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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   26195 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Humanity Peaked When I Was In High School.

Hypothesis: The reason there's such a broad nostalgia for the 90's and 00's is because that was actually the highwater mark for human aspirations (at least in the West). This is not because of any particular bit of art or culture or anything like that, but for boring historical forces type reasons.

So let's start by talking about art and culture. There's an image that every one of us has of the International Man of Mystery. James Bond. Jason Borne. Raymond Reddington. You can probably imagine your own version of this archetype. What does his background look like? Upper-middle class family, highly educated, top of their class, summers in [European location], winters in [different exotic location]. Military, special military, two decades of nebulous experience in fieldwork. Rafa can probably bang out a dozen plausible Early Life's without pausing for breath.

The end result is a man of spectacular and all-consuming agency. He is unparalleled in his ability to navigate and manipulate the world around him and the reason for that is his knowledge and experience. He speaks six languages, is familiar with a hundred cities, a thousand weapons and ten thousand wines and liquors. He knows the classics, knows the latest tech, knows fashion, watches, cars, boats, aircraft - everything. He is the embodiment of generalized domain-specific mastery, the culmination and exemplar of centuries of traditions that reached their crescendo when I was in high school, at the turn of the millennium.

Between 1990 and 2015, the plausibility of that man failed.

I don't mean that he was ever truly realistic. But most of us here can probably think of people who were reasonable understudies for at least a significant portion of that totalizing skillset. If that one professor we had who seemed to know about everything had gone special forces instead of into economics, yadda yadda.

The problem is that the world of 1990 was both smaller and had a stronger foundation. A well-bred prodigy who reached his prime in 1990 could plausibly speak English, German, Latin, Russian, a Romance language and a random other and thereby talk to anyone who probably mattered. There was enough commonality and overlap in those cultures that he could believably move between them with grace and comportment.

The world of 2025 is bigger. Now he needs to also speak Chinese, Japanese, 8 Indian tongues, Korean, Arabic, Farsi and a couple African languages. Where is he going to learn all of those? Boarding school? Dramatic 20-something romances? It's just too much. It breaks the bounds of plausibility. The structures and support, the cultural traditions that elevate the best of us, they don't exist for this scale. They're not up to the task. The closest we have to a man who can weave between English and Mandarin is John fucking Cena. When is the next (black) James Bond going to solve a puzzle based on his understanding of the Dao and the 4 Classics? It will land with a fraction of the 0.01% of the audience that reads xanxia and whiff for everyone else.

The world of 2025 is too complex for a single man to navigate it like that. Sure, Jason Borne can use Google translate, but that hamstrings his omnicompetence. Taking that tact just highlights the extent to which even the best of us can't master the world anymore. Reddington might know how to manipulate the phone lines, but how is he going to manipulate The Algorithm, which completely changes every six months? Do the highly specialized tech geniuses even understand what they hell they've called up enough to twist it to their own ends?

That's why I think nostalgia has locked onto the 90's. It's the last time the world felt fully human-comprehensible. Hans Gruber seemed like a man who generally knew what was going on in the world - and we could imagine such a man existing.

Now it's beyond that, it's systems of shoggoths that we can tweak and manipulate, but none of us can truly grasp as a whole - and we can't even really imagine someone who can. We've seen too deep into his Twitter feed and know he has utterly retarded opinions about things we do know a bit about. Worse, we have no institutions and traditions to wrangle the shoggoths. That's likely a factor in the AI frenzy - the hope that we can build a shoggoth-wrangling shoggoth, a sheepdog mi-go, while EY screams in horror at the blind arrogance of that plan.

Well, like I said. A hypothesis.

Humanity Peaked When I Was In High School.

Most people think that. Regardless of when they were in high school. The exception is the people who were losers in high school, who think humanity peaked slightly later when they stopped being losers. Compare "50's" (actually early 1960's) nostalgia among high-functioning Boomers and "60's" (a period that started in 1968 and continued well into the 1970's) nostalgia among left-idiotarian Boomers.

The golden era for everything is always 20 years ago. That's how long it takes society to weed its collective memory of the bad and keep the good. Everything people say about the garbage we have today vs. the awesome stuff we had yesterday was being said yesterday about the stuff we had the day before and so on. That goes for pretty much everything - cars, appliances, movies, etc. Really, it's a mix of good and bad, but given enough time, it all becomes good.

20 years ago it was 2005 -- if we aren't seeing nostalgia for whatever was going on then (it's so lame that I don't even know!), maybe it's because the 90s really were that much better?

We have such a man. Our very own kulakrevolt

Donald Trump is bigger and more successful than the idea of James Bond and he navigates the 2020s fine. Elon Musk too for that matter.

Musk is the real deal - obviously a very different paradigm, but Bond-tier apparently-superhuman talent. If James Bond shitposted for 20 hours a day when he wasn't saving the world from Spectre, I don't think he would have the reputation he does.

Trump played a superhumanly-effective CEO on TV, but he was a replacement level CEO in reality, both of his dad's company and of USG as a first-term President. Suggesting Trump as the answer to @Iconochasm's question makes as much sense as suggesting Lashana Lynch or Idris Elba as the next James Bond - they replace Craig, not Bond.

On the other hand, there is a possible mistake here. James Bond is employed on His Majesty's Secret Service. If he was real, we wouldn't know about him. The current C ("M" in the Bond movies) has previously been an elite athlete, a counter-terrorist field agent in the Middle East and served as Q immediately before taking over as C. We crossed paths at Cambridge and she also came across as someone who could hold her own in a poker game against Le Chiffre. She is exactly the sort of person who could win, perhaps even has won, the respect of a double-0 agent working for her. The culture that supposedly produced James Bond and the Ms he worked with still (just about) exists - it just produces talent which points in a direction other than tech entrepreneurship. (Bond, notably, was never a leader of men, a businessman, or an inventor).

Even when Fleming was alive, the idea of a Bond who also built his own gadgets was not plausible.

Trump took his father’s modest low-rent real-estate empire and turned it into one of the most iconic brands on earth. He built a tower at the center of the world and put his name on it. He succeeded at real estate and then transitioned into media, to the point that the name “Donald Trump” was synonymous with the 80s. (American Psycho, Back to the Future, the Wikipedia Page “Donald Trump in Music”, “You’re Fired!”).

After all that Trump ran for President, of the United States, president, with no political experience, and achieved the most shocking underdog victory maybe ever in American history. He then made in 2024 the greatest comeback in American political history since Nixon. And is probably the most consequential President since Nixon, if not since FDR.

“Replacement Level CEO”? Look at the objective facts of this man. Fred Trump owning some apartment buildings in Queens did not put Donald Trump on a guaranteed collision course with Michael Jackson and Mohammed Ali.

I sometimes feel as though the perception of TDS and “the MAGA cult” has created this third strain middle wave Trump revisionism that has to somehow desacralize him into being just some guy. Well, let’s not exaggerate, we have to be reasonable and acknowledge Trump’s flaws, he’s just a man after all… In some sense the TDS people have a more accurate view of Trump’s importance. “Replacement Level”? Trump is a Great Man of History. Acknowledging that doesn’t preclude us from discussing his failures in the same way we can acknowledge that Napoleon gave too much preference to his family or that Washington was actually mediocre at tactics. But Trump is undeniably a great man. And we’re fascinated by him.

Is that the same as James Bond? Trump is certainly a character that represents a huge domineering vision of the future. Maybe that vision doesn’t speak to you specifically, but it has completely changed the arc of American right-wing politics. Trump inspired hundreds of millions of people with a new vision for success. Maybe that’s not the same as James Bond, maybe the media category is a separate field and Jason Bourne and Liam Neeson are all derivatives and we still haven’t moved on from Sherlock Holmes. The sex(-less) appeal is all in video games now and Mario and Pikachu aren’t ideas of the Renaissance Man.

But in the real world the 2020s are full of colorful men-of-action, the fascination of the Tech CEO, scrying not the CCP but Xi Jinping, “Putin’s War,” the rise of the streamer and “content creators” personalized individuated “influencer” brands. The 90s was more obsessed with the corporate archetype than we are now (The Matrix, Fight Club, Work From Home didn’t exist, what happened to all the boy bands?).

After all James Bond is just a media image, he doesn’t exist, he is one archetype bubbling up through the collective unconscious by whatever arbitrary and random process that happens. He says more about the 50s than the 90s. But there are lots of figures like Trump who speak to the 2020s and they don’t point to a culture lacking in ambition.

Donald Trump, or at least his persona, is a remnant of the 80s though.

He's like the Undertaker bringing so much longevity to the gimmick that you forget he's from a different era altogether.

Might be caused by population ageing coupled with fallout from decades of the Triffin dilemma, i.e., economic growth slowing down in the 1960s, trade deficits becoming chronic and growing starting in the mid-1970s, Reaganomics needed to deregulate financial markets and take on more debt to cover rising costs starting in the early 1980s, and so on, driven by the use of the dollar for global trade.

Apologies for making this a total digression but including Raymond Reddington in that list is just absolutely laughable as "international man of mystery" goes because The Blacklist decided to Shyalamatwist by making Raymond Reddington, James Spader Moustache Twirling Hopkins Hannibal Channeler, a fucking woman.

It probably wasn't meant to be a girlboss attempt as much as it was meant to be a Smart Twist, but the reveal coinciding with the heights of cultural wokeness just made the entire series retroactively worse (I think, after the second season of Spader Smugly Wins I got tired of the premise). In any case the idea that Great (wo)Man Raymond Reddington is an aspirational touchstone for younger men to set themselves by is dodgy enough to begin with and became ridiculous later on.

The one US TV series that DID approach the AI apocalypse anything resembling competently was Person Of Interest, where it ended up being humans effecting their AI Godslaves. Otherwise most Great Man stories have to be small, since nukes and interwebz are unnavigable. Unless you're a leet hacker like Hugh Jackman who can keyboardhack while getting slopknobbed.

EDIT https://popculturereferences.com/we-dont-need-authorial-intent-to-know-who-red-reddington-was/#:~:text=Knauf%20confirmed%20that%20the%20intent,to%20leave%20after%20Season%208.

Knauf confirmed that the intent of the writing staff on The Blacklist (specifically show creator and co-showrunner Jon Bokenkamp and John Eisendrath, co-showrunner for the first eight seasons, and then solo showrunner in the final two seasons) was that the Red Reddington (James Spader) that we followed on The Blacklist for ten seasons was born Katarina Rostova, the mother of Elizabeth Keen, the FBI agent who was the co-lead on the series with Reddington until her actor, Megan Boone, chose to leave after Season 8.

@MaximumCuddles, this may or may not serve as proof. I personally noticed this theory when there was fucking ENDLESS spaderfacing about "well maybe I AM really your father or not hmm hmm hmm" that irritated the fuck out of me when watching Blacklist, combined with the lead actress just being very bad at doing anything other than white woman whining about this brainteasing, so I just caught up the summary when it finished and, yea, retroactively made my decision to dip early on worth it.

That's fucking hilarious. I haven't actually watched much of the show, just enough to grasp the conceit. In my mind, Reddington was something like the final money-grubbing exploitation of the character concept, dragging it down to Law & Order spinoff levels for the people who still watch network TV.

As someone whom is aware of but has never seen any of the things you’ve referenced this comment is a goddamn roller coaster of emotion.

Are you takin the piss or are you deadass?

James spader’s character turns out to be a woman? This reads like a /pol/ parody of Yellowstone. I’m legitimately frightened to know the answer to this.

Are you takin the piss or are you deadass?

On god bruh, unc is deadass. Shit is not bussin, that shit is low-key sus AF. Gyatt.

In the year of our lord 2025, you’re either a spiritual boomer or a spiritual zoomer. No in between. Call it.

I still see all the other phrases a lot, especially "unc," but we seem to have passed peak "gyatt." I feel this is a positive development.

Also bussin is passé at this point as well

If I had to take a guess it’s been about 67 weeks since it passed from typical zoomerspeak

James spader’s character turns out to be a woman?

It isn't in the Wikipedia article.

It's been awhile since I saw the show, but it really jumped the shark. The Spader character wasn't actually Raymond Reddington, I forget who, but was somehow related. The real Reddington was someone else, and then someone else from that. It was a series of fake faces. I don't remember the woman part, but the show got bad, so I buy it.

The 90's/early 2000's were might be better compared to now, at least when restricting ourselves to social factors like "social cohesion" or "expectation of the typical person that they'll get married and start a family," but that doesn't make it peak. You're still dealing with sky-high divorce rates (that only "recover" due to declining marriage rates - the early 2000s are debatably the beginning of "inceldom" as an actual trend, and not just a one-off thing you might experience only once or twice in your life). You have to go way back, arguably pre-Industrial Revolution, for that

I see no indication that nostalgia for the time - either by younger Gen X or older Millenials reminiscing on their youth, or by younger Gen Z/early Alpha exposed to 90's/00's pop culture by their parents - is driven by regret that being an International Man of Mystery is harder now. Everything I see points to (a misguided) belief that things were more optimistic then.

Also, wasn't the 90s the time when cocaine use swapped for heroin use?

My nostalgia comes from the fact that childhood set the bar at things like family, cartoons, playgrounds, and succeeding at educational challenges. Then those things all changed rapidly and I had no framework on what to do and tried filling the void with memberberries and creative writing failures. I want to go on unfocusedly for several paragraphs, but that'd probably just reenforce it.

Related enough to add some commentary.

I can say what I honestly wish I saw more in movies and shows these days:

Competent teams of people coordinating their unique skillsets in interesting ways, where the success or failure of the whole venture depends on everyone fulfilling their role with precision.

That guy is the polyglot, that one there is the martial arts expert, she's got a PhD level understanding of volatile chemicals, and this last dude trains seagulls to steal jewelry from tourists. A rich benefactor is paying us to deliver a donor heart to a hidden village in China to be transplanted into a sick child for unknown reasons.

Ocean's 11 is maybe the ur-example here. "We want to complete an extremely specific set of tasks for the possibility of a singular, massive payoff if everything goes well, and possible ruin if any piece of the plan fails." Maybe Mission Impossible is a better standard example, but the later movies really lean towards "everyone is omnicompetent at whatever talent the plot requires." I still like them, though.

Despite what cynics say, I think the "team of people overcoming massive odds through sheer skill" is a winning trope, and for good reason. I think that's TRULY what makes heist movies appealing.

I also suspect, for example, Star Trek, USED To be about this to a large degree! Everyone on the ship has their specialization and their duties. And as long as they had a competent Kirk, Picard, Janeway, to get everyone to do their job correctly and align their objectives, this was enough to achieve victory against unknown opponents and strange phenomena.

I gather that Modern Trek has discarded much of that framework in favor of more emotional drama and angsty grit.

There was definitely some kind of trend of "swiss army knife" heroes in the 2000's. They spoke every language (or could learn them overnight), they had combat skills, hacking skills, engineering skills, charismatic and witty personalities. Often they were really good at chess. Basically, Mary Sues, with better writing.

Tony Stark being able to build an advanced exosuit in a cave with a bunch of scraps sort of deal. Batman in the comics, for damn sure.

And yes, it has become absurdly obvious that human beings with broad skillsets that are all at least two standard deviations above the average really do not exist. There are grifters who make money presenting themselves as this sort of person (and pay me $100/month I can teach you, too!) but is not anyone out there who can infiltrate the CIA and assassinate a high ranking official then hack the database to erase their own existence, all by their lonesome (or with a handful of supporting cast). Anyone that MIGHT be able to do that probably works for the CIA already.

Humans can specialize very well. But only in like two, maybe three things at most. Scott's review of "Raising a Genius" touched on this. If you're genetically predisposed and trained from near birth at a given talent, you can become world-class at that thing! But the time spent on that training probably precludes being exceptional at much else, for the same reason.

Elon Musk probably can't throw a decent punch. The world's best martial artists are likely piss-poor programmers. Genius-level intellect does not, in fact, guarantee massive financial success. Although it helps. And that's leaving aside the "fooled by randomness" aspect where sometimes, seeming outliers kind of just bungled into their own success.

Nothing wrong with imagining the existence of such people in fiction. I'm a huge fan of the Jason Bourne series myself. But they're probably better categorized as 'modern mythology' than anything else. And this trope is getting WAY less credible in a world that, as you say, becomes more complex to navigate on a yearly, maybe monthly basis.

Watch a kitchen sometime. While The Bear is an extended exercise in stress and heavily recommended, I believe the much-more-feel-good but overly sentimental/dramatic Japanese show Grand Maison Tokyo is also worthwhile as a team competence exercise.

Thomas Jefferson was a botanist, architect, paleontologist, president of the American Philosophical Society, politician and other things I'm surely missing. Benjamin Franklin had a similar resume. An LLM or a better historian than myself could fill in the blanks for some real Renaissance era Renaissance men.

Fast forward to the mid-late 20th century, and we're in an era where scientists can conceivably read every manuscript/major text in their field. By the 90s, the scope narrows a bit so that you could reasonably have read every paper in your subfield, by the 2000s we're talking sub-sub field. Today, if you look at one of the popular genes to study there are literally >100,000 papers published on it, with about 5,000 more coming out per year. The scope has narrowed from comprehensive knowledge about biology -> subfield (genetics, immunology, oncology, etc) -> sub-subfield (autoimmunity, leukemias, etc) -> gene or gene family -> some aspect of a gene family or cell type. Teamwork, communication and interlocking specialties are hugely important in ways that they weren't before. My main paper had over 50 authors and included dozens of different specialties and techniques I have no idea how to do.

Now it's beyond that, it's systems of shoggoths that we can tweak and manipulate, but none of us can truly grasp as a whole - and we can't even really imagine someone who can.

Biology is a shoggoth we can't ever grasp as a whole. Maybe there are limitations to intelligence, and no being is ever going to truly grasp biology in a comprehensive way. But if you want to keep making progress, you either need to build a shoggoth-oracle and have it teach us or you need to enhance our brains somehow a la neuralink. Otherwise, we're just going to keep spinning our wheels pumping out shitty papers that nobody reads or can fit into any kind of coherent picture.

Teamwork, communication and interlocking specialties are hugely important in ways that they weren't before.

Yeah, with this approach we can still make progress in terms of scientific knowledge, but I think we've largely slipped past a point where a single person can keep it all in mind. Maybe that's fine, or maybe it's causing problems or maybe we're missing critical insights. But the discomforting thing is that we're losing the ability to tell. We can see trees, but not the forest. In an ironic way, it's almost a reversion to a more primitive state, albeit at a massively larger scale.

In a hunter gatherer tribe 10,000 years ago, you could rely on knowing what everyone else knew. Nowadays it’s impossible for someone to say science doesn’t know x. There’s too much science. Things are coming to the edge where human understanding is finding it increasingly difficult to penetrate to higher levels of understanding the natural world. Maybe future AI will represent a new information/industrial revolution of sorts and take us to places we can’t go and in a way, it’s already doing that.

Sorry, but I have to smile at the idea of the world of the 90s being smaller. In one way, yes. Modern technology like smartphones and the Internet was not entirely ubiquitous, you could be out of reach of people trying to contact you from work or social reasons, and everyone had not put up every single detail of their real life on various platforms - Facebook was still in its prime, and many of the hot hip sites of those days have long vanished.

But Bond etc. were creations of the 60s, it was just as implausible in 1990 as in 2020.

Nostalgia has locked on to the 90s because a new generation is looking back at the simpler times when they were in their teens and life seemed easier to navigate, they weren't trying to handle adult responsibilities, and pop culture was what they consumed, not today when it is product for Gen Z or Alpha. People are talking about My Chemical Romance and the likes because those are the bands of their youth. I don't think I've ever listened to one of their songs, or if I have, I can't tell you which one, because that was not my era (I was just old enough when punk was kicking off and the New Romantics came along, followed by the rise of the indies, these are the bands of my nostalgia days).

In ten or fifteen years time, someone else will be writing nostalgically about how much simpler the world of 2020-25 was.

One of the inciting observations for this post was the fact that my own teenaged kids seem to lock into 90's nostalgia harder than their own youth. My daughter loves the same emo punk bands that were big when I was her age. My son watches 80's and 90's sports movies on loop.

Although, now that I think of it, that might parallel my brother (born in the 90s) being obsessed with A Christmas Story, a movie from 1983 based on a book from '66 about the Christmas of 1940.

There's a reason I repeatedly called the idea a hypothesis.

Are there even any truly iconic western ips of the 2020s that people will have nostalgia for in a decade? The 2010s had some hits like Frozen, Game of Thrones, maybe pickle rick etc, but honestly I can't name anything memorable recently.

Saltburn, Oppenheimer, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. I don’t know if any of these will become iconic, but then iconic has come to mean milkable corporate crap in recent decades, so we might be through with the age of iconic media. We might be through with the very concept in the era of IPs.

If you look at top 50 (by box office receipts) 2020s movies, and restrict to American movies, Oppenheimer (at #13) is the top entry that isn't a sequel to or a remake of or a movie version of some already-highly-successful narrative IP from an earlier decade ... and then the second-highest entry is Elemental, at #48??? Did I miss a bunch?

We might be through with the very concept in the era of IPs.

I know this isn't a new trend, but I hadn't realized just how bad it's gotten. In the 2010s we've got Zootopia at #38, Bohemian Rhapsody (not counting a song as narrative IP) at #46, The Secret Life of Pets at #50, and that's it, so essentially no better.

But back in the 2000s we see Avatar at #1, the first Pirates of the Caribbean (not counting a theme park ride as narrative IP) at #32 (then up to #3 and #6 in sequels), The Da Vinci Code (based on a successful book, but a 2003 book) at #24, a couple Ice Age movies (sequels to a 2002 movie), 2012 at #27, Up at #29, one of the Twilight sequels (based on a 2005 book), Kung Fu Panda at #34, The Incredibles at #35, Hancock at #36, Ratatouille at #37, The Passion of the Christ at #38, Madagascar at #50 and its sequel at #40, Night at the Museum (based on a 1993 book, but not an already-highly-successful one like Harry Potter) at #46, and The Day After Tomorrow at #50.

Now, note that I didn't say I was looking for good, just successful and original. I can't say I'm proud of the culture that gave us Twilight, Dan Brown, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, or even Dances With Smurfs. But at least it was a noticeable fraction (looks like around 1/4) of a culture! The idea of original culture was clearly on its way out, even then, though - the originality fraction for the 1990s is around 2/3, way more than I want to list out in a comment, and that's despite not including a swath of embarrassing entries like the 2000s did.

Clearly the peak of popular original culture was the late 90s (I'm going to say 1999 - The Matrix was right about that being "the peak of your civilization"), and although it's a priori suspicious that @Iconochasm and I identify this peak as being when we were in high school, it's a fact supported by data, not just nostalgia. Suck it, kids these days.

Avatar: Way of the Billies

What about K-Pop Demon Hunters earlier this year? Seemed to have a lot more staying power or cultural penetration than most things recently.

Did it? I'm only immersed in the Western infosphere while online, but I'm online a lot of the time, and I've barely even seen any memes of it.

It is certainly the hottest movie among elementary schoolers. Not sure about a wider cultural impact.

Only technically western. If you're allowing that you might as well allow Squid Game.

There was that audience participation remake of The Andromeda Strain...

No, I know exactly what he’s talking about with the world of the 90’s feeling smaller. I grew up with that too, although changes were happening rapidly at the time as well. I can remember when we’d advanced beyond the ARPANET, which the Internet was still a handful of sites on a 56k dial up modem that disconnects every 6 hours and nobody could call your home rotary telephone while you were on it. I can remember a peer telling me when my friends and I started first becoming interested in girls, “… women and malls go together like warez and a T3 connection, my nigga…” AskJeeves, Geocities, an endlessly buffering embedded RealPlayer video that takes 1 hour to play a 2 minute clip. Number Munchers in school and Descent/Myst DOS/PC games at home. If you wanted the answer to a question and you couldn’t find it, you had to consult your home encyclopedia (which a lot of us had) or go to the library. There was no looking it up on Wikipedia. Life was still mostly lived outside though. I remember building a clubhouse with my sibling and father, endless adventures and being outside hanging with friends all over the place.

Goldeneye was the first Bond movie I ever saw and I still regard it as the best one. It’s the only Bond movie where I regard the villain to have won. Alec Trevelyan was the real hero if you paid attention to his story in the movie.

Not everyone that looks back to the past has nostalgia on the mind. There are things that are objectively better about 2025 than 1995, but childhood is not one of them.

The Internet has undergone a massive shift since then that I'd compare to a rapidly growing town: back then we didn't have quite as much variety, but you could mostly trust someone's personal page on a .edu domain and expose ports on your machine like leaving your front door unlocked. These days it feels very urban and while that has some advantages (variety of content), some really miss the small town vibe and we now all have to lock our doors, encrypt everything, and our kids keep getting distracted by the blinding lights of the casinos and seedy joints that have moved in.

I can understand wanting to have the Internet equivalent of a white picket fence in the 'burbs.

Alec could have been a hero, but in the end as Bond said, his plan was to cause a global financial crisis to steal some cash. "Nothing more than a common thief" if I recall the line correctly.

Trevelyan had a vendetta against the British because they betrayed his parents and left them to die. They later recruited him to be an agent for MI6 and figured he wouldn’t have remembered what they did because he was a young kid. He hid is true motivations until he became a fully trained spy and turned on the British just as they did to him.

That was the whole point of the story. It was a story about vengeance. I don’t blame him one bit. If my adoptive country did that to my family and friends I’d conceal my true intentions as well, and turn on and fight to dismantle and destroy them with everything I’d learned and mastered. The “bank robber” element was an insignificant sidebar to the main plot point.

At the end of the day, Alec was a traitor. He smiled at his colleagues every day while secretly he plotted to undermine everything they were working to protect. I find it hard to think of such a man as a hero.

Furthermore, the story is at the very least more complex than he tells it. What responsibility did the British owe to the Cossacks? They had fought for the enemy (Nazi Germany) against an ally. Giving them to Stalin was inglorious in a perfect world, sure, but it’s silly to treat it as a betrayal.

If I were ever in such a position I’d hope I would betray my country before I would my family and friends. Man’s a hero in my book.

If your family and friends were allied with Nazi Germany, you really should betray them and work for your country instead.

If my family and friends were allied with Nazis I’m pretty sure I had other problems somewhere along the road.

If you ever felt like contributing an example to the nostalgia genre (80s Ireland?) I’d love to read it.

80s Ireland was a land of rain and misery - high unemployment rate, crashed economy, expectation that pretty much as soon as you hit 18 you will emigrate because there's damn-all at home for you.

In 1987 a government minister defended the emigration expectation (and lack of action by the government) by telling us "We can't all expect to live on a small island". Population back then was around 3.5 million. Population today is around 5.5 million.

The 90s were the Celtic Tiger and the good times would never stop, except it was a bubble and the 2008 global crisis hit us hard once again. Austerity budgets and back to the emigration trail.

Today we're being told that the economy is going great (sounds familiar?) but yet people feel that they have less money in their pockets, prices are going up, and there isn't enough damn housing (sounds familiar?)

Hmm, yes, I see. Although arguably the emigration was responsible for the Celtic Tiger and Ireland’s prosperity generally. When America etc. were looking to see how to invest in Europe, having a lot of Irish-Americans and the general diaspora in high places saying it should be Ireland was probably very important.

The world has gotten in one part more complex but in another smaller. The Internet has homogenized the world turning foreign places into America lite.

Diversity may not be our strength but it added a richness (ie you could see how different people live). That is now lacking.

I think this changing idea of the "size of the world" may, at least in certain aspects, purely be a matter of the self-understanding of the same Western culture you hail from and are speaking to. For a specific example, in 1990, Japanese was more important than it is today: the bubble had not popped yet, the population was peaking, a big fraction of the dominant tech companies were Japanese, people's English was worse and they had no Google Translate to pull out in an emergency, and American pundits were actively and credibly nursing fears of a future of complete Japanese dominance. Now Japan is where the Chinese fly to do their low-cost duty-free shopping and Westerners make off-grid LARP videos where they buy some abandoned house in the mountains and farm cucumbers. Yet, a modern James Bond would be considered more cringe for not knowing Japanese than a 1990 James Bond was.

It doesn't affect the substance of the argument you are making, but James Bond did speak Japanese.

James Bond read Oriental Studies at Cambridge, which requires you to study two Middle Eastern or Asian languages to fluency, and given his known interest in Asian culture and lack of interest in Middle Eastern culture, I suspect Japanese was one of them. On-screen translation convention means we can't be sure, but there are scenes in You Only Live Twice which only make sense if Bond is speaking Japanese. This isn't in Fleming, but it's been in the films consistently since long before Japan was a threat to take over the world in the 1980's.

Bond actually adventured and lived in Japan in the novels.

Interesting - I wondered where EON got the idea that he was an Oriental Studies major from.

I think this changing idea of the "size of the world" may, at least in certain aspects, purely be a matter of the self-understanding of the same Western culture you hail from and are speaking to.

Absolutely. Up until the 90's "the world" meant Europe and maybe Japan. Everything else was a bit player. Now, China is a pole, and I don't think the West has any kind of traditional method of grappling with how different their culture is, much less offering the opportunity for deep understanding or even passing.

Europe has become more samey, but there's no Chinese/Indian equivalent of The Grand Tour to develop a cadre of people who grok those cultures.

Does anyone remember the flurry of books in the 90’s about the Japanese economic miracle? I remember all the hoopla in books like The Emerging Japanese Superstate that they were going to overtake the US economy. Then the bubble popped. I remember my father explaining to me as a kid how the gardens of the imperial palace were valued more than the entire state of California. Yeah. That’s a bubble.

Well, if it was written before the effects of the plaza accords kneecapped japan's economy, it's understandable.

It was certainly a common cultural trope at the time. TV Tropes has a better list than I could come up with offhand, but it's IMO most interesting as an uncommented-on undercurrent like in movies Back to the Future II, Die Hard, or Alien, but there are some works of literature that comment on it on more directly: Crichton's Rising Sun, Stephenson's Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.

I think it's an interesting example of how the zeitgeist can be wrong: Japan remains a world power, but it's projected continued ascent was oversold.

I had a hilarious conversation once of my relatives once where we were brought up movies as an example of American arrogance to the rest of the world. Two of the movies we came up with were Die Hard and Independence Day. If you try to look at them with our inborn cultural blinders off but as someone who’s a complete new initiate to our way of life, they’re actually incredibly chauvinistic movies when you think about it.

Not just chauvinistic, solipsistic.

The old joke is that the British overconfidence is thinking everyone secretly wants to be British, whereas American overconfidence is thinking everyone secretly already is American.

Yet, a modern James Bond would be considered more cringe for not knowing Japanese than a 1990 James Bond was.

Are we all forgetting You Only Live Twice? Probably would be excoriated for yellowface amongst many other crimes as well as being generally cringe, but the 60s also were interested in Japan as a modern, post-war nation taking a role on the global stage. (The novel seems to be a little more complex in its exploration of Bond's character than the movie, which naturally was more oriented towards being in sync with the suave spy theme of the Bond movies).

I enjoyed your comment and generally agree. However, just regarding African languages - it feels to me like the wider world has never been less interested in African cultures than it is now. At least for a while Kwanzaa had some cultural significance. But consider: when was the last time a cultural trend happening in Africa was discussed on this forum? Has it ever happened? Especially apart from white South Africa.

For having such a bulk of population, Africa has nearly literally zero cultural force. I do often wonder what kind of stuff they're getting up to down there.

But consider: when was the last time a cultural trend happening in Africa was discussed on this forum?

Tangential to Black Panther and the genre of Afro-futurism? But I agree, not much about cultural trends. Though now and again musical trends seem to come and go - see world music, Paul Simon collaborating with Ladysmith Black Mombazo, Mory Kanté having a late 80s hit, Youssou N'Dour, Ali Farka Touré, Amadou and Mariam, various others.

Tangential to Black Panther and the genre of Afro-futurism?

No more African than Kwanzaa - Marvel is a US company targetting an audience of Black Americans and their simps. The picture of "Africa" in Black Panther is of a culturally homogenous blob whose spiritual capital is South Central Los Angeles.

The picture of "Africa" in Black Panther is of a culturally homogenous blob whose spiritual capital is South Central Los Angeles.

Africa in Black Panther is incredibly heterogeneous, with one super-advanced country so isolationist that its more numerous and much more impoverished neighbors are barely aware it exists.

The homogeneity isn't between Wakanda and the rest of Africa, it's between Wakanda and the woke USA. When Wakanda decides to break its isolation and try to uplift the suffering black people of the world, where does "the first Wakandan International Outreach Center" get built? South Sudan? ($700/year PPP-per-capita GDP, lowest in the world, then mid-civil-war with hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees) The DRC? ($1,700/y, infamously one of history's most brutally victimized colonies, a decade or so out from an even larger war, and their fictional neighbor) Rwanda? ($4,000/y, another neighbor, a couple decades out from one of history's most shocking genocides) I could keep going, but naah: it's Oakland. African-American median household income $60,000 (really hard to compare to mean per-capita GDP, but divide by ~4 and you're still way ahead), under 100 African-American homicide victims per year.

There's a strained diegetic reason for this, but the straightforward extradiegetic reason is pretty much as you say: Africans in Africa aren't salient to scriptwriters the way African-Americans in California are.

We don't disagree on substance here - my spin would be that

  • There is no meaningful heterogeneity between film-Wakanda and film-rest of Africa because we don't see Africa outside Wakanda onscreen - it is represented memetically by scenes of Black America.
  • Wakanda is a collection of bad tropes of "darkest Africa" with a veneer of technological civilisation that the locals explicitly didn't build the hard way - the way the story is told implies that niggas who act like niggas could and did build technological civilisation if they had access to vibranium (memetically, if YT hadn't stolen Africa's natural resources). So culturally it is intended to be part of blob-Africa.

Wakanda's decision to start their outreach in the US was so egregiously bad it broke my suspension of disbelief. Even if you accept the assumptions of the universe, it isn't plausible.

For having such a bulk of population, Africa has nearly literally zero cultural force.

Afrobeats did have a moment with artists like Burna Boy being successful and working with members of the diaspora in Britain. From South Africa Tyla is probably the most prominent artist that's making waves in the US?

Their momentum seems to be stymied in the US though which might explain why it doesn't feel like it has any impact. In both cases their promotional runs seem to have poisoned the well a bit either because they were perceived as lecturing American blacks or not responding correctly to awkward questions - the whole colored category in SA apparently sounds awkward to AA ears and Tyla really failed to give a soothing answer, or any answer at all. Now every time she comes up in the hip hop media so does this issue and they're not kind. Probably doesn't help build up a head of steam.

In her defense, it's kind of a no-win. The answer that I see is that "colored" is a different thing from black and saying that might be even worse than appearing uppity.

As if to further drive home your point, Kwanzaa—the one traditional African cultural celebration Americans used to know about—isn’t even African. It was invented by a black American radical activist in 1966 as a replacement for Christmas.

If anything i feel like its the opposite. The world is smaller and much more comprehensible. Everything is homogenising and genuine cultural differences are being sanded down to the extent that people don't really understand that they exist at all. People speak about diversity more than ever but understand it and accept it less than ever. A single small country used to contain more diversity than a continent does today.

The romance of the unknown and the unexplored is disappearing and to the extent that things don't work it pisses people off more because they assume maliciousness when they feel like they understand the causes of the dysfunction.

Why were things better in the 90s/00s? Because things felt like, globally, that they were going in the right direction and all boats were rising. Communism had largely collapsed, there was rapid economic growth (including in the remaining "communist" countries), there was "peace" (at the very least no threat of global war) and a form of genuine global cultural idealism. All this then collapsed in various stages. People's impression of how things are is at least as influenced by where they perceive things to be heading as by where they currently are. People are perceiving a downward trajectory(or it's first and second order derivatives), even in America.

Because things felt like, globally, that they were going in the right direction and all boats were rising.

That is it. Collapse of the Berlin Wall, now the Cold War was over and there was no threat of nuclear war. Capitalism had won and every country would pursue money-making, and to do that trade needs open markets and political stability and no wars. People were doing better as we came out of the 80s recession. There was a sense of optimism. Colour blindness was in, idpol wasn't yet a thing. Gay rights were winning. We had environmental problems, but they were solvable (see the ozone layer and doing away with CFCs), e.g. adopt recycling and do away with pollution, not the intractable problem of climate change. Things were getting better and would always get better because now we were smart, educated, peaceful, and Science and Progress would bring us into the ever more bountiful future hand-in-hand.

It was the End of History and the liberal project had won.

Ehhhhhh. I am a digital nomad, from the US and have spent more than half of the past 3 years in either (non-anglophone) Europe or Asia, and really all you need to know today is English.

I speak pretty good German and Spanish, my French and Japanese are ok enough for tourist purposes. Every educated person in Germany and Austria speaks perfect English, the only use I get out of my German is speaking to Turks in Germany and Hungarians/Eastern Europeans, Romanians and Turks in Austria. Spanish is more useful in Spain and probably requisite in central/South America (barring Brazil and a few outliers) but admittedly I haven’t been there so I don’t know. In France you are expected to speak French and English ability is associated with upper classes- so people will be embarrassed if you expect them to speak English, but in response to your point being that French is necessary for important badassery, in my experience anyone important enough in France and broader Europe already speaks English.

In Asia it’s even less required to speak a local language. In most of Asia they will be surprised if you do. Japanese don’t go to Korea and speak Korean, or Japanese, they speak English. Koreans don’t go to Japan and speak Japanese or Korean they speak English. And so on and so forth.

As an aside, a little while ago I was thinking, oh it would be so useful to have a watch that displayed live translations of whatever audio was in my environment or people I was speaking to in English. Then I saw a piece in I think the WSJ saying the new AirPods can translate/interpret people speaking to you in foreign languages. I thought that was cool and useful though I worry most people you speak with will still think you’re being rude for speaking to them with headphones in, plus it won’t talk to them in their language so I think the watch visual interface solution would be better. I also worry about the barrier to integration of cultures being too low. Now every immigrant with $120 (or whatever AirPods cost) can get translation of whatever language they want, giving them an asymmetric advantage over people who aren’t using the technology.

Ehhhhhh. I am a digital nomad, from the US and have spent more than half of the past 3 years in either (non-anglophone) Europe or Asia, and really all you need to know today is English.

How would you say you approach interactions in these cultures? Is it "I am clearly an outsider, but we both know enough English to complete this retail transaction?" Are there any of these cultures where you feel like you understand them enough to finesse? To not pull a three fingers incident?

The point of the languages example is as an expression of mastery.

Hahaha, oh no, I’m nowhere near three fingers level mastery at Japanese or French culture, I probably couldn’t even pass as a New Yorker or a Southerner, as a midwesterner myself. I mean, mastery of a culture to the degree that you avoid the three fingers incident in Inglorious Basterds is nearly impossible, which is the biggest takeaway of that scene for me anyway

Koreans don’t go to Japan and speak Japanese or Korean they speak English.

Agree on the other points but this one actually isn't true. When I was in Japan I actually saw a lot of Korean tourists speaking in Japanese. And there are a surprising number of google reviews by Koreans accusing the local workers of discriminating because they pretend not to understand because of the Korean accent.

I also knew a Korean person who told me that learning Japanese is easy due to the fact that the grammar is quite similar, as well as a large amount of chinese-derived vocabulary(Kango/Hanjaeo). So of any two Asian languages, Japanese and Korean are the most easiest to learn the other. I assume it's like learning French/German, where they are mutually unintelligible, but due to their similarities, there are a ton of people who can speak both.

When briefly in Japan I was surprised how much Japanese wife Chinese wife was able to decipher.

I believe there's a typo here unless you have two wives.

I think his Japanese Wife is the polygamist based on this. Just since she has a Chinese wife doesn't mean @aquota does.

concerning.

When your post started with 'humanity peaked in the 90s', I didn't think the reason was going to be that James Bond would need to learn too many languages these days, quite the curveball.

Well to his point, who’s the comparable culture icon of today? John Cena?

Ironman/Robert Downey Jr. with comparable real life cultural icon being that of Elon Musk. When I think about it, modifying Bruce Wayne/Batman fits more than ever with decadent society turning into Gotham City real fast.

I will not be the first to use this comparison, but the startup tech-savvy entrepreneur is the modern version of pirate/conquistador/adventurer. They are highly individualistic people who carve their own space in hostile environment already occupied by corporate and state behemoths, often winning with boldness and intelligence racking huge treasures, fame and armies of women from around the world, who want to have babies with them.

Give them buff physique from gym, interest in MMA and Brazilian jiujutsu and some gun kata skills they use when cartel goons break into their underground bunker/office next to private power plant in Panama in order to kidnap them to steal some cryptocurrency. You have a pretty compelling hero right there. Maybe even more so than some naive secret service government spook which is so uncool today. You can even spice it up by making him traditional Catholic with some templar ethos or something.

John Wick? Maybe Dom from Fast and the Furious (which existed in the 90s but genere swapped to action hero much later)?

Batman

Batman existed when I was growing up.

More likely, the ethos of John Wick and Batman is more relevant than ever. Revenge as its own form of justice, outside the law, for past grievances.

There's some interesting anecdotes I remember hearing about how Batman is more popular in first world countries where as in poorer places they prefer Superman.

Bond existed well before the 90s.

Bond was still a popular icon in the 90’s.

I favour the 'giant messy bureaucracies blocking you from doing everything' angle rather than the omni-competence angle. Today James Bond would spend half an hour of the film filling out his License to Kill, going through compulsory workplace seminars about bullying and sexism, then trying to get legal clearance so he doesn't then get prosecuted for doing his duty (probably gets prosecuted anyway).

Most of us aren't James Bond. But we do have to sit through this nonsense.

The real-life version of James Bond would be a bunch of British bureaucrats sitting in meetings for months, punting a decision down the road until a disaster strikes and they are forced to announce that the perpetrator was on their radar the whole time. Meanwhile James Bond becomes a depressed alcoholic doing a desk job and waiting for retirement. High-agency people working in a gay and retarded bureaucracy ruins suspension of disbelief. They either find a new job, or stop being high-agency.

The British once understand the art form of political and economic bureaucracy. Then the wrecking ball of stupidity came in with Thatcher and the Friedmanites and the British lost touch with that side of their historic traditions. Them and the Chinese were masters of the concept at one point. I’ll always be satisfied when the Keynesians smacked him around a bit on their turf. His neoliberal policies have done so much damage to this country.

See also: Shin Godzilla.

Shin Godzilla is one of my favorite movies of the last decade and probably the best thing Anno made that isn't the rocket launch sequence from Honnêamise. It irritates me immensely because Shin KR and Shin Ultraman were nowhere near as good and I am a fan of both those properties.

The real-life version of James Bond would be The Sandbaggers, where they do sit in meetings a lot but it's also the greatest spy show ever made and one of the best media recommendations I got from this forum.

I just started watching this. The writing is amazing. Why can't we make shows like this any more? This reminds me of the decline in the aesthetics of architecture and makes me sad.

The end result is a man of spectacular and all-consuming agency. He is unparalleled in his ability to navigate and manipulate the world around him and the reason for that is his knowledge and experience. ... Between 1990 and 2015, the plausibility of that man failed.

It's actually objectively easier than ever to be a badass motherfucker. The problem is the liberal propaganda and brainwashing against the traditional idea of masculinity has made the entire idea a taboo. The idea of a dominant high agency masculine womanizer is no longer something that can be glorified in the current culture.

The world of 2025 is bigger. Now he needs to also speak Chinese, Japanese, 8 Indian tongues, Korean, Arabic, Farsi and a couple African languages. Where is he going to learn all of those? Boarding school?

Nah, there's no reason to learn anything except English, Chinese, and maaaaybe French. You'll have access to 99% of all of the economic growth on the planet and also be able to travel and communicate without barriers anywhere and talk to literally everyone important.

I learned Japanese but what's even the point when Japan has had 30 years of negative gdp growth and every hotel and restaurant in the entire damn country bends over backwards to have English and Chinese speaking staff.

And no, nobody is going to learn Indian or African since the people there don't even use it for business when pajeet down the street speaks a totally different dialect.

The closest we have to a man who can weave between English and Mandarin is John fucking Cena.

The next generation of Chinese-American action heroes (sponsored by the Communist party) is right around the corner.

90% great comment.

Don’t throw in slurs for emphasis.

Three day ban.

It's actually objectively easier than ever to be a badass motherfucker.

Provided you're willing and able to live a criminal lifestyle, and accept your retirement plan is an unlamented death or a prison.

What end could James Bond expect?

(Pretty funny that the one time we have a consistent canon they just kill him off)

He retires/is kicked upstairs, and the new agent takes on the code name "James Bond" and number 007. (That seems to be how they explain change of actors in the films and why he is always late 30s to mid 40s, and why he's not immediately recognised on sight by enemy organisations).

They take over the number, but not the name. In No Time to Die Bond (now retired, but called back for one last mission) and 007 are different characters.

In so far as the filmmakers bother to maintain long-term continuity, Bond from Dr No to No Time to Die is a single character played by multiple actors, who never retires before being de-canonised. Casino Royale is a reboot, with Craig's Bond being a different character in a different continuity, who has a career of a realistic length before retiring and being replaced as 007. There is no suggestion that either Bond was a pseudonym, although it wouldn't be surprising given the nature of spycraft.

and the new agent takes on the code name "James Bond"

Yeah giving a bunch of your spies the exact same name over the course of decades is a great way to maintain secrecy. They should just go one better and name him British Spy. He can just go around introducing himself as "Spy, British Spy" while performing all the patented British Spy Mannerisms they carefully instruct every one of these guys to indulge in as publicly as possible.

It's all fantasy, and trying to fill in the holes in continuity is more of a game than anything. Someone as notorious as "James Bond" is going to be found out, so the idea of him doing undercover work just doesn't fly from the start.

Yeah it's all in good fun, half of all fandom consists of making up rationalizations for stuff like this.

See, they also give the same training and the same name to every technician and accountant.

That's not really how "they explain it." In fact they don't explain it. Bond remains Bond throughout the series. His one wife (Traci) was seen married and murdered in the one Lazenby film, then in the subsequent film Connery is out for vengeance for her murder. Later, in a different film, Roger Moore lays flowers on Traci's grave. And then even later in License to Kill Dalton is said to have been "married once, but that was a long time ago" (notably this is said by Felix Leiter, played by an actor who played the same character for both Moore and Dalton, though only in Dalton's second film--in his first, Leiter was played by someone else.) There's no explanation. For stupid reasons they played around with the double oh seven moniker in the most recent (and final) Bond film, but that's another issue.

Is that actually the explanation or is that (the oldest) fanon?

Obviously 007 is a codename but "James Bond" being a codename (is "Felix Leiter" also a codename? Do all Bonds and Leiters end up as friends?) doesn't seem to have ever been canon AFAIK. The Craig Bond films certainly reject it.

It just seems like canon just doesn't matter that much to Bond. New actors allow soft reboots and that's that. Getting tangled up in the history is how you get a mess like Spectre or the need to give a definitive ending in No Time to Die. I'm not sure that form of modernization is actually better. That's how you eventually end up with MCU kudzu-canon.

Presumably he has a fatal heart attack while attempting to bring one last female Russian/SPECTRE/Chinese/whatever agent to his own side.

That's how he'd want to go out, certainly.

The idea of a dominant high agency masculine womanizer is no longer something that can be glorified in the current culture.

In what sense? You can probably rack up casual sex numbers that'd be impossible to prior generations but most of it going nowhere (and you're not even going to be whelping bastards like they used to due to the pill and abortion) and being on easy, unprotected targets. Most careers/high-achievement lifestyles are gonna actively be blocking you, as well.

I only put that because OP mentioned James Bond but that part is optional

An update on the J6 pipe bomber story. Steve Baker of Blaze Media is now claiming that a Capitol Hill Police officer planted the pipe bombs based on gait analysis from the videos released from the FBI of the pipe bomber and known footage of the Capital Hill Police officer. (https://www.theblaze.com/news/former-capitol-police-officer-a-forensic-match-for-jan-6-pipe-bomber-sources-say). Blaze Media also claims Shauni Kerkhoff the officer in question left the Capitol Hill Police to join the CIA mid 2021 to work on dignitary protection.

Blaze Media claims the gait analysis was a 94% match but I'm unsure as to how unique that match is or how suspects were selected for matching or how many suspects were tested. Apparently, the pipe bomber also walked with a limp and Shauni had a football related injury that required an operation. Hypothetically, if 1/100 people would score a 94% match then its very likely such a match could have been produced by just trying to match against all the Capitol Hill Police officers. However, if only one suspect was tested and this testing was based on some other lead then you would have more confidence that this match was not a coincidence. Shauni was the neighbour of a person of interest that was linked to the metro card that was allegedly used by the pipe bomber (https://archive.ph/wMRun).

Former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin realized Friday that he was doing surveillance next door to the woman now suspected of being the Jan. 6 pipe bomber.

Steve Baker was also arrested in relation to the J6 riots (https://loudermilk.house.gov/where-is-the-outrage-over-steve-bakers-prosecution-3/) and may hold some animus against Capitol Hill Police officers.

Congressman Massie has made a statement about the claim on X (https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1987120156682953165):

America is waking up today to learn that Capitol Police turned CIA orchestrated the pipe bombs on January 6th, and the FBI has covered it up for over fours years. I questioned FBI Dir. Wray, ATF Dir. Dettlebach, and FBI asst Dir. (over DC) D’Antuono under oath. All played dumb.

Tbh you don't need gait analysis from the footage you can see a guy casually strolling and leaving a backpack. And the other video a guy (plains clothed officer possibly) beelines exactly where the backpack is stashed, doesn't search for it just goes there, picks it up and goes to a police car to turn it in. This little convenient "bomb" that was constructed exactly like the example bombs the police use for training down right to the same store bought comical kitchen timer thing was used to RICO the whole thing and slap a bunch of charges on unrelated J6 conservatives.

Blaze Media claims the gait analysis was a 94% match but I'm unsure as to how unique that match is or how suspects were selected for matching or how many suspects were tested.

Yes, that is a bugbear I have with the way the media uses statistics. To the statistic ignorant, it sure sounds like they're 94% certain that's the person, but that is not what a 94% match is. I imagine 100% is the exact same gait and that with time, clothing, weather, urgency the same person might not match themselves 100% every time, but what is a standard % match variation for the same person at a different time? Is it never under like 98%? How many people match at 94% on gait? Do gaits cluster?

So much missing information tell if this is significant or not.

@gattsuru makes some good points about the gait analysis, but I don't think you even need to go that far. I spent 2 1/2 hours at the DMV this afternoon and did some reading about gait analysis. I learned that the way it works is that analysts break gait down into components, and analyze those components into categories based on how prevalent they are in the population. Like a lot of other things, when a gait analyst says there's a certain percentage match, what they're saying is that, based on the attributes they observed, they can eliminate that percentage of the population. With that being said, from here on out I'll assume that the science is bulletproof, because I don't know that that even matters in this context.

I've read a lot of crime books in my life, and one of the things that's always interested me is suspect descriptions and how useful they are. I've read about cases where police failed to solve the crime because they seemed to focus on a description that wasn't very good, and others where they didn't solve the crime and dismissed good descriptions as being too vague. I've also seen authors excoriate police departments for not focusing on suspects who matched relatively vague descriptions. So during my time at the DMV I also thought about a rubric that could be used to categorize suspect descriptions.

  • A Level 1 Description would be one that eliminates 90–99% of the population. This may seem high, but anything less than that isn't really even a description. If the suspect is described as a black female, well, only 12–14% of the population is black, and about half of them are female, so that eliminates 93% of the population right there. If the suspect is described as a young, tall, white male, 40–45% of the population is white males, eliminating children and anyone too old to be reasonably described as young and you cut that in half, and cut it in half again to get rid of anyone shorter than average height, and you're down to 10%. These kinds of descriptions are of little to no use in a police investigation and are completely worthless in a trial.

  • A Level 2 Description is one that eliminates 99–99.9% of the population. These can be of some use in an investigation but are of little to no use in a trial. Suppose the man running from the scene was described as an African American teenager, short and extremely overweight. Take the 7% who are black men, teenagers being about 20% of them, divide by half again to get people shorter then average, then in half again to get anyone plausibly described as overweight (always use the larger numbers), and we're in that 0.1–1% range. But in most places there are going to be entirely too many short, black, overweight teenage boys for police to identify and question them all.

  • A Level 3 Description would eliminate 99.9–99.99% of the population, but still include between one person in a thousand and one in ten thousand. To give a few examples:

    • Caucasian male, age 50 to 55, tall, athletic, blue eyes, grey hair, driving an older model pickup.
    • Caucasian female, 20–23 years old, brown hair and eyes, about 5'7", large breasts, extremely good looking, piercing in the nose and tattoo on the lower back.
    • Hispanic female, 45 to 50, extremely short, somewhat overweight, perhaps 4'11" and 130 pounds, bushy eyebrows, wears glasses, blue painted fingernails.

These kinds of descriptions are of value to police and may play some role in a trial, but no one could be reasonably convicted of a crime based on them. It's also worth noting here that some of the attributes are changeable, and this needs to factor into the analysis as well.

  • A Level 4 Description would eliminate 99.99–99.999% of the population, but still probably include a few people in any decent sized metro:

    • Caucasian male, 40–45 years old, between 5'2" and 5'5", thin, long, sandy-colored hair, large glasses, large square face, smokes cigarettes, looks a little like John Denver.
    • African-American male in his 20s, average height, muscular build, shaved head, several gold teeth, gold earring in left ear, prominent scar on neck. Very deep voice with trace of a Jamaican accent.

If you match a description of this specificity you should expect the police to come to your door, but it still wouldn't be enough to convict absent other information.

  • A Level 5 description would exclude 99.999% of the population or more, aka 1 person in 100,000 or less. This is the point where you stop combining combinations of independent variables that belong to lots of people and zero in on very specific attributes that are themselves fairly unique: A missing finger, a particular tattoo, one green nipple, etc. At this level you're on the defensive; if you match a Level 5 Description, you're going to need an alibi.

  • A Level 6 description is a description that applies to only one person: Fingerprints, DNA, being recognized by someone who knows you. A Level 6 Description is an identification.

I bring all this up because there's a certain level of obfuscation going on, both with the science and the use of percentages. Supposing we didn't have any gait analysis but a witness who told the FBI that he observed the person in the video and it was a man who appeared to be of East Indian descent, and Baker claimed that Rajneesh Sarna was the perpetrator on the basis that he's a male of Indian descent living in the DC area, everyone would find it ridiculous. Yet Indians only make up 3% of the population of the DC Metro, and assuming men are about half of those, and we're at a 98.5% "match". Actually higher because a certain percentage of that population is going to be children. All this 94% "match" means is that the police officer they're claiming is in the video has the same gait characteristics as 378,000 other people in the DC area, more if we allow for the possibility that the perpetrator was from elsewhere. Even a 98% match only gets us down to 126,000 other people.

Of course, that wasn't the only attribute mentioned in the article; it says that both the person in the video and Karkhoff are about 5'7". Being very conservative, about 10% of the population can reasonably described as 5'7". It's the point where the bell curves cross, which makes things convenient, and about 9% of men and women will be this height. I don't know how accurate the FBI estimate is supposed to be, but we'll assume it's pretty accurate and just bump the numbers up to 10% to allow for a little wiggle room (an inch on either end would make this closer to 25%). That gets us in to Level 2 description territory, but still includes over 5,000 people. The Blaze engaged in motivated reasoning by linking this to a Capitol police officer and working backwards from there. An honest assessment would have looked at any surveillance video from DC they could get their hands on and analyze the gait and height of as many people as possible. Of course, if that information was fed into their computer and they ended up identifying a 45-year-old cashier from Landover, Maryland as the only possible suspect, they never would have published the story, because it would have been ridiculous. And that there's one person in thousands who happens to have been employed in some law enforcement capacity in the DC area makes things really convenient for them.

If that were the end of it, we could put this nonsense to bed, but there's also the whole business with the Metro card. As per the article:

Former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin realized Friday that he was doing surveillance next door to the woman now suspected of being the Jan. 6 pipe bomber.

“The FBI put us one door away from the pipe bomber within days of January 6, and we were deliberately pulled away for no logical or logically investigative reason,” Seraphin told Blaze News Friday. “And everything about that tells me that they were involved in a cover-up and have been since day one.

“They were f**king in on it,” Seraphin said.

Seraphin proposed doing a “knock and talk” at the door of an Air Force civilian employee whose address was tied to a vehicle that picked up the bomb suspect in Falls Church, Va., on Jan. 5, 2021.

Seraphin’s team spent two days watching the man, but Seraphin’s request to go face-to-face with the person of interest was denied. The team was pulled off the case the same night, he said.

Seraphin said he has given the same details publicly since 2021.

“There’s a personal reaction to it, which is the complete vindication that the things I’ve been saying and my recollection of being briefed on this stuff has been accurate for years and I’ve never changed my tune,” he said.

The FBI tied a DC Metrorail SmarTrip card allegedly used by the pipe-bomb suspect to an Air Force civilian employee but determined that while the man purchased the card, he did not use it. The suspect allegedly used the card to travel from D.C. to a stop in Falls Church after planting the pipe bombs. The Air Force civilian employee had purchased the SmarTrip card a year earlier.

I apologize from the long quote, but I wanted to include it as-written to point out something here that's particularly dishonest. The article refers to "the suspect", and from the context it looks like it's referring to Kerkhoff, and it talks about how the suspect used the card to travel to Virginia after planting the pipe bombs. Not being familiar with this evidence, I presumed the story to be making this point: Kerkhoff was the person seen in the surveillance video released by the FBI. The video was taken the evening of January 5, and while it doesn't show the bombs being planted, it shows the person who likely planted the bombs walking with a backpack in the vicinity of the targeted buildings. This person then went into the nearby Metro station and took it to Falls Church, Virginia, where they were picked up by a friend whose Metro card they used. The FBI surveilled the friend's house but were pulled of for reasons that weren't explained to them, and weren't allowed to talk to the guy, who happened to be a civilian employee for the Air Force.

As many of you know, I'm a fan of reading official reports to get all the details as best as they can be known, as piecing things together from news reports and the like is time consuming and doesn't usually contain all the necessary boring details. In January of this year, a joint report on the pipe bomb investigation was issued by a group of congressmen representing subcommittees with names too long to mention here, chaired by Massie and Loudermilk. This report was incredibly critical of the FBI's response. What we learned about the whole Metro card thing was far different than what was implied in the article.

Surveillance showed a suspicious person (POI2) photographing a dumpster near where the RNC pipe bomb was planted before meeting with 2 other people and disappearing into the nearby Metro station. This video was from the morning of January 5. The FBI was able to link POI2 to the Metro card of a man living in Falls Church (POI3), and had the FBI surveil both. POI2 was a man. The FBI interviewed him and reviewed the pictures on his phone, which corresponded with his story that he had been taking pictures of numerals on doors and the like, including numerals on the RNC dumpster. The FBI was satisfied that the guy had nothing to do with the bombing and they eliminated POI2 and POI3 as suspects on January 19.

Seraphin's story about what happened seems a lot less suspicious in this context, and it's pretty clear that he was a minor part of the investigative team who didn't know the whole story behind what was going on. The FBI identified POI3 and put him on a surveillance team. In the meantime they interviewed POI2 and eliminated him as a suspect. POI3's status was contingent on POI2 being involved, and once POI2 had been eliminated there was no reason to interview POI3 or continue to watch his house. As for Kerhoff's allegedly living next to POI3, so what? It's an odd coincidence, but what does it really mean? Someone who is a 1 in 5,000 shot to be the person in the video happens to live next to someone who had nothing to do with the bombing.

This has to be some of the worst "journalism" I've ever seen. They're using "the suspect" to refer to people seen in two different videos, one of whom was already identified by the FBI, interviewed, excluded as a suspect, and not the same sex as the person they're accusing. I don't know if they're intentionally engaging in misdirection or if Baker is simply incompetent, but neither would surprise me.

I think that you are correct in you assessment of the probabilities. However, another consideration is that the gait analysis evidence was reported on simply because it was found to be somewhat significant, so it is subject to p-hacking considerations.

Fundamentally, I am not sure how a Bayesian should update on true but potentially adversarially selected evidence. As an intuition pump, consider two persons A and B which are in a relationship which is supposed to be exclusive. A suspects that B is cheating. B proposes to send A screenshots of their text messages. Normally, a random sample of texts which contain no evidence for misbehavior would be at least weak evidence of the absence of such misbehavior. But A will not get a random sample, but potentially a curated subset selected for being misleading. Thus A should not update at all on receiving harmless screenshots (beyond the signaling value of going through the effort of sending them, at least). If A is willing to update even a tiny bit on such a screenshot, B can take them for a ride.

On the other hand, "the evidence presented by my enemies was adversarially selected" is a fully general counterargument. Most of the evidence which we use to build a world-view does not come with a strict chain of custody to guarantee that it was randomly sampled and reported without publication bias etc.

I have no good way to resolve these two viewpoints. In criminal justice, the idea to allow both sides to make their best case certainly seems helpful.

Pinging in @Jiro. I understand you're argument, and while I addressed the potential adversarial motive in selection of the evidence, it was more as an aside, an observation that would give me another reason to be suspicious. But it isn't essential to my argument, because this failure mode seems to happen regardless of whether the observer has an ulterior motive, and is usually the result of a completely logical chain of events.

The cases I was referring to where this happens with police is where they get a Level 2 Description and become on it to the point that they fail to appreciate how broad it is. Take my example from above, where a witness sees a perpetrator running from a crime scene who is an African American teenager, short and very overweight. Let's suppose that a couple hours after the incident a beat cop canvassing the neigborhood come across a young man of that description who is 5'4" and 200 pounds in a pool hall a few blocks from the crime scene. Detectives question him, and while they don't get much in the way of evidence, they don't entirely buy his story. So they spend the next several weeks investigating him, never coming up with anything useful, but also never considering that he might not be the guy. Years later someone writes a book about the case and talks to an old cop who insists that this kid was the killer but they never had enough to prove it.

The police in a case like that didn't go on a wild goose chase because they had some special reason they wanted to pin a crime on that kid, they did it because they came across him early in the investigation and he matched a description given to them by an eyewitness. They didn't consider that the description could apply to hundreds of people, and that they should have been casting a broader net rather than narrowing the scope of the investigation early based on the description alone. It ultimately doesn't matter if Baker has an animus against the police. Even if he was arbitrarily reviewing CCTV footage to try to find a match, if he found some guy walking outside a restaurant who matched to the same degree and started making the argument that it must be that guy based on nothing else, then it's still just as bad.

On the other hand, "the evidence presented by my enemies was adversarially selected" is a fully general counterargument.

Not really. It's just a fully general reason to reduce your confidence in the evidence (combined with rejecting evidence beneath a certain threshold). Your confidence may be reduced and there could still be enough left to believe it.

If someone says "I robbed the First National Bank at 11 AM on Tuesday", even if it's reported by your enemies, the fact that it's adversarily selected doesn't matter much, because it's hard to take that statement out of context without lying. (Things like "that's actually from a roleplaying game" are considered lies by normies.)

This is related to the discussion above as to why to believe the DHS when it says things about the immigrants it catches. For one thing, even an adversarial selector is believable if they say "this man was wanted for assault". They'll rarely lie and that's hard to take out of context.

The Blaze better be extremely certain, or they're gonna get a 100m+ civil judgment. The risk that Baker's gone off the deep end isn't trivial, and he's been very maximalist in reporting before. That said, the pipe bomber has been one of the more severe of many misses when it comes to the law enforcement response to

I'm generally very skeptical of gait analysis. Human-brain gait analysis has been extremely limited: open in scihub, and you'll find that the 'experts' got 71% and the randos 64%... when scoring one of six potentials in the training set). CNNs have done much better, but they still have problems with training data or large numbers of classes. That's not as bad as outright frauds like bite mark analysis, but it's one of the places both prosecutors and juries both seem to take that error rate seriously. And "he personally pegged the match at closer to 98%" makes me think this is the sort of human-lead that leaves a lot of space for thumbs on the scale.

The metro card is more interesting. I'll admit I have a lot less knowledge about the internals of those systems, so there might be well-known vulnerabilities re: spoofing, and there's always a genuine possibility that the original owner just dropped it somewhere. The FBI response seems extremely basic But it a lot of winking toward circumstantial evidence that, if weak, would at least narrow the search area much more for the gait analysis to not just be hilarious fraud -- though in turn, it would point to either unprofessional or nonprofessional planning for the bomber even if true, which I don't think the Blaze wants to recognize.

Probably safe from lawsuits as the CIA will refuse to confirm or deny.

It sounds like the metro card might not have been from the pipe bomber but someone the FBI thought was a person of interest. But it is a very weird coincidence that someone the FBI thought was a person of interest was next door neighbours with a Capital Police officer. The gait analysis can be explained by Blaze seeing what they want to see. However, while it might be unlikely that a Capitol Police officer might be neighbours with a person of interest if we are willing to expand it to federal employee its probably not that unlikely.

It would also be funny if this was not a cover up and it turns out the suspect is actually part of some right wing militia. Of course at this point a lot of people will have trouble believing she was part of a right wing militia even if she was.

when it comes to the law enforcement response to

Think your sentence got cut off there.

Gait analysis is one subset of video and image analysis, which is generally pretty good. I wouldn’t convict anyone on it but it’s very good for narrowing suspects.

And in this case it’s extremely suspicious that the suspect lives next door to the guy registered on the metro card / getaway vehicle. And neither was ever staked out.

Does The Blaze have $100M?

I would put gait analysis in the same category as bite mark analysis, handwriting analysis and forensic firearm analysis. All pretty much worthless, probably mostly used for parallel construction purposes

It’s closer to facial recognition software, which has gotten fairly good.

Comparing the marks left on bullets to the different rifling of individual firearms seems legit. You have doubts?

Not OP but it did always seem insane to me. Most bullets go through a pretty destructive process when they collide with a target. At those speeds lead is more like playdough. The barrels of the gun also don't seem like they should all be that unique. Mass production doesn't usually create uniquely identifiable things.

I could understand general identification differences like ammo or weapon differences. But anything that differentiates different guns of the same make and model seems suspect.

I do not have strong intuitions either way. Presumably, there is a difference between a JHP bullet hitting a steel barrier and a FMJ getting more gently stopped in ballistic gelatin.

In theory, this could be tackled through careful statistical analysis, same as DNA, so we would at least know if the results are strong or not. In practice, I suspect that methods are selected for convincing juries rather than the scientific-minded community. Hence "lie detectors" etc. I would probably read an article "bullet forensics: much more than you wanted to know", but am too lazy to research it myself.

I always felt sure this was a false-flag. The idea that someone could get away with doing that in DC, the most surveilled place in America, next to the most surveilled political offices? It’s just impossible. It doesn’t work like that. Especially not in the AI age. Every street is surveilled, so even with no facial features or DNA they could figure out who did it through brute force process of omission.

I suppose the reason for this is that if the protesters managed to actually secure the building, they could make a whole show of the bomb in order to justify lethal force against the protesters. Maybe they would even let it explode so that they would have footage to put on repeat.

Who's "they"?

CIA in conjunction with DC police. Like, they wanted a contingency plan for if the protesters had somehow hardened their position; it may require the use of lethal force to disperse them; this requires an emotional justification for the public (the bombing).

the other conspiracy is 'they' wanted to discourage objections to the certification of the electoral count. the protestors provided a justification for suspending congress and then this created pressure for senators on congressmen who would otherwise voted to reject some States from doing so. if the protest didn't work out then the pipe bombs were a backup plan for creating pressure. there is also a claim that the joint session needed to be suspended in order to prevent motions for pausing the certification process from being voted on (https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/03/12/the-parliamentary-motive-behind-the-j6-fedsurrection/)

And there wasn't a single Trump-friendly DC police officer to blow the lid on this operation?

Fallacious logic. There have been plenty of conspiracies that have held up to scrutiny with no one whistle-blowing, despite the likely large number of personelle involved.

MK-Ultra, for example, is only know due to a filing mishap that meant not all the paperwork on said project was successfully destroyed.

More recently, we've learned of 275 plain-clothes FBI agents amoung the January 6 crowd - not a single whistleblower.

Conspiracies can work just fine, it seems.

More recently, we've learned of 275 plain-clothes FBI agents amoung the January 6 crowd - not a single whistleblower.

What do FBI agents usually wear?

Or look at the Twitter - Biden laptop scandal. The IC spent months “prebunking” a story they knew was true so when it came out social media would take it down. We know because Musk bought Twitter.

Given that police are the profession with just about the highest concentration of MAGA true believers, I'm going to call BS on the idea that operation Bring Down Trump could proceed without a single person breaking ranks.

Why would you tell the MAGA true believers about Operation Bring Down Trump?

That's the thing that really muddies the waters in conspiracy discourse, everyone acts like they have no idea how the government (or people) work. They act like "the government" is this magical monolithic entity. But "the government" doesn't do things, people inside the government do things, and sometimes they do things unofficially and/or illegally.

The threat that people are trying to get at when they talk about "the Deep State" isn't that "the CIA" will "decide" to screw over an elected official. You think there's some internal CIA policy that says "it is the official position of the Central Intelligence Agency to bork This Guy in Particular"?

No, the threat is that some guys at the CIA who don't like This Guy in Particular will use their official position and resources to bork him. I mean, look at Watergate. There wasn't an official FBI position of "we will leak evidence of the Watergate scandal to the Washington Post," Mark Felt took advantage of his position as Deputy Director to do that. And it would be the same with the DC police - IF this theory is true (and it seems too soon to tell, to me) it's not "the DC police" doing this. It's a group of DC police officers who, by virtue of not being completely stupid, aren't going to tell DC police officers who would disagree with their plan any more than they would post it on the Internet.

That's not to say that there's never been an Official Policy To Do Something Bad (there has), but the Stringer Bell's rule applies doubly so to people in the government. (If only conspiracy theorists would actually watch and pay attention to The X-Files, which actually understands the dynamic here decently well.)

Just a quiet conspiracy between everybody who had access to footage in what is, as OP put it, the most surveilled place in America.

More comments

It’s slightly more believable when you consider that Trump only got 5.4% of the vote in D.C. in 2020. And of course, not every officer would need to be in on it, just the higher-ups. I’m not claiming that there was a conspiracy, but your particular objection doesn’t seem to me to hold much water.

Image and video processing in general is very sophisticated. Much more sophisticated than the public is aware. No comment on whether this specific application is any good or not.

If only Blaze had just used good old reliable “anonymous sources”. Then we could believe unhesitatingly, as with stories that Donald Trump is a Russian intelligence asset, Donald Trump wrestled his presidential limo driver, Donald Trump called soldiers losers and suckers, etc. etc. These are all stories I was treated as some kind of crazy MAGA partisan for having the temerity to doubt.

Then — between this and the revelation of Arctic Frost, perhaps it’s time to have another conversation about The Deep State. As in, the thesis that the security state operated a slow-moving coup against Donald Trump might have been right about everything. That there really was a vast conspiracy to destroy Trump. And MAGA was right about everything.

It barely matters. The goalpost just shifts to them having been correct to do so, because the axiomatic belief is that Trump must be destroyed by any means nessecary. They are already electing officials that gloat to the opposition about wanting to see them murdered. You think they care about corrupt investigations at this point?

Define “they”. I think there are a lot of smart people on this forum and other places who fell for the Russiagate scam or should otherwise realize they were wrong about the Deep State. This matters insofar as we want smart people to realize what we’re up against.

or should otherwise realize they were wrong about the Deep State

I define "they" as the people who ask who "they" is.

Define “they”.

The people who voted for Jay Jones.

RIP James Watson

And so we lose one of the 20th Century pioneers of DNA research. He made it to a nice and comfortable 97 so at least he got to live a full life. His contributions were undeniable but we are all aware of what happened to him in his later years when his awards and honours got stripped because he talked to liberally about HBD. Back then I interpreted all this as yet another example of "Woke gone mad" left wingers who couldn't attack the argument so decided the best shot was to attack the man himself.

Other than the HBD stuff I thought he was a perfectly normal retired scientist, a bit wacky maybe but that's almost obligatory if you have a Nobel prize.

However I have very recently (in the last hour after news of his passing broke) learned that there's more to the sorts of things that Watson said than merely "respectable" HBD. For example there's this quote:

“Most men in bio are short because they can’t get women, but because you’re tall I know you’re genuinely interested in bio”

and this:

“Women at Oxford and Cambridge are better than Harvard and Yale because they know their job is to look pretty and get a rich husband”

and this:

“There is a biochemical link between exposure to sunlight and sexual urges.. that’s why you have Latin lovers”

and then there's this:

“Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them”

This new knowledge has made me reevaluate my views on him. Now my new provisional views on him are that he clusters with Brian Josephson: academically brilliant but kooky in the head:

In the early 1970s, Josephson took up Transcendental Meditation and turned his attention to issues outside the boundaries of mainstream science. He set up the Mind–Matter Unification Project at Cavendish to explore the idea of intelligence in nature, the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness, and the synthesis of science and Eastern mysticism, broadly known as quantum mysticism.[6] He has expressed support for topics such as parapsychology, water memory and cold fusion, which has made him a focus of criticism from fellow scientists

except that Watson's views were even more corrosive to modern civil society than Brian's. The more you know, as they say...

  • -29

Even by the standards of 1950's Cambridge, Watson was obnoxiously sexist. When I was an undergraduate, this was still the sort of thing that was considered an unfortunate but excusable flaw in a great scientist - both at the time and in the 1990's it was considered less embarrassing than John Maynard Smith's communism, for example. And accordingly most people didn't feel embarrassed about it - anecdotes about Watson's sexism were part of the lore of Cambridge molecular biology.

“Most men in bio are short because they can’t get women, but because you’re tall I know you’re genuinely interested in bio”

I'm struggling to parse this somewhat. Does he mean short men go into biology because they think they'll have an easier time dating in a female-heavy field? (Incidentally, clicking the link for this statement statement directs the user to a "this page doesn’t exist" page on X)

I doubt there are hard facts or numbers to back this up, but as someone rather bio-adjacent, and with plenty of friends and family in pure "biology", I sincerely doubt that being around women is the primary motivating factor for the men who enter the stream. And if there's a short man epidemic in bio, never heard of it. A quick search turns up zilch.

Just within medicine, there are stereotypically male vs female specialties. I've never heard of a guy become a pediatrician because they wanted to get laid more often, or not want to be a orthopedic surgeon because there are too many dudes.

The more parsimonious explanation is that a combination of innate proclivities, earning potential and skill filtering determine things.

I know a handsome male gynecologist who was fairly explicit about exposure to attractive females in the training pathway being part of his decision making

In every situation where men infiltrate women heavy spaces they either get rejected for being pervs or get treated as one of the girls. Unless you're good looking to begin with, bur you dont need to be IN the program for that to yield benefits just hanging around the water cooler "because it smells nicer here".

or get treated as one of the girls

No, you never get treated as "one of the girls". Even if they don't reject you as a pervert, you will always be an outsider and treated with the associated distance.

Perhaps I should be clear, treated as a shitty inferior member of the girls. The lowest caste, like the annoying younger brother good only for carrying stuff and explaining why ____ is so stupid. All the bad stuff of girl cliques none of the sisterhood crysession catharsis. I mean you can have that but you'll just be even less of a man in their eyes.

That’s it exactly. Most STEM fields are extremely male-dominated, but Biology is (or was ten years ago) over 60% female.

The only source for MOST of those statements is a big long list of stuff that Watson supposedly said. Watson was known to be based, so I wouldn't be surprised if he said some or all of them. But without a real source, it's quite possible some of them are fabricated or modified.

Guy born a hundred years ago had fallen off the fashionable language of the cutting edge of academic groupthink?

Famous scientist also a bit of a crank and believed in various wobbly theories at the edge of respectability in their time?

Got cancelled for political reasons?

We talking about Newton, Galileo, Socrates?

You pay high-functioning autists to push forward science and then complain when they occasionally say awkward stuff. Insane. Isn't Google in the midst of trying to get rid of some 2 billion dollar AI researcher for the same thing.

The google AI guy didn't even say "awkward" stuff, he just replied to a company chat about trans activism with pretty standard views of "no such thing".

Awkward for highly liberal environments, normal for normal places, run of the mill for conservative places, and just the air we breath as of 15 years ago.

He said "gender doesn't exist and god doesn't put people in the bodies of the wrong sex" I wouldn't call that going against trans activism. I'd call that believing that trans people don't exist and anyone claiming so shouldn't be given any special considerations, polite or otherwise.

If I said "god doesn't exist" and want anyone making theological arguments to be denied special considerations for their beliefs, you wouldn't call me "being against christian/jewish/muslim/etc activism"

This is a classic: don't bring up politics at work, end of story. People who do should be fired.

  • -10

If he had been the one to bring it up that might follow, but it was a reply in a thread about the topic. Gender was brought up by others in an "of course we all agree" fashion, he just replied.

In your example your reply of God Does Not Exist was in reply to a thread about what workplace activities we could do to advance muslim goals then that is very different from saying it in the middle of a budget meeting.

If people who bring up politics at work should be fired then it is the liberals of Google who should be on the block, not him, since they are the ones who brought it up.

Is he being forced to reply? There's this weird behavior some people do where they can't keep their shit to themselves. Some general thread of the topic, some tribal consensus building, and because you disagree, you NEED to respond. Damn the consequences! The TRUTH is the most important thing. Never-mind its truth as you see, it without room for how others do. It's very annoying, self-centered behavior that makes me want to cuff these people like their parents should have.

In your example your reply of God Does Not Exist was in reply to a thread about what workplace activities we could do to advance muslim goals then that is very different from saying it in the middle of a budget meeting.

Are they talking to you? Or are you butting in? There's a bunch of unknowns in this case that make it unclear what the context was. If this was attempting to use funding from his department/group, then he has lee-way to intercede. But if a general google forum for their workplace is having this discussion, then he's engaging in asocial behavior trying to butt in and swing his dick around, being a "Debate Me Bro" at work.

If people who bring up politics at work should be fired then it is the liberals of Google who should be on the block, not him, since they are the ones who brought it up.

Your terms are absolutely acceptable. I want near zero tolerance for this shit. It's annoying unprofessional behavior.

If people who bring up politics at work should be fired then it is the liberals of Google who should be on the block, not him, since they are the ones who brought it up.

"That's not politics, that's common decency" -- leftists on Google's internal forums.

“Most men in bio are short because they can’t get women, but because you’re tall I know you’re genuinely interested in bio”

Odd, as I'm not sure biology is known as a high-paying field that draws in short men (surely that would be finance or something) but not objectionable.

“Women at Oxford and Cambridge are better than Harvard and Yale because they know their job is to look pretty and get a rich husband”

If a woman finds herself surrounded by very intelligent, conscientious men, she'd be crazy to not try and marry one of them. I'm not the first person to realise this.

“There is a biochemical link between exposure to sunlight and sexual urges.. that’s why you have Latin lovers”

Definitely true. The link between vitamin D and testosterone is well-established.

“Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them”

Seems like a poor choice as a hiring manager. Why not take advantage of anti-fat prejudice and get talented fatties at a steal? But still not an earth-shattering revelation.

Odd, as I'm not sure biology is known as a high-paying field that draws in short men (surely that would be finance or something) but not objectionable.

I imagine the view there is "well, bio is full of women because the ladies, bless their little fluffy heads, aren't smart enough for real science like chemistry and physics, so a short guy will have a better chance there" mixed in with some "and since men are smarter than women, a guy in bio will hit the top of the profession, tenure, prizes, etc. faster and easier than competing against men in other disciplines".

Why not take advantage of anti-fat prejudice and get talented fatties at a steal?

Because fat people are stupid. If they were smart, they would not be fat. It is easy not to be fat, so if you are fat, it is because you are too stupid, lazy and greedy not to be fat. Everyone knows this!

  • -13

Because fat people are stupid. If they were smart, they would not be fat. It is easy not to be fat, so if you are fat, it is because you are too stupid, lazy and greedy not to be fat. Everyone knows this!

Leaving sarcasm aside, I agree that fat = stupid is a stupidly reductive frame (with caveats for the smallish correlations with conscientiousness, IQ, SES etc).

That being said, it's 2025, for most people, relief from obesity is a prescription away. Free passes handed out if, after trial, GLP drugs don't work for them, but anyone wanting to lose weight and in possession of even modest means owes it themselves to try.

(This wasn't true back when the quote was presumably made, different times, less cooking under the warm sun of man-made wonders within my comprehension)

Because fat people are stupid. If they were smart, they would not be fat. It is easy not to be fat, so if you are fat, it is because you are too stupid, lazy and greedy not to be fat. Everyone knows this!

I assume this is a joke, because if not then something has been making us real stupid since the 1970s.

As a fat person myself, I've had the "it's easy to be thin" and "fatness is a moral failing" lines quoted at me, so part a joke, part the weariness of being judged as Watson allegedly judged fat interviewees.

But being fat is a sign of moral failing at least in virtue ethics. Specifically you engage in gluttony, which is one of the seven deadly sins in Christianity, it was a sin in Stoicism, it is a sin in Buddhism as form of taṇhā and it is a sin in many other similar moral systems.

Being fat is most certainly a moral failing. Fat people lack taste. I cannot comprehend how one would be able to find good, high-quality food in the quantities required to become fat. Most food is simply not good enough to get fat over. No one has ever gotten fat eating at Michelin-star restaurants.

If you can't acknowledge that pizza isn't very expensive but still tastes good then you have some kind of mutant snobbery gene that disqualifies you from commenting on the diets of normal human beings.

Most pizza is gross.

Okay well, here on Earth, humans like it.

If Michelin-star restaurants are your requirement for "high quality food", then most people don't, and cannot eat high quality food most of the time they eat.

As someone founded a fin-tech company, I highly recommend the biology route. It is Saturday, and I am at the office and will be stuck here until the evening. Unlike the stereotype of finance people as old money aesthetic, my view is more autistic nerds doing the actual work combined with sales people who barely work i finance or understand the products. Someone considering biology is probably not going into those sales jobs.

The more technical sides of finance are almost all men and women on dating apps don't really understand or appreciate your job title anyways. You are far more likely to meet high quality women in a biology lab. Proximity is the most important factor and finance is not it.

You are far more likely to meet high quality women in a biology lab

Endorsed. Quant finance is sub 10% women and even the women we do have are very much not "tradwife" types.

This new knowledge has made me reevaluate my views on him.

That he wasn't just an incredible scientist, but he was also based?

water memory

Is it bad that this is the only one that really seems disqualifying to me?

I was curious enough about this to look up Josephson's water memory views, and I found this letter to a critical editor:

Molecular memory

Sir: Lionel MD gram’s account of Jacques Benveniste’s research (“The memory of molecules", 19 March) failed to make it clear that the experiment discussed, where a biological signal is recorded, transmitted over the Internet, and applied to water elsewhere to regenerate the biological effects of the source, is not just an idea but rather an experiment that has already been carried out, with impressive results (see Benveniste’s web pages at ioimo.digibio.com).

We invited him to describe his work at our weekly colloquium to learn more about the research, which seems both scientifically interesting and potentially of considerable practical importance - while the results claimed may seem surprising, the Cavendish Laboratory has been host to many surprising discoveries during the 125 years of its existence, and the controversial nature of the claims was not seen as good cause to follow the herd and veto his making a presentation.

In regard to the Nature condemnation of 1988, my conclusion at that time was that its authors had made an insufficient case for its headline claim “High- dilution experiments a delusion”, and nothing since has led me to see the frequent denunciations of the work as anything other than the hysteria that frequently accompanies claims that challenge the orthodox point of view.

The manifestations of scientific prejudice, well documented by Michel Schiff in the book The Memory of Water, can be extraordinary; another reason why we felt it important to invite Dr Benveniste to talk at our colloquium and be able to present his results to scientists in an uncensored form. I am grateful to The Independent for following on with its article.

Professor BRIAN JOSEPHSON Cavendish Laboratory Department of Physics University of Cambridge

Maybe crank curious, not an outright crank himself?

Most men in bio are short because they can’t get women, but because you’re tall I know you’re genuinely interested in bio

What, concretely, bothers you about this? (Are you a height-challenged guy?)

Is it that he seems to hold a belief that shorter guys compensate for a lack of height by choosing scientific occupations? I'm not sure about this, but I'm almost curious enough to pull NLSY data on height and major to find out.

Or is it that you object to the idea that occupational groups show differences in their anthropometric measurements at all? If so, these are very well-attested in the literature: managers, professionals, and especially politicians are all taller than average.

Or is it just that he's not treating possible discrimination in a very somber, serious tone? If so, whenever Obama dies, will you be posting here about how he made fun of Buttigieg and said he could never become President because he's too short?

Is it that he seems to hold a belief that shorter guys compensate for a lack of height by choosing scientific occupations? I'm not sure about this, but I'm almost curious enough to pull NLSY data on height and major to find out.

Sometimes I’ve wondered if this stuff happens on some kind of unconscious level people aren’t entirely aware of. A lot of socially awkward people for instance find their way into reclusive activities and hobbies often because they don’t integrate well with others and are not invited to participate in a lot of outgoing activities. It’s not a coincidence that geeks and nerds all tend to ‘look’ a certain way physiologically and find their place in the same setting and occupied by the same hobbies. “Are you into computers because you can’t socialize or are you incapable of socializing because you’re into computers?”

Or it’s the same reason guys with big dongs find their way into pornography while guys with small dongs tend to become serial killers and ride motorcycles. This kind of self slotting of people into categories rarely happens through conscious and deliberate decision making. It’s some kind of social pattern that I haven’t deciphered yet but it’s a lot like when they gave testosterone to liberals how they instantly became republicans. Thankfully I’m not just right-wing but I’m far right-wing.

ride motorcycles

Any evidence for this?

It’s pretty hard to see.

It’s not a coincidence that geeks and nerds all tend to ‘look’ a certain way physiologically

Do they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser

In the case of nerds specifically, I think the simplest explanation is that they are high-systemisers who are fascinated by abstract systems with complex (yet consistent and legible) rules. The world of interpersonal relationships with its frustratingly arbitrary and definitely inconsistent ("lookin' good, Susan") ruleset is confusing and scary for them.

If you're an intelligent high-systemiser, this means pursuing a career in physics or computer science; if you're not particularly intelligent, you instead get into D&D, MtG or trainspotting.

This meta of mining disparate, single-sentences from the history of someone's life is so annoying in every context. "Look at these sentences the person said!" It's a post-2020 phenomenon and it's extremely annoying, but that's probably why you posted it.

It's a post-2020 phenomenon

This was happening in 2016 and I only picked 2016 because I didn't feel confident saying ~2013

Can you perhaps expound more about why you think these quotes, if even true, are bad? They seem like jokes with a solid grain of truth in them.

I'm not the OP, but I believe as an ubermensch who was a leading authority on genetics he had a moral responsibility to not casually sling such inflammatory shit that would carry the weight of genetic condemnation. He had a right to his shitposting, but the world is correct to complain that this shitposting is undignified.

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a moral responsibility to not casually sling such inflammatory shit

Nah, fuck off with that. We're talking about like six sentences of random jokes from across a guy's entire life, and at least four of them are complete and total nothingburgers. Maybe everyone else has a moral responsibility to not be a motherfucking baby about it.

He is not saying this stuff in the comfort of his home with his friends and being secretly recorded and outed. He has said much of it in interviews with journalists.

It is beneath the dignity of the academy for its members to use that opportunity to crack racist (and sexist) jokes, Especially if one is a world famous geneticist.

  • -14

This list is incredibly paltry compared to a list of naughty things my family and I have said in the last week. As the result of one of these tedious "look at what no-no words this bad man said" fishing expeditions, one with a public figure's entire lifetime to muck-rake, it's positively pathetic in how anodyne it actually is.

As for the academy, it's been so thoroughly disgraced at this point that concerns about its dignity are beneath comment.

As for the academy, it's been so thoroughly disgraced at this point that concerns about its dignity are beneath comment.

In this house we believe in holding intellectuals accountable for both going full retard on wokeness and for bigoted JAQing off.

  • -13

Hey buddy I think you got the wrong door - reddit's two blocks down.

bigoted JAQing off

The fuck are you actually talking about? None of the quotes in the OP are even phrased as questions.

JAQing off

Both a thought defeating cliche and not what Dr. Watson was doing.

Do any of those quotes show James Watson faux-innocently asking questions in order to get someone else to argue for socially unacceptable positions? I don't seem to see one.

naughty things my family and I have said in the last week

Do you not see the difference between you and your family engaging in bar talk in relative privacy and The Most Decorated Science Man saying this during interviews with the press?

Not really. This kind of thing just seems really trifling across the board, and we'd be better off if nobody cared. You can't even articulate a reason to care other than the long since dead "dignity of the academy."

Other geneticists have a right to not want to be associated with that. In the same way if someone in my friend group says some extremely inflammatory shit in a public place, now I’m complicit in his statement and actions and condemned by association. It doesn’t matter if you share the same sentiment or not at that point and it may very well be stupid and ridiculous, but it’s easy to understand why people don’t want the spotlight and attention on them. Whether in my personal or professional life I’m not someone who’s out to antagonize others intentionally and would prefer not to fight battles I don’t have to.

Other geneticists have a right to not want to be associated with that.

Naa, they can fuck right off, if for no other reason than because Watson was the big dog. He didn't have an obligation to shut his mouth because his less-talented successors found him embarrassing or something.

He didn't have an obligation to shut his mouth but the rest of the scientific community wasn't obligated to let this guy who fits right in with shitposting Twitter edgelords represent them.

Charles Murray's dignity he does not have.

And in the end Watson was the one crying like a bitch that his reputation was ruined.

Our society should have great men and and if they want to be recognized as great men they should behave more on the Bertrand Russell or Richard Feynman end of the scale than the Andrew Tate or Dan Bilzerian end.

He didn't have an obligation to shut his mouth because his less-talented successors found him embarrassing or something.

Okay what about Crick, the person he won the Nobel with, who had a much more accomplished career? He also found him embarrassing. They're not all scrubs complaining that the big swinging dick brought the truth too hard and it hurt their feelings.

He didn't have an obligation to shut his mouth but the rest of the scientific community wasn't obligated to let this guy who fits right in with shitposting Twitter edgelords represent them.

As far as I know he did not claim to speak for the scientific community in the controversial things he said.

Charles Murray's dignity he does not have.

Yeah, see what that got Murray

The difference is what happened to Murray was actually unfair.

So the penalty for being late, is the same as the penalty for rebellion you say?

“There is a biochemical link between exposure to sunlight and sexual urges.. that’s why you have Latin lovers”

There might be something to this. My libido often goes way up if I spend time outside on a hot day, and it's not just because there are many scantily clad women walking around.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8411113/

UVB exposure increases circulating sex-steroid levels in mice and humans
UVB exposure enhances female attractiveness and receptiveness toward males
UVB exposure increases females’ estrus phase, HPG axis hormones, and follicle growth
Skin p53 regulates UVB-induced sexual behavior and ovarian physiological changes

You are putting too much weight on second-hand and third-hand quotes. Even when not outright made-up, such quotes tend to be some mixture of out of context and paraphrased in a way that changes their meaning. This is especially true when the people passing along the quotes strongly disagree with even the things the quoted person has actually said, or when you are concerned about something different from the person passing it along. Even when being honest, people tend to repeat the meaning they heard, not the actual words that were said.

For example, lets say he makes a joke that some people think is offensive, will the people telling this to a reporter and the reporter writing both make it clear in the paraphrase used and the context mentioned that he was joking? If the person repeating it thinks making such jokes is "racist", and furthermore that Watson is a "racist crank" anyway because of his comments regarding the IQ gap, he probably thinks it doesn't matter whether the comment is a joke or not. Whether joking or serious, the comment carries the same meaning: "I am racist". (Similar to this misquote from a now-ex Washington Post reporter, to her the fake Charlie Kirk quote and the real one conveyed the same meaning.) Then you come along looking for whether Watson is "kooky" and suddenly it actually matters a lot whether something is a pet theory he passionately believes in, a speculative hypothesis he entertained for a couple sentences, or an outright joke that he never even seriously suggested. Even without deliberate dishonestly, the witness and the journalist can lossily encode his statements in a way that conveys the information their ideology cares about but drops or distorts the information people with different beliefs care about.

“There is a biochemical link between exposure to sunlight and sexual urges.. that’s why you have Latin lovers”

Hilariously, if you dig into the links, you'll find that one of the reasons Watson said this is, apparently, because of an experiment where injecting melanin directly into men had Viagra-like results.

Your takedown of Watson (...shortly after his death) doesn't ask if any of his kooky views might be true or why he believes them, it just holds them up and says they are bad. Some of them were probably wrong (which, for a scientist, is arguably worse than bad) and some of them were probably insensitive, but aren't you a little bit curious to know more about the effects of melanin on sexual desire?

Sounds to me like he was also a comedian if he really said all that.

This new knowledge has made me reevaluate my views on him.

Positively, right? This sounds like exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from you, just with some slightly different targets.

“Women at Oxford and Cambridge are better than Harvard and Yale because they know their job is to look pretty and get a rich husband”

This makes me think of a post I once read about a woman coming to a conclusion along these lines. She was undergrad at Harvard, studying hard to secure for herself, after another decade of hard work, a life of upper-middle-to-upper class comfort. She described a night where she was thinking about how much further she had to go, and how her gaze sort of panned over to the MBA library, which was full of eligible bachelors 5ish years further along that life path. So she decamped from the undergrad study lounges and started spending that time in the MBA study lounges, where she might have a serendipitous encounter with a handsome shortcut.

This is a well-crafted piece, let's break it down:

  • OP begins with praise of James Watson, that's good ethos, builds rapport.
  • Then there's a little narrative of how he once believed the simple rightoid account of Watson's cancellation, but then [Adam Curtis voice] something strange happened.
  • He links to a long list of quotes on a liberal blog. Now, this is very clever, in that the full list has plenty of quotes many people here will either chuckle at and consider understandable, or outright agree with. Much heat to be generated just from commenters digging in and litigating the quotes.
  • The selected quotes are well-chosen on that criterion, but also to get the attention of particular niches - the manlets, the redpillers, the Peaters. The last one will get at least two mottizens arguing with over exactly which lines it crosses.
  • Now, what you leave out of your writing is as important as what you put in. And see this spot here, where OP deftly leaves out an argument. Now, he could explain his reasoning, why he reevaluated his views on Watson's "respectability", but that would narrow the scope of the comments and keep him defending himself in them. But, as everyone knows, those statements are bad, and I'm sure you all agree that anyone making them must be crazy, that's just consensus.
  • Very clever twist next to replace the argument: OP draws a parallel with mystical kookery of exactly the type that mottizens of rationalist heritage particularly hate. Now, the false equivalency is obvious, there are all kinds of differences you can draw between an HBD guy saying grouchy, inflammatory things about women and minorities, exaggerating theories within regular biology, or making spicy jokes, and a quantum consciousness homeopathy yoga guy, so the weakness of the analogy is particularly great for getting those comments heated up.
  • The parting shot, the cherry on top, is to end by asserting that Watson's views are even worse for "modern civil society". Again, no argument, but none needed, and the use of "modern civil society" calls deftly back to the rightoid-to-enlightenment narrative from the start of the post.

I'll leave it to the gallery to decide if OP simply has natural talent at this, or is a trained and well-polished master baiter, but, from me, kudos.

I want to sincerely thank you for taking the time to do this.

As I noted in my last ban for Count (and elaborated upon in subsequent discussion), he's very good at what he does (trolling). In a forum where people are largely acting in good faith, and where assumptions of good faith are both recommended (it's in the rules) and generally believed, he's the best at mimicking the surface traits of fact-based discussion.

Now, we could just warn and ban him with the bare minimum of effort, but that's generally a last resort. So any formal action usually requires a lot of explanation. That can get very tiresome, even burdensome.

And note that this effort isn't for the sake of Count. We know he's a troll, and the only reason he's around is because he contributes just enough to not be clearly net negative. We don't bother with the lengthy explainers for his sake, but we consider them necessary for everyone else, particularly newcomers to our forums, or those who aren't quite as jaded and get confused as to why seemingly innocuous or borderline posts get hit so hard. In a way, Count benefits from the existence of the people he seeks to rile up.

I'll bookmark this, just in case I need a proper analysis of his nonsense that isn't written solely by myself. Thanks again.

Oh come on, I can't believe this, every time I make a top level post we get people going "5 secret and esoteric knowledge reasons why BC is actually trolling even when he says he's sincere" that there's no good response to other than going "no" because with text anyone can make up anything to support their viewpoint and make it sound plausible (see your average literary analysis magazine or Scott's Recent Anti-Christ lecture).

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. - Cardinal Richelieu

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. - Cardinal Richelieu

You just did exactly this to James Watson. You have no right to complain about it.

Ah, but he has every right to play the part of the fool by complaining about it.

I think it only takes a very quick glance at this forum and past moderation activities to realize that us mods have very little in common with the good Cardinal. We warn sparingly, and hand out bans even more so.

As is regrettably necessary, mod decisions usually revolve around matters of opinion, not the kind of objective fact that can be analyzed under a microscope. Yet, the average Mottizen attracts little such censure.

The last time I had to ban you, I even went to the trouble of rewriting your post to demonstrate a version that used inflammatory language to only the minimum extent necessary:

https://www.themotte.org/post/2269/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348561?context=8#context

So I am confident that it isn't the content, but the user presenting it and the way it's presented that's an issue.

At this point, you have the following options:

  1. Keep doing whatever it is you are doing, till someone less amused by your antics permabans you.

  2. Write something of actual quality to counterbalance things (you are in fact capable of doing this, look at your Alawite writeup, it won an AAQC). Or, if you're going to keep actual intellectual effort at what it is, phrase things in a more neutral manner.

As it is, my stance is that your current post isn't quite bad enough to warrant another ban, but has supersensitized my receptors such that a second offense will definitely result in a ban.

Honestly, I'm not sure any expression of sincerity will make up for past actions. Finding Christ or Allah right at the noose might do good things for your immortal soul, but it'll take a great deal more to make us not consider you a bad actor.

I'm not interested in debating your character with you, though I might with other people who genuinely don't understand our stance. What is within your control is your behavior, such that you may delay or deny the looming banhammer.

If you can't? Well, you'll certainly break out of the loop of samsara, for better or worse.

  1. Ban everyone interesting
  2. Site dies because it’s boring and everyone is scared to post
  3. ??????
  4. PROFIT

In fairness, people have been saying “the forum will die because you’re banning all the interesting people” for at least 5 years now.

On the other hand, we actually have banned some interesting people, and the forum is worse for their absence.

Okay buddy - you and @ABigGuy4U - I am calling your bluff. Who are the people we have permabanned who actually made the forum worse for their absence?

The only one I can think of is @HlynkaCG and he is extremely debatable - for every Hlynka-stan who misses him, there is someone who was screaming at us to ban him for years. And I've already written several times about how we did everything we could, short of just literally saying "The rules don't apply to Hlynka," to avoid having to permaban him.

Every other permaban I can think of might have been in some cases an "interesting" person, but they were interesting in the sense that they wrote high-effort screeds spitting high-effort venom, and the people upset that we banned them approved of the direction they were spitting.

Go on, tell me who on this list was a valuable contributor who you think should be granted amnesty?

We do not casually permaban people, and we let even the most belligerent and obnoxious people, if there is even a shred of redeeming quality in their posts, have multiple chances before we pull the trigger.

I personally don't find @BurdensomeCount's contributions very interesting, though I will say his trolling has gotten less blatant. I just skimmed the OP because it was the usual uninteresting BC sneering. He mostly gets away with it because he's toned down the celebratory triumphalism about enjoying the fruits of immigrating to the UK which he looks forward to being conquered by his people who will punish the white supremacist natives in good time. It was those kinds of posts that got him banned before.

for every Hlynka-stan who misses him, there is someone who was screaming at us to ban him for years.

"50% of the forum loves them and 50% hates their guts" is practically the definition of an interesting poster. If there's unanimous agreement that someone is a good contributor, then they may indeed be a "good" poster, but there's a cap on how interesting they can be.

And I've already written several times about how we did everything we could, short of just literally saying "The rules don't apply to Hlynka," to avoid having to permaban him.

My suggestion has always been that bans are capped at a length of one year, except in incredibly egregious cases (e.g. spam bots, or the person launched cyberattacks on the forum or something). I don't expect that this suggestion will ever actually be implemented, but it is a possibility nonetheless.

Go on, tell me who on this list was a valuable contributor who you think should be granted amnesty?

Hlynka is the primary example of course, also fuckduck9000, AhhhTheFrench, AlexanderTurok.

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Go on, tell me who on this list was a valuable contributor who you think should be granted amnesty?

Looks like @fuckduck9000, banned for this, was banned for something far less inflammatory than stuff that barely merited a warning in this very thread.

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Depends on the point of view. Some people that I expect others to think were "interesting" really only had a few interesting ideas, ran out of them and got banned once their manner of conversation outweighed the reiteration of their ideas.

What's interesting about posting try-hard "provocative" top level posts, and ignoring literally everyone who points that out several of the premises are wrong?

Three of the top level comments this week devolved into long threads that were entirely just navel-gazing about Motte rules and decorum. Then this one comes along and it just immediately turns into an inquisition about whether it’s bait with no actual substantive discussion of the topic. I don’t know much about James Watson and I would have liked some actual discussion about his life, work and pet theories regardless of who started the thread. If the “bait” is so fine grained that you need a fifty page analysis about it whether or not it’s bait, it’s effectively become a pointless distinction. Meanwhile the discussion gets slower and more sclerotic every week and there are fewer and fewer top level posts.

If the “bait” is so fine grained that you need a fifty page analysis about it whether or not it’s bait,

Whatever gave you that idea? Literally everything he posts in top level is bait. Watson was a subject of past culture war debate, and the rat-sphere was sympathetic to him, so he attacked him because he wanted to own the chuds. It's as simple as that. If you think that's uncharitable, then the fact that he refuses to adress responses that show he's just plain wrong, proves it.

Meanwhile the discussion gets slower and more sclerotic every week and there are fewer and fewer top level posts.

I'm not here to serve as entertainment. Letting people rile others up for shits and giggles, because you find the conversations "sclerotic" would just shit this place up. You can literlly just go on over to rdrama if you're so bored.

I appreciate your thanks, though having slept on it I do feel like trolling back at him and to some extent backseat modding wasn't the ideal good-citizen-of-themotte response to give BC. But whomst among us is the perfect mottizen?

I'm touched you think your work was trolling. If only Count shared that definition!

Don't worry about it. While we raise an eyebrow at armchair psychoanalysis of the average Mottizen (or people someone has a grudge with), I doubt any of us would object here when it's Count in question.

Richelieu could also find treason in six lines written by a traitor, but he didn't feel it was necessary to mention that.

Damn I genuinely learned something from this lmao

Kind of makes me want to shitpost more, there's so much unexplored skill ceiling. You've put me on to some new tech.

Feels like when I first figured out how to wave dash.

Study rhetoric! Preferably with a Classical flavour to it, though of the moderns I recommend Leo Strauss, HL Mencken, and Keith Johnstone's Impro. As Rousseau said, "man is the chief instrument of man", and rhetoric is how one accesses that instrument. Not entirely unlike wavedashing life, honestly.

I second the recommendation to study rhetoric, changed my life for the better and won me a bunch of prizes back in the day.

Great breakdown. His trolling sometimes gets me, but it's artful enough that I can't truly be mad. And he's pretty witty sometimes.

Trust me, I'm not a leftoid baiting. You'll notice the conspicuous absence of any mentions of Rosalind Franklin in my post, which would be the number 1 point anybody of a left wing persuasion would attempt to make here.

Instead I fully and freely acknowledge that Rosalind Franklin has been massively overrated, the narrative about how Watson and Crick somehow "stole" her work (never mind the fact that it's very unlikely she would even understand the implications of the images she produced, it's very non trivial to go from this to realizing it implies DNA has a double helix structure) is completely discredited and her contributions were nowhere near those of the people who actually got the Nobel prize.

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No, I don't think you're a leftoid baiting - mate, I wouldn't have chosen to make that post if I didn't know your posting well.

Plus, mentioning Franklin would be poor baitcraft. You'd get written off as a leftoid and not get nearly as much attention as doing the former rightoid schtick.

Some people here, including yourself, seem to have developed the view that I'm some sort of evil genius who has nothing better to do than spend my free time honing the art of the bait and trying those skills out on the people here like some sort of lab experiment. The truth is a lot more mundane (as life often is): everything I say is certified 100% organic and genuine with no artificial preservatives or colouring.

You may not be an evil genius but inadvertently (or not... OooOoOOOooOo) you're quite good at poking the hornets nest here

I like it, please continue

So, previously, in response to justawoman, I wrote that there's a distinct stage in the decline of forums where their dynamic becomes increasingly dominated by people coming in to argue with "the forum", which they see as an amorphous outgroup blob. The paradigmatic example to me is all the incels (not in the lib sense, actual incels) going to 4chan's /fit/ to argue with /fit/izens about how self-improvement is impossible and nobody will ever get laid except Chad. It may be true that, in certain respects - perhaps on particular issues, perhaps in response to particular arguments, or perhaps, perhaps often, in response to obviously bad posts which cloak themselves in those issues and arguments - themotte can summon a hornet's nest. This is bad. It is bad to poke the hornet's nest, bad to summon the hornets, bad to be a hornet. If you do this, you are degrading the space and the community. Even though many people come here and see what they want to see, themotte is not a monolithic rightoid hiveblob, but to troll it as if it is a monolithic rightoid hiveblob is to summon that hiveblob out of the future as an entirely natural defense mechanism. If you like this dynamic in a community, I invite you to move on, and instead visit the beautiful imageboard of /pol/, where anyone can play 128D dramatard chess with whatever outgroupblob they choose to envision.

While what you say is 100% true, the unfortunate truth is that The Motte has been slowly but steadily shifting in a "monolithic rightoid hiveblob" direction.

It is not one, and one of the reasons I like to state my opinions and then get dogpiled by the hiveblob is to prevent it from becoming one (as long as I am here, it can't be one by definition).

But as someone who considers themselves a pragmatic centrist with (classical, not contemporary) liberal characteristics, I do find this place increasingly frustrating. So like it or not, it's cathartic to see some seethe and cope from the gang.

What would you say are the 3 main Left and 3 Right beliefs that position you on the centrist chair?

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I'll be honest, man, I have a low opinion of self-professed "centrists", precisely because many of them are never happy unless they have some hiveblob they can preen against. I appreciate you not doing that. My advice to onlookers - you want to make this place better, and truer to its mission, find the small cracks, the points of true difference between the people here, and crack into them with an open mind.

I feel like one of those famous artists who puts certain elements in his painting because they look good to him there full stop only for art critics 100 years later to write essays on how "the contrast between the bright cerulean blue of the sky and the complementary colour muted orange of the Autumn hilltop is a very clever trick employed by the artist to enhance the strikingness of the image for the viewers eye" etc. etc. going out to 20 pages of "analysis" when such a thought had never even crossed the artist's mind in the first place.

I'm just giving my genuine honest views but some people here choose to interpret that as me playing 6D chess with time travel...

To be fair

artists who puts certain elements in his painting because they look good to him there full stop

And

the contrast between the bright cerulean blue of the sky and the complementary colour muted orange of the Autumn hilltop is a very clever trick employed by the artist to enhance the strikingness of the image for the viewers eye

Are the same thing. The artist might not be able to articulate why they like the elements, but they have an excellent eye for what looks good, it's what makes them an artist. So they make shit that looks good to them, and then everyone else goes "holy fuck this looks great, how?" and then break it down

Applying this example to here. You write things that you think are interesting and expressive. Your honest views are interesting, and incidentally what you find interesting is also excellent The Motte chum in the water.

Please keep sharing your interesting ideas, I very much like them

Nah I think you're an asshole but I think you're earnest in your beliefs, which makes you the fun kind of asshole to debate with

This isn't debating, though. Bartender_Venator's post is not debating with BurdensomeCount - it's deflecting by making a post entirely about the person himself. It is a very well-polished deflection, but it is nonetheless a deflection.

I disagree. @Bartender_Venator was doing effective debating, which can be seen for how he maneuvered BurdensomeCount into falling into the same debate trap twice.

The debate-appropriate response to bad faith framing arguments is to note their use rather than engaged in desired debate on the terms set by the accusation. When the initial presenter is approaching with a potential motte and bailey argument when the rhetorical bailey is itself trying to insinuate and argue over a connotation, and thus assume the conclusion that the insinuation is valid basis to start discussion, the appropriate response is to challenge the argument's paradigm in the first place.

Note that Bartender_Venator's breakdownn isn't an ad hominem argument that BurdensomeCount's argument is an invalid troll argument is wrong because he is a shit-stiring troll, repeat troll troll troll. He didn't try and justify a charge of trolling based on past BurdensomeCount troll efforts to establish a pattern of history, or even linking to the rather direct mod analysis on BurdensomeCount's trolling style. Bartender_Venantor is targeting the argument, claiming that argument-level deicisions reveal bad faith, and letting the implications of that argument critique pain BurdensomCount.

Specifically, Bartender shifted the debate from any debate over the characters Count wanted attention provoked towards to a meta-structure review of how BurdensomeCount's argument was structured. He identified and contrasted both obvious and subtle methods that were used to lead the audience to a conclusion or conflict without actually committing BurdensomeCount to making certain arguments. Bartender noted various points where Burdensome could have added elements that would have earned charity/good faith credit (could explain his reasoning), but also notes the implications- and thus potential reasons- for why they are absent. These coincide with argument structure decisions that could, in isolation, have innocuous reasons, but coincidentally happen to have overlapping / reinforcing thematic effects consistent with trolling. While Bardtender does end off with the passive-aggressive accusation by very conspicuously drawing attention to the lack of a personal accusation ('I'll leave it to the gallery'), the core of the argument for why the audience should find that creidble is how a characterization of Count's argument-structure stand on its own as evidence of good or bad faith on Count's part.

Note in turn that BurdensomeCount did not actually contest Bartender's characterization of his argument in any respect.

If Bartender made had made an ad-hominem debate attack, that would have been an easy winning move. If the original original argument structure was sound, or at least defensible, it would have undercut Bartender's critique and any implicit judgement on good faith. Burdensome could have strengthened the foundations of his argument by providing additional justification for suspect design inclusions, he could have added to the foundation by taking Bartender's invitation for elaboration. Burdensome could even asked for audience forgiveness, claimed he was trying to keep his wordcount down, that it might have distracted, or so on.

Instead Count attempted a suspiciously specific deflection of a personal characterization that wasn't made ('I'm not leftoid baiting'), and then tried to change the subject via a rhetorical concession ('Instead I fully and freely acknowledge') to a topic that had nothing to do with the structural analysis of his argument or Bartender's position. This might work in troll-format motte-and-bailey where the bailey is arguing about the subject of nominal discussion, and the motte is falling back to 'well a more reasonable characterization of the topic was this.' But it was also a a transparently plebian attempt to change the topic, even as he couldn't resist not giving an actual denial that he was baiting.

Which, is why the motte-and-bailey retreat failed on its face. Count's intended motte no longer had value because both motte and bailey were now the bailey to Bartender's position- that the argument structure itself was bad faith. Count's attempted fallback still left him within this bailey that Count was more interested in not-making arguments in able to troll a conflict rather than defend a relevant position.

Count made it even easier for Bartender to draw attention to Count's penchant at rheotorical sleights of hand ('I don't think you're a leftoid baiting') and attempts to reframe the argument. Not only does it make Bartender look better at understanding Count's argument than vice versa, as Count didn't dispute Bartender's correction, it also makes Count's subsequent retreat to a persecution defense another validating example of abandoning the previous arguments. In this way, Count not only gave validity to the initial critique, but practically turned it into a prediction.

Which is how Bartender's argument works on multiple levels. He was not only able to describe Count's conduct in mechanical terms that Count didn't dispute, but do so in ways that Count's own nature led him to validate, even after they were explicitly pointed out. Add to it that Count's response also aligns to rather direct style call-outs from months ago, a style which many posters know, and Count comes across less as some sort of genius, evil or otherwise, and more like someone whose predictability is part of the charm they are clearly getting humored for.

Thank you, Dean, I appreciate your thoroughness. It's a surprising pleasure to have a post analyzed and explicated like this.

And yet at no point does Bartender even attempt to criticise Count's point. That's the issue. The top-level post is, essentially, arguing that James Watson was a kook - someone who held not merely weird or unusual views, but views that are essentially bigoted, judging entire people because of inherited characteristics that do not reliably cluster with the traits he ostensibly cared about.

Bartender cedes this entire issue. Bartender accuses Count of trolling or baiting, and argues that Count's various points are carefully chosen to provoke the Motte. But at no point does Bartender defend Watson, or argue that the points Count chose should not be relevant to a judgement of him, or that the points Count chose are out of context and unrepresentative, or try anything else similar. The closest Bartender comes to an actual argument is suggesting that the comparison between Watson and Josephson is ill-chosen, but since that comparison is not necessary for Count's criticism of Watson to land, it hardly suffices as much of a rebuttal.

I don't think the top-level post here is great. I think Count would benefit from doing more work to explicitly stitch together an argument. Count's post ought to link those quotes together into a worldview, show more compelling evidence as to the general worldview that Watson held, and then indicate why that worldview is wrong. I'll even grant that there's a bit of consensus-building in the top-level post, which is against Motte rules, though I also think that Bartender and some of those around him are trying to consensus-build in the other direction.

But just as an argument? Count puts forward at least the sketch of an argument against James Watson's character. Bartender does not engage with that argument in favour of accusing Count of trolling. Well, that's as may be. But it means that the argument around Watson slips past. Bartender is arguing about Count, but he is not arguing with Count.

More comments

I'm glad that someone remembers the time and effort I spent in analyzing Count. Almost seems worth it, though I'm never getting that lunch break back.

That's the rub. High effort trolls like Count demand similarly high effort in specifically litigating their many sins of omission or commission. I would be entirely fine with "haha, very funny, but we know what you're up to" as a ban message, but as I've mentioned here, those who aren't closely following his trajectory tend to be alarmed and request clarification.

I suppose one can draw parallels to reality. Are the police in SF worried about the reaction of fent users, or are they worried about the concerns raised by otherwise perfectly law abiding citizens?

I think you would very much like to believe that's how people see you here, and I can see how you might have read that into my sarcasm. I just think you spend too much time on arrdrama, enjoy shit-stirring for the sake of it (possibly picking your views based on that, I can't say, but would be many such cases), and lower the tone of this otherwise pleasantly autismal establishment.

None of your excerpts of scandalous things he said has degraded my opinion of him: he seems to be a cool bloke. Imagine on all the discoveries we missed out on because cool blokes like him were filtered out of the researcher track by useless know-nothing neo-Lysenkoists who valued political conformity over intelligence and curiosity.

You think "sunlight exposure is the reason behind 'Latin lovers'" is defensible under any reasonable interpretation? Indians must be drowning in pussy where ever they go if that's true.

  • -22

Drowning in pussy, maybe not. But Indian men are not exactly known for their chastity.

I find it genuinely funny that you chose this in particular, since it's imo among the most reasonable quotes. Sun exposure has a well-attested, uncontroversial positive impact on our general mood, it's really not a big jump from there to positive impact on libido in particular. Going from there to stereotypes about different nationalities is certainly uncouth, but, again, pretty straightforward.

Whether it's actually true is another matter, but it really isn't so far out there.

You think "sunlight exposure is the reason behind 'Latin lovers'" is defensible under any reasonable interpretation?

Defensible to whom and in what way? He didn't put this theory in a paper and try to publish it, did he? You can't possibly imagine that people here would give a shit about such a comment unto itself.

If we want to discuss the hypothesis seriously, not necessarily. Is it merely the presence of melanin? Absolute sunlight exposure? Excess exposure to sunlight modulated by level of presence of melanin? Which hypothesis do you want to debate?

They must’ve caught the solar flare unfortunately, if I’m to go by his logic.

The stereotype in Western culture is that Latin men are sexually aggressive or highly passionate, depending on how well they follow Rules 1 and 2. Indians also have a reputation for being sexually aggressive horndogs.

He said sexual urges, not sexual success.


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