any from India - maybe it's because people in India are vegetarians and so they don't have markets where hundreds of different animal species are all concentrated in close proximity? (I'm really just spitballing here to be honest.) But China has very high population and density as well, with mediocre health and sanitation, so a virus coming from there is no big surprise.
daezor
3d ago
Disclaimer, I haven't looked into this topic at all. I just think there's a point that's often missed in these discussions:
When we're thinking about the likelihood of a novel virus emerging, we need to be anchored on a distribution according to population, not time, because each new human being is a new opportunity for a virus to take form. The relevant figure is: What percentage of the people who have ever lived are alive today? Seems like it's about 7%. So, the number of novel human viruses we should expect to see arise in our lifetime is about 7% of however many have arisen in all of history. Those are some good odds, if you're a virus!
But (more speculatively) it's worse than that, because viruses emerge from the interaction of more than one organism, not necessarily of the same species. A plasmid might emerge from a bat, land in a pangolin, then later escape with a mixture of bat and pangolin DNA, etc. Therefore, depending on how many steps it takes, the number of opportunities for viruses to arise will increase as the Nth power of population, with an extra bonus for the density of humans and animals all crammed into one small place. I would venture to say that the amount of genetic material being shuffled around nowadays in places like Wuhan is a situation without precedent in the whole history of life on Earth.
daezor
3d ago
We're all stuck in a maze of ideological contradictions with no escape. That's why I'm somewhat more sympathetic to Nikole Hannah-Jones than most of the people here. She is someone who took Steve Bannon's words to heart:
When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think ... A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society.
In other words, a group recruited from the top N% highest-IQ people from all over the world is not really a nation (society, community, etc.). They may be economically successful, but they'd be missing something important of non-monetary value. At least, Steve Bannon seemed to think so. And recall, it's the immigration hardliners on the right (including Bannon, and those further to the right) who say: "Citizenship is not a question of merit. If you're a Talented-Tenth individual from a 3rd-world country, then your responsibility is to stay there and help lead your country. You abandoning your people to come here will just make both our country and yours worse off."
This is precisely what Nikole Hannah-Jones wanted.
But of course, all of this is living in a fantasy world that either never existed, or at least hasn't existed for a long time. Unilaterally "cooperating" while everyone else around you is shamelessly "defecting" will just bring misery upon yourself without achieving any benefit in the end.
daezor
10d ago
I think people are misunderstanding my point. It's not clear to me that the 19th-century European immigrants ever did assimilate, at least in the way that matters. @Opt-out says we "will be stuck with poorer governance forever" - I consider the possibility that this has already happened, that we have been stuck with poorer governance for this whole time, and that it's far too late to do anything about it. The only reason why people assume that the Irish/Italians/etc. did successfully assimilate is because nobody alive today remembers a time before they showed up. Those of us who live in big cities have just come to accept a constant background noise of graft, corruption, and gangsterism which (I believe) would never have been accepted in a supermajority-Anglo society.
daezor
10d ago
Once you have permanent groups that are not assimilating you can not unring that bell and will be stuck with poorer governance forever.
The question is, didn't this already happen 100+ years ago with the aforementioned "Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Irishmen"? The Jeffersonian ideal gave way to Tammany Hall, the Mafia, union politics, etc. - so we see that that assimilation project was not successful either. Perhaps, the immigrants assimilated America to themselves, and not the other way around.
daezor
10d ago
If the Indians comprise 0.1% of the crowd but they just so happen to all be concentrated in one corner of the stadium, then this by itself is proof positive that they are unassimilated. What "assimilation" looks like is for each subgroup to be evenly spread throughout the population in proportion to its numbers, which is evidently not what's happening here.
I'm not saying that this even dispersal is what causes assimilation; rather, someone who is culturally assimilated will naturally find that their circle of acquaintances (such as the people they go to football games with) is representative of the population.
(I rather doubt that anyone on Twitter is making this argument. The interpretation that the whole crowd is 90% Indian is more provocative and thus more likely to go viral.)
daezor
17d ago
Isn't astrology fundamentally opposed to leftism because it denies the Blank Slate and asserts that the most important aspects of one's character are determined (dare I say "assigned") at birth?
daezor
19d ago
Doesn't receipt paper fade over time? Something to watch out for if you're using it for important recovery codes.
daezor
19d ago
Am I, and people like me, not also people? Your thinking here is shady. You talk about people but obscure massive variance between individuals. You are universalizing too quickly.
We're talking about broad trends here, not necessarily universals, just what is sufficiently popular to be reflected in policy under a democratic system. The people on this forum are certainly not representative of the general population. Indeed, this is what I'm claiming is the formative experience of "nerds" - finding that one's own preferences are inexplicably out of step with the mainstream, and a consequent desire to place oneself as far out of reach of the "mob" as possible (which, in the present discourse, is termed "anti-democracy" or "fascism").
daezor
20d ago
186 is the new upper-bound for the smallest gap that occurs infinitely often. It is conjectured that this value is in fact 2. But you can trivially prove that arbitrarily-large prime-free sequences exist (N!+2, N!+3, N!+4 ... N!+N).
daezor
20d ago
The below-quoted replies (to combine several threads into one) are glossing over a key question, which is: What differentiates between the two factions of nerds? Again, it's not an issue of nerds vs. popular kids; it's nerds vs. other nerds. The most strident voices against techno-fascism are themselves "nerds" by any definition. Many are autistic, and will say so right in their Tumblr/Bluesky bios. (And when you meet them in person, you can tell it's true.) They have prickly mannerisms and are not exactly "people persons". They are not generally from wealthy families or from poor families. They play a lot of video games. Etc.
I've tried to capture the distinction as "computer" vs. "theater" nerds, but even that feels incomplete. Many left-wing nerds are, in fact, technically proficient and may even work for tech companies (think: Rust developer with programming socks and Blåhaj); while many right-wing nerds are well-acquainted with the humanities, art, and literature (think: this forum).
And as I mentioned, there is no obvious demographic category that explains the divide either. There are white males on both sides, and non-whites on both sides. There are LGBT people on both sides.
So, we remain in need of an explanation for why some nerds go one way and some go the other way, and in particular, why the fight feels existential to both sides, like an actual ethnic conflict where your loyalty is determined genetically and so you have to stick with it through thick and thin. But if you're a nerd and you find yourself on the losing side of the Nerd War, can't you just... switch sides?
the leftists don't hate them for being rich, they hate them for being nerds
daezor
21d ago
The new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy has been making the rounds. In lieu of reading it, here's an NPR interview.
In his new book, journalist Gil Duran argues that a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires and the venture capitalists who fund them have concluded that democracy is in their way and that they should be governing in its place.
At the core of this is a middle-school-cafeteria psychodrama that remains unresolved. The lived-experience of "computer nerds" is that of being instrumentally valuable to many, terminally valuable to none. As a result, anti-capitalist rhetoric that disparages money as a source of moral value is received by them as a personal attack. The computer nerd feels deep down that his earning-potential is the only thing he brings to the table in the status game; as far as he's concerned, his value on all other axes might as well be rounded off to zero.
Therefore, the computer nerds wants nothing more than to get away from all those teeming masses with their grabby hands who want to take all his stuff and leave him with nothing. If it takes moving to one of Balaji Srinivasan's seasteads, or to Elon Musk's space colony, then so be it.
they want to build zones to escape democracy altogether
A world that they fully control, a world where no one can question their authority and a world where they can exclude anyone they don't want
Huh? Is it a zone, or the whole world? There's a big difference - but hold on. That comic is the story of nerds simpliciter, not just computer nerds. And the people most outspoken against "The Nerd Reich" are also nerds - "theater nerds" to be precise. To continue the cafeteria picture, the theater nerds are (if anything) even more autistic, more put-upon, and more bullyable than the computer nerds, while the bullies themselves (the "jocks" and "popular kids") don't even figure in to the dialectic at all. So what's going on?
I guess it comes down to the different coping mechanisms each group employs. The theater nerds find solidarity with each other at least, whereas the computer nerds have no need for each other because they have their toys to play with, which can incidentally eke them out a living independent of anyone else. But the theater nerds have no such refuge, and so, being poor in both financial and social capital, have been forced over generations to build up an elaborate alternative system of social capital which is a lot more off-putting to outsiders but seems to form much deeper personal relationships within itself than any within the computer club. This, at least, levels the playing field between the two nerd factions somewhat.
But then, if some computer nerds start getting uppity and decide to form alternative solidarity groups of their own, now this upsets the balance. I suppose the theater nerds believe there's only so much space for nerds in this world, and so any ascendancy of computer nerds will leave less for them.
Honestly, I'm really just spinning a yarn at this point. There are a lot of holes in this story that I don't know how to patch up. In particular:
- The rhetoric is mostly aimed at tech billionaires, but then why do regular codemonkeys feel the need to defend them? After all, it's not like Mark Zuckerberg has any solidarity with you, Facebook Software Engineer #83,587.
- Where do race and other conventional "categories" fit into this? The anti-fascists attack the tech world as being "white supremacist", even though the tech world is largely Asian and Indian (a fact which the actual white supremacists never fail to point out).
- Whence comes this conflation of "exit" with "world domination"?
But I can't shake the feeling that all of this debate about "techno-fascism" (or whatever) is operating at a high simulacrum level, concealing the true reasons why people get so animated about this and why they choose the sides that they do. But what are those true reasons?
daezor
23d ago
I think this niche is filled nowadays not by any specific place, but by nomadic lifestyles in their various incarnations - perpetual tourism, van life, digital nomads, passport bros, etc. But by its very nature this can only be done by isolated individuals and never as a population-level movement. And so, I would surmise, the selection process that began 6,000 years ago has now come to an end.
daezor
23d ago
Americans are not this. We traditionally have a big contrarian and rebellious streak. Genetically I came across something called the Wanderlust gene and you can find it at high rates in Americans of European descent versus the population groups they came from in Europe.
My working model is that this selection effect was in constant operation from the dispersal of the Proto-Indo-Europeans - that the more peaceable and agreeable people would stay put, while the restless and rebellious segment would press further west - all the way until the closing of the American frontier in the 19th century. And now we're all trapped in here with each other, and we don't know how to manage.
daezor
27d ago
It makes me think of the famous Iroha poem:
Colors are fragrant, but they Will eventually scatter; Who in our world Shall always be? The deep mountains of conditions [samskara] — We cross them today And we shall not have shallow dreams Nor be intoxicated.
Then we have the "Nightmares", which grow increasingly aggressive as you get closer to waking the Wind Fish. These represent attachments, which try to keep you trapped in the world of maya.
(Importantly, in the game, death is not the same as nirvana. Death just reincarnates you back into the world of illusion, and is an obstacle on your path to awakening.)
And also, something about the eight instruments of the Wind Fish and the Noble Eightfold Path? (OK, maybe this is a stretch.)
I won't go so far as to say that the game is "preaching" a Buddhist message. It just seems like its overall narrative speaks to a culture with Buddhist background assumptions, in the same way that (to take an example mentioned below) The Land Before Time is not exactly a "Christian" story, but the overall "sacrifice → tribulation → paradise" theme is one that Western audiences will understand instinctively because of their Christian background.
daezor
27d ago
It's been a long time since I played Link's Awakening, but I seem to recall it's not so much a downer ending as a "Buddhist" ending. To read it as "everyone dies at the end" is to impose a Western (Christian) lens on the story which is not present in the original.
If we're going to extrapolate a trend, maybe its that in the '90s there was more media being produced in Japan with distinctively Japanese cultural assumptions, since it was aimed primarily at domestic audiences, and the translation into English was only an afterthought.
daezor
30d ago
There is no "contract" to "violate" if only one side ever accepted it. If I hire you to paint my house but you don't do it, I'm under no obligation to pay you.
daezor
30d ago
People have mentioned the epistemic reasons for doing this (stereotypes as heuristics), but separately there is also the game-theoretic (contractualist) reason: Individualism is a social contract that has both costs and benefits. In order for a social contract to work, you can't let people get away with getting the benefits without also incurring the costs. Here, the benefit of individualism is that you don't have to get blamed for the actions of other people just because they share some characteristic with you. The cost is that you have to reject any preferential treatment you may receive from others who share that characteristic on that basis.
Therefore, if you see that members of a certain group treat each other with special preference (most of their friends or marriage partners are fellow [X]s, they tend to hire each other, they refrain from "snitching" when one has broken the law, etc.), then it makes sense to collectivize blame onto them, even as you might prefer that they join the individualist social contract instead.
All right, I'll bite: What makes you think this? In particular, what objective are the Feds accomplishing by running Patriot Front? And how does a hypothetical non-Fed version of Patriot Front differ from what we actually observe?
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