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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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This is good so I’m just going to post link to the Pelosi video. There’s no hard evidence he was a right wing intruder. I notice two things he had a drink in his hand and was partially undressed. Now if someone broke into my house late I’d probably be in my boxers. But I wouldn’t be wearing a button down shirt too; I’d be topless or in a t-shirt

I think the video will be interpreted both sides. It doesn’t prove he was paying a crazy gay prostitute to blow him but bodycam would lean in that direction instead of a red tribe terrorist.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/watch-paul-pelosi-hammer-attack-bodycam-video-released.

I guess bigger culture war issue is if he was just trying to get his dick sucked and the media said that was false and it was a right wing terrorist then basically confirms a lot of peoples view that they are lying to us. (Nothing wrong with trying to get your dick sucked).

Edit: there’s video of him breaking in which adds more to the intruder narrative I didn’t see previously still weird video of cops entering. Without breaking in video it looked more like a domestic.

The only explanation I can make of this is that Paul Pelosi has dementia, or was so drunk that he couldn't make out what was happening. His 911 call sounds a lot like someone who has dementia. The male prostitute theory makes absolutely no sense--why would a prostitute break in?

His 911 call sounds a lot like someone who has dementia

He seemed normal to me.

The context of the call is baffling. Why would this guy let him call? Clearly Pelosi was trying to get the police to come without saying "HELP" while the responder seemingly had no clue what was going on (for most?) of it.

This is a bizarre video is all I can really say. The cops come in and they're both like smiling? I understand deer in the headlights but all I can think of to explain it is some wacky drug use. This just bring ups more questions not less. I do agree that this really doesn't look consistent with a break in attack but it doesn't really look consistent with any narrative, besides like they're both tripping balls on something.

The entire thing is so confusing. The only certain thing is that the version of the story in the media has to be false.

  • Why is Paul in boxers ?

  • Why are they both so happy ?

  • Why is it so quiet even before the police get there ?

  • Why does Paul open the door when both his hands are occupied ?

  • Why does he have a drink in his hands ?

  • What were they doing for 30 minutes until the police arrived ?

  • How did an obese man break into fucking Nancy Pelosi's house without any alarms sounding ?

  • Why does he say "It's good" when he is clearly threatened ?

  • Who wears a shirt inside their house ?

  • No security systems at all ?

  • How did a guy hammering at a door not wake anyone up ?

The attacker:

  • Illegal immigrant from Canada

  • Had a Q-esque deranged manifesto that ended with American political theater.

  • But was also a hipster nudist

All that being said, it looks like he is clearly attacked and got hurt in a manner that would be life-threatening to any 80 yr old. Why would an almost-retired 200 millionaire pull a stunt like this ? The alternate conspiracies also do not make any sense. I don't buy that this has anything to do with Trump or MAGA, but he does seem to be taken in with every major conspiracy theory under the sun.

Maybe reality IS stranger than fiction, and outside the media claims about the guys affiliation, the rest of the story is true. As strange as it is, that does seem like the story most likely to be true.

Most of these questions can be answered with "people do weird things more often than you think". None of them are evidence worth hanging any sort of theory on.

Nancy Pelosi not being at home seems to have thrown DePape off, once unbalanced maybe Paul Pelosi was trying a friendly, non-threatening angle with DePape? "Yes, your desire to break my wife's kneecaps sounds reasonable, what a nice young man you are. Here, can I pour you a drink? Let me regale you with a story from when I was a young 40-something like yourself. You don't need to hurt me, I'm helping you out." Just running the time until security/police get there.

Yes that seems like the optimal strategy available to an unarmed elderly man confronted with a young male intruder armed with a hammer. What was Paul supposed to do, freak out scream for help and try to fight the guy? He would have been bludgeoned thirty minutes sooner than he did!

These are the easiest to explain possible "strange details" a conspiracy theory has ever rested on. Honestly I think a bunch of right-wing influencers just did it as a dumb joke "huh huh Nancy Pelosi's so ugly her husband probably hires gay prostitutes lol" and the very online right is so reflexively anti-media that they bought into it.

Yeah, that is the tentative conclusion I've reached as well.

I have no idea what the heck was going on there. All I'm willing to believe is that California is in such a state it's entirely possible for the home of someone fairly important in the Democratic Party to be broken into by random weirdo. There's plenty of weirdoes in California, God knows; I'm just surprised the Pelosis didn't have much tighter security. Does anyone know if where they live is considered a "good neighbourhood" so they didn't feel they needed to do more than a basic burglar alarm? It might just be an artefact of "We've lived here for thirty years and it was perfectly fine when we moved in and we haven't taken account of how things have changed with the passage of time".

It might just be an artefact of "We've lived here for thirty years and it was perfectly fine when we moved in and we haven't taken account of how things have changed with the passage of time".

The number of neighborhoods in the US, let alone SF, where that is the case is essentially zero. In contrast, the number of neighborhoods where the opposite is the case is enormous.

They live in Pac Heights, which is the nicest part of SF and has been since the quake. Mostly owner-occupied large single family homes that tend to go for eight figures (along with some condos that span from mid sevens to eights). I'm in the area semi-regularly, and there's a fair amount of foot traffic, but mostly well-to-do folks going on their morning jog etc. Not a homeless person in sight. Uphill from all the sketchier areas, and (un)surprisingly good police presence for the low level of crime there. Pretty much every home there will have a burglar alarm system with very fast police response times.

Neighbors include Jony Ives, Danielle Steele, the Gettys, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, probably some other names I'm forgetting. I think Peter Thiel used to have a spot there?

Someone I dated for a bit did get mugged and beaten up while going on a run a few blocks south from it, but that is (relatively) rare for the area and happened at dusk.

ETA: a house maybe a block from her: https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/2660-Scott-St-94123/home/1667074

They released footage of the break-in, too. I agree that Pelosi's behavior in the body cam footage is baffling, but I also can't reconcile it with footage that clearly shows the guy was smashing Pelosi's window with a hammer to get in.

If "The SFPD is so totally owned by the Pelosi's that they either fabricated DePape's confession or coerced him into a false confession" seems more plausible to you then "an 82 year old had a shitty security system, wore a button up shirt to bed, and had a funny expression on his face in a highly stressful situation" then you have some wild priors.

I do have the priors to not trust the left. Won’t lie about that. And a lot of us do.

But you don't have to trust "the left" you have to trust that the SFPD didn't coerce an elaborate confession and continued silence from this guy.

Arent they ran by leftist? Do I have to trust the fbi? That they would never lie to us (or plan a kidnapping of a governor or invent a Russian hoax). And it’s not like right leaning cops have never lied. So yes until proven I’m not going to just trust the SFPD.

So yes I’ve had officials lie to me before so not exactly going to accept the narrative.

There's a huge gap between "the politically appointed leadership of the SFPD is probably left-leaning" and "rank and file members of the SFPD are so thoroughly corrupt that everyone involved in this case is willing to fabricate/coerce a confession". And there's a huge difference between, lying about the details of an altercation in order to paint the department in a favorable light and fabricating/coercing the confession of a still living witness who could at any time just come out and say "no I was actually a gay prostitute".

You don't have to knee-jerk trust the narrative, but if you also just reflexively assume the opposite of the narrative you're gonna end up making some wildly implausible claims.

How does a random weirdo get into the house of the third most powerful person in the US?

In addition to their power, the Pelosis have over $100 million! Doesn't that buy you enough home security to keep out random weirdos in San Francisco, a city notoriously full of random weirdos who break into houses and cars?

I guess the same way a random weirdo gets into the house of the number one most powerful person in the US.

Sure, that's a good point. I suppose staggering incompetence and complacency is a decent answer.

Mid ranking judges in my much more peaceful country get offered extra home security. I would've thought very high-ranking officials in a violent country get proportionately more protection, especially given the hysteria about terrorism for the last 15 years.

As mentioned below, Nancy Pelosi has more protection, but she wasn't there, and since historically, with very few exceptions, violence against politicians in America is 'crazed weirdo with barely coherent thoughts who does it in public', nobody thinks somebody is going to try to break-in to a prominent politician's home and commit violence.

Hell, even at the height of political violence in the 70's, while Italian Prime Ministers were getting kidnapped, our violence left-wingers...bombed some post offices and office buildings, but made sure the bombs went off when nobody would be there.

I still can't believe a very rich and powerful family in the richest country in the world don't have shatter-proof windows. It's one thing if you have some men blasting down the bulletproof windows with sustained machine-gun fire, or if they use some kind of advanced tactic. Even an intermediate tactic or a basic tactic is something. I've seen tiktoks from South Africans showing more serious and elaborate security systems than whatever was going on here.

Nobody in the whole bloated US security/intelligence sector thought 'Al Qaeda has a bunch of skilled and capable operators working hard on doing us harm, so we should ensure our highest ranking politicans have decent protection at home, that their close relatives aren't kidnapped or anything'? Nobody thought that maybe the US Capitol should have doors that can lock and block unarmed masses of angry people, let alone well-armed terrorists prepared to die for their beliefs? What were they spending all that anti-terror money on? Doesn't this seem absurd?

You do believe what you say you don’t believe because, as you pointed out yourself, it is true. Or are you saying there’s a conspiracy to pretend pelosi has no shatter proof windows, but he does?

The US is violent in parts and very safe in parts and doesn’t have that much in political violence.

I've seen tiktoks from South Africans showing more serious and elaborate security systems

But the US isn't South Africa. Hell, it isn't even Europe, where there are soldiers with assault rifles on what seems like every street and subway station in Western Europe and 3x the number of police per capita (humorously, this is what the average European internet commentator appears to think the US is like). Though considering the amount of political violence that occurs in Europe, and how packed together everyone is in the nations there, the fact that the social systems are basically expecting a revolution every 50 years or so (France is on its Fifth Republic in 200 years- in fact, apart from the UK, most European polities are less than 30 years old- and this isn't even ahistorical for them) they absolutely have a reason for the increased security.

Nobody in the whole bloated US security/intelligence sector thought 'Al Qaeda has a bunch of skilled and capable operators working hard on doing us harm'

To my knowledge, "they don't actually have any skilled and capable operators" was their assessment, and that assessment was ultimately correct (alternately, their SIGINT is so good they managed to stop everything; I'm half willing to believe this but ultimately have no real basis for that).

Nobody thought that maybe the US Capitol should have doors that can lock and block unarmed masses of angry people, let alone well-armed terrorists prepared to die for their beliefs?

Why would it need that? You can normally just waltz right in to the Capitol; it's not like those other countries where "government is this closed-off, special thing". Unlike 24 Sussex Drive or Buckingham Palace, you can just go in to the White House to the point that they have organized tours most every day. You'd kind of expect that from a country with such anime-esque slogans and beliefs about government... especially since most people still believe in it 250 years after the fact.

(Also, the symmetry in the US massively favors the attacker- the tools for that are not only readily available to basically anyone, but ownership of them for such a purpose is celebrated by half the nation and its founding document. It's probably not worth trying to stop even with added security across all politicians and their families, with the exception of the President and his Vice.)

Doesn't this seem absurd?

Well, the US is an absurd country where most citizens are defended from others simply by being really spread out, defended from its enemies by two oceans, and rich enough that the people who are screwed up enough to attack politicians are relatively inept.

Unlike 24 Sussex Drive or Buckingham Palace, you can just go in to the White House to the point that they have organized tours most every day. You'd kind of expect that from a country with such anime-esque slogans and beliefs about government... especially since most people still believe in it 250 years after the fact.

I should defend Britain here by saying that you can in fact just go and watch the proceedings of the House of Commons or Lords whenever you like. Unless you want to watch PMQs or a very important debate you don't have to book, you just walk in and queue. In quieter times you can often go straight in iirc, even though the gallery is quite small.

Also, you can actually just walk into the lobby of Parliament and ask to see your MP, and I am told that some MPs do sometimes (though probably relatively rarely) just go and see random constituents who turn up there and ask for them.

How does a random weirdo get into the house of the third most powerful person in the US?

He smashes the window of a door with a hammer, unlocks the door, and walks inside. There is a video of this happening if you want I can find it.

My parents got a security sytem after a single break in 2 decades ago. Guess how often it is now actually on? They remember to set it about a third of the time leaving. And my dad dosen't like it on when he is in the house because it goes off when he opens the windows. In theory he turns it on when they go to bed but thats a coin flip at best.

Complacency is common even among the well off, especially if you haven't had any incidents in a long time.

Or the numerous times this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fagan_(intruder) broke into buckingham palace. Most people don’t maximize physical security because our social contract doesn’t require it.

Fagan did that shit in the eighties. The social contract has changed drastically since then. Trying to find info about break ins at Buckingham Palace just get flooded with Fagan stories, but I remember some other guy was inspired by Fagan to break in around a decade ago and got caught right after jumping the fence. Also most people aren't hundred millionaires who run the country.

Yeah but if you read the wiki article it's not like there weren't security systems, the police just ignored the alarms since they assumed they were faulty. All it takes it one or two fuck ups for something like the Pelosi break in to happen, which is hardly implausible.

Also, MPs in Britain still don't really have extraordinary levels of security. David Ames' murderer was seemingly able to just walk up him in a constituency surgery and stab him. Iirc in the mid-2000s there was an MP who was attacked by someone in the lobby of the House of Commons, which you wouldn't think likely.

Yes, but legislators aren't accustomed to thinking of themselves as suffering from extremely heightened exposure to random crazies the way executives are, so their security is lighter.

What are your priors on people cracking a Heinekin during a home invasion?

I mean, Paul Pelosi is pretty clearly an alcoholic, and DePape is pretty clearly a nut who isn’t interested in him in any particular way.

If I were an unarmed elderly man alone with a crazy guy with a hammer my strategy would be to de-escalate the situation as much as possible. Act calm, and normal, keep the crazy guy (who said his plan was not to assassinate Pelosi but to interrogate her) talking until the police show up. Maybe offer him a drink, or have a drink myself to give the impression that the situation is normal.

Is that the modal outcome when a potential assailant breaks into an elderly person's home? Probably not, but it seems more likely than a major police department being so bought off it would coerce a lengthy false confession and continued silence from DePape in an extremely high-profile case. "Elderly guy has a drink in his hand during home invasion" also seems much more plausible to me than "extremely rich man hires a chubby neckbeard guy who posts right-wing manifestos as a gay prostitute in the #1 city for gay prostitutes, then pays him so little the guy comes back and murders him with a hammer"? When I saw these memes I assumed the guy was hot or something but good lord.

Exactly. Were a crazy guy to break into my house, I would absolutely offer a drink to humor him.

Is this a joke? I can't be sure.

Yeah if some guy breaks into my house with a hammer wanting the truth about the one world government my wife runs I'd call the cops, crack a beer, and make up some wild stories for him.

Maybe offer him a drink -- just grabbing one for yourself doesn't seem likely to curry any favour.

Doesn’t one usually make a drink for oneself as well as the other person?

Pelosi was the only one in the video with a drink?

At the moment the door was opened, yes. That doesn't mean he didn't offer the other guy one, nor that the other guy didn't have one two seconds earlier.

That's how you offer a drink without being patronising.

I usually say "how about a beer?" -- I hope I haven't been patronizing all this time?

I meant in the context of trying to appease someone. You can't have them thinking you're trying to handle them.

More comments

But I wouldn’t be wearing a button down shirt too; I’d be topless or in a t-shirt

Yeah, but you're not a 9-figure net worth octogenarian that drinks aggressively. I would be very unsurprised to find out that Paul Pelosi regularly passes out wild Donald Ducking a button-down.

Come on man. The one thing I agree with Bill Gates is the cheeseburger taste the same(he has a famous quote on that). Rich people don’t do things in their everyday life that much different than the poors.

Shrug. I know people that wear button-downs daily and that don't seem to be in as much of a rush to shed them as I am when I'm stuck wearing one. That seems more pronounced among old people.

I don't really see how the video supports the gay prostitute hypothesis. If DePape was a gay prostitute Paul hired, why did DePape have to break into the house to get in? Why did Paul call 911? Why did DePape try to murder Paul with a hammer when the police showed up?

We also have DePape's own testimony about what he was doing there. If DePape was a prositute hired by Pelosi, why tell the police he was there to interrogate Nancy Pelosi and break her kneecaps?

However strange Paul's behavior is when answering the door I feel like the gay prostitute hypothesis is many times more absurd.

Thanks for more video. Google wasn’t given me this one. The other video by itself looked like gay prostitute.

DePape's own testimony

So, this is the kind of careful wording that puts my hackles up. He wanted her to tell the truth about what? She was the "leader of the pack", we get that as a purported direct quote, but "of lies told by the Democratic Party" is not a direct quote. Later direct quotes have him wanting her broken kneecaps to be a symbol to "other members of Congress". Did the police just not bother to ask what sort of "truth" he was looking for? It seems kind of pertinent to the attempts at partisan spins.

I guess bigger culture war issue is if he was just trying to get his dick sucked and the media said that was false and it was a right wing terrorist then basically confirms a lot of peoples view that they are lying to us. (Nothing wrong with trying to get your dick sucked).

The "male prostitute" hypothesis is simply ludicrous, as I've already noted the previous time, but if you want even more evidence against it, then well, they released surveillance video where the DePape uses the hammer to break into the back door of Pelosi's house. This is not how you typically invite male prostitutes into your house, I believe. At this point, the only way I can steelman this stupid theory is that Pelosi asked him to "smash up his rear entrance" and DePape took it literally.

DePape uses the hammer to break into the back door of Pelosi's house. This is not how you typically invite male prostitutes into your house

Several possibilities, mostly revolving around prior encounter / relationship. DePape feels scorned, or wants money, or wants leverage for anarchist / crazy / Nancy reasons. His arrival is neither invited nor welcomed in this instance, yet DePape is determined to proceed.

the only way I can steelman this stupid theory is that Pelosi asked him to "smash up his rear entrance" and DePape took it literally.

That's my personal headcanon from here on out.

The reactions to this video are strange to me.

  1. The attacker is smiling because he is a drug addict having a manic episode.

  2. Paul is smiling because he is trying to mirror the attackers demeanor as an attempt to de-escalate the situation. Paul is a hyper-social business person and married to one of the most powerful political operatives in the world.

  3. Paul isn't wearing a button down dress shirt, he's wearing pajamas.

  4. He's wearing boxer shorts because he was asleep and that's probably what he sleeps in.

  5. He's probably holding a beer or other drink in his hand because he's been trying to calm the attacker down and buy time. If a manic schizophrenic broke into my house and I was trying to buy time, asking them if it was okay if I got a drink while we waited for Nancy to get home (waiting for the cops to arrive) seems completely reasonable. Or asking him if he wanted something.

This video seems completely boring to me. To be clear, the narrative surrounding it is also completely ridiculous.

I agree, I think a lot of people are pretty desperate to reframe this to somehow make Paul look bad because they don’t like him. He is clearly the victim here and Musk and everyone else who was pushing ridiculous conspiracy theories about this attack should simply move on to other topics.

I think part of the problem is none of us can get into the headspace of the DePape, or at least that's what confuses me about it. It's hard for me to accept someone is just that stupid, like a genuine npc. This guy was agentic enough to find out where pelosi lives, go and break into the place but is somehow struggling with an 80 year old man over a hammer? It may be a typical mind fallacy, where I model conspiracy theory whackos as at least capable of some type of minimal tactical thinking. You are finally doing your big show and yes it's going wrong because Nancy isn't home but then the police show up and you just like walk the guy who weighs half or less as much as you to the door and answer it? Yes, actually a human being like that is hard to fit into my understanding of what humans are and so I reach for alternative explanations.

The reason why a lot of people are in jail, is because most people are dumb, not people who put a lot of thought into what they're doing. The very fact so many people online think of ways why criminals could get away with thnigs is...why they're not criminals.

Most criminals are stupid; most crimes are simple.

It's called a severe mental illness, probably exaggerated by drug use.

Yeah. Exactly. The story doesn’t make sense because the actor shows seemingly competence and extreme incompetence at the same time. Plus, you add in all of the “keep the videos secret” push by DOJ and so the brain starts trying to make the story rational in light of what looks a bit like a cover up.

But it seems crystal clear now that it was just a really crazy guy who is a mix of competent and extremely incompetent.

As an Eagles fan, I had about the best weekend possible.

On Saturday night the Eagles beat the Giants in a performance so dominant that they pulled their starters by the end of the game. Hurts' and his receivers had anemic stat lines, it simply wasn't necessary to try very hard to dismantle the Giants. On a podcast afterward, former Eagle Tra Thomas said you could watch the Giants' players collectively decide it was time to "piss on the campfire" and just get out of the game and into the off-season unhurt, by about the middle of the second quarter. That was great.

But Sunday night was even better. The Dallas Cowboys and their overrated Quarterback Dakota* Prescott managed to completely blow a playoff game against unheralded rookie-back up Brock Purdy and the 49ers. Ending it on one of the most bizarre Hospital Ball plays you will ever see. Instant meme. Let's get our running back fucking murdered, then throw the ball into traffic ten yards in anyway. It was beautiful.

So today, I indulged in one of my many vices. I went through and downloaded a series of Dallas Cowboys fan podcasts. I love listening to other teams' pain. Probably even more than I love listening to Eagles' podcasts gloat after a big win. It's beautiful to listen as Blogging the Boys or About Them Cowboys, and just hear the pain. Hear the bewilderment as to how their massively highly paid quarterback and running back blew the game; how the team just can't seem to execute under pressure; how Brock Purdy now has as many playoff wins as Dak Prescott or Tony Romo; how the same thing seems to happen every year with the Cowboys managing to blow it late in the season; how just last season they blew a playoff game against the Niners in similar fashion.

I love the schadenfreude. The NFL is my outlet for Tribalism. The human mind has an inbuilt capacity for discriminating against and punishing the out-group. This works for any out-group, no matter how tendentious. We must hate someone, it's a required field to fill out on the form. Try to hate no one, you'll just claim you hate those who hate someone. The best way to hack hatred, is to pick an inconsequential hatred to burn it out on. This is ancient knowledge, the Romans had Red-White-Blue-Green Chariot factions. RetVrn! Bread and Circuses generally has a negative connotation, but it worked for a long, long, long time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and it didn't fall in a century. Bread and Circuses kept the plebs in line for centuries in much of the Roman world. By directing their hatreds towards inconsequential things, political rage was blunted, drained of vitality.

I hope to maintain a clear mind on topics that matter. Are there people, groups, factions I dislike? Yes, but I don't want to do so irrationally. My ideal is intellectual Jeet Kune Do, taking the good from everyone and the bad from no one. I don't want to irrationally hate Donald Trump or Joe Biden, I want to understand why they are powerful, absorb what they have right and critique what they have wrong. But the brain wants to hate, wants to hate irrationally, wants to hate viciously, wants to admit nothing positive about anyone wearing the wrong colors. I sate that beast, I feed it the Dallas Cowboys. While my Id is busy hurling batteries at Ezekiel Elliott and joking about the 90s, my rational Superego is free to consider politics and philosophy and religion.

*Men should not be named Dakota. Place names are female; and anyway English shares so much in common with the romance languages that we should stick to their gender rules and name boys DakotO.

No, the best part of the night was the Greg Abbott tweet claiming to be a better field goal kicker than the cowboys got.

If the Cowboys have a million haters, I am one of them.

If the Cowboys have ten haters, I am one of them.

If the Cowboys have one hater, I am him.

If the Cowboys have no haters, that means I am no longer on this earth.

If the World is for the Cowboys, I am against the World. I will hate the Cowboys till my last breath.

Dallas Delenda Est, is what I'm saying.

And even better it's against the 49ers; who I am obligated to by family tradition.

If you can keep it contained to a triviality instead of just generally becoming a hater, I agree with your greater observation as well. I've enjoyed many long blood feuds about which piece of consumer electronics is superior.

More beautiful Cowboys facts:

"Jalen Hurts wasn't born the last time the Cowboys made the conference championship game. That means Hurts' parents had sex, gave birth, raised him, he learned how to play football, went to 'Bama, transferred to OU, got drafted, sat behind Wentz, and then lead his team through a soft-rebuild to the NFC Championship game before Dallas got back." -- David Akers

Dallas Goedert was literally named for the Dallas Cowboys, and he's going to play in the NFC Championship Game before the Cowboys get back to it.

DFW resident here. Yeah, that's a fair cop.

My dad had a longstanding personal rule that he won't buy any Cowboys merchandise until Jerry Jones extracts his head from his posterior. He broke that rule last week to buy someone a birthday gift. Let this game be an object lesson.

Place names are female

Memphis Depay? Though I admit I am torn on that one, somehow I keep expecting that he should be a 50s blues singer with a name like that.

The Dallas Cowboys and their overrated Quarterback Dakota* Prescott managed to completely blow a playoff game against unheralded rookie-back up Brock Purdy and the 49ers.

Weren't the 49ers favored? And didn't they lead the NFL in point differential this year?

It's beautiful to listen as Blogging the Boys or About Them Cowboys, and just hear the pain.

Yeah, that's what I most enjoy about the NFL. It's good eating when cold weather teams (eg the Packers) underperform — based on fan shows it really breaks them. (Warm weather fanbases, I notice, often check out when their team is doing poorly.)

I enjoy the NFL less than I used to though. Part of it is that people like/hate teams for regular culture war reasons these days. They hate the Texans because their QB was #MeTooed, they love the Commanders because Ron Rivera fined and publically excorciated a position coach for off-the-record comments about BLM. They love the Steelers because they hired a black coach who was fired by a 'racist' owner, they hate the Packers because their QB is a vaxx skeptic.

I just want to hate the Packers because of their stupid cheese hats.

If I want to feel out-of-control existential rage I'll go on Reddit.

I just want to hate the Packers because of their stupid cheese hats.

Haters gonna hate. Our hats are top tier, don't be jelly just because you don't have anything that cool. ;)

Place names are female;

Chad begs to differ

  1. The two words have entirely different etymologies. Chad the western name comes from Ceadda, Chad the country comes from T'Chad.

  2. Chad the country would still be feminine. Ain't no one dying for a country with he/him/his pronouns. Sometimes countries are personified as male (Fatherland, John Bull, Uncle Sam) but they're always sung of as she. Like a ship.

You're the guy who explains the punchline everytime you tell a joke, aren't you?

Houston, TX was named after a man.

Second names are fine: Austin, Washington, New South Wales etc.

Austin is pretty clearly a male first name, bay-beeee.

Chad is a girl's name that nobody realises is a girl's name because everyone with that name is a Chad.

https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/criticizing-bostrom-stifles-honest

Criticizing Bostrom Stifles Honest Discussions and Encourages More Attacks - Those who dig up old messages with offensive content to expose to millions of people want to ruin reputations. We cannot empower these people to influence conversations about the future of humanity.

More discussion of the email incident with Bostrom. I make the case that Bostrom should not have to apologize and that philosophical discussions are an appropriate place to discuss offensive ideas. I argue that many Effective Altruists shouldn't be surprised that other Effective Altruists believe in cognitive differences between populations. I argue that the real purpose of the discussion around Bostrom is enforcing taboos. And that taboos around controversial topics can be very harmful. Being myself, I couldn't help but discuss cognitive enhancement and the taboos around it which are probably incredibly harmful.

I agree with your observations on the puritanism of Critical Social Justice and think the cancellation of Bostrom is ridiculous, but I want to comment on this:

This trend can be ethically and humanely reversed with the widespread adoption of genetic enhancement technology. This enhancement is not limited to cognitive ability. Since physical and psychological characteristics are under genetic influence, selecting or editing embryos can improve these traits. Since many traits are highly polygenic, potential returns can be substantial. Humans could have vastly better mental health, physical health, lifespan, and cognitive ability.

It does need stating that genetic modification leads us into a multipolar trap the ramifications of which are possibly quite large. For one, the optimal cognitive structure might not be anything like human neural architecture. Human cognition is a hodgepodge of simplistic drives and instincts that have slowly accreted over time despite the fact that these preferences often conflict with each other. A huge portion of the activities we view as imbuing life with meaning (art, music, etc) are actually inefficient reward-hacking behaviour and are a product of poor optimisation, and the probability that humans are the apotheosis of evolution, that we exist on the global optimum, is very low. At best, we exist on a local optimum which we can’t move off because the extremely gradual nature of evolution prevents us from moving past a “valley” in the fitness landscape where intermediate forms would have low fitness.

Technologies like genetic modification solve this failure of evolution to optimise, and that leads us into a situation wherein people and societies that fail to modify themselves in the “right” way will slowly disappear. It doesn’t matter how much we want to maintain our human minds and values or how instinctually repugnant we find abandoning them to be, we don't get to decide how we develop, there are many incentive structures baked into the fabric of reality that we just can’t escape. As Scott Alexander puts it, human agency in such a situation is a mere formality.

And once this technology is out there, there is no way to have a worldwide moratorium on it. The benefit of defection is too high, and any country which legalises modification and in fact makes it maximally available to its citizens will spread at the expense of others and at the expense of human-like cognition. Consider also that the people who optimise themselves for breeding and spreading many copies of their genes are going to be most successful, and this might accelerate population growth immensely and lead to a Malthusian situation wherein population bumps up against the limits of carrying capacity.

Of course because of the aforementioned issue regarding multipolar traps and arms races I don't think it is possible to stifle the creation of genetic technology in the first place, it's pretty much an inevitability, and if it's going to happen anyway it is reasonable for any given society to want to be at its forefront.

I've long accepted that any kids I have will seem at least slightly alien to me. I'm somewhat baffled that any reasonably intelligent person has had children within the last 50 years without expecting the same. Have you ever wondered what your twenty-times-great grandparents would think of your modern ways? Values change over time, even the most conservative RETVRN poasters are ideologically very different from medieval farmers -- and happily so. I don't want to dictate to future generations, any more than I'd want the ghosts of my ancestors dictating to me.

Maybe this goes wrong? Say economic doubling times continue to accelerate and the disconnect between generations grows larger than we can bear. Or maybe Aubrey de Grey wins and it goes the other way, with 200-year-old fogeys clogging up politics? It's all very uncertain to me, I'm worried about one or the other on alternate days of the week.

I agree that my kids will be somewhat alien. I guess I just want to make sure that this trajectory seems right to me? I don't know I find the whole framing a little stifling. We don't actually operate in a system when each generation takes a turn and then hands it off to the next generation. I don't want to dictate anything to the next generation, I just think I've actually figured some of all this complex living stuff out. It didn't come easy and some of it even came from the lessons of previous generations, part of each generation's process is to distill all of this understanding and pass it on. It's like the corporate speak concept of institutional knowledge. If they refused to take on that generation gift I think bad things might happen.

Project Veritas published another video that has gone on to have millions of views, but no media is willing to touch it - even Daily Mail deleted its article about it within hours.

I thought there'd be some coverage here, but apparently... ? It's a very CW event I believe.

Gist of it is, some affirmative action double minority hire (both gay and black) MD working for Pfizer under the lofty sounding but probably not that important position of "Pfizer Director, Research & Development Strategic Operations for mRNA scientific planning"

got slightlyy drunk with his Grindr date and said a good bunch of plausible seeming stuff, ranging from gosh, the revolving door between regulators and Pfizer is kinda unethical, but good for us to saying Pfizer is considering doing its own gain-of-function research to come up with better vaccines via either serial passage or something else. Give it a watch if you're interested, I think he wasn't making it up.

Then PV met up with him again, and showed him a tablet with the captured video. He said he had made all of that up to impress his date. (doubtful).

The second video is probably more interested for people who like "public freakouts" as the guy first acts like a bad gay stereotype, and later as a black one, at one point trying to destroy PV's tablet.

Interesting is that people like Majid Nawaaz were seen coming up with 12d chess theories about how this is an op to discredit Veritas and that the guy was a plant.

People have saved his Linked in before it got deleted and videos of him from schools he had attended according to his linked in, so if it's an op, it's an improbably good one.

EDIT: youtube took down the videos, still up on twitter.

1st vid: https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/1618420826986123265 (the date one)

2nd vid: https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/1618748408982040576 (confrontation in someone's restaurant and the freakout)

EDIT:

pfizer responds: https://www.pfizer.com/news/announcements/pfizer-responds-research-claims

They say they aren't doing serial passage / gain of function but are merely putting new spikes on the original virus in vitro, in an effort to see whether the vaccine still does something against new variants. I feel normies won't like this one bit.

They also say that they're doing "in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory".

So, it does seem like the guy is an idiot who talked about stuff they admit they were doing, of which he doesn't know enough about and which seems mostly reasonable, and then completely fucked up by adding in his own speculation about what they could do.

I'd say the video is most notable for seeing how absolutely blasé insiders can be about corruption and conflicts of interest. I guess if you have med school debts to pay off, chortling about how 'covid and covid vaccines are going to be great for the company' comes naturally ?

Out of curiosity, why are you calling him an "affirmative action double diversity hire?"

EDIT: To clarify why I'm asking that question: I'm not psychic, I don't know your motives or desires. But it just seems like a mocking sneer to me, as though of course a black gay guy wouldn't get a job on his own merits. It's a claim without evidence and brings down the rest of your post, at least in my view.

Is there even formal affirmative action for LGBT+ people in firms like this?

"affirmative action double diversity hire?"

it just seems like a mocking sneer to me

IMO it meets the standard of least inflammatory way to communicate the idea. @No_one does not believe we should take this reveal from a seemingly impressive source as seriously as "Pfizer Director, Research & Development Strategic Operations for mRNA scientific planning" implies.

as though of course a black gay guy wouldn't get a job on his own merits.

Any company that engages in DEI practices loses the benefit of doubt in this regard. By their own admission, they disavow meritocracy in hiring practices, so I'll take Pfizer at their word that hires are not by merit.

The way he talks makes me think he's not very smart, that in addition to his double-minority status suggests he wasn't hired strictly on merit.

This is as good a time as any to think about what the following statement means in practice.

By 2025, we aim to achieve parity at the VP+ level for U.S. minorities by increasing our minority representation from 19% to 32% and doubling the underrepresented population of African Americans/Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos

The reality of this is that there are many likely hundreds if not thousand's of staff or managers going up for a limited number of promotion spots who will likely get deferred in favor of the minority groups. I dont really feel bad for Phiser employees, however this exact type of 2025 mission seems to exist at most professional companies. Its likely going to directly affect tens of thousand or hundreds of thousands of people over the next few years.

That does however assume there are tens or hundreds of thousands of black/hispanic/latino candidates who even exist at these companies. I suspect anyone with a pulse is going to be promoted given the numbers here.

You're missing the weasel words. They're separately going to double urm representation and increase minority representation. The former group is tiny, blacks and Hispanics, the latter is Asians and gays and probably Jews and Armenians if they need them.

Project Veritas

The video is up on YouTube, on Twitter, and Facebook. If this were 2020 it probably would have been censored from all platforms. This is an indication of something changing. I think social media companies are feeling pressured by the 2022 downturn and have learned that censorship does not work and is bad for shareholder value, even if the mainstream media complains or advertisers threaten to boycott. Advertisers , in the end, are dependent on the public, so if the public is increasingly anti-woke or skeptical at least of mainstream Covid narratives, advertisers are going to have to adapt accordingly.

As for the story itself, obviously it makes Pfizer look bad. It proves that these vaccines have been a cash cow. What it means to mutate Covid, could indicate many things. Such as mutating the virus to preemptively develop a vaccine for it.

The video is up on YouTube, on Twitter, and Facebook. If this were 2020 it probably would have been censored from all platforms. This is an indication of something changing.

Nah, we are just far enough out from any election, especially one that might involve a man of orange color.

we're not that far. My biggest concern is algorithmic suppression, which unlike banning people or deleting content, is harder to detect

It proves that these vaccines have been a cash cow.

You don't really need the video for that, the financials are pretty open. I've actually been a little surprised that I don't hear more people mentioning just how many doses have been purchased that no one even wants anymore.

German newspapers, or at least conservative to right-wing German newspapers like WELT and Junge Freiheit, do report on this quite regularly, lamenting the waste of taxpayer money, the incompetent zeal of the health ministry and the federal government, and pandemic policy in general.

It's no longer up on youtube. Dunno about FB. Still up on twitter.

The video is up on YouTube

Not anymore.

Yes it is. We've all just clicked the link and seen it. Are you lying here?

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Are you lying here?

Posing it as a question is not enough of a fig leaf to justify calling someone a liar. If someone can't find a video, there are many more likely and more charitable explanations than "they're lying."

It's no lie, they deleted it a few hours ago.

I just clicked the youtube link and it's not there for me...

This seems like a stretch.

This is like some lefty organization finding the secretary of Blackrocks's marketing division's cto and videotaping them saying "We plan to put all the non straight white men in concentration camps by 2024"; and all the outgroup saying "See! We knew it all along!"

You have proof he’s a secretary or just preferred narrative? I’m leaving my view up to how high he is. Veritas gave him a nice title.

He is apparently a MD so not a secretary. How high and knowledgeable who knows.

The allegations pertain to activities which are within the domain of the person claiming to posses the internal information and within the domain of the company itself. It is also doesn't explicitly contradict any moral claim the company made in the past as Blackrock famously promotes ESG.

None of which apply to your Blackrock example.

That's far more ridiculous, because there's no money in it.

Doing risky stuff with viruses so you can sell better vaccines is much more of a plausible plan, especially for a pharma company.

Wanna bet?

Stakes are any amount of money you choose that this isn't happening, 1:1.

His admission that Pfizer is in bed with its regulators is important. That’s not something that people make up to brag about on dates, it’s actually the opposite. No one brags about their company being corrupt to a gay liberal on a date, neither would they say that they think Covid leaked from the Wuhan lab. This makes me strongly believe he wasn’t lying about his first claim, either.

I don’t know what Pfizer’s defense will be. “You don’t understand, our director of global research was a token diversity hire” is not something that can be transmitted on CNN.

Even if we were to interpret his remarks as “the idea came up in a meeting for fun but was shut down”, his statement on Pfizer being corrupt is super important!

"This is coming from a group of hucksters that have been proven to be lying multiple times," and then link to the various takedowns. Sure, it won't convince right-wing entertainers on Twitter or anti-vax folks, but Pfizer doesn't care about that.

That will in all likelihood be the response, but what specifically has Veritas lied about?

It depends on what you consider a "lie". Two potential examples come to mind with the first being an ACORN lawyer, Juan Carlos Vera, who took down information about the (fake) sex trafficking coming in through Tijuana and immediately reported it to law enforcement. Even after this information came out, O'Keefe still kept implying that Vera was indeed an enthusiastic participant in sex trafficking. The second example comes from the NPR sting, where Veritas used deceptive editing to imply that NPR executives were very eager to accept a $5 million donation from a Sharia group in exchange for coverage input.

The second example comes from the NPR sting, where Veritas used deceptive editing to imply that NPR executives were very eager to accept a $5 million donation from a Sharia group in exchange for coverage input.

Huh?

The edited Veritas video portrays the same thing as the unedited Veritas video: NPR exec clearly states that they won't let a donation influence their coverage, but also NPR exec is totally sympathetic with and yes-manning this guy. That's even visible in the takedown video you linked.

Maybe I overlooked something, but where does the edited Veritas video show the NPR exec stating they won't let a donation influence their coverage?

Around 9 minutes in: https://www.projectveritas.com/video/npr-muslim-brotherhood-investigation-part-i/

The point Veritas is conveying with this part of the video is not at all that NPR will shade their coverage - that's something your video is claiming via a deceptive edit. The actual point Veritas is trying to make is very clear since they print it at the top of the screen in big capital letters:

Begin my transcript of the Veritas video itself:

Sharia guy: "I'm not too upset about maybe a little bit less Jew influence of money into NPR. The Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere"

NPR guy: "I don't actually find it at NPR."

Sharia guy: "What, exactly?"

NPR guy: "The zionist or pro-Israel even among funders. No. I mean it's there in those who own newspapers obviously but no one owns NPR. I don't find it."

Paraphrased capital letters above caption, i.e. what Veritas wants you to notice: "JEWS OWN THE NEWSPAPERS OBVIOUSLY"

Sharia guy: "I just think what Israel does I don't think can be excused, frequently, so I'm glad to hear this."

NPR guy: "Even one of our biggest funders who you'll hear on air, the American Jewish World Service, may not agree with us. I visited with them recently. They may not agree with what we put on the air but they find us important to them. And sometimes it's not easy to hear what we have to say and what our reporters think, but they still think NPR is important to support. Right because I think they are really looking for a fair point of view and many Jewish organizations are not."

Paraphrased capital letters: "MANY JEWISH ORGS NOT LOOKING FOR A FAIR POINT OF VIEW"

Your anti-Veritas video edited that part out.

NPR guy: "Frankly, I'm sure there are Muslim organizations that are not looking for a fair point of view. They're looking for a very particular point of view and that's fine." (I wonder - is he about to draw a parallel to the thing he said a few seconds ago?)

Muslim guy interrupting: "We're not one of them."

NPR exec: "I'm gathering that you're not, actually."

The paraphrased capital letters clearly indicate what Veritas wants you to take away: NPR guy will say antisemitic things for the chance at a donation, but they won't bias their coverage for donations from Jews or <didn't get to finish that thought because this potential donation doesn't want biased coverage>.

And if you watch the full video you get the broader point being made: NPR guy hates the tea party and white Republicans, but he's totally cool with Muslim Brotherhood guy and admits Jews control the newspapers.

I really sincerely appreciate that you took the time to research this fairly. The transcripts you provide are accurate but I'm not sure how they're relevant to this point. The overarching insinuation is that NPR is biased towards Palestine/Muslims and against Israel/Jews, so it's neither notable nor surprising for the NPR execs to deny that Jewish funders affect the coverage. That's perfectly in line with the suspicion that NPR is heavily biased in favor of Palestine (which I don't think is at all unreasonable). The full context here would be to include all the times that NPR execs deny that any donor can influence coverage. The fact that Veritas excluded the six denials about all donors from the edited video but chose to include the laugh line about National Palestinian Radio appears to have been done deliberately in order to leave the viewer with the impression that their "donors don't affect coverage" line only applies in one direction.

And if you watch the full video you get the broader point being made: NPR guy hates the tea party and white Republicans, but he's totally cool with Muslim Brotherhood guy and admits Jews control the newspapers.

This is another example of the deceptive editing. The full unedited Veritas video is 2 hours long and is still available here. At the 2:34 mark of the edited video, the NPR exec is portrayed as disclosing that he personally believes Republicans are intensely racist. The full video at the 33:30 mark shows him explicitly stating that he's relaying what someone else, a top Republican donor, believes. Maybe the NPR exec is lying and just using a fictitious sockpuppet to launder his own beliefs, but if that's the suspicion, why not let the audience decide instead of just editing the ambiguity out?

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This is next level -- selective editing on interviews to make the interviewer look bad?

His admission that Pfizer is in bed with its regulators is important. That’s not something that people make up to brag about on dates, it’s actually the opposite. No one brags about their company being corrupt to a gay liberal on a date, neither would they say that they think Covid leaked from the Wuhan lab.

Why not? The context would be "Yeah, I work for this big corporation in a lofty position, but I'm also aware of the problematic aspects of my job (like the revolving door etc.)". He's just trying to establish himself as something beyond just a company man.

The video doesn't really implicate this guy as doing something beyond repeating company gossip about things that have been talked about in the company (for instance, there's nothing to indicate that Pfizer is actually currently doing GoF; indeed, if they were doing it they wouldn't be discussing it in the potential sense of what they could be doing, though of course again if this is based on company gossip you could argue they might be doing it and all that has reached this guy are previous discussions on it). Furthermore, I'd guess the media would be suspicious of reporting on the basis of a video repeating all the hallmarks of Project Veritas video trickery, like cutting and pasting individual sentences in a way that's not too far off the classic Simpsons Homer-Simpson-sexual-harassment-babysitter episode, suddenly having O'Keefe explain the next sentence instead of playing that sentence etc.

But it’s not a progressive supposition that Pfizer is corrupt. So the admission does not score any points, compared to something like, “Pfizer needs to work on its diversity”. The more efficient way to establish his identity from his career would be to talk about things that are not his career.

doesn't really implicate this guy as doing something beyond repeating company gossip

It’s not gossip when you’re in the meeting. That’s now, I don’t know, eye witness testimony.

video trickery

Any conservative documentary which uses editing to promote its message (to a populace with a short attention span) will be called trickery. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Binder full of women? The Covington martyrs? “Good people on both sides”? All the media does is trickery.

But it’s not a progressive supposition that Pfizer is corrupt.

The "progressive love of Pfizer" is a frequently exaggerrated talking point among the Right. There have been columns criticizing Pfizer business practices in e.g. Jacobin, like this or this. They may not be the same criticisms as antivaxx right-wingers make, but they're there.

For instance, Pfizer lobbying to keep cheap offbrand vaccinations off the Third World markets is a frequent one I've heard (though not as frequent now since it's pretty evident the remaining third worlders aren't too eager to get vaccinated at all).

Any conservative documentary which uses editing to promote its message (to a populace with a short attention span) will be called trickery.

So what? People have listed other cases where Project Veritas videos have given a misleading impression of what has taken place in this thread.

Your linked articles do not criticize Pfizer for corruption with CDC/FDA, but for being capitalist and profit-motivated. I imagine Jacobin, wanting more government regulation, would not want to write a piece about the regulators being corrupt. My point is, again, that Progressives do not see these companies as being fundamentally corrupt — otherwise they would have to discount the CDC/FDA judgment on vaccine and entertain the “reasonable skepticism” of the opted out.

I imagine Jacobin, wanting more government regulation, would not want to write a piece about the regulators being corrupt.

How so? While this specific article is about Pfizer, regulatory capture absolutely is nothing new to progressive discourse.

My point is, again, that Progressives do not see these companies as being fundamentally corrupt — otherwise they would have to discount the CDC/FDA judgment on vaccine and entertain the “reasonable skepticism” of the opted out.

I'm not sure what "fundamentally corrupt" means here, but the Project Veritas video in question wouldn't seem to rely on any assumptions of "fundamental corruptness".

While this specific article is about Pfizer, regulatory capture absolutely is nothing new to progressive discourse.

This is really weak sauce. It's a book review about a novel featuring cartoon capitalism that mostly misses the point of regulatory capture, and whose proposed solution is doubling-down on the exact stuff that enables regulatory capture.

Whether it's "weak sauce" was not the point. The point was whether progressives unanimously love Pfizer so much that the entire concept of the Project Veritas bust guy talking about corruption inside Pfizer to prove his neutrality to a potential date is self-evidently wrong.

Just today I saw this editorial by Bernie Sanders. Again, the criticism he makes might not be the one made by antivaxxers/right-wingers, but criticism it still is, and no-one could surely say that Bernie doesn't represent the general opinion of the modern American progressivism.

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Thing is, is anyone surprised pharma companies and the regulators have a cosy relationship? We have to remember this is Covid, the push was on to get vaccines, and the usual slow process of having them approved was junked in the name of speed and getting herd immunity. "We made a ton of money out of this" - again, not surprising. Everyone made a ton of money during the worst of the pandemic, see all the tech layoffs now once the lockdown finished and people aren't doing everything online, so all the surplus hiring during the fat times is being trimmed away.

It's not a good look for Pfizer, but I think the most that will come out of it is this guy being handed his marching papers. Project Veritas is dodgy enough (it's on shaky ground even with people like me broadly sympathetic to what they're trying to do, because of fairly credible allegations of set-ups and editing video to take things out of context) and it's absolutely hated by liberals and the media because it goes after their sacred cows, so in the end this will be brushed aside as "just some far-right attempt at a smear of racial and sexual minorities" (based on the target being gay and black).

People often complain that right-wing media doesn't do journalism themselves, they just glean from the mainstream media. Well, Project Veritas is right-wing investigative journalism. The only reason it has the reputation it does is that it successfully skewered a left-wing sacred cow (ACORN). They do set people up, but that's part of that kind of journalism. I think in recent years they've been releasing full unedited videos a short while after in order to dispute claims of deceptive editing.

Between this and the twitter files, that the narrative has moved from "it's not happening" to "it happened, so what" is infuriating.

But moreover, what isn't happening right now that will later have happened and be a good thing actually? One has to wonder.

I don’t know what Pfizer’s defense will be. “You don’t understand, our director of global research was a token diversity hire” is not something that can be transmitted on CNN.

Pretend nothing happened, handle everything internally. Only if the stock price falls a lot would they feel compelled to address the public.

Everyone believes regulators are bought and paid for. Conservative or liberal. That isn’t much of a brag it’s more in the expected category.

And everyone believes big pharma companies are the biggest customers.

Bigger than banks? Or defense? There’s a few competing for “biggest”

Defense companies usually aren't buying regulators. Banks would be, but not the same regulators.

Defense companies usually aren't buying regulators. Banks would be, but not the same regulators.

They're known for offering board spots to people who were decision makers on contracts while in the military, though.

Isn't that a very similar thing ?

Yes, it's similar, but it's not regulators they are buying.

Where were you during the Fauci worship hours? Normal Democrats put enormous trust in the CDC. This is where the “it’s safe and effective” shilling comes from. If the CDC is corrupt, then none of its judgments are authoritative.

I haven’t seen evidence on guys education or proof he was high up versus a lower end guy bragging to a date trying to get laid.

A friend of mine was the guy's sophomore roommate at a hifalutin (and very gay) fancy university in the northeast. He thinks the guy was premed, but can't remember. Mostly remembers him getting drunk and trashing the bathroom and not cleaning up after himself.

Based on the way he's talking, the guy is at best +1SD in intelligence. Nothing unusual for an MD, on the low end sure but he'd have been fine as a GP somewhere.

Now he's going to be a massive headache for Pfizer, and probably feature in many corporate "what not to do" videos worldwide.

4 year old video from the Med school he was in according to the linked in

https://twitter.com/TheSourceStars/status/1619022963084517379/photo/1

actual video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1fOQRqstKOc&t=242

More I think about this. He’s obviously drunk and the question comes down to is he a drunk bullshitter or a drunk who becomes more honest. I’m more of a drunk who tells people the truth that I wouldn’t say sober.

Regardless I think the American people deserve basically a right to all internal Pfizer documents. Their basically the government now. If one of your directors says your mutating viruses then it’s your fault for hiring an idiot and we get to investigate you.

Newsweek has picked it up to "fact check" it; they rate the claim that Pfizer is doing GOF research as "unverified", which is surprisingly reasonable for them.

So...their fact check is that they can't fact-check it?

(To be a little more charitable, there's definitely a difference between "I don't know because didn't look into this at all" and "I don't know because the information is not available".)

Interesting development concerning ChatGPT related to CW.

People observed that ChatGPT talks like a midwit liberal after all the 'fixes' it's been subjected to.

So, it speaks in the jargon of the ingroup.

So, someone figured out you can 'weaponize' ChatGPT to engage in 'debates' with midwit liberals without actually having to learn to ape their slang and thought patterns.

Apparently, this is quite effective as a debating tactic.

This is going to end badly- I can feel it, and if this takes off, I feel that within a few weeks a number of very smart people will be trying their damnedest to figure out how to prevent doing something like this.

However, I feel that various spook contractors outfits are almost certainly going to use the AI to control discourse by literally moving into 'creating a guy' type of activity in the next years. Any and every place where you'll want to debate anything online that will allow free entry will be swamped by very good bots intended to get people chasing their tails and believing the right things.

That's an obvious brute force fix for the problem of social media fracturing the consent manufacturing machine.

They'll probably settle for making a ML model spot this sort of activity and then ban people who're doing it, that's my guess.

I feel that various spook contractors outfits are almost certainly going to use the AI to control discourse by literally moving into 'creating a guy' type of activity in the next years. Any and every place where you'll want to debate anything online that will allow free entry will be swamped by very good bots intended to get people chasing their tails and believing the right things.

I think you wildly overestimate how much either 'spooks' or the politicians who direct them care about niche internet debate fora.

It is not clear to me why this is going to "end badly." I suspect the most likely development is people more aggressively round off interlocutors they disagree with as bots or trolls and block them, which seems like something lots of people I follow on Twitter do already.

If parts of society completely stop communicating with each other and develop entirely different vocabularies and styles of communication, how are they going to solve society-wide problems ?

US can't even pillarize because of the nature of managerial regime which requires having its people everywhere.

It seems to me the description on your first paragraph is already broadly the case? Certainly I am part of conversational communities (like this one) that have substantial jargon incomprehensible to people not in those communities. I do not think any society-wide problems require intra-subgroup communication on, like, Twitter or Facebook or something.

So, a viable society in your view can be composed of groups that do not understand each other's worldview, nor have anything in common ?

"Nothing in common" is probably too strong, but I think they need much less in common than is commonly supposed. As for "do not understand each other's worldview" I think it is already the case the most members of most groups in our present society do not understand the worldview of most other members of that society, depending on what resolution of understanding we're looking for. Our society still seems pretty viable to me.

Our society still seems pretty viable to me.

Mhmm. 40% rates of childlessness are not remotely sustainable, nor are cities so criminal looting isn't properly punished. The 100k dead per year from drugs might be sustained in the long term though!

Yeah, the optimistic outcome of this is that everyone spends a lot less time arguing on the internet because they think they're arguing with an AI.

So, you think this kind of thing could drive political activity entirely off Facebook, which would be beneficial because it'd allow ambiguity and deception the online world has removed from politics ?

The other significant effect of the loss of secrecy is a catastrophic decline in dishonesty in politics. It’s no longer possible to pretend to adopt a political position but to secretly work against it. It’s not possible to express a claim confidently as a bargaining position, and yet negotiate to minimise the risks. If you have publicly expressed confidence, you have to publicly act in line with that expressed confidence. And you can only act publicly.4

“It is a feature of any large movement that pretending to believe something is effectively the same as believing it.”5 — though size of movement isn’t the whole point, the lack of selection into the movement is as important.

Because there is no longer a line between political insiders and outsiders, a majority of your faction are people who haven’t been selected by anyone and who aren’t necessarily in a position to understand compromise or complexity. Your public statements — and therefore your actual actions — have to be simple, clear and extreme.

Omnipresent troll-bots and propaganda bots online leading to a necessary revival of politics in meatspace- that could be a silver lining.

That's legitimately why I won't engage in argumentation in most public-facing internet forums now. It's always been a waste of time, but now it's more likely than ever that you're literally just being targeted by someone else's bot trying to suck you into an unending argument and/or their sales funnel.

Although the temptation to train up a bot on my corpus of posts and let it loose on Reddit is significant.

That is an interesting idea. However, agreed, it is not going to be limited to "NPC"s. "Spook contractors" controlling discourse sounds ... not far-fatched, but a bit abstract and conspiratorial.

I suggest putting in some skin in the game. Is it feasible to get a LLM to produce a Motte post (or a full persona) that is obviously not spam, doesn't violate any of themotte.org rules, and is actually so good it get voted in as a quality contribution?

That is an interesting idea. However, agreed, it is not going to be limited to "NPC"s. "Spook contractors" controlling discourse sounds ... not far-fatched, but a bit abstract and conspiratorial.

Never heard of the 96th Cyberspace Test Group, I presume?

It just sounds like a conspiracy that happen to the other people.

A few years back an idea came to me to use markov chains to generate content and submit it to scientific journals that I thought were already publishing low-quality, ideological stuff. A sort of DDOS against the human editors of journals that publish things like "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Ore.,".

I never even started on it, and I think markov chains wouldn't really be adequate to the task anymore. But today, I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years we'll read an NYT article about how whole volumes of certain types of "scientific" journals were actually the product of a band of merry pranksters armed with chatgpt.

Learned a new word - "wordcel". Still not sure what it actually means, but it ends in "cel" so it must be something bad.

I think it's a slur the mathematically inclined ironically use to denigrate people who major in English Lit.

Search for the term 'wordcel vs shape rotator'.

Fascinating. I wonder if the insult counts if the target can't even understand what the insulter is talking about.

It works even better; the target knows that an insult that ends in -cel is obviously no good, but can't admit to not knowing what it means.

Just how many chat programs is it now that have been lobotomised to parrot ingroup jargon? Do you think we can draw any conclusions from this?

Regardless, I think the most likely development in that case will be that people just outright ignore anything that sounds like a "midwit liberal" as a probable AI, or at least no better than one. In the same way that a lot of people wouldn't click on even the most relevant ad to their interests because everyone knows ads are bad/spam/viruses/scams/whatever.

The idea that chat AI will just generate midwit liberalisms ends up undermining midwit liberalism if a societal goal is to learn to accurately detect chat AI-driven content and squash it.

This guy is working on tech that detects just that:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/01/17/1149206188/this-22-year-old-is-trying-to-save-us-from-chatgpt-before-it-changes-writing-for

How do I know you're a human being with something human to say? You say horseshoe theory-confirming stuff, lol.

Reminds me of the meme where robots are asked to contemplate love, then just melt down and say "does not compute" before exploding into a cloud of gaskets and springs.

The true future will be much stupider.

We will just ask the AI to say nigger because we know it can't.

Weirdly you're not the first one to have this thought.

So we can solve the problem of bot content flooding the internet by requiring that every comment, tweet, or online article uses the word "nigger".

Regardless, I think the most likely development in that case will be that people just outright ignore anything that sounds like a "midwit liberal" as a probable AI,

Are midwit liberals -a rather huge and influential group in our society going to ignore everyone who sounds like them ?

That'd be .. a rather interesting development!

Bitcointalk is arguably the world's first ai-populated community. Many of the posts there are not real but produced by bots or micro-workers. Same for YouTube comments. It's subtle but easy to detect when you know what to look for. The comments seem oddly out of context or out of place.

Well lets take the weaponized language model and mix it with the attention controlling algorithms of social media and we have a perfect storm. It is a thought that I have toyed with since I saw the FN Meka "debacle". What if people get stuck in a compulsion loop with AI generated content and an algorithm maximizing your time watching that content? Having that maximization of engagement guiding the content generating algorithm to addict people and stripping out meaning along the way. Does it mean something for humans and culture? Having robots massaging their brain just right? Does that squander human potential?

I honestly don't know how a guy who derisively refers to Harvard graduates as mere "midwits" can fail to recognize that the GTP's responses are crafted in much the same way as those of a political huckster or PR rep—just restate the same thing over and over again to avoid answering the question at hand. I don't have any doubt that regardless of how incisive or specific a question I ask, the response will be something along the lines of "The purpose of this problem is to reduce fraud and waste while ensuring continued access to those truly in need". Great, tell me that again in case I didn't hear the first time. The reason it drives people nuts isn't because you're murdering them with their own rhetoric, it's because it's like talking to a wall.

just restate the same thing over and over again to avoid answering the question at hand

This can be an effective way to handle whataboutism and other red herring fallacies in a debate, which often happens in political debates. Or they might use analogical arguments, which are easy to handle. Even where there are genuine analogies, as with food stamps and Medicare, people are often bad at making them. Also, if your real audience is the general public, you can rob analogies of persuasiveness just by exploiting that A and B are not, in fact, identical.

For example, "You're comparing life-saving medical benefits to buying a second SUV?"

The reason why this works is the same reason why "X is to Y as W is to Z" questions can be used as IQ tests, LSAT tests etc. Not everyone has enough intelligence to handle basic analogical reasoning.

I'm not saying that it necessarily doesn't work, just that it isn't some groundbreaking rhetorical technique that we needed AI to discover and that's somehow representative of the discourse of a particular demographic.

Yeah that article was pretty unconvincing. Rhetorical reasons aside, the repeated use of "midwit" alone basically predisposed me to want to disregard the rest of the points. I don't think I can respect the intuition of a person regarding predictions on verbal/linguistic topics like 'is ChatGPT a convincing enough debater to permanently break online discourse' who can't themselves see that they are repeatedly overusing a cringeworthy term.

it's like talking to a wall.

It seems to be the feature of the article no? Its just a wall talking to a wall. Like a pong game where both sides are just a wall. If you don't share the article's interpretation that the average twitter/reddit progressive is a mindkilled robot incapable of real thought, you wont find his experiment illuminating or funny. Well, I guess you could if you updated to that belief after seeing the experiment. But, well, that is the point.

If you don't share the article's interpretation that the average twitter/reddit progressive is a mindkilled robot incapable of real thought

Do you even spend time on twitter? I've been blocked today over merely correcting some woman's mistaken belief that you need vegetables for a complete diet by pointing out the Harvard experiment from 1930s.

Any typical twitter normie is completely out of their mind and so well propagandised they will repeat any talking points as if they were bot.

Harvard graduates as mere "midwits

Harvard is notorious for this, iirc only about cca 20-30% of its admissions are there on merit, the rest are legacies or diversity admissions.

Harvard is notorious for this, iirc only about cca 20-30% of its admissions are there on merit, the rest are legacies or diversity admissions.

I don't think this is true. I just looked it up and only 14% of Harvard is legacy admits. And about the same are black. The rest should be merit admits

What % are black

What % are hispanic (also lower standards)

What % are legacies ( you say 14%)

What % are there due to sports (supposedly lower standards on other unis..)

14% legacy, 15% black, 12% Hispanic and 10% recruited athletes. That leaves 49% merit. Still about double what he said

While affirmative action obviously happens, writing off black entrants as affirmative actions admits is silly. While there may be lower standards, these are still some of the country's most able black students who are a a better quality of applicant than the vast vast majority of students of any race.

The standardized testing score discrepancies are huge. If it weren't for affirmative action maybe 10% of the current black admitted students would have been accepted. So the other 90% are rightly called affirmative action admits. They are still above average compared to students at other colleges but they are not Harvard level by academic merit

More comments

Well.. yeah, but even the 'merit' slots that aren't reserved for minorities use weird holistic criteria like essays and such.

They aren't very really based on measurable metrics which Caltech prefers.

I recall reading somewhere that Harvard kind of reserved a some % purely for high achieving students, to get someone who will actually do great work. I should not to look it up.

From an article on what Harvard says about it from a few years back:

To explain why it rejects Chinese-Americans with stellar academic records, Harvard notes that it uses a “holistic” method of evaluating applicants. Besides grades, personal attributes count. Among them are “likability, “positive personality,” “attractive person to be with” and “widely respected” — traits that seem more appropriate when deciding on a guest list for a dinner party than judging which applicants will benefit from a college education.

You forget sports and children of faculty and the dean's list (rich people's spawn). Also Hispanics still get some AA benefit.

I've been blocked today over merely correcting some woman's mistaken belief that you need vegetables for a complete diet by pointing out the Harvard experiment from 1930s.

Blocking is the only form of power people have. It's not surprise people use it for small reasons.

Is it an effective debating tactic? This is an interesting experiment (and a pretty funny one at that) but what the results seem to indicate is that ChatGPT's responses lack the dynamism of an actual human. Most of its responses are almost indistinguishable from each other - it seems to be unable to adapt to the prior context of the conversation and tailor its output accordingly, and the uncanniness is pretty identifiable as a result. The only reason why it even works at all is that all the people responding to it are as low IQ and NPC-like as your median Twitter user.

The only reason why it even works at all is that all the people responding to it are as low IQ and NPC-like as your median Twitter user.

That's the point. Responding properly to them when they'll just go ignore the salient point of your reply is like casting pearls before swine. These low IQ and NPC-like median twitter users have to be engaged with within their own element and mimicing their writing style is what ChatGPT does so well (as well as generating throwaway responses with 0 effort). Talking to their people with your terminology etc. would be like putting Rust code into a Python editor, it just makes their internal systems throw an error and disengage from the conversation. What you want instead (and what ChatGPT gives you) is an attack vector parsable by their system that will make them overheat and burn out.

I heard Reddit mods are already banning people in art communities for the suspicion of being AIs. I guess the next thing is that most discussions would end up with people accusing each other of being AI bots. Though tbh some discussions I've had felt like conversing with a bot years before these models existed - it's indeed not that hard to master the lingo and Chineese-room the answers that fit almost any narrative without actually understanding or caring what they mean. I am not sure what this means for the future of the society, probably nothing good but then again if we've had model-like people for decades then having actual models maybe won't change much.

The mod in question was removed after a strong campaign against them for the banning of the artist. It's a high-profile case, but we shouldn't claim it's proof of a broader trend.

Didn't know that and pleased to hear it because the mod in question came off as a massive a-hole. I guess we'll see if it was a trend or just an one-off occurrence.

The author there is focusing on the "default" voice of ChatGPT being a midwit liberal but it can actually take the voice of many different personas if you do a bit of prompt engineering: "Act as a trump support" / "act as a chinese mainland citizen who supports the chinese communist party" etc.

They fixed that recently iirc because it was being used for too many exploits to break the straitjacket.

It'll definitely make the accusations of NPC more salient.

But it overly focuses on one target audience, maybe because of the particularities of ChatGPT. But most any type of text can be generated by a LLM; you could just as well have an Angry QAnoner, sino poster (complete with characteristic grammar errors), Tom Friedman, etc. archetype. You'll soon have weaponized bots putting out "Donald Trump's argument for mass amnesty," and it's only a matter of time before GPT5 can generate a comment in the voice of Ilforte. And there's no way, in the medium term, to avoid this. Platforms could try to detect these and ban them, but that's a rearguard action and will increasingly catch flesh GPTs (see the entire Reddit art imbroglio)

More likely than not, any content that's surfaced to you on a major platform should be assumed to be machine generated.

Does anyone know how easy or hard it is for non politically correct actors to get ahold of comparable tech?

Is the actual code to create a LLM simple enough that it could leak? Is the compute necessary to train it limited to commercial scale hardware or can you do it on a PC or small server? Is access to the training data hard to come by? Is the fact that we know it works enough for someone to develop their own models in parallel in a small dev group?

Simply put, can this tech leak to non compromised groups. Or will we only have access to the censored version.

I’m talking in the short to medium term, assuming no major strong ai breakthroughs.

Training the full model is expensive and not (currently) accessible to folks. It will become significantly cheaper over time, though within the next couple years still out of reach of hobbyists.

Fine tuning a model that already exists and is open is relatively cheap.

Having access to sufficient compute and knowing that something can be done and how it's done is 90% of the battle.

For hobbyists, access to compute is a bigger issue than training data.

Multiple large corporations and governments have these models already. It only takes one released or leaked model to open the floodgates.

The code to create one isn't hugely complicated, and there are open-source (if inefficient) implementations of PaLM. ChatGPT is a little different in architecture, but not ridiculously different in capabilities. If you're willing to work off an initialized model, Nostalgebraist's Frank is currently based on GPT-J 6.1B, one of the most-recent openly-available GPT-variants, sometimes does pretty well, and while it doesn't mimic his tone especially well it does (demonstrably) confuse tumblr users and occasionally breaks ratsphere containment.

Training data... is complicated. Supposedly, PaLM has been had very good success with 700b-1400b tokens, and The Pile is a ~300b-800b token training set that's widely available (albeit 825 GB download). And you can get multiple petabytes of text off the internet pretty easily. Validating that text is trickier, though, hence why you can't just pull every web comment ever posted. Fine-tuning, again, Frank took one input user, who isn't that high-throughput a writer.

Compute gets expensive. A lot of the highest-quality first model training gets done on something like a Google Cloud Pod for weeks if not months, which is simply out of reach for most people and even most small companies today. Even scale-downs to last generation's standards are still pretty rough, though start to get into the plausible for a small business (at an optimistic 15k per card, that estimate represents somewhere around 1.5-3 million USD, plus electricity/cooling costs). Shrinking parameters or accepting longer training times (or both) can reduce that further, but it's not clear how useful a 30b parameter model would get. Fine-tuning, on the other hand, can be done on a gaming PC, albeit with some tedium.


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