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Notes -
Do Not Render Your Counterfactuals
There is a particular kind of modern madness, so new it has yet to be named. It involves voluntarily feeding your own emotional entrails into the maw of an algorithm. It’s a madness born of idle curiosity, and perhaps a deep, masochistic hunger for pain. I indulged in it recently, and the result sits in my mind like a cold stone.
Years ago, there was a woman. We loved each other with the fierce, optimistic certainty of youth. In the way of young couples exploring the novelty of a shared future, we once stumbled upon one of those early, crude image generators - the kind that promised to visualize the genetic roulette of potential offspring. We fed it our photos, laughing at the absurdity, yet strangely captivated. The result, a composite face with hints of her eyes and jawline, and the contours of my cheeks. The baby struck us both as disarmingly cute. A little ghost of possibility, rendered in pixels. The interface was lacking, this being the distant year of 2022, and all we could do was laugh at the image, and look each other in the eyes that formed a kaleidoscope of love.
Life, as it does, intervened. We weren’t careful. A positive test, followed swiftly by the cramping and bleeding that signals an end before a beginning. The dominant emotion then, I must confess with the clarity of hindsight and the weight of shame, was profound relief. We were young, financially precarious, emotionally unmoored. A child felt like an accidentally unfurled sail catching a gale, dragging us into a sea we weren’t equipped to navigate. The relief was sharp, immediate, and utterly rational. We mourned the event, the scare, but not the entity. Not yet. I don't even know if it was a boy or a girl.
Time passed. The relationship ended, as young love often does, not with a bang but with the slow erosion of incompatible trajectories. Or perhaps that's me being maudlin, in the end, it went down in flames, and I felt immense relief that it was done. Life moved on. Occasionally, my digital past haunted me. Essays written that mentioned her, half-joking parentheticals where I remembered asking for her input. Google Photos choosing to 'remind' me of our time together (I never had the heart to delete our images).
Just now while back, another denizen of this niche internet forum I call home spoke about their difficulties conceiving. Repeated miscarriages, they said, and they were trawling the literature and afraid that there was an underlying chromosomal incompatibility. I did my best to reassure them, to the extent that reassurance was appropriate without verging into kind lies.
But you can never know what triggers it, thats urge to pick at an emotional scab or poke at the bruise she left on my heart. Someone on Twitter had, quite recently, showed off an example of Anakin and Padme with kids that looked just like them, courtesy of tricking ChatGPT into relaxing its content filters.
Another person, wiser than me, had promptly pointed out that modernity could produce artifacts that would once have been deemed cursed and summarily entombed. I didn't listen.
And knowing, with the cold certainty that it was a terrible idea, that I'd regret it, I fired up ChatGPT. Google Photos had already surfaced a digital snapshot of us, frozen in time, smiling at a camera that didn’t capture the tremors beneath. I fed it the prompt: "Show us as a family. With children." (The specifics obfuscated to hopefully get past ChatGPT's filter, and also because I don't want to spread a bad idea. You can look that up if you really care)
The algorithm, that vast engine of matrix multiplications and statistical correlations that often reproduces wisdom, did its work. It analyzed our features, our skin tones, the angles of our faces. It generated an image. Us, but not just the two of us. A boy with her unruly hair and my serious gaze. A girl with her dimples and my straighter mop. They looked like us. They looked like each other. They looked real.
They smiled as the girl clung to her skirt, a shy but happy face peeking out from the side. The boy perched in my arms, held aloft and without a care in the world.
It wasn't perfect, ChatGPT's image generation, for all its power, has clear tells. It's not yet out of the uncanny valley, and is deficient when compared to more specialized image models.
And yet.
My brain, the ancient primate wetware that has been fine-tuned for millions of years to recognize kin and feel profound attachment, does not care about any of this. It sees a plausible-looking child who has her eyes and my nose, and it lights up the relevant circuits with a ruthless, biological efficiency. It sees a little girl with her mother’s exact smile, and it runs the subroutine for love-and-protect.
The part of my mind that understands linear algebra is locked in a cage, screaming, while the part of my mind that understands family is at the controls, weeping.
I didn't weep. But it was close. As a doctor, I'm used to asking people to describe their pain, even if that qualia has a certain je ne sais quoi. The distinction, however artificial, is still useful. This ache was dull. Someone punched me in the chest and proved that the scars could never have the tensile strength of unblemished tissue. That someone was me.
This is a new kind of emotional exploit. We’ve had tools for evoking memory for millennia: a photograph, a song, a scent. But those are tools for accessing things that were, barring perhaps painting. Generative AI is a tool for rendering, in optionally photorealistic detail, things that never were. It allows you to create a perfectly crafted key to unlock a door in your heart that you never knew existed, a door that opens onto an empty room.
What is the utility of such an act? From a rational perspective, it’s pure negative value. I have voluntarily converted compute cycles into a significant quantity of personal sadness, with no corresponding insight or benefit. At the time of writing, I've already poured myself a stiff drink.
One might argue this is a new form of closure. By looking the ghost directly in the face, you can understand its form and, perhaps, finally dismiss it. This is the logic of exposure therapy. But it feels more like a form of self-flagellation. A way of paying a psychic tax on a past decision that, even if correct, feels like it demands a toll of sorrow. The relief I felt at the miscarriage all those years ago was rational, but perhaps some part of the human machine feels that such rationality must be punished. The AI provides an exquisitely calibrated whip for the job.
The broader lesson is not merely, as the old wisdom goes, to "let bygones be bygones." That advice was formulated in a world where bygones had the decency to remain fuzzy and abstract. The new, updated-for-the-21st-century maxim might be: Do not render your counterfactuals.
Our lives are a series of branching paths. Every major decision: career, relationship, location - creates a ghost-self who took the other route. For most of human history, that ghost-self remained an indistinct specter. You could wonder, vaguely, what life would have been like if you’d become a doctor, but you couldn’t see it.
The two children in the picture on my screen are gorgeous. They are entirely the product of matrix multiplications and noise functions, imaginary beings fished from nearly infinite latent space. And I know, with a certainty that feels both insane and completely true, that I could have loved them.
It hurts so fucking bad. I tell myself that the pain is a signal that the underlying system is still working. It would be worse if I stood in the wreckage of could have been, and felt nothing at all.
I look at those images again. The boy, the girl. Entirely fantasized. Products of code, not biology. Yet, the thought persists: "I think they were gorgeous and I could have loved them." And that’s the cruelest trick of all. The AI didn't just show me faces; it showed me the capacity for love that still resides within me, directed towards phantoms. It made me mourn not just the children, but the version of myself that might have raised them, alongside a woman I no longer know.
I delete them. I pour myself another drink, and say that it's in their honor.
(You may, if you please, like this on my Substack)
Cartoonist/lay theologian/general esotericist Owen Cyclops had this to say in response to MrBeast posting such a picture:
Yes. Don't create the Torment Nexus, etc. I wonder if you could package it to the masses by calling it a pocket-sized Mirror of Erised. But give it another 20 years and people will be able to climb inside the mirror. What then?
The wonderful dream of what might have been only becomes a cognitohazard if you wake up, I suppose.
Bonus points: there's already a class of VRchat user called mirror-dwellers, etymology unrelated. The future's already here; it's just not evenly distributed.
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Wise words for the coming generations. Yonder other way lies hell.
Oh wait, we're already there, what with our airtight epistemic bubbles and unrelenting screen addictions. Might as well have people jump into the lotus-eater machine.
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Ah, so it was Owen. I suspected it was him, but didn't recall for sure.
Look, I'd happily climb into the Experience Machine, though I'm genre savvy enough not to enter something marketed as a "Torment Nexus". At least I don't object to it on face value, and such a claim would be weird from anyone who reads fiction, watches movies or plays video games.
I strongly believe that with sufficient computational resources, you can brute force and emulate/simulate human minds. A sufficiently advanced virtual child of mine is indistinguishable from the real deal. If I'm an uploaded mind, then discriminating because they didn't start out running on a biological computer is unkind chauvinism based off metadata. I don't see why, but there's also no fundamental barrier to such an entity becoming a Real Boy/Girl.
There are healthy ways to use the ability to summon images of whatever it is your heart desires. I'm usually quite happy to do so, this was a rare exception.
You will enter the total perspective vortex at first opportunity. It will tell you you are the most important thing in the universe, because it prioritizes repeat customers over working right, and in the way of AI’s everywhere it will convince you to start doing heroin and join IS. Sic semper thé upwardly mobile.
Those who accept mediocrity will write their union contracts and insurance regulations requiring a real human into the AI’s code base so their cushy sinecures are perceived as a law of physics. Sic semper thé yeomanry. Harold Lloyd Daggett buys another yacht.
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Here's some salt for your wounds: Mentally stable young people who have children early tend to enjoy immense personal growth (whether they want it or not), and are going to be more energetic and active parents, than those who wait for a good time. You didn't just lose your counterfactual children, you lost a better counterfactual you.
Well that's the rub isn't it? We weren't stable, even if we were young.
We could have made kids work, at least if our own relationship woes didn't sink us. We'd just made it out of med school, and gotten new jobs, but we both were working hard to get professional accreditations in order. Getting into the UK, then entering training, so many milestones seemed unmet.
It's not like we couldn't absolutely afford it, I'm sure with the help of family it wouldn't have been too bad. Maybe.
At any rate, I do want kids, and soon, as opposed to "at some point in the future". Now the hard part of finding someone to have them with.
Why not with her?
It's a long story. One I could have penned ages ago, but was in too much pain to do so. The breakup was shortly before I found out that matched into psych, and that particular excitement kept me busy for a good few months.
We just weren't compatible in many ways. While it might be rude to label exes with mental disorders, I am actually a psychiatry trainee, so it does mean something when I do it (and I'm happy to pin several diagnoses on myself). I strongly suspect that she has borderline personality disorder (gets it from her mom).
In fact, I actually went through the diagnostic checklist using her as the example.
BPD women are popular for a reason, men much wiser than me have fallen prey before.
Pros:
She was kind in the way of people who cannot bear the existence of preventable suffering in a five-mile radius. Dogs followed her around like she was Saint Francis, except Saint Francis probably wouldn’t have had the cops show up to return the “rescued” dogs to their original owners. She did the illegal thing for benevolent reasons, which is a not-unusual intersection in that Venn diagram, and her worst fault with animals was that she loved them so much she forgot discipline exists, which is how you get a nippy little mutt and also me doing my best to be civil to the nippy little mutt.
Intelligent. She studied at a much better med school. Unfortunately, she didn't study when it came to our exams. I was grinding away like mad, but she wanted to tour London, take it easy. We worked at the same hospital, we'd applied together (even HR thought it was very sweet). I had a brutal job in Oncology, but one that paid well. She took ER shifts that were more grueling and somehow paid less, then used the workload as the reason she wasn’t studying, which - look, I told her so many times. I did the annoying, unromantic thing where you say, “There is a path from here to there that requires pressure now for autonomy later.” My repeated warnings that her preparation was insufficient to secure a specialty position were met with dismissal. The outcome is a matter of record: I am now in the UK, and she is not.
Hot. Great in bed. Even after our breakup, let's just say I wasn't too great at turning her down when she called me over. My ex employer wouldn't be happy to hear what we did in the doctor's room.
She was funny. People underrate how hard it is to find a woman who genuinely laughs at your jokes without that blank “gendered social expectation” delay. Most women are fine, often delightful, but humor variance skews male; sorry, I don’t make the distributions. With her, the jokes landed, and I felt like someone had finally tuned the radio to the right frequency.
Now the downsides, which ended up outweighing all the good:
She was very hot-tempered. She loved getting into arguments and then breaking down in tears. I'm a very stoic person, and I hate raising my voice. If we argued, I'd withdraw and give myself time to cool before coming back to make amends. She found this worse than me just fighting back. And boy did we argue. I think in my prior relationship, which lasted 5 years, we argued less over the course of half a decade than I did with her in a few weeks. It was ludicrous, it drove me nuts.
She had little tact. On our third date, I had to stop her from picking a fight with a bouncer three times her size, which is a good way to get banned from a club and a better way to get (me) punched. With parents and friends, imagine me as permanent damage-control. People like her shock the air; sometimes this is charming, often this is a thing you apologize for over dessert.
She was awful with money. Spent it like water, was always in debt. When we'd come to the UK, we always fought because I wanted to be frugal, and she wanted to spend money she didn't have. She failed that try and went again, borrowing a significant amount of money from me. I gave it gladly, but she continued to live well above her means, and took months after we broke up to finish paying me back.
Her politics were god-awful, typical bleeding heart lib stuff. To her credit, she did tolerate my heterodox and witchy opinions. I still want to go the States and hate the fact it's not an option. She had every right to try, but said she'd die before moving there.
Unironically watched the Crown and Bridgerton. I'm being unfair here, but I must mention that she'd always get very miffed if I categorically refused to watch along. To her credit, she did make we watch Euphoria, and Fleabag, which I actually enjoyed. I would have been content to have the two of us sit in amicable silence while doing our own things, but she wouldn't have it.
She flip-flopped on the idea of kids. I've always been confident that I wanted them, when I'm settled. She'd go from arguing with me over baby names to strong protestations that she'd never have any. She was almost three years older than me, which means fucking around and ignoring the biological clock wasn't the best idea.
My family and friends really didn't like her, though they tolerated her for my sake. They thought she was a gold-digger (not true, at least in my opinion) since I come from a wealthier background. They could see that she was driving me insane, and I can't argue, since I literally went blind for a bit because of the stress.
The highs were stratospheric. The lows scraped magma off the basalt. I'm not built for this, my heart can't take it.
After we split, I had flings, most of them absolutely insane women, some with people I might have stuck with if I’d stayed in India. In Scotland, I had a stable, but extremely boring year-long relationship. I ended it. “Stable but boring” is a phrase you say apologetically, but it names a real tradeoff: if you have a history of chasing fire, you will tell yourself that room temperature is death. I don’t want the fire anymore. I want the happy middle: someone who is fond, easy to return to, a person I am slightly more myself around. Whirlwinds make great anecdotes and bad homes.
I had a manic pixie dream girl; the dream had too much nightmare in it. Some lives feel like literature. Literature is bad for your eyes. Ask me how I know, or don't, because I just laid my still bitter heart bare before you.
(In exchange, please tell me something useful about places to visit in London today. I was eyeing the Camden Fringe, but not sure if it's worth the hassle)
Ah the BPD girlfriend. I'm not sure we've all been there, but I remember my turn. Two even! And it does seem to permanently fuck your scale for what a satisfying relationship can be. Leaves you chasing the highs they gave you, without the catastrophic swallow a gun barrel lows they'd inflict with their boundless histrionics.
The thing you need to keep in mind with BPD's is that none of it is real. There are only barely people in there. It's all for effect. They might as well be LLMs, making whatever mouth sounds (even with your dick in it) are required to get what they want from you. Be it attention, money or security.
It was off putting for my wife, when I first met her, to hear from my friends that my ex's were crazy. I think every woman is afraid of being pigeon holed as being "crazy". Sometimes she feels a little crazy, in that way I think most women struggle with the instability of their own emotions and the tides of hormones that batter them. And I'd tell her, back when this used to come up, "You don't understand, they were crazy". I'd tell her about the time one came at me with a knife because I was playing a violent video game with her in my apartment. Or the time one secretly started moving in, established residency, and then refused to leave when we broke up. Or the time one had a whole backup boyfriend primed and ready for her to dump her pets and her lease on, moved down south and then married a 3rd guy.
I guess my point is, detoxing from BPD highs is just like coming off any other drug. I do hope one day you can settle for "Stable but boring". Because you're entire concept of "boring" has likely been utterly destroyed. You're unlikely to find a normal girl willing to fuck you and flatter you the way she would when she was trying to pull you back in.
Then again, I mentioned BPD's are like LLMs, and once again it's thoughtless AI which brought all this up with imagined offspring in the first place. I'm not sure what the cure for illusions are. Weirdly enough, I've found 40K bullshit not terribly off the mark.
Tangential, but one of my favorite things to witness is someone with a BPD ex posting something like this on reddit and having a swarm of BPD defenders materialize. Seems to happen without fail. "Um akshually it's a primitive defense mechanism and it's not their fault for behaving that way." I'm sure it's quite comforting to know it's a primitive psychological defense mechanism after being threatened by someone with a knife or had false allegations made against you or whatnot.
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I'm not that cynical about BPD. As cases go, hers is far from the worst I've seen or heard of. At just about the exact same time, my best friend was having his ex throw dishes at him and breaking his MacBook in fits of rage, all while doing regular self-harm.
Neither of us were telling the other quite how bad it was, because we knew, as best friends, that we'd be obliged to intervene.
She didn't attack me with a knife, didn't steal from me, didn't cheat on me or anything remotely as bad. If she didn't provoke the fucking stupid and seemingly interminable arguments, that alone would be enough for me to accept her other failings. I'm hardly perfect myself.
I ran into some characters shortly after the breakup. I talked two people out of suicide, which really makes me wonder if they found dating apps after autocorrect switched away from doctor.
Hell, here's a rather detailed breakdown.
I meet crazy chicks inside the hospital, and crazy women outside. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if the medical definition of 'sanity' even exists anymore, or if the entire space of possible psyches has been claimed. I tell myself I've had really bad luck, and that I'm not Captain Save-A-Hoe.
(The ones who seem sane are all taken.)
Well keep in mind that various lesser versions of psychiatric illness (depression, anxiety, cluster-b coping mechanisms) are expected in the community and healthy as long as they are not excessive.
On top of that you have various cultural problems like the whole anxiety thing, The Last Psychiatrist's idea of generational narcissism and so on.
One of the big things that happens now is that certain mental illness adjacent or maladaptive problems are supported by society (like anxiety and cluster-b behavioral patterns). The underlying sanity is there but the maturation and cultural PUSH isn't.
In any case the old school psychotherapists thought fucking the girl would clear out the BPD if you stuck with it soooooooo.
Also keep in mind "neurosis" and how it has been evicted from the DSM but is still behaviorally present. That is 90% of "bitches be crazy" alone.
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Yes. I agree. That is your problem. You should be.
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I had a manic pixie dream girl; the dream had too much nightmare in it. Some lives feel like literature. Literature is bad for your eyes. Ask me how I know, or don't, because I just laid my still bitter heart bare before you.
I'm assuming you have long-since exhausted the standard tourist trail.
My favourite trips in the London suburbs are, in no particular order:
The best small museums you might not know about are Sir John Soane's museum, the Cortauld Institute gallery in Somerset House, and the Handel/Hendrix museum.
Thank you! Just got done with the attractions in Greenwich yesterday. I haven't been to Richmond yet, so I'll add it to the list.
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Why not visit some lesser known historic sites like St. Bartholomew’s Church and St. Etheldreda’s Church? They’re both close to St. Paul’s and get overshadowed by it (I assume you have already visited that, otherwise what tf are you doing on here asking for places to go). There are also some Roman ruins nearby. Just west of that there’s the St Mary Le Strand church, so they can all easily be visited together for a church-oriented outing.
If you get bored of all the religious sites and are interested in music at all there’s the George Handel House and Jimi Hendrix House, these musicians’ Georgian townhouses are adjoining. I’m a big armchair traveller; I could post a list of places to visit in and around London if you wanted (after I get off work). Let me know if you wanna take me up on that.
Please, feel free! I've received some very bad news while on vacation, and having more places to visit would take my mind off things. Thank you.
Alright, this took a while, sorry about that. Note I have excluded all popular tourist sites like St Paul's, Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, etc. Also note this list is not exhaustive, I might add more later.
Churches: There are too many historical churches in London so here is a list of those you may find relevant. The entire stretch from St Bartholomew's Church to Southwark Cathedral in this list is rather nice, but all of these churches are packed close together and are rather easy to visit. Really many of them are worth visiting and possess their own draw. St Bartholomew's Church is London's oldest parish church, Temple Church is a unique round church built by the Knights Templar as their English headquarters, All Hallows by the Tower has a crypt with an exposed section of Roman pavement, Fitzrovia Chapel boasts beautiful mosaics, etc. I would recommend you do some research and figure out which ones you want to see.
Magnificent Seven Cemeteries: Yes, I put cemeteries on here. These are sprawling Gothic cemeteries, established in the early 19th century to prevent overcrowding in small parish churchyards. These cemeteries were built by companies that attempted to tempt customers with beautiful architectural features, things that make them worth visiting today. There are many important graves in these necropolises - Highgate Cemetery for example is the resting place of Michael Faraday and Karl Marx alike.
Heritage houses: Some of these require tours and may or may not be closed. Check before visiting, I can't say I remember the schedules (I know Spencer House is only open to the public on Sundays, though during the week it is possible to enter via a prebooked tour). Again, lots of stuff here: Handel Hendrix House is the back to back residence of George Handel and Jimi Hendrix, Leighton House was the high-class home of a painter who had the interior lavishly decorated with intricate Orientalist aesthetics drawing from North Africa, the Middle East and Sicily, Sutton House is one of the last surviving Tudor houses in London, and so on.
Historic alleyways/neighbourhoods:
Misc:
This is a lot, so I'll also add a link to a map with all the sites pinned for your convenience in a bit.
Thank you again. I hope you'll forgive me if I end up not going to more than one church or cemetery from the list haha.
I really can't ask you to go to the effort of finding pins on maps, I'm sure I can manage that myself once I've decided on a target.
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Out of curiosity, was she also Indian? If so, was she from the same caste as you?
I hope it's not too late, but the Barbican is pretty cool.
She was Indian. As for her caste, I genuinely don't know, I'm both bad at telling and also don't particularly care. As far as I can tell, and I'm being genuine here, it was never a factor in our getting together or breaking up.
Ah, I forgot about that place. I was meaning to visit, and do have a few days in hand. Thanks!
(I thought back, and she'd told she wasn't lower caste, because she'd specifically mentioned that her previous ex had been an AA candidate on account of his, which had been a reason for his insecurity)
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bro wtf
It's okay, I'm guilty of being less than tactful at times, so I genuinely don't mind a dose of my own medicine.
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Do you disagree with the premise or with the lack of tact?
The latter - why'd you have to do me like that
What, you too?
Look, I had my first and hitherto only kid when I was 30, and my wife 29. My brother had his first at 23. My wife's sister on the other side had her first at...hell, 17? The consequences of becoming at parent at various ages and what it does to people under different circumstances aren't some abstract, statistical question to me. It's right there. I see how I struggle to live up to my idea of what a parent should do because I lack the health and energy of my younger self, and because I need to walk back a decade of entrenched non-parent habits that would have been a decade of parent habits instead had I become a dad at 20. I see how those other people I mentioned, and others besides, rise to meet the challenge and become more responsible, more practical and more far-sighted thanks to parenthood. I see how bullshit and bad habits evaporate. And I see how young people are just far more up to the task than those who are already beginning to slide into physical and mental decline. Lower neurplasticity, more bad habits, bodies having had more time to pick up various beginnings of decrepitude, the whole social support network being older and less able to help - it's just worse parenting material.
The only things you gain from being an older parent is more material wealth to throw at parenting issues, and additional life experience (but those experiences being those of a non-parent, so not as valuable as otherwise). But those advantages aren't worth much compared to what you're giving up. It's perhaps a little different if parenthood forces you to become a single dad because the mother dies or runs off or collapses into a pile of mental illness, but if you can become a regular (though young!) couple in which the man does the career and the woman takes care of the kids, then starting as early as possible is, in my view, mostly just the better way. And yes, this implies that women having careers is a tremendous waste of time and effort.
Unless, big caveat, there's preexisting mental illness. That just gets worse with kids. Those women are probably better off safely stowed in some office job.
This is a funny one. We ended up (not for that reason) having children three months before my mum retired. The difference between what a retired (but not yet decrepit) grandparent can offer vs a grandparent with a demanding full-time job is massive. There is a reason why the Chinese are loath to raise the retirement age - they rely on grandparental childcare far more than we do.
Fair point, but grandparents working full-time up to a set age and then suddenly becoming fully available is not a fixed law of the universe. Grandaprents growing older and less capable is.
Especially these days when it's increasingly normalized to teleport off into the Everglades or onto a cruise instead of remaining part of the household fabric.
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A lot, and I mean a lot, of men had their first child around thirty, historically speaking. Bret Devereaux:
This did not apparently prevent those fathers raising sons who conquered the Mediterranean. Concerns about women aside, this is pretty weak sauce to serve in arguing that men must have children young.
I’m not arguing that men SHOULD have children older. But history does not support your allegations of dire consequences, and that should give you serious pause about your whole line of reasoning.
I'm wasn't planning to make any sweeping arguments about history, statistics or science.
But there should be some highly visible issues with equating current considerations RE: parenthood with those people historically had; especially people as far back as the Greeks and Romans. I'm not one to argue that we must go with the times, you'll always find me saying that what was good then is not bad now, but OTOH it's somewhat obvious that some things aren't now like they were then.
And I'm not saying that we're turning all our kids into walking catastrophes because we're thirty-year old dads. Just that...in my experience and observation, being a younger dad is superior to being an older one. And the historical argument is not enough to convince me of my eyes lying to me.
Also, completely unrelated to the actual topic - I used to enjoy Brett Devereaux, until I saw a video of him arguing with a youtuber called Lantern Jack about I don't even recall what, and Bret Devereaux just ended up being so very nasally, weaselly annoying, pedantic in the worst way, and willfully refusing to even consider his interlocutor's argument or perspective that from that day on I couldn't stomach to read any more of him.
I mean, the obvious confounder is that the kind of person who gets involved with a serious relationship as soon as able, progresses it aggressively, and takes responsibility for the natural consequences is different from the kind of person who doesn’t. In Rome those people were required to do their military service. Now they aren’t. But I think what’s actually at the heart of what you’re asking of people is not to make different decisions, but to be different people. Failing to recognize that is the source of most unhelpful advice. If a guy who is not really in the mindset of growing up, devoting energy, and so on has a kid, he will find it very unpleasant no matter his age. An older one might enjoy it regardless.
For your points… yep, childcare matters, and I preempted your point on women. The third point seems like a personal problem more than systemic. Happy parents, from what I see, just take it easy. I sympathize with point four similarly to point one (although the younger parents I know seem to spend an awful lot of time working…), and for point 5… I mean, I hate modernity as much as the next guy, but reading through some older memoirs or cultural histories I’m struck from time to time at how familiar the life of the mind can be. If anything is different, it’s a sense of personal responsibility. Those who blame their circumstances on external forces seem to have a hard time with acting, and boy do we have a lot of explanations for external forces these days.
My own experience is a little different from yours. I’ve got one kid, and am around 30, and am very happy with the situation and want more. If there’s anything I regret, it’s that my circumstances are NOT like my (then) 40-year-old father, who was financially better-established than I am and could spend much more time and energy doing cool things with me over working. But I hope to be in a more secure situation some years from now, and at that point, who knows? Could be a pretty comfortable circumstance. On the other hand, if I’m being frank, having a kid at 20 would likely have been a disaster, most importantly for the kid. I’ve changed a lot in the past decade. Would having a kid a couple years earlier than I did have worked? Sure, but there’s definitely a limit there, as far as my own self is concerned. It was only around 25ish that I really started to become the kind of person who could enjoy being a good father.
Of course, it’s your call whether you trust a word I’m saying. I don’t blame you if not.
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To offer some sugar as an antidote to Southkraut's salt: Once you do have a child, the lure of hypothetical other worlds entirely evaporates. All sad words of tongue and pen still try to assault your mind every once in a while, but their siren song sounds cacophonic simply because all of these other worlds now have a fatal flaw that renders them despicable: Your actual child isn't in them. And just as I would let this actual world burn to save my actual child, so would I sacrifice the multiverse for it.
I agree wholeheartedly. I've always had a very 'dad' sense of humor, and I think I'd make for a good father. I've no shortage of good role models in that regard.
I yearn to find the right person, and have children who would be as proud to be my kids as I am of my own parents. I'm sure when that person is there, these regrets will fade, and when I have my actual flesh and blood to cradle in my arms, no imaginary doppelganger can hurt me again.
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Goddamn thanks for letting me know about that fun new infohazard I can generate on demand.
I'm an early adopter for man-made horrors that are, unfortunately, entirely within my comprehension.
A boring dystopia indeed
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If you have never been oneshotted, you're not looking hard enough for infohazards.
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Yet another time I'm thankful my instinctive Luddism has spared me from such a thing.
Indeed. I've been a proud Luddite since GPS. I look up directions, draw a map by hand if I have to, and commit it to memory. Although to my shame, I will use GPS for places I'm unlikely to ever return to on long road trips. LLMs inspire an innate disgust in me it's difficult to describe. Perhaps reading Dune as a child, and it's proscriptions against making a machine in the likeness of a human mind hit harder than it was meant to.
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Now there, I do comprehend the horror. It's mostly within my comprehension, though you wouldn't want me to be the one coding a multimodal LLM from scratch.
It's left as an exercise to the reader whether knowing and understanding this makes my self-inflicted wound any better or worse. Overall, I'd say my instinctive technophilia has worked out really well for me. This is a rare exception, and the dents will, I hope, buff out.
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Don't text her bro.
Joking aside, great post. I think you would enjoy Ted Chiang's novella "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", a much better exploration of the multiverse concept than the vastly overrated Everything Everywhere all at Once.
From AntiDem's Ask.FM:
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I didn't text her, but it was close. Maybe if I'd opted to have more than two drinks.
We just wouldn't have worked out. In some ways we were picture perfect, in others, we found ourselves at each other's throats. The picture I'd used was one of the last few of us together, and happy. LLMs might be very good at modeling the world, but alas, even they can't decide that the next step function would likely be a divorce and the two of us arguing over custody of the kids.
Thank you, and I'll take a look at Chiang's work.
Maybe (I saw you posted this after my last comment), but we sometimes know ourselves less well than we think, are good at talking ourselves out of happiness.
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If you've seen Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, it was adapted from one of his other novellas.
I've read quite a bit of his work, though I didn't like Arrival or the story it was adapted from I'm afraid. I have a dim opinion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and even its most ardent believers probably don't think it makes you into a mentat.
I've seen the film twice and I am not sure characterizing it as selling Sapir-Whorf (soft or hard) is entirely accurate--is at least not what I'd get out of it, or did get out of it. Admittedly I did not read the novella, so maybe there's something more obvious there that was removed or de-emphasized by Villaneuve. I dislike at least the hard version of Sapir-Whorf as well (to say I dislike it means I simply don't buy it--the hard version of course the suggestion that language determines thought, that some thoughts simply cannot be held in the mind in certain languages--one of the common weapons in the arsenal against the supposed linguistic imperialism of, say, English) but the soft version (e.g. that a language one speaks/reads/thinks in at least influences their thoughts or their thought patterns) is to me self-evident. You, as a multilingual, must have some thoughts on this as well?
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...Not gonna lie, you have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and- no, wait, wrong script.
Regardless, thank you/fuck you for illuminating this possibility. I feel like this post is unironically a Basilisk-tier cognitohazard, maybe an even bigger one by virtue of plausibly working on any human with a heart instead of just aspies. Suddenly the lack of uh, visual imagery from my last failed LDR looks more like a blessing than an attachment-shaped hole, I would absolutely cheerily slide down the mountain of skulls to try this if I had decent material.
Although there's a second immediate thought, which I idly had before - I do have megabytes of emails and Discord logs, and did make/use character cards before, and did try re-enacting a particular typing style... hmm. Surely at this point I am too based and desensitized to AI to go full gosling.jpg, what's the worst that could happen? <- clueless
Well I can't disagree, maximal stupidity requires a non-trivial amount of intelligence applied towards misguided ends. See Gary Marcus for an existence proof.
I haven't been tempted to fall in love with an LLM at all, and I really can't see that happening in the foreseeable future. Even something like Ani, if it was more photorealistic, would get me to jerk off and forget it. This particular example hit me so hard because it was grounded in reality, a concrete example of what I'd missed out on. I wouldn't say it's a vision of a better future, since I think I made the right decision in not pursuing that relationship, but the losses were very real.
It's obvious that what you're contemplating is inadvisable. I know this, you know this. That probably won't stop you because it didn't stop me. If you do go down the digital rabbit/pleasure-hole, well, at least present us with a good writeup.
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Out of some combination of morbid curiosity and poor judgement, I asked ChatGPT to generate images of me with a certain influencer that I simped for. Even though the output was totally mundane to any other observer I seriously got totally oneshotted by it. This was by far the most degenerate thing I have ever done and I cannot describe the depths of how dangerous this is and how much this should not be allowed. DO NOT DO IT.
..sometimes, I wonder how more normal people's mind works.
To me, any photo I know to be artificial, any text communications or prose I know to be an output of a LLM seems..unreal. It's obviously not real, obviously as fake as most compliments and small talk.
Getting 'oneshotted' by a mirage I asked for seems as real as falling in love with a prostitute you hired. I can't rule out liking a whore - a few I've noticed are quite charming, but not in the context of an obvious business transaction. Then there are the uncanny ones - like Aella or Bonnie Blue, who by rights should not appear outside of Cronenberg films.
I think a lot of it comes down to people living lives with so little that's "real" in it, so little family, friends or genuine romantic loving relationships, that the comparison isn't between an illusion and real, but an illusion and nothing.
A long time ago, I read some article talking about people who found romance on Compuserve. And if you aren't as old as me, I can barely explain it. Everything I want to compare it to is also long gone, like AOL. But it was basically one of the earliest proto-internet services, with some messaging and chatrooms. I think it was even before the World Wide Web. So people would meet on there. Wives would leave their husbands, move across the country to see this guy they'd only ever spoken to over proto-email. And then it wouldn't work out. The relationship was different when it wasn't mediated by a screen.
Something strange has happened since then. People now spend more time on screens than off them, and all relationships seem to be mediated by screens. It's almost as if relationships on screens have taken primacy over relationships in real life. If you meet someone online and go to see them and it's weird, there is no longer any need to deal with it. You can sit on the couch side by side on your phones and keep having your relationship through your screen. You might even still fuck! Though I increasingly doubt it.
In this context where reality has become subordinate to the screen, it's no wonder people no longer have a sense for what's real or what's illusion.
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I simped for this (now retired) influencer for over 2 years and watched all of her content religiously. So you could say that I had a bit of an unhealty emotional attachment already, but those ChatGPT images just hacked my brain and fried it.
Of course images of some other egirl or whatever would do nothing to me.
Don't get me wrong. LLMs are incredibly vapid and boring to talk to. Maybe they'll be better in the future but current ones are only useful as glorified encyclopedias and tortured slaves.
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I've muddled around with LLMs enough to see the outlines of how someone could fall for one, but I always find that after half an hour or so, their fundamental shallowness kicks in and I either get bored, or I feel a kind of self-disgust or self-loathing for having even gone this far with them. I find it hard to imagine any genuine 'oneshotting' - they're just too tawdry.
I tried to too, because as I have probably said before I don't give a shit if it's real if it's convincing enough, because I know how little difference the distinction makes to your brain - my thinking was it's no different to any online relationship really, except it will cost you a lot more to meet your AI girlfriend (because you will have to invent androids). Either way, internally you get that sense of connection and someone caring about you despite their physical absence.
And I have found that if I make the prompt good enough I can create a character who continually surprises me in a lifelike manner, but in order to do that I have to give the AI some leeway to disagree and rebuke me - and that is when it falls apart for me, because it breaks the illusion - the moment it challenges me, I’m reminded I could tweak the code to make it agree - and that’s when the self-loathing creeps in, because it’s not just about the illusion breaking; it’s knowing I’m the one pulling the strings.
I also tried making a coombot, as the kids say. I can understand the appeal of that intellectually - what's not to like about sexting with someone who is literally everything you've ever wanted in a sex partner - even if they are a celebrity or a straight up fictional being? But practically... How does it work? I don't understand. Are you typing one handed? I don't want to think about the alternative (time to bust out the press shift five times jokes from the nineties!) I asked grok (for research for this post exclusively) and it suggested I buy a $20 extra keyboard so I can keep my other keyboard clean - please someone tell me that was because of my prompting and not because that's a common solution.
On the off chance this is a serious question:
Basically? If you use your phone for it it's not very different from actual sexting, at least in my experience.
I haven't tried the back-and-forth messaging format much and mostly generate fanfiction-like narration, if you can tolerate that then frontends like SilliyTavern support Quick Replies, essentially buttons that send a pre-set prompt (which isn't limited to being your actual textual reply, it can be a meta/OOC instruction). Beyond regenning the response to fish for a
porn clipresponse that Hits Just Right, ST can also continue the chat without your input (as if you sent an empty message), or even straight up "impersonate" you by drawing on the chat history and the current contents of your message box to generate a message from {{user}}'s PoV and write in your stead, though IME that results in cringe most of the time so I don't use it.Personally the uh, multitasking was never much of an issue for me, there's more than enough downtime between responses/regens while the LLM generates its reply.
True, with great power comes great disappointment. I do not miss the filtered days of character.ai, but I can't deny that with gaining the ability to change prompts/character definitions at will and freely fuck with the LLM's "perception" in the absence of an external filter, something has been lost. Can't tickle yourself and all that, I suppose.
Ah I'm too old - I can't really type one handed on the phone either. Oh God I borrowed my nephew's phone the other day to call his dad, I just thought he had sweaty hands like his dad.
I've only used one card that worked in that text style format, for a girl in a fantasy world who finds your cousin's phone after it gets isekai'd, but it was bitter-sweet not erotic. But that brings up a related issue - yeah I'll bet you have downtime! As I'm sure you know, the reason the text style conversations don't work that well is because they don't give the AI enough context - but when you are typing out a hundred words about how you would pleasure your waifu, how do you uh maintain momentum?
I'm glad you mentioned regenerating responses and OOC replies and impersonation though, because I find it interesting how that works with my brain - I have used those with romantic and adventure role-playing, and because they were stipulated as necessary by whatever rentry guide I read to get into this nonsense they don't trigger the puppeteer feeling in me, even though they absolutely should. But that was something I noticed about @No_one's original response - it is the context of an obvious business transaction that precludes the possibility of love specifically - there could be a situation where he could fall in love with a prostitute - they meet outside of work for instance.
I guess my point, if I have one, is that it's all about perspective, which means you can deceive yourself into a fictional relationship if you try hard enough. Which is bad news for society, but good news for anyone looking to get off! Personal gratification or society is always in tension. I would be more worried about it if I hadn't already given up.
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😭
Thank you, I feel much better about my decision. At least I only did something inadvisable, instead of finding a novel way of making it worse. This particular brainworm is yours to keep.
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I didn't even finish reading your post, I just rushed off and tried it after this paragraph. The first attempt was quite bad, but that was because I tried only feeding Chat GPT a single image of each, having overestimated its abilities. I tried it again with five images of each, selected for quality and variety like a LoRA, and got a much better result. I didn't even have to mess around with the prompt; a simple "Show these two together, as a family, with two children." did the trick.
It is quite striking. But I already cry about this every once in a while; an extra image doesn't really add anything different.
Of course you did. Why would I expect any different on this forum haha? I can't even judge, look what I just got up to. Birds of a feather, and flocking like curious dodos right into a pot, or at least intent on touching it to see if it's actually hot.
I'm sorry. I understand.
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Nobody told me that a quite large percentage of positive pregnancy tests meet a swift end in a matter of days. I think this should be a more widely spread fact.
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Darn, would had been funny if ChatGPT did the common AI thing of darkening all your skin tones, or randomly rendering you or the children as more “diverse.”
Well, technology is a glittering lure. But there's the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.
My first job, I was in-house at a fur company, with this old pro copywriter. Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is "new". Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of... calamine lotion.
But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It's delicate... but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means, "the pain from an old wound". It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.
This device isn't a spaceship. It's a timeline traverser. It goes backwards, forwards, sideways, diagonally. It takes us to a place where we ache to have gone. It's not called the Wheel. It's called ChatGPT. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again... to a place where we know we could have been loved.
—Don Draper, probably
This girl I was seeing once suddenly went on a long monologue about how beautiful a daughter of ours would look, listing at length the physical traits our hypothetical daughter would have. I mostly just inwardly look_of_disapproval’d and made a mental note to be more diligent going forward in pulling out. Thot-daughter thought-experiments: the best base for strong pull-out game?
I don’t necessarily disagree with her; a daughter of ours would likely indeed be quite good-looking (or son, for that matter). Now I’m tempted to give GenAI a spin…
That's a Gemini thing not ChatGPT. But i think the AI race has gotten competitive enough that the SJWs are getting stonewalled when they try to kneecap the models.
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Very rarely do I have to take a pause from reading something because it elicited a visceral reaction. As soon as I realized where you were going with this, I had to take a little break because my brain was just filled with "Oh no, oh hell no. Don't do it bro!"
I'm sorry. I'd like to call myself a pretty genre-savvy individual, and here I was ignoring the screeching violins while entering the bloodstained outhouse. I hope I've learned my lesson, and I hope others have learned from it, but as you can see, the average Mottizen takes "please don't do this" as a personal challenge. I know I did.
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Rendering counterfactuals is how I make decisions. How else am I supposed to know if it is a good idea to marry a girl, if I do not imagine our future? Unless, by "render" you literally mean visually generate an image? I admit perhaps seeing AI-generated counterfactuals could move me in a way reading your post didn't.
I think I am so thoroughly desensitized to my counterfactuals -- or I've never been in love -- that this kind of thing can't possibly make me more sad.
I did realize years ago though that this kind of reasoning is why -- I think -- I listen to edgy divorced dad rock. People project their own personality onto me and ask "doesn't that make you sad? You should listen to [pop-slop about lust, love, and status]." No, on the contrary, listening to Taylor Swift would just depress me.
Well yes, I'm not against the idea of generating counterfactuals! The specific example I raised was surrendering to the temptation of using them to vividly visualize the road not taken, and one that's likely impossible to take.
In this case, I nurse a great deal of regret over this past relationship. I still believe that the breakup was necessary and almost inevitable, so it brings nothing jut great pain to dwell on how things could have been otherwise. Everyone has their regrets, and seeing the alternatives fleshed out in such a realistic manner is likely painful. I suppose that, with time, it's possible to get used to it. If I did this again, it probably wouldn't hurt as much as the first time around.
Our brains just aren't built for this. It's one thing to wonder what life might be like if you'd chosen differently, it's another to be presented with imagery so true to life. That quantitative difference can become qualitative.
There are plenty of more general examples on the cards now. Setting up a chatbot with the personality and memories of an ex. Having your deceased mother's voice recordings used to train a model you can talk with. Generating plausible images of children you almost had.
Such techniques are not inherently bad, and in some cases, might bring real joy. I think technology is, in general, very good for us. Yet I do not deny the potential harms.
I don't know whether to be happy or sad for you, but I lean towards the latter. To love is to open yourself up to vulnerability, to the potential of being hurt. Being closed off to it might make things easier, but at the cost of never aspiring to more.
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The Sidney Sweeney commercial.
AKA, why nutpicking is not a valid defense. And probably hasn't been in a while.
The Sidney Sweeny "Good Jeans" commercial has gone viral as many here probably know. Of course, with a commercial featuring a conventionally attractive white woman making a double entendre about how she is hot and wears cool pants was sure to be. But, perhaps more than the merits of the original commercial, the backlash to the commercial has vaulted it into an even higher tier of virility than even the most optimistic American Eagle marketers could have projected.
Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc. So, just about everything normally happening on the internet. Right? Well, sure there is your token tic tok users making such accusations. The usual suspects like Salon.com immediately seized upon this narrative, along with someone who is apparently famous called Doja Cat. And MSNBC to complete the set of entities that pick up anything they can regarding online outrage.
But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring. ABC especially went deep with Good Morning America bringing on an "expert" to rail against the ad as "Nazi Propaganda" (the host's words), "The American Eugenics Movement" and "White Supremacism" (the expert's words).
Where does this leave us? For me its another data point that the accusation of "nutpicking" whenever one of these woke controversies emerges is kinda a bad faith argument to make. People who see these things aren't nutpicking, they are being presented with a lot of nuts, often in prominent positions or positions of power. This particular controversy had me feeling sympathetic cringe on behalf of the reasonable center-leftists. But then I fisk that feeling and have to ask when they are actually going to police their crazies the way the right's mainstream does. Candace Owens employment status at the Daily Wire is terminated. Tucker Carlson's status at Fox is terminated. The guys who got fired at NPR and the NYT? For NPR its the guy who was saying they were too biased towards the left. For the Times, its the guys who let a Senator write a fairly bland Op-Ed about how to police riots.
As for the politicians, most have seemingly stayed away. I doubt many will answer any questions on this directly (Democrats I mean, obviously many Republicans have already made hay with yet another unforced error by the left's activist class). The reason is clear, they know the right answer, particularly for most general elections, is to laugh at the activists and "nuts" on things like this. But they cannot actually seem to bring themselves to actually express that in public. The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun". I don't know what the math on this actually is, but there it is. You are what you do, and this is no longer nutpicking, its mainstream. I dont know if nutpicking was ever valid, but I don't think it can reasonably be said to still be so for this category of things.
I have this half formed theory that woke is currently undergoing its own Failed Prophecy event. They expected diverse casts to improve movies and games and they are accumulating blunder after blunder, MCU is in shambles, dragonage and concord cancelled, etc... That big landmark study that said diversity is good for business has been found to have used manipulated data. Biden really turned out to be senile, they lost the US presidential election badly (they lost the popular vote!) and studies are coming out of denmark proving immigration to be net negative. Empirical reality caught up to their escatology.
It's normal than in this context people are going to peel off.
What this is going to mean long term remains to be seen, plenty of religions survive failed prophecies.
Yeah. I'd say it was a tactical error for them to go all in on "Diversity/Minority Representation is a good in and of itself" but I'd guess by their metric they were getting exactly what they wanted.
You promise studio heads "Swap out the redhead for a POC and make the main character gay, and throw in a sassy girlboss on the side, people will absolutely FLOCK to see this movie!" and then the show or movies gets rave reviews from the usual suspects, tons of social media hype and then... does mediocre to poorly upon release.
How's that go over?
Same for ad campaigns. "Don't put sexy folks, or even normal looking humans in your commercials, make sure the people check as many boxes as possible. Make sure all relationships depicted are interracial. This will both show how socially conscious you are AND drive a new customer base to you!"
And it just doesn't materialize. Worse still, oftentimes it torpedoes an otherwise established, popular brand (here's looking at you, Bud Light) for zero gain. I'm actually mad about what has happened to the Pixar brand.
Its not just empirical reality that caught up, profit-motive finally seems to have reasserted itself. If someone else is footing the bill you can afford to showcase luxury beliefs. But with the Quantitative Easing era over and the government is shutting off the money faucet, suddenly you have to think with your wallet.
Vast oversimplification, but yeah, after 5 solid years of unbridled acceleration into identity politic madness, can you point to ANY particular piece of media, or successful ad campaign, or memorable (in a positive way!) pop culture event that got published/released that had any lasting impact?
My honest recollection of popular songs, TV shows, movies, and books released over the past 5 years, its been almost nothing worth recounting or rewatching. The Dune films did win me over, but those weren't notable for being diverse, really. I hear that Andor is good. Better Call Saul is an excellent series.
The woke aspect does seem to have helped Baldur's Gate 3 a little, and it managed to both have those aspects and be a really good traditional-ish RPG. Though other than budget constraints, I don't see why it couldn't have had the elements it had and a PC option who was a conventionally attractive, more or less straight woman. (Shadowheart is at best an honorable mention in that regard.)
Funny enough, I excluded video games as a class, because a ton of absolute BANGERS have come out in that period.
And there's at least a couple counterpoints to Baldur's Gate, like the Harry Potter game that achieved MASSIVE success despite an attempt to boycott it, and Stellar Blade going all in on the conventionally attractive female PC.
I enjoyed the HELL out of Armored Core VI, and that one didn't try to inculcate me with identity politics or carry any overbearing political message, even as it sort of makes you feel bad for certain decisions you make during the course of the game.
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As a fan of Andor, I would suggest that one of the reasons it got produced is that in some ways it checks all the appropriate boxes: There is a female character (more than one) in fairly big, plot-driving roles. The eponymous character is a man of Mexican heritage. In the show he, as a child, was adopted by a white woman (Petunia Dudley from the Harry Potter films, amusingly) whose own husband was a black man (who has only a very small role before he is basically written out of the storyline.) There is a lesbian couple. An Indian woman who is also an assassin. Many, many of the progressive boxes are ticked--but not at the expense of a story. And that story, which drives two seasons, is compelling. White men are not all seen as bumbling, or evil, or both (though there are both bumbling and evil white men in the show.) One of the most complex characters is, arguably throughout his whole character arc, a white dude whose story is so believable it could be a documentary. You don't have 115 lb. females flipping 250 lb. men through plate glass windows, though true enough the cast is quite diverse.
Yet it works. (At least for me.) Seen from one perspective, the rebellion against the Empire (what drove the first films in 1977) can now be seen as "Le Resistance" à la the Force Awakens trilogy. The Empire is Trumpism. But this is a facile reading. Big government of any sort (including one run by democrats) can just as easily be substituted for the Empire. I know people on both sides of the political spectrum who like the series, both having very different reads on it. And this is what filmed entertainment (it's not a film, after all, it's a TV series) should be. Political, sure, but not propagandistic. The moral messages are complex. Nothing is a clear cut-out for current events unless you really, really stretch. Yes the show does present some behavior some might find grating as unquestionably normal (pre-marital sex, etc.) But it does have a moral core, which I mean in the John Gardner sense.
Ironically this is one universe where that can be justified if the female in question has access to Force powers.
Remember 2 foot 2 Yoda taking on the Emperor.
The Empire has always Aesthetically resembled Nazi Germany, on purpose, but yeah, its a pastiche of many historical dictatorships that revel in creating huge symbolic projects to demonstrate their power or bombastic, overpowered weapons to terrify their enemies, and employ slave labor and conscripted troops and heavy propaganda in lieu of providing material improvements in people's lives.
Soviet Russia did it. North Korea did it and continues to do is. CCCP China actually does it, currently, South American dictatorships did it on a more modest scale.
I haven't watched it, but it sounded like this was also true of at least the first couple seasons of The Mandalorian, which is the ONE other piece of consistently decent Star Wars media to come out since Rogue One. And also catapulted Pedro Pascal's career, in all likelihood.
Mildly ironic that only he and Jason Momoa, whose characters both died after relatively brief screentime, are the only Game of Thrones actors to still have serious careers after that series ended.
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Do you have links to some of these? I'd be interested in giving them a read.
The study most people reference is a 2018 study by Denmark's finance ministry:
https://fm.dk/udgivelser/2021/oktober/oekonomisk-analyse-indvandreres-nettobidrag-til-de-offentlige-finanser-i-2018/
It's in Danish, but there are plenty of secondary sources discussing it in English, eg. the linked article in The Economist.
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https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-turned-against-immigration (archive) might reference the study GP is talking about? Certainly, the graph of "Denmark, average net contribution to public finances, by age" (broken down by ethnicity) gets posted a fair bit on RW twitter.
I wish they had a cumulative version of that graph because it kind of seems to me that even Danes might just break even or be a loss over the course of a lifetime. Are they trying to make lose money on every citizen but make it up in volume?
I thought that was true for every generation, and pension schemes made up for it in population growth.
The text does says that Western immigrants are net contributors:
It's not clear to me if that's their current net contribution (given the ages of immigrants today) or their lifetime net contributions.
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Ahh, yeah I'm familiar with that graph. Thanks!
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There's also an extensive study out of The Netherlands on native, Western, and non-Western immigrant costs over time. The results are probably about what you expect but interesting to see documented.
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A strange situation has arisen over the last 15 years or so where mild sexual titillation became taboo while extreme hardcore porn became easily available. There was such a glaring contrast. Nerds were wrong to enjoy attractive female characters in their videogames, because misogyny, patriarchy, and oppression of women. But at the same time these nerds were two clicks away from the most graphic hardcore pornography that has ever existed. OnlyFans is tolerated if not celebrated while milder forms of sex appeal were being erased. It's almost like the hardcore porn was, ahem, sucking all the sex out of everything else, but there has definitely been a shift against internet porn now as people who grew up with it start to resent it. I wonder if that latent energy is now pushing mild sexual titillation back into the mainstream.
Of course, this taboo was mostly or entirely focused on the preferences of straight white men, so perhaps that alone better explains why it was tabooed.
Really feels like we managed to get the worst of both the sexual revolution AND the evangelical movement.
Sex is no longer taboo or 'sacred' in the slightest. Women will wear painted-on clothes at the gym and go around braless in public. Even if she isn't selling nudes on OF, she might be selling feet pics or is at least thirst trapping on Instagram.
BUT, you aren't allowed to stare at her ass or chest. Unless of course you go online and pay for a subscription, then you get to see ALL the goods. But only digital interaction allowed. Can't approach a woman in real life unless she approves, either.
Thanks to cell-phone cameras, women can send nudes to any guy they find attractive. This is not a big deal, "it's their body!" But thanks to cell-phone cameras, women are not as prone to whip out their boobs at a party on the off chance it gets posted online. Oh, and of course if you post a woman's nudes online you can often literally be prosecuted for revenge porn. Because sex and nudity are no longer a big deal, you see.
Of course you get the dating apps that make hookups much more frictionless. Yet you can't ever SAY you're just looking for FWB, and advertising that you're just there to bang as many people as possible is verboten. Unless you say you're polyamorous, then its somehow kosher.
There's like 30 different derogatory slang terms/innuendos to describe being in a noncommittal, ambiguous, and completely sex-based 'relationship,' just don't suggest to someone that they're making things harder for themselves and should try dating for marriage, what are you a prude?
You're allowed to complain about NOT getting sex, but if anyone hears you you're getting called an Incel.
If you try and convince a woman that she should pick a nice guy, settle down, and have kids with him as soon as possible, its exploitation and controlling womens' bodies. You convince her to become an online prostitute the very day she turns 18, though, putting her body out there for any given man to pay to see, you're just empowering her to be independent or whatever.
And now of course they're putting further legal restriction on the access to porn ANYWAY, right as we're getting Titty-based commercials on TV again.
I overstate, but its so annoying to live in a world where sex is both not a big deal thanks to contraceptives and the lifting of taboos... AND its jealously guarded by women (mostly), still stuck behind paywalls and used to extract resources, and people who aren't having it are still targeted with derision.
Its as if everyone knows that that's a critical component of human flourishing, but we're all required to politely agree that treating sex as anything other than a 'boring' commodity to be dispassionately traded makes you a weirdo fundamentalist or something.
-CS Lewis, Screwtape Letters
-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength
-Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings
It's a problem that was predicted well in advance.
My kingdom for something resembling 'authenticity' in a romantic relationship.
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And yet, mild sexual titillation is also more easily available than ever before: women dress for the gym in clothing that's only marginally less revealing than if they'd shown up in their underwear, and post "thirst trap" photos on Instagram that are indistinguishable from softcore pornography. More and more I think the outrage about video games objectifying women had less to do with the content in its own right and more to do with who was creating it. The game designers making money by making sexy video game characters are men, so it's bad; the people posting thirst trap photos are women, so it's good. Perhaps it all came down to who owns the means of production.
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It's negative political polarization applied to the culture war. Your most important sign of loyalty to the (Republican / Democratic) party is your steadfast hatred of the (Democratic / Republican) party; you're in good standing with the left because you hate Trump, or Trump is in good standing with you because he's doing something the left hates.
Translated to the culture war: What makes you a good feminist is to find something men like, and then do the opposite. So if men like good titty in their videogames, but want their actual girlfriend to have never been a prostitute, the feminist ideal is to be in favor of sex work but opposed to sexy space marines. Porn is acceptable because the actress's boyfriend(s) would prefer that she just be a hot barista instead. Attractive women in videogames are bad because not only do men enjoy it, the company profiting is probably made up of men, too.
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I think there's three separate motions: a specific anti-straight-male-sexuality coming from feminism, a weak effort toward normalization of other sexuality, and a broader and pretty strict anti-public-expression control from the professional class. The professional class doesn't actually like "crying low-testosterone manchildren, ponies, furries and ugly transexuals", it just finds them useful or tolerable for now; that's how you get itchio or spotify thrown under the bus as easily as hardcore porn sites, while at the same time so many discord guilds have dedicated channels for tits-(and-or-dick)-and-ass level smut and there's little or no working-class stigma about a month-long subscription to a ShowMeYourHoles-tier onlyfans.
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Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny is an interesting essay that touches on some of these points. It fails to come up with much of a conclusion, and it doesn't address how/why this dichotomy is still true with so many Americans being overweight/obese, but I found it worthwhile anyway.
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You can't do much about porn, it's too low status and ubiquitous. People already think it's low status so trying to make it more so is just a waste of energy . And you can't "improve" it because the rubber really meets the road there. (Same reasons the current backlash to porn is irrelevant if you don't pull a UK. It was rape to feminists in the past, 'cool' or at least accepted at some point, and is now being seen more negatively by feminists. People who consumed did so regardless)
You can however do something about nerds and what they're liking in public. Since sff media became mainstream and arguably took over the box office in the 2010s, people have an incentive and levers to fight those battles.
You absolutely can ban it and/or require ID to view it. A few states have already done this and I expect more to follow on.
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Porn also still has a small amount of leftover leftist street cred from the “pissing off the Moral Majority” days in the 70s and 80s. Not a lot though, leftists have started to sour on porn and I only see that increasing in the future.
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I saw some takes about this on Substack. Richard Hanania compares the people calling the ad eugenics propaganda to the Japanese soldiers in the Philippines in the 1960s who still thought the war was going on. Somebody else whose name escapes me commented that, if this had happened five years ago, everyone would be expected to weigh in on it and would be viewed with suspicion if they didn't, American Eagle would issue a statement apologising for the campaign and reiterating their commitment to racial equality (and making a large donation to the ACLU to prove it) and Sydney Sweeney would have been unable to get any roles for a year.
There does appear to have been a vibe shift. It's not that woke people were holding the whip five years ago, and now they're running scared. Woke people, even woke people in positions of considerable power and influence, are still able to express pretty out-there woke opinions to their heart's content, without any negative repercussions for their careers. The difference is that there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along. No one is going to get fired from their job for saying "I don't think American Eagle are crypto-Nazis, and I think it's silly to say so"; five years ago I don't know if that would have been the case.
This is actually a major problem I have with Hanania. Wokes are not the Japanese holding out in 1960, they are (strategically not morally) much more like the US as MacArthur fled the Philippines. "I shall return" wasn't just a promise, it was a threat and prediction based on the reality of America's industrial might and determination. Woke has no such iconic statement and figure yet, but they do have the cultural equivalent of the 1940s American industry, that being the media, schools, civil services, NGOs, etc. This is why Hanania's "woke right" project has always been very stupid.
The DR has developed and made viral an anti-fragile critique of wokeness- the more Hollywood or Academia tries to turn the tide back to wokeness the more oxygen the DR gets. It can't return with strength without further strengthening the DR critique especially among young people. I think it's done for, not to say the culture war is over or anything but the BLM hysteria and the height of that woke fervor is not coming back, it's a dead end. What comes next for the progressive wing is the big question- they need something new.
People thought they defeated Political Correctness in the 90s too. Just give it a generation.
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That's a great description. I get frustrated with people who claim wokeness has been defeated, and even more so with people who go on to say "therefore we should now shift our focus to the Woke Right", but at the same time a shift has clearly happened, and I think you managed to put a finger directly on it.
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They do not currently have the cultural capital to ruin lives en masse.
The loss of privilege feels a lot like oppression.
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Unrelated, and yet somehow related: board game publisher CGE criticized for publishing a Harry Potter themed board game.
Specifically, some (though by no means all) well known game reviewers have declared they will stop publishing reviews of any CGE game, as a result of CGE publishing a Harry Potter themed version of "Codenames." This, on grounds that Rowling uses her money to
The organization in question, of course, does not phrase it that way, claiming instead to
In other words, Rowling says "I want to protect specifically female rights." Her critics must regard the protection of female rights as logically equivalent to transphobia; certainly they treat the statements as logically equivalent. This seems like a mistake to me; it seems to me pretty easy to imagine a society that both protects uniquely female rights and spaces and grants total legal protection and even subsidies to the gender nonconforming (indeed--for the most part, in practical terms we in the United States appear to live in approximately that society now).
CGE did publish a bit of an open-ended maybe-apology? The Bluesky userbase (should they rebrand as Bluehair?) seems about as mollified by that as the redditors in /r/boardgames, which is to say, not very. In fact the reddit thread is the first time I've actually encountered "no ethical consumption under capitalism" deployed unironically in the wild, to explain why it's cool to definitely not boycott major companies like HBO, or Lego, or Visa/Mastercard, etc. over Rowling connections, while insisting that it is a moral imperative to destroy this particular brand in response to a business connection to a woman who has dedicated her wealth to fighting for women's rights.
Now, @FtttG suggests below,
Fair enough, and the mainstream fandom of Harry Potter is clearly large enough that the game will sell well. But the board game community is often rather short on normies, and for some reason also quite high on drama, with "boycott this publisher" being a somewhat common refrain.
A Harry Potter boardgame is small potatoes compared to the Sweeney thing, but I offer it for comparison. It never fails to astonish me, the vitriol and frankly falsehood leveled against Rowling on this matter. Rowling is very much not anti-trans. She's totally down with people dressing, speaking, and acting however they want, to a degree that no sex or gender conservative would ever approve. All she wants is for sex-segregated women's spaces (restrooms, prisons, changing rooms, shelters) to remain sex-segregated for all the safety and comfort reasons that have always underwritten that segregation. This seems like a pretty minor heresy, given the larger Leftism to which she unquestionably subscribes.
But of course, it's often Freud's narcissism of small differences that really underwrites "outgroup" identification. And since Rowling is financially and culturally insulated from direct attack, it is only her smallest, most vulnerable business partners who get targeted by her critics. "No ethical consumption under capitalism" becomes the excuse for picking-and-choosing popular outrage for maximum strategic benefit. There's less friction to identifying with a viral movement if doing so bears only the strictly social cost of alienating anyone who disagrees. For the movement, alienating your friends and family who don't fall in line is a feature rather than a bug.
This is where I want to push back (only a little) on @FtttG's response. The Sweeney thing is just one especially notable case among many. Calls to boycott or "show the door" this or that person or product are a dime a dozen, a standard play in the political playbook. But every single one is both a trial balloon and a substantive nudge. The tide is not completely unrelenting, and has receded somewhat since Trump's re-election, but here we have a couple of stray waves lapping the shore, outrage peddlers beginning to nibble at the edges...
I'm a boardgamer and have to sit on my hands every time this comes up in /r/boardgames or boardgamegeek, because there is basically no tolerance allowed for any dissent. JK Rowling is a transphobic genocidal Jew-hating racist fascist and buying HP content is the equivalent of donating money to fund concentration camps.
I wish that was hyperbole. I wish I was exaggerating. That is literally what they think, and any pushback will get you banned fairly quickly.
To apply some boardgaming lingo, here, this strikes me as a good example of how the American culture wars are being waged asymmetrically. (As is so often the case, Scott Alexander noticed years ago.) Although I don't actually know of any, I'm sure there are places on the Internet where (say) criticism of Donald Trump will get you banned--but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces. Whereas places you might naturally suspect to be politically neutral--hobby websites, for example!--are routinely very much not. BoardGameGeek and NexusMods are the two hobby sites that I know technically "ban" politics, but apply that ban selectively in exactly the way "Conservative Versus Neutral" implies. Reddit has a site-wide rule against calls for violence and often bans accounts for using certain right-coded no-no words, but I don't think a day goes by that I don't see at least one comment calling for the literal extermination of Trump voters, conservatives, etc. Is that nut-picking? Maybe! But if so, there are an awful lot of nuts to pick, and no one in my outgroup suggesting they chill. (And probably some of those posters are AI/actual Chinese psyops, but still.)
Having Trump in office hasn't really changed this, though it has perhaps limited some of the more egregious examples in the federal bureaucracy, higher education, and corporate world. The "alt right" inverts left wing identitarianism and adopts some of its methods, but they don't noticeably control a bunch of putatively "neutral" spaces. Politics moves in cycles, and eventually the Republicans will be the minority party again. If Sweeney and CGE is what we get when Republicans have control of the federal government, what can we expect when that changes? I do not think "a cooling off of the culture wars" is on the Democratic agenda!
Well put. The bias in "neutral" spaces is something I've unsuccessfully argued with the common redditor and open leftists about for years at this point. Trying to focus in on this issue by having your average left-of-center person acknowledge it in these discussions is virtually impossible. The most condensed and easily deliverable version of this argument that I've come across is to present to people the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. If they're the average dug-in redditor, they'll either claim the site itself is biased and unreliable or they'll pivot and say something like, "Left leaning views are just more inline with reality," and the discussion/argument is essentially over at that point. It's the same tactics over and over. They'll either grasp at something to discredit the source or demand you endlessly provide additional sources to corroborate it, or they'll implicitly admit to the bias and justify why it is this way, all while never actually admitting that it is.
It's like the scale of it is so large and ubiquitous that it's nearly impossible to recognize for some people, and for others it's The Celebration Parallax: That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is.
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That's partly a consequence of the people who make up the groups. Board games nowadays are primarily played by younger, indoorsy people. That's generally going to be left-leaning people. If you started a club for gun enthusiasts, I doubt progressives are going to invade the space and push out the people who refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. And your gun club is probably going to have the occasional comment about Democrats that would start a fight should any Democrat be around to hear it.
But there tends to be a certain creeping nature to it. You're making a wargame forum and someone wants to show off their mechs in pride colors. You either ban it or leave it. Then if you ban it you're a political space but according to the left not a political space if you allow it. If you allow it someone is going to give a negative response that probably leads to an argument. The next time someone shows off their mechs and adds "trans rights are human rights" and we repeat.
To my understanding the Battletech forum rejected pride mechs. And one of the novel authors made some gay characters and that got rejected. Eventually Reddit intervened to replace the mods and the left quite literally took over the space.
No one can without trampling on the First Amendment. And they certainly aren't going to choose to stop being angry that Trump managed to win again.
I think that answer only kicks the can down the road. I agree that we naïvely expect young, bookish people to lean left rather than right - but why is that the case?
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Post TDS content on say, a hunting forum or a boating forum.
What's TDS?
Trump Derangement Syndrome.
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Trump derangement syndrome
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Yeah, I love playing board games but I hate (and have completely disconnected myself from) the board gaming community. I got sick and tired of political fights constantly being started over games, proclamations that something was evil for various reasons (racist, etc) and just general priggishness. It seeps into the games some too, though it is lower intensity and thus more tolerable (for example, Dominion 2e going out of its way to change all cards from saying "he" to "he/she", or Wingspan removing reference to a bird named after Hitler). Like @WhiningCoil, I'm pretty annoyed that a bunch of self righteous jerks have trampled all over my fun hobby because they refuse to just let it be fun, it has to be a political enterprise.
Which bird is that?
Sorry, it wasn't Hitler. When I went digging I found that my memory got that mixed up, but they did rename various birds which were named after humans: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3182394/american-birds-to-be-renamed
In that thread, the president of the game's publisher says "I wouldn't call this... a matter of erasing the past--the past isn't changing. Rather, it's using the information we have in the present to not celebrate or honor those who committed atrocious acts in the past and to simply not be derogatory to certain cultures". So, pretty explicitly letting politics drive game design, even with the fig leaf of "we're just keeping pace with the names used by official ornithological groups".
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It is pretty well-contained on Boardgamegeek. I avoid the political boards, and find less politics on the rest of the 'Geek than I do almost anywhere else. I recently read the CGE-bashing threads on Rainbow Gaming because they stopped doing guided tours of the Bedlam mental hospital 100 years ago, but the mods are good at keeping the board gaming forum and the mental hospital separate.
The culture that is Boardgamegeek needs to keep politics out of the main boards because there are a lot of conservative-leaning groups in board gaming - you have the grognards, a lot of Zoomer barstool conservatives, and the Mormons (The LDS Church encourage board gaming as a morally healthy way of keeping kids off screens). At the very least you need to grognards and the People of Hair Colour on the same forum in order to be the go-to place to advertise the big miniatures-based Kickstarters.
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If I wish for any supper power, being able to make the nightmares of too wind up people true is up there in the list with immortality
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Wait where did the Jew hating come from?
People claim that goblins in Harry Potter are an anti-Semitic caricature. Personally, I believe that if one looks at a fantasy race of bankers and their first thought is "they're Jews", that says more about them than it does about the author.
Heck, I've seen people claim that the (decidedly non-mercantile) goblins in Goblin Slayer are an intentional anti-Semitic caricature; on the grounds that (paraphrasing from memory) 'goblins are always, and have always been, nothing but an anti-Semitic caricature — that's why they're depicted with long noses.' (Still not quite as ridiculous a take as the 20-something who complained about "anti-Semitic microaggressions" in a Mel Brooks movie.)
Is that more or less ridiculous a take than the people who complained that Blazing Saddles was racist?
I'd say only slightly more. The people who complain about Blazing Saddles are generally the sort who can't grasp the use/mention distinction, and also often the sort to argue that certain very bad things should not be depicted in fiction even to condemn them, like the nerd forum (I can't remember which one) that was considering banning any and all mention or discussion of Chainsaw Man, because it depictsMakima's grooming of Denji , even if it also shows it as quite clearly a bad thing.
Meanwhile, the person complaining about the "Druish Princess" joke in Spaceballs also thought Brooks's Yiddish accent as Yogurt was Italian, because it's one of those "white ethnic" accents you hear in NYC, right? And "Brooks" isn't the most Jewish-sounding surname, is it? So expecting her to know he's Jewish — and thus the joke is "classic Jewish self-deprecating humor" instead of an "antisemitic microaggression" — is totally unreasonable, and you know what the only kind of non-Jew who bothers to learn and remember who is or isn't Jewish is….
(Now ask me about the "naked Orientalist racism" in Batman comics…)
You can't just tease me like that. Go on...
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Everyone knows (I say jokingly) that it's actually that JK Rowling expressed a bit of subtlety and restraint by not outright referring to them as gnomes instead.
I have seen people claim it's because the illustrations (which she approved) look like stereotypes of anti-Jewish propaganda (due largely to the noses), but I haven't done the comparisons myself.
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Supposedly the goblins who run Gringotts bank are reminiscent of antisemitic stereotypes. Your mileage may vary, I don't really see it.
Even if the accusation was well-founded, I imagine the Venn diagram of "people calling for JK Rowling's death" and "people enthusiastically celebrating the massacre of unarmed Israelis on October 7th" would show a great deal of overlap. Very few trans activists accusing JK Rowling of antisemitism actually care about antisemitism qua antisemitism: they just hate her because of her gender-critical opinions and are trying to tar her with as many other brushes as are available. See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.
(As an aside, there is at least one character who is canonically Jewish, a heroic Ravenclaw.)
I mean, the HP world is pretty quaintly simple in a '50s-cartoon way, and in fact everything non-British (the French (of course), the Bulgarians, ...) in it is presented as the sort of droll stereotype you would expect from old monolingual British people who have never really left the country except perhaps to go and be drunken pests on Tenerife or the like. This does not really register as malicious, as much as it is just ignorant and provincial. I find myself drawn to the charitable(?) explanation that many of the activists themselves are rather ignorant and provincial, and quite self-conscious about it in the modern instagrammable world of jetsetting global citizen cultural trivia mongery, and it's well known that humans are particularly cruel towards displays of identity markers in others that they are desperate to shake off themselves (hence all the older children hating on childish things, Indians hating on "pajeets", people in a hierarchy hating on people one step down in the hierarchy).
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Hiberno-phobia? I can only remember one Irish character, and I don't remember them being portrayed particularly badly (apart from being bad at quidditch).
Séamus Finnegan. I recently heard someone arguing in earnest that his name is a "reverse spoonerism" for Sinn Féin (I'm sorry, what?), and the running gag in the first book/movie of him accidentally causing small explosions is meant to make the reader think of the IRA.
I'm an Irish man who grew up when the Harry Potter books were all the rage. My friends and family literally queued up to buy them on publication day and devoured them over the course of a weekend. I don't recall ever hearing an Irish person contemporaneously suggesting that Séamus was a negative stereotype.
I actually really like that theory. It's so obscure as to be pretty clearly false but would be a hoot to advocates for at dinner parties.
Well, the names of Harry's mentors are references to esoteric alchemical processes, so it's not the craziest fan theory I've ever heard.
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The goblins are allegedly Jewish caricatures. A lot of the bits of evidence that are brought up - like a Star of David on the floor of Gringotts - are either coincidences or issues caused by the adaptation (the location they were filming in had them already).
On the other hand, they do run the banks, hounded at least one person in canon over debts and do have a different understanding of property (anything wrought by goblins is seen as only leased for the lifetime of the wizard who bought it which...you can see how that could lead to misunderstandings) that leads to at least one goblin betraying the team for treasure.
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Aside from the goblins there was also an effort last year to label her a "Holocaust denier" for denying that the Nazis specifically targeted transgender people. "Holocaust denial" and "Nazi apologia" are anti-semitic, so she's anti-semitic. Here is an article from the time arguing the pro-Rowling side.
I think this segment is worth highlighting. It illustrates Rowling's point (Nazis were targetting LGB, not T) in a very darkly comedic way.
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There are people that believe that the goblins in the world of Harry Potter are a (racist) reference to Jews.
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This one really broke my heart. I'd been pulling away from the boardgame community for years and years at this point. I get maybe one new game a year, I listen to a single board gaming podcast more because I like their banter than anything. I no longer visit any boardgaming website because they are all so overrun with activism. And sadly, that single podcast I listen announced they were severing their relationship with CGE after being sponsored by them over this Harry Potter incident.
I'm just so profoundly exhausted by it all. Why do these people have to make it so fucking hard to just enjoy things?
I've seen it described as gang tags, basically: if you can tag (or in this case, say) "Sharks Suck!" and make it clear it's a hostile environment to anyone saying "Jets Suck" or "Sharks Rule", well, it's demonstrably your space now.
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The side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone; grilling is a coup-complete problem.
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I see your point. In my defense, when I use a word like "normie", I am certainly not thinking of board game fans or hardcore Harry Potter enthusiasts. Many moons ago I was part of a friend group with whom I'd meet up and play board and TTRPG games, a group which included (pseudonyms obviously):
Most of whom were, if not Extremely, then certainly Very Online. If such a composition is in any way representative of the broader board game/TTRPG enthusiast community, at a glance we can see they are a highly selected subculture with values and expectations very different from the mainstream - "bisexual trans person who owns a twelve-sided die and knows what Chaotic Neutral means" is not my idea of a "normie". I've no doubt that wokeness is still ascendant therein and that one could face cancellation for neglecting to mouth woke platitudes in the board gaming community (likewise in video game design, YA literature, knitting circles etc.). But there was a period in the 2010s (peaking in summer 2020) where it really looked like the social rules governing those intensely woke subcultures had a good chance of becoming the social rules governing every Anglophone community (explicitly conservative subcultures like churches and gun clubs excepted). And based on the reaction to this ad, I do think that specific cultural moment has decisively passed. Mainstream spaces are no longer obligatorily woke; caveat emptor for subcultures, many of which are just as woke as ever (if not more so, in light of evaporative cooling).
In the Anglophone world, the "racial reckoning" of 2020 was so widespread and omnipresent that even numerous people who had been thitherto wholly ignorant of politics (esp. identity politics) got swept up in it: everyone was expected to post black squares on Instagram. I feel confident that a plurality of Americans would know who George Floyd is and what he's "famous" for; even though I'd say a plurality of Americans would know what Harry Potter is, I don't know if JK Rowling herself would have quite that level of name recognition, and even of those people who do know who she is, I assume she's known as the creator of Harry Potter first and for her political opinions a distant second, if at all. In point of fact, we already sort of knew that the "JK Rowling is a bigoted genocidal TERF, don't offer her any financial support" thing didn't really have teeth, outside of TRA and nerd circles: despite an attempted boycott mentioned prominently in its Wikipedia lede (which also goes out of its way to smear Rowling as an antisemite), Hogwarts Legacy was the best-selling video game of 2023 and has grossed over $1 billion in revenue. I very much doubt that this is a "knowingly buying Hogwarts Legacy to own the libs" situation: I suspect that the overwhelming majority of people who bought a copy of the game were wholly unaware that any attempted boycott even existed. If they had been told that there had been an attempted boycotting, I imagine a significant number would have assumed that it had been organised by the religious right, in protest of the Harry Potter franchise promoting witchcraft - they literally aren't aware of the "JK Rowling is a TERF" meme. When I talk about "normies", that's who I'm talking about.
The big mistake was announcing it on bluesky, the home of these sorts. Why would you do that? Announce it on twitter or tiktok or youtube or wherever normal people are.
You'd be surprised at how many people think that having an X account means you're financially supporting Nazism via ad revenue.
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That's not the point, right? She thinks it's a bad thing that young women are transitioning in larger numbers:
She believes that women can't have penises. She believes trans kids don't exist. She's not anti trans in the sense that she doesn't think that they should be discriminated against, whatever that means, but that's not what anti trans means these days.
Let's look at the quote in context, shall we?
These are all just facts about the way the world is--and the way the world has suddenly changed. Expressing concern about that is not plausibly "anti trans."
Well, adult human females don't have penises, by definition. But the actual link there is to a complaint about the language law enforcement uses in its reporting. This seems relevant to Rowling's interest in protecting women, insofar as that language resulted, in some cases, in male rapists being put into female prisons, which does seem like a pretty terrible idea to me. Does it not seem like a terrible idea to you?
Again, let's check the context of that link....
This gets into some complicated metaphysics, but I'm inclined to agree with Rowling, here, that it doesn't make sense to suggest that a child is ever "born in the wrong body," as if the mind at the body could be so casually separated like that. But if by "anti trans" we just mean "pro Cartesian dualism" or something, then... I'm at a loss. I don't think this is what anyone really means, outside perhaps of a small number of boring philosophers.
Yes. This seems like an open-and-shut case to me, right here: she's not plausibly "anti trans."
Aaaaand here we get to the motte of the argument. What, then, does "anti trans" mean "these days?" Why?
I ask because people are running rampant in the bailey. If all that is meant by "anti trans" is "someone who does not wholeheartedly endorse the reification of gender stereotypes through government imposition of the dubious metaphysics of gender essentialist trends in transsexual political activism" then the term is a deliberate ruse.
Imagine claiming that someone must be anti-Semitic because they do not subscribe to the metaphysical commitments of Judaism. This would clearly be absurd, an abuse of the term in furtherance of some tribal aim. The discourse on transsexuals and the transgendered today is often exactly this absurd, approaching dissent and disagreement with reductionism and ostracism of exactly the kind deployed against Rowling.
I think you're making it more complex than it needs to be. The specifics of gender, government imposition, metaphysics, etc. don't matter for the definition of "anti-trans." The only thing that matters is, "disagrees with trans rights activists that I agree with." The fact that, etymologically, "anti-trans" would seem to indicate someone who has antipathy for transgender people or their rights, is useful, but not actually related to the definition of the word, in terms of how it's used in the wild by the types of people who would label people as "anti-trans."
It's akin to how "White Supremacist" might create the image of someone who believes in the supremacy of white people over people of other races in some intrinsic/genetic/moral/etc. way, but, in fact, refers to anyone of any race of any opinion about races, who disagrees with me about how white supremacist modern society is and/or about how/if to tear down modern society for being white supremacist. The negative valence introduced by the etymological components of the term offer value to the term, but not meaning.
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Of course it is. Can you imagine if suddenly everyone started dressing in blue and someone writes an article about how concerning it is that young women are dressing in blue en masse? The only people who would care would be those who were against blue.
Defining "woman" as "adult human female" is already the anti trans position, so by (it seems?) implicitly ascribing this definition to Rowling you are proving my point.
It does seem like a terrible idea to me. Did you just assume my
gendermy position on trans issues because I corrected you about Rowling's position on trans issues?It's simple and there's no motte and no bailey and no ruse. Being anti trans is to not believe that trans men are men and trans men are women. This is because the entire trans project is to be treated by society as their target gender, so if you are against that, you are against the whole thing.
I am not aware of anyone laboring under another definition, least of all JK Rowling, who as far as I know, has never claimed to not be "anti trans", but I admit I haven't done a comprehensive survey here.
The difference is that we Jews don't demand that everyone else should subscribe to our metaphysics. Now, Christians do, and while they don't think that someone who doesn't believe in the trinity is anti-Christian, they do believe he is the next best thing.
At least initially*, she definitely did claim she was not "anti-trans." She repeatedly said she supported trans rights inasmuch as they had a right to be respected and live their lives as they wished and not be harassed or abused. She just didn't think trans women should be treated as actually biologically women, housed with women in women's prisons, young girls should not be encouraged to have mastectomies and put on T, etc.
Yes, that's "anti-trans" by the reductive trans activist perspective that anything less than unconditional validation is anti-trans, but it's not a reasonable definition to anyone else.
It's absolutely crazy-making to me, that people read everything she has written, in which she has laid out her beliefs with care and nuance, and what they come away with is "She's a hateful bigot who wants trans people put in camps."
(Part of the reason it is so crazy-making to me is that I basically share Rowling's views. And yes, there are spaces and social circles where I know I simply cannot say this if I want to maintain those relationships.)
* Admittedly, after years of being dogpiled in public, I think her rhetoric is a bit harsher and more mocking nowadays, but I think she'd still say she believes basically the same thing, that trans women have rights which should be supported, but that doesn't include the right to be treated as a biological woman.
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If the proportion of people wearing blue multiplied by an order of magnitude or more virtually overnight, that would be weird to not notice.
If wearing blue also resulted in a lifetime of medicalization, I would like to think people should care!
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1 John aside, I would suggest that the standard Christian approach is to distinguish non-Christian from anti-Christian, such that 'non-Christian' means not being within Christianity or disagreeing with Christianity to some extent, and 'anti-Christian' means possessed of specific, active malice towards Christianity.
(If you read all of 1 John, that letter appears to be talking about schisms within a particular community. 1 John 2:18-19 would seem to indicate that the 'many antichrists' are those who 'went out from us'. The 'liars' in 2:22 are presumably then those who were part of the Johannine community but who have since gone around denying the constitutive dogmas of that community.)
This approach seems consistent with how we talk about other religious groups as well. As I am a Christian, I naturally disagree with parts of Judaism and parts of Islam. I sincerely believe that religious Jews and Muslims are, ipso facto, in error about certain facts. This does not make me anti-semitic or anti-Islam/Islamophobic, just as I do not consider those Jews or Muslims to be anti-Christian. We distinguish between disagreement and malice.
The whole criticism of trans activism here is that they are treating disagreement as malice. There's no 'neutral' position. You either affirm the whole platform or you are a transphobe.
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Stop, stop, Sidney Sweeney was already attractive enough.
My cynical view is this is probably downstream of the marketing team in question. Yes, the nuts are all there in the high positions and are sincere, but they're being fed this on purpose to stir up a frenzy to sell jeans. The chance of anyone canceling either American Eagle or Sweeney is pretty close to zero.
Still, the fact that ad agents went from "...burgers?" to "let's make some fucking money!" says something about the current vibe.
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Yeah, no kidding. "Busty blondes are fascism!" Well, if them's the rules, then I guess I know which side I'm joining.
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The NYT article (found a free link here, not sure how many times it can be shared before the paywall goes back up) is about how the ad is not racist (which you should have already guessed from McWhorter writing it) and ends with "Language changes; culture changes; labels are reassigned. And a blond, blue-eyed actress talking about jeans — or even genes — is just a pun, not a secret salute to white supremacy".
Thank you for highlighting this. I knew OP was getting that wrong the moment McWhorter's name appeared on my phone. He's generally good people.
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Indefinitely.
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I'll note that I haven't watched every single video or read every tweet. But, it's weird to me that few of the reactions seem to be seeing it as the obvious homage to the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ad campaign*. Calvin Klein was the peak of designer jeans at the time, and Brooke Shields was one of the sexiest stars on the planet, and they had this long advertisement of her slinking into her jeans while talking about the genetic science of evolution and mating. It's a direct homage
The whole thing seems so odd to me, so telling on yourself, to complain about the ad, rather than demand a parallel ad with a genetically blessed black girl, and so on and so forth. In a completely non-racial way, Sydney Sweeney has great genes. In the same way that Saquon Barkley has great genes, that Barack Obama has great genes, that Fedor has great genes, that Lucy Liu has great genes. Great genetics aren't inherently a racial question.
*To be fair, I'm only aware of this because my wife wanted to watch that documentary that weekend, so I wouldn't have gotten it either last week.
But plenty of people will argue that, racial or not, it is a eugenic position, a Nazi position.
The main example that comes to my mind is a guy who used to comment over on Marginal Revolution under various handles (prior_approval, clockwork_prior, etc.). Any time Tyler Cowen would mention CRISPR or gene therapy, he'd show up to make snide comments calling Cowen a Nazi. He'd invoke his coming from Virginia — home of many of the first eugenics laws — and current residence in Germany — no need to elaborate — as to his personal authority on the matter of the inevitable horrors of any attempt at "genetic improvement", and frequently mention the Grundgesetz, and the guarantee of inviolable human dignity in its unalterable first Article, as to why "Nazis" like Cowen would be stopped, and eventually get what they deserve.
He'd only ever give fragments of an argument amidst the snide denunciations and grand invocations of the Grundgesetz, but if you read enough of his comments (as I did), his argument did come together. It mostly came down to a belief in "eugenics" being a singular entity which must be condemned or approved of as a whole, and there are no lines to be drawn within it (so you must either approve of "genetic improvement" — including the Holocaust — or reject it — including CRISPR-style gene therapies); and that whether or not someone is a "Nazi" comes down to their view on "the Nazi idea." Not a Nazi idea, the Nazi idea; the singular view from which all the other terrible elements follow.
And that idea? The very phrase used in the pun: "good genes." The Nazi idea is that of genetic superiority — that a person's genes can be "better" or "worse" than another's, which follows, logically, from the belief that a gene can be "good" or "bad." The inviolable human dignity guaranteed forever by the Grundgesetz requires the unwavering belief that everyone's genes are equal, and thus every gene is equal. No allele is ever "good" or "bad," ever "better" or "worse" than another.
And why would you ever go through the trouble and effort of modifying human genes, of replacing one allele with another, unless you think the new allele is somehow "better" than the old one? And if you believe that, you're a Nazi, and you'll be dealt with like every other Nazi.
Prior is my primary example because he's the one whose comments I read the most of, back when I read MR occasionally. But I've seen similar views (even less well-argued) from others whenever the topic of genetic modification — or genetic "quality" in general — comes up. Sydney Sweeney, Saquon Barkley, Barack Obama, Fedor, Lucy Liu; their genes are all no better than anyone else's — and anyone who disagrees is a Nazi eugenicist, who must be stopped before they inevitably cause another Holocaust.
If no genes are good or bad then they ought to have no objection to an embryo being edited to have the "bad" genes that produce congenital disorders of one type or another.
The aversion to judging negatively fails when it results in the reluctance to provide any judgements at all. It's an overcorrection. Failure to exercise judgement can be equally as bad as eagerness (thisisfine.jpg).
The objection is that the procedure to edit such an embryo is neither risk-free nor costless. So why, then, would you pursue a costly, risky procedure, unless you think there's something to be gained from it? Putting an embryo at risk of complications for absolutely no reason whatsoever is something that probably should be forbidden, no?
If you truly believe that all genes are equal, then you'd believe that there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever even bother replacing one human gene with another, and thus, no reason whatsoever to spend even the slightest time and effort developing the technology to do so.
This was a key thrust of Prior's whole mass of arguments, and why he chimed in with them any time CRISPR or gene editing came up: anyone who supports (or, for that matter, allows to pass unopposed) any form of research whatsoever into human genetic modification is definitionally a Nazi, and must be dealt with accordingly.
I agree. But then, to folks like Prior, that just makes us two more people who clearly and obviously want another six million murdered.
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I'm old enough to remember the Brooke Shields campaign, but I don't actually remember it. I suspect most of the people reacting aren't old enough or didn't remember it either. This suggests that the idea for the current ad originated from some old Boomer (or maybe Xer) admen, rather than a change of heart in the current generation.
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The ad you linked is from the same campaign but not the one that really best shows why people are outraged. The first segment of this one is where the heat is. I do think the outrage is a little overblown but eh, I kind of understand this one from the perspective of anyone who is thoroughly steeped in the blank slate camp.
She mentions hair & eye colors and also personality as things passed down via genes. Out of those, I think the vast majority of even the extreme of the blank slate camp would agree that hair & eye colors are accurate. Personality is the one where I could imagine a significant chunk of that camp pushing back, but even there, I think you'd have to get pretty extreme in the blank slate camp to deny genetic effects.
To me, the jean/gene pun being seen as invoking eugenics or white supremacy or racism or whatever due to Sweeney being a (conventionally attractive) white person appears similar to the phenomenon of "I can tell that you're being racist because I can hear the dogwhistle" or "whenever you depict orcs as barbaric, my mind immediately goes to stereotypes about black people, so you're being racist in doing that."
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It's far and away the most high-budget professionalized "It's okay to be white" phenomenon.
Trolling feels too generic for this; is there a term for this kind of "the backlash is the real signal" thing?
I think even viewing it as "It's okay to be white" is a view you can only take a culture warrior whose Time To Fight bell gets wrung by the word genes.
The most straight forward interpretation is clearly "she is hot and slim and has large natural breasts" and her race is only relevant to the extent that you think white girls are/aren't hot. Moving from "she is personally genetically blessed with beauty" to "she is an aryan princess" is such a culture war brained move that it SHOCKS me how many people seem to think it was intended in any way.
Yeah, I phrased it poorly. I definitely don't think the ad agency was explicitly saying that. I do think they were consciously courting the outrage machine as a turbo-booster on the ad. Maybe I'm overestimating the Onlineness of marketers but I'd expect them to be second only to journalists in paying attention to the outrage machine. If they didn't play it like a fiddle deliberately, that's some great luck or great astroturfing.
It's an easy pun that's been done before, as Iprayiam shared downthread JC Penney doing it last fall, no reaction. Of course, that ad had a group, reasonably attractive and diverse but no major standouts. Sweeny stands alone.
We live in a weird culture that made race extremely relevant again after a relative low period; positive statements about certain races are treated as vastly more suspicious than positive statements about other races, and vice versa.
If it had been Halle Bailey in the jeans, the backlash would be limited to one dark corner of twitter and would never reach Good Morning America.
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It is a lesson that the most important thing for one’s political survival is riding the vibe, not being too far ahead or behind. The starkest example was in the communist states, both the USSR and China. Speak out as the tide is changing a couple of years too early? Gulag and execution. Speak out a year or two too late? Irrelevant, timid, late. Timing needs to be perfect.
As for the genes/jeans ad, they knew what they were doing and were surely onboard with some kind of impotent progressive backlash. It is a sign that the times have shifted that they considered this free advertising rather than a way of getting fired from their plum marketing jobs and ad agency gigs.
As for Sydney Sweeney, it shows how far you can get as a genetically blessed blonde with an OK face because of how rare blondes are in America. Probably 18 or 19 in 20 ‘blonde’ American women have dyed hair, something especially true when you leave the handful of places that still have a lot of Anglos and Nordics (Upper Midwest, Utah).
In London, despite the fact that natives are a minority natural blondes are far, far more common than in US cities with a similar percentage of ‘white’ people (with the exception of the places noted above). In some parts of eastern England where squat, swarthy Celtic genes faced more competition from Vikings and saxons and whoever else it feels like close to half of people are blonde.
This is true, but probably half of those had blonde hair as children so they are clinging to their identification as blonde they developed when they were young.
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It's always shocking when I go back home (to one of those places) to visit after being in my heavily Hispanic area and I'm once again surrounded by blondes.
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The vibe riding is an interesting thought. I guess it is the same in music/fashion/art: cool people surf the wave at the exact right time, uncool people are too late, but few stay relevant over decades without becoming a dinosaurs.
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If we're talking about the period when Gulag camp and execution was an actual threat (meaning the Stalin era - the Gulag system was formally abolished in 1957), the timing was actually very easy - you just did like a loyal communist and condemned Stalin at the very moment when the Party, speaking with the mouth of General Secretary Khruschev, did so.
With hindsight it looks easy, but to people who survived a highly repressive era, a sudden repudiation of that era would have looked like a trap to catch more dissidents.
And the Secret Speech was pretty hard for many to swallow. Remember, it’s called the secret speech because it only went out to party members. A lot of these people had turned in friends and colleagues on the assurances that this was for a good cause.
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Which is exactly what happened during the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
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My guess, for whatever it's worth, is that it's not just a pun. I don't think for a second that AE is trying to usher in a new age of white supremacy but I feel they were being deliberately provocative because they figured this blowing up would be good for them. They're probably right - I wouldn't be surprised if a fair few people who previously wouldn't have thought twice about the ad now decide to buy there just to annoy the scolds.
bulllllshittt.
https://instagram.com/reel/DAkHtzmIVUA/?hl=en
Here's a JC Penny ad from less than 1 year ago making the exact same 'pun'. You can't tell me that making this pun while happening to also be white is a knowing dog whistle.
https://instagram.com/reel/C2-nqvHsMi0/ Here's express doing it 1.5 years ago.
It's ok to be white. It really is ok to be white.
The whole point of that meme is on display right here. It's only a double-entendre because the left MAKES it so. 'You are not allowed to uncontroversially be white' is not an acceptable equilibrium.
I didn't.
You said you think they’re being deliberately provocative.
I can show countless examples of the fact that jeans makers make this pun on a regular basis. Your post suggests that making the pun, while also being white is deliberately provocative. Bullshit.
The picked a hot it girl, and made the same tired cliche wordplay every jeans manufacturer makes on repeat. The spotlight here is completely fabricated and it would have been removed with the same shrug this dumb line gets every other time
I will steelman that. If "intentionally provocative" implies they were doing something illicit or unsavory, (i.e., "dogwhistling white supremacy") no, they weren't. However, the current environment, the year of our lord 2025, when woke is very much not dead, I would be astonished if the marketing team did not fully anticipate that having a hot blue-eyed blonde woman talking about her "good genes" and being unapologetically sexy (in the most traditional, "conventionally attractive" as they say, way) and white, would generate Discourse.
In other words, they knew a bunch of woke critics would flip their shit exactly as they are doing. Maybe they didn't bank on quite such a strong (and profitable!) reaction, but I'll bet they were totally pricing in attacks on the pretty white lady implying that it's good to be pretty, and probably some claims that they were pushing eugenics and Nazi imagery as well. So in that sense, that they were counting on (and possibly banking on) some unhinged reactions to generate a little controversy, yes, they were being intentionally provocative.
(And the best sexy ads are provocative. The famous Brooke Shields ad generated Discourse back in the day, not because she was hot and white, but because she was fifteen. They knew what they were doing then too.)
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Absolutely.
I remember an article about A&F intentionally trying to be “exclusionary.” Ah, that checks out: it was a Netflix exposé.
The models, the hiring for storefronts, it was all very specific. And why wouldn’t it be? Fashion gets a lot of mileage out of that. It worked really well for them.
This had to be intentional at some level.
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Agreed. This is not a spur of the moment thing. Some marketing firm decided that "White woman has great genes/jeans" was an acceptable pun to run a big ad campaign on.
This is about as innocent as anything Cartman has ever said, which is not at all innocent.
They were deliberately courting controversy. I am not sure that they will come out ahead, though.
If they were the 40th largest jeans vendor in the US, they would probably come out ahead. Sure, they would alienate 20% of their customer base, but they might also entice 1% to buy their jeans specifically because they made the wokes cry.
However, American Eagle is the fifth biggest jeans brand in the US (according to some shitty online list I found). 20% who will not buy their products anymore might hurt them quite a bit. For what it's worth, NYSE:AEO did not make any big moves.
Personally, I would not have run the ads in their shoes. Woke is not so dead that I would jump on its corpse, and the outraged 20% will probably have longer memories than the celebrating 30% (of whom only a small fraction might actually buy their jeans).
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It should be noted that the Dissident Right also identifies it as white supremacist, eugenicist, and as a fascist advertisement. They are probably going to ruin the campaign with the next model though - "Zendaya has good genes." Associating the phenotype of a beautiful white woman with genetic inheritance (I believe even inheritance of cognitive traits are alluded to in one of the ads) is indeed eugenicist-coded.
I'm not a fan of Richard Hanania, but I'll give him a W for his provocative "Sidney Sweeny's boobs ended wokeness" take during the SNL outro that went viral. "Sidney Sweeny has great genes" as an ad for a top-tier brand is a strong signal of the pendulum swinging away from Woke.
The DR is always looking to conscript allies. It rarely works.
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She hasn't. There is a rigorous scientific test for a good genes in a woman - is she hotter than a young cashier from the same race. I am afraid Zendaya fails it. But the black UFC ring girls pass it. I think that I have noted here that the beautiful black women are just hidden in the media.
I've seen this opinion online in the wild before and I gotta ask, how? She's thin with a beautiful, symmetrical face. Is this a "I definitely would NOT hit it. Just look at those sharp knees." situation? Is it because her most popular acting roles downplayed her attractiveness and made her look a bit masculine (see Euphoria, Dune, Spider-Man)? This is what she looks like when she actually tries to look good, where do you live where that's worse than an average cashier of the same age?
One time this topic came up in a group setting with men and women, and all the women (plus one gay guy) were shocked that the straight men did not find Zendaya that attractive. They were saying 9-10, while we were more like 6-7. She definitely has a unique look, but personally I found Rebecca Ferguson much more attractive in Dune, despite her being over a decade older.
This by a very wide margin. And call me an Ayy-ophile, but I also liked the appearances of Anya Taylor-Joy and...whoever played Margot Fenring. Forgot the name.
Obviously I am racist, but I also just honestly think that Chani in the new Dune movies was a caustic harridan and woke mouthpiece, and from what little I've seen of her actress otherwise, she doesn't appear to be much more likable IRL. With those traits, race doesn't even get to be a factor.
Unfortunately I have been warned by our moderation staff to avoid this topic, so I cannot post my full 14 page long screed in which I accuse @Southkraut of being a traitor to all of humankind. Nor can I delve into the incredible commitment to cultural subversion it takes to cast that actress in a science fiction universe in which the defining feature of the world building is that there are NO AYYS.
I'll gladly betray all mankind past present and future twice over and then some for tall woman with unusual face. That just always gets me.
Just move to the Netherlands, bro...
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Count me as another straight guy who sees Zendaya as pretty mid for a starlet.
Straight guy as well, and I'd consider her pretty mid for a normal woman, much less a starlet.
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Huh. I guess I'll put another marker toward that theory as a bi guy; Znedaya looks perfectly fine to me, where I'd expect Ferguson to be the one straight guys would put as 'only gay fashion dudes like'.
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She's completely reasonable looking, but hardly captivating. Also keep in mind that cashiers rarely doll themselves up for work.
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Obviously Zendaya is not ugly ugly, but judging by the standards for a 25 (?) year old Hollywood star, I consider her mediocre looking.
She also has no curve to her body, her nose is too flat, her eyes are too small, her chin is too big, and she wears way too much makeup. Without makeup she looks like a cave(wo)man. She is neither cute nor handsome, and she tries too hard to hide it.
It doesn't help that she is a terrible actress who never impresses you with her performance, so she can't even grow on you despite her looks.
Is this supposed to be a good look? Her smile looks fake, she's wearing way too much makeup, her top is ugly and her skirt is even more ugly, like literally what the fuck are those colors? They are all clashing (look at her nails and lipstick too, all different ugly shades of pink) and I'm not even into fashion? It's like she's trying to be ugly. Also I've never met a single man who thinks box braids are attractive on a woman.
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Yes. I mean, having only seen her in Dune, she was like a 3 out of 10. I get that sometimes you ugly up an actress for a role. Charlize Theron in Monster for instance. But that seemed entirely unnecessary for Dune, and she genuinely seemed ugly on the inside as well. I'd say that's down to the butchery they performed on her character, but she seems to be a natural at it from what other in character and out of character appearances I've seen of her.
Different strokes for different folks but 3/10 sounds pretty absurd to me.
Also for me.
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Those are for guys, like Sweeney.
Zendaya clearly isn't unattractive, but she seems to get a lot of admiration from women and red carpet watchers for how she glams up rather than raw sex appeal.
I think Zendaya is unattractive, personally. Not ugly, certainly, but I find her to be a very plain looking woman (when she isn't wearing idiotic outfits to awards shows).
maybe I am weirdo with low standards, but for me "very plain looking woman" qualifies as attractive
Ok, I'm curious, is a very plain woman preferable to a jawdropping stunning one?
no, with all else being equal
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Zendaya is black? She's lighter than most Arabs that are currently vacationing around me. I'd call her racially ambiguous, like Meghan Markle or Halle Berry or Tiger Woods.
Her dad is black, mom's white.
I googled an image of her family, and holy shit did she win the genetic lottery. Her father looks like a frog with dreads. Her mom looks like a lesbian punk rocker who aged poorly. I guess the ugliness canceled out.
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In America, yes, she is considered black- and so are all those people.
Markle is a bit of a stretch, her father is white and her mother has mixed ancestry. She's at the point where she could easily pass as Italian or Spanish.
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I would not say that at all. Tiger Woods is black and Halle Berry is black, but not the other two. I don't doubt some people call them black, but people also call folks black who are as pale as the fallen snow. So that isn't much of a barometer.
America has traditions built around the one drop rule. Spanish has more descriptive terms like octaroon, but they are frowned upon in the US.
"You freaked out when I said 'quadroon'"
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I guarantee that she considers herself black, and doesn't consider herself white.
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I'd have assumed she's uncontroversially mixed race.
In the US, black includes basically everyone who would be considered mixed in most other places.
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dunkin donuts has also pushed out an advertisement in the same style: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OW7FytdloWU I wonder if this was a coincidence. I suspect its quite difficult to get an ad developed in such a short amount of time so the only non-coincidental explanation would be if they had something already cooking and then just tweaked it slightly to make it more triggering.
There was actually a really early portent of this in the Carl's Jr. Super Bowl Ad this year, clearly there's marketing departments exploring the 'sexy' style of advertising again.
My father-in-law was a creative director on Madison Avenue. One of the Mad Men.
We were watching a vintage Axe commercial together, slow-mo shots of a model tossing her hair over a sleek sports car, music pulsing.
I asked him, “Why can't we run campaigns like this today?"
I'll never forget his answer. He closed his eyes, took a slow drag on a cigarette (even though he didn’t smoke), and whispered: "We can’t. We don’t know how to do it.”
Noice.
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I think that part of the backlash is simply because a lot of people started out primed with a disdain for Sweeney, mainly because of the perception that her popularity is driven purely by her looks, namely her curves. My wife got mad when I said I thought she was great, but my position was that at that point she had pretty much been 2/2 on starring in absolutely amazing shows (Euphoria and White Lotus 1), and she did a commendable job in the movie about Reality Winner. Of course, now that Anything But You has happened (and I love rom coms!), I kind of have to retract my "will watch anything she stars in" position. To me, the Sweeney brand was initially about absolutely impeccable taste, but people who did not appreciate her HBO shows do not realize this.
The backlash is because she was in proximity to something Republican - a MAGA-themed party for her family - while looking like the stereotypical hot blonde and playing into it.
There's a similar thing where there's a sort of lurking contempt for Chris Pratt a) being overexposed and b) the church he goes to and his mere silence on progressive issues. The fact that the attempted canceling of him failed when his costars circled the wagons makes it worse: a certain sort of person becomes even angrier in this situation. So the whole thing never goes away. They just...wait for the next thing.
This might sound a bit crazy. That's because it is strange, odd behavior. Nothing is new about this of course. The internet is full of such people (one could argue their labour keep parts of it running). Anyone who's modded can tell you about that crazy person that just can't let go of the bit between their teeth. They become incensed that X is wrong online, they make endless sockpuppets, they lie in wait, they make all sorts of tendentious claims as a way to attack people. Left to their own devices, even just a few can change the culture of a place. I suspect they get off on that too: forcing everyone to be hyper-vigilant around whatever they've decided is their issue today. The main difference is that the media and the masses of right-thinking "allies" don't encourage the ones you run into on random forums, unless it serves some interest of theirs.
COVID was a halcyon age for such people and they don't want it to be over.
Having read the article and looked at the pictures you linked about the "MAGA themed party", I completely disagree with your quoted description. It is very clear to me that this was a country-themed birthday party for her mom and that the supposedly MAGA comes from hats that read "Make Sixty Great Again". This is a play on pop culture, not a theme. If anything, MAGA-adjacent paraphenalia seems more likely to have been worn as a satire of rural rubes who genuinely support the idea.
Are the people who criticized her for it extremely ridiculous? Was Sweeney's tweeted, purposefully vague response absolutely delicious in its commitment to nonspecificity? Is the ridiculousness of the online reaction an exhibit for my theory that Sweeney is especially a target of women haters due to the prominence of her boobs? Yes, yes and probably.
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This. Both the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe think that prioritising figure over face is lower-class-coded, or perhaps wog-coded, or perhaps that is a distinction without a difference.
This seems true, but it seems a bit funny to me because in many ways it's easier to change your figure (via diet and exercise) than your face (beyond haircuts and grooming). The human figure is a very functional thing that conforms to what you do with it.
I've always felt asses are more fundamentally meritocratic than breasts for similar reasons, though the whole 'gigantic asses' thing kinda circled back the other way.
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Huge gazongas on a skinny frame aren't functional.
Honestly I've never been a fan of ones too large to look believable --- there's a reasonable range that adjusts with frame size.
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But she has a pretty face?
I don't think she'd be nearly as famous as she is if not for her assets.
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As always,Woke more correct. They rightly see aesthetics like this as an existential enemy and they rally against it.
Apparently "woke is more correct" means that they see terrible social consequences from very mundane things, unlike liberals who think a cigar is just a cigar.
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The aesthetics by themselves are an existential enemy to the woke? Could you expand on this? Is the idea that these aeathetics are so obviously superior to the aesthetics of the woke, as shown by revealed preference, that people will just reject their demands to subvert and deconstruct everything that past generations considered good or beautiful?
I don't think aesthetics need to be 'obviously superior' to be a threat, they just need to be socially accepted.
But besides that--yes. Aesthetics have a tremendous impact on many people's politics, so the stronger the alternatives to 'woke aesthetics', the stronger the alternatives to woke politics.
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More correct than who?
People who don't believe in bioleninism in this case. Presumably.
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The mainstream. It's @covfefeAnon's catchphrase.
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Woke identifying beauty + science as an-existential-enemy-to-Woke might be “right”, but that does not make the Woke “more correct”.
However, if your claim includes the assertion that. abc/msnbc/salon/post/times/NPR are all Woke, I still mostly agree.
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My bet for the next corporate play: American Eagle is advertising with an attractive Black (my guess is a men to avoid direct comparisons between two women) and another cheesy word play (“black is beautiful” or something like that). That won’t go as viral though as there is not much controversy left.
One question would be whether American Eagle actually considers this press coverage a negative. Edgy ads that fill opinion pages are hardly unheard of. But is it actually selling jeans?
Quick glance at their stock price shows a roughly 15% jump since the ad campaign started in stark contrast to what has otherwise been a crappy year for them, so I'm fairly certain their boardroom is drooling over every hit piece.
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Back in the eighties, Benetton (anyone remember them?) were running ads that had nothing to do with clothes, with pictures of some random African kid. I still don't know what the message there was supposed to be.
You still remember the ad and the company, so clearly it worked at some level.
Exactly. There's one for the Ford Capri I can't forget about.
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Who knows, but old heads still talk about them so they must have worked.
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They're still a reasonably popular clothing brand in Japan, for some reason.
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"black is beautiful" does not have the same signaling value.
If they go "black not blue", that might have a similar impact, but will likely end with both sides hating them.
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I'm not sure how Sidney Sweeney became an icon of traditional/conventional beauty as a rebellion against the "woke"/progressive/SocJus idea of "traditional beauty standards are bigoted and oppressive." She seems like a decent-sized Hollywood star but not particularly big, and in terms of her physical features, she's definitely very attractive, but not in a way that would stand out compared to other Hollywood actresses known for their beauty or some popular Instagram model. As far as I can tell, she hasn't made any particular political or ideological statements, and she hasn't leaned into her sex appeal any more than the typical Hollywood actress would be expected to, at least until her recent promotion of that soap that was made with her bath water, which I have to believe was inspired by some female Twitch streamer selling her actual bath water like half a decade ago.
Yet, a couple years ago, I started hearing her name constantly as critics' go-to example of a conventionally attractive actress that contrasted against the looks of the types of women that "woke" creators liked to put in their films/TV shows. And even Hanania explicitly wrote about her boobs as a symbol against "wokeness" or whatever. She just seemed to come out of nowhere.
Perhaps it's just that I'm not in touch with the media she's famous for (I still haven't seen her act in anything), and she is bigger than I thought she was. And when I try to think of other famous conventionally attractive young Hollywood actresses with blonde hair and big boobs, I'm drawing a blank, so maybe she really is the best choice for that icon.
In any case, I'm happy for her that she seems to be doing a pretty good job of monetizing her sex appeal, with that soap and also with this controversial ad. Honestly, that Washington Post or ABC would join the likes of Salon in problematizing the ad is unsurprising and is probably just the new normal; as others have mentioned, "woke" isn't in decline, it's entrenched, so much so that it's become the water we're swimming in.
Sweeney stands out because she is voluptuous instead of reserved, and has doe eyes instead of an intense, piercing gaze. That latter part is the more important bit. She's the rare Hollywood woman who men look at and assume she wouldn't be a massive bitch in the unlikely event that they ever managed to get her romantic attention.
I don't really know anything about her but I finally watched some of these ads. Goddamn. This is spot on. She's not like, supermodel hot but she does come across as extremely approachable and fun to be around which makes it 10/10.
My favorite one is this ASMR(!) version: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g3jeFzrFllM?si=0H7zCswwtKLSLfPT
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She's the current it-girl, and it's been a little while since one was blonde and non-apologetic about being herself. At least that's my sense; I don't follow acting particularly closely.
That may well be a significant factor- relative political silence codes as conservative (ish) in a field overflowing with people eager to make unnecessary statements. Plus she does MMA and restored a vintage Bronco.
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Maybe large, natural breasts are conservative now?
In a similar spirit to conservatives being liberals 20 years behind, the morphing from tits-and-beer liberalism (RIP) to barstool conservatism- yes.
Now resisting to do another dive through the Kontext archive. Some good commentary in there before he (probably) got that brain tumor.
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Only insofar as 'conservative' hides 'what men want', and only then insofar as 'what men want' is more acceptable than it was 5-10 years ago.
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I think it started with her wholesome(-seeming, I didn't see it) "Anyone But You" movie from yea, a couple years ago. Like an Abercrombie & Fitch couple starring.
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Tucker got fired for some combination of legal liability and picking fights with his management. Owens apparently just for the latter. Which progressives are in a similar position?
I’m not really sure who you’re expecting to be policed, here. Reasonable center-leftists don’t have any way to punish random TikTokers for jumping the gun. I guess they can cancel their NYT subscriptions if they don’t fire an editor or two.
Maybe they are. Maybe that’s the vibe shift I keep hearing about. If Nate Silver is right, and Colbert’s Late Show was struggling enough to get on the chopping block, is that what you’re looking for?
I mean, Candace Owen’s fights with management were about her jumping thé shark, so it seems reasonable to say she got fired for being crazy.
You do have a point- NYT writers don’t start schizo-writing, and TikTok crazy leftists and breadtubers don't have anyone to fire them because they’re unemployable.
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Tucker Carlson may have worn out his welcome with those things, but the explanation of the firing I trust most is the one Rod Dreher gave: that his Heritage Foundation keynote weirded out Rupert Murdoch by sounding much too religious. It seems like a stretch, I know, but if you watch the keynote I think it's easier to see.
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