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PaperclipPerfector  11hr ago (text post)   198 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 20, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Just had a random thought. Arguing on TheMotte about politics is kind of like stepping back in time to the 1800s before radio and TV. This is an era of politics that people like Postman like to idealize, and I see why. You come to admire and/or believe in other posters because of their arguments/style rather than good looks. At the same time, it's not like this place is a beacon of rationality (despite being better than most of the rest of the internet) at all times, which I think highlights the rose-tinted glasses nature of this kind of thinking. That said, I've enjoyed getting to know users here by the way they write, rather than how they look.

So, what are you reading?

I'm adding Jews in the Soviet Union, Vol. 1, another open access book, to my list. Looks like the full series isn't published yet, but volumes 1, 3 and 5 are out.

I just started Oathbringer, the third novel in the Stormlight Archive series. I really enjoyed the second half of The Way Of Kings and the first two-thirds of Words Of Radiance, but I found the totally forced love triangle her appears to be building between Shallan, Kaladin, and Adolin extremely tiresome and off-putting. I’m hoping he abandons this as the series continues, but clearly he put it there for a reason. (The reason, I suspect, is that he realized he is creating a commercial product which is likely to be consumed by a large audience of women, who want and expect that sort of thing. Perhaps I’ll be proved wrong and he’ll develop it in a way that is more artful and plot-relevant than he has this far.) I’m loving the world-building, I just need the characters to be more consistently well-written if I’m going to continue the series after this one.

Yeah I wouldn't worry about that. Even in the third book (let alone further), it isn't a factor any more. And to be fair, I don't think it was ever much of a love triangle. I think the story was just there to show Kaladin and Shallan mistaking normal human relationships for romantic feelings because they are kind of screwed up, not to have there be a serious contention.

Oh good. The worst parts of the books so far have l been Sanderson’s various pathetic attempts at insult humor, which he apparently considers the height of wit, and that entire mini-arc brought out the nadir of it.

Stormlight Archive is where I pretty much bailed on Sanderson. I really liked the first book, but the second was so tedious I lost any desire to continue the series.

This is, in fact, what seems to happen with all his series. A decent first novel increasingly becomes self-referential Cosmere wank in the later books. And more and more it's Brandon Sanderson (tm) writing a Brandon Sanderson (tm) novel. The man has no range.

I’ve read all five. Don’t worry about it. The quality is a bit uneven IMO but that’s not going to be a big part of things going forward.

White Witch, Black Curse (The Hollows, Book 7), by Kim Harrison. Book 11 of He Who Fights With Monsters was fine, and it wrapped up all of its major plot arcs, but I don't feel the need to run out and read book 12 right now.

Was Floyd picked as a figurehead because he was a criminal, rather than in spite of this?

I've been wondering about this from time to time over the last couple of years. I'd like to know if there's a term for this political strategy, if indeed it exists.

Surely there were some truly "innocent", non criminal black men - or black women, as the media would spin the 'racism crisis', but I gather it is pretty rare for women of any color to be murdered by cops - who were killed by cops in dubious circumstances, and could have been picked out by the BLM movement as their martyr? I'm not American and am not very familiar with the issue, but I do vaguely remember a few cases of egregious police brutality against black men without criminal records and without meth addictions, maybe even during the same time period in the year 2020. Rather than someone with a long criminal record and two types of hard drugs in his system.

If indeed this was done on purpose; why? May it be in order to make the pill harder to swallow for political opponents? And with the movement becoming unstoppable as they hoped for, it resulting in a bigger political win? If people went along with protesting for a criminal, they'll definitively be very likely to do it for actual decent people too...?

The video of George Floyd just looked really unusually bad, and it came at the right time(the lockdowns when black culture had adapted to social-media scrolling driven video-based victimmongering rather than text based a la facebook or radio), in the right place(a white progressive ruled city). I think that's the reason. Most people killed by the cops are scumbags, even if they don't deserve to die, and so mathematically an unusually bad-looking video at the right place and time will probably have a scumbag in it.

This was addressed in one of the holy texts:

More important, unarmed black people are killed by police or other security officers about twice a week according to official statistics, and probably much more often than that. You’re saying none of these shootings, hundreds each year, made as good a flagship case as Michael Brown? In all this gigantic pile of bodies, you couldn’t find one of them who hadn’t just robbed a convenience store? Not a single one who didn’t have ten eyewitnesses and the forensic evidence all saying he started it? [emphasis mine—and note that this was written in 2014!]

I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.

TL;DR: controversial topics go more viral than benign ones.

Edit: also, to address the specific case of George Floyd, at the time, the video footage that went viral was very chilling to watch. (Or so I’ve been told by friends, conservative ones, who had watched the video; as a rule, I try to avoid viewing such things.) When one sees a man being choked to death slowly over the course of eight minutes while protesting “I can’t breathe!” then it’s hard not to viscerally feel that an injustice has been committed. (And if I remember correctly, the video went viral long before the man’s extensive prior criminal history or fentanyl usage became common knowledge.)

Out of curiosity, of the people here that watched the video, who found the video chilling to watch?

I didn't. I do find plenty of things online disturbing, but this wasn't one of them.

Thank you for the link. I suppose Occam's Razor here is that the controversy adds to the virality and that's that.

I never watched the video either, but I had the same reaction to the text. I don't doubt that the cops in question were horrible predators.

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