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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   26332 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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In a way, AI is harder on nerds than it is on anyone else.

At a closed-door meeting in Princeton, leading researchers said agentic AI tools now handle up to 90% of their intellectual workload—forcing a reckoning over who, or what, drives scientific discovery.

It is interesting to see, now that it is ingrained into the personal and professional lives of vast numbers of ‘normal’ people, how mundanely it slots into the daily existence of the average person. I don’t mean that critically, I mean that the average person (especially globally but probably also in the rich world) probably already believed there were ‘computers’ who were ‘smarter than them’. ChatGPT isn’t so different from, say, Jarvis in Iron Man (or countless other AIs in fiction), and the median 90-100IQ person may even have believed in 2007 that technology like that actually existed “for rich people” or at least didn’t seem much more advanced than what they had.

Most people do not seek or find intellectual satisfaction in their work. Intellectual achievement is not central to their identity. This is true even for many people with decent-IQ white collar jobs. They may be concerned (like many of us) with things like technological unemployment, but the fact that an AI might do everything intellectually that they can faster and better doesn’t cause them much consternation. A tool that builds their website from a prompt is a tool, like a microwave or a computer. To a lot of users of LLMs, the lines between human and AI aren’t really blurring together so much as irrelevant; the things most people seek from others, like physical intimacy, family and children, good food and mirth, are not intellectual.

This is much more emotionally healthy than the nerd’s response. A version of the Princeton story is now increasingly common on ‘intellectual’ forums and in spaces online as more and more intelligent people realize the social and cultural implications of mass automation that go beyond the coming economic challenge. Someone whose identity is built around being a member of their local community, a religious organization, a small sports team, their spouse and children, a small group of friends with whom they go drinking a couple of times a month, a calendar of festivals and birthdays, will fare much better than someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating an identity built around an intellect that is no longer useful to anyone, least of all themselves.

I was thinking recently that I’m proud of what I’ve done in my short career, but that smart-ish people in their mid/late twenties to perhaps mid/late forties are in the worst position with regards to the impact of AI on our personal identities. Those much older than us have lived and experienced full careers at a time when their work was useful and important, when they had value. Those much younger will either never work or, if they’re say 20 or 22 now, work for only a handful of years before AI can do all intellectual labor - and have in any case already had three years of LLMs for their own career funeral planning. But in this age range, baited to complete the long, painful, tiresome and often menial slog that characterizes the first decade of a white collar career, we have the double humiliation of never getting further than that and of having wasted so much of our lives preparing for this future that isn’t going to happen.

At a closed-door meeting in Princeton, leading researchers said agentic AI tools now handle up to 90% of their intellectual workload—forcing a reckoning over who, or what, drives scientific discovery.

I find this wildly implausible.

Have you done research? It's not even about the tedium of grant-writing or whatever, people are doing a tremendous amount of routine work in data analysis and literature search, and scientific standards for programming are very low, "Ph.D code" is a meme. Even if AI doesn't contribute to the process of "discovery" per se (such as reasoning about hypotheses and planning experiments – though it definitely can plan experiments at this stage), it can trivially take over 90% of pure cognitive work-hours.

I recommend trying out some of the hot new models, with high reasoning settings. Opus 4.6, ChatGPT 5.2, Gemini 3.0 pro and so on, or even DeepSeek-Speciale. They're starting to make progress on really hard research-level physical reasoning tasks even without human guidance, and in a structured environment they are a great help to researchers.

P.S. Just an example of people's opinions, one of hundreds.

The "up to" might be doing a lot of the work here. Some (many) weeks, those people spend all their days just writing grant proposals, writing/editing research papers, peer-reviewing other papers, preparing teaching, and answering emails. On those tasks, you could have an LLM do 90% of the writing. Still going to involve lots of prompting, rejecting output and prompting again. You can also have it do 90% of your literature surveys. It is better at search than the old tools are, after all.

The question is if this "up to 90%" is actually what "drives scientific discovery". Because when a grad student shows up with interesting measurement results, the LLM will do 0% of the thinking of what that means, what the updated hypothesis is, what direction the research is going to go in, and what potential papers this might result in and what other measurements are now necessary to test the current hypotheses.

Same goes for peer-review. The LLM can write the boilerplate "this is garbage unfit for this kind of journal". The decision that the paper sounds fishy and the data looks unconvincing is not coming from the LLM.

Probably well over 90% of the effort put into research is already useless. It hasn't gone unobserved that we keep putting more and more resources into research with fewer and fewer results (compared to the early-to-mid 20th century, for example). Many excuses are offered for this such as "the low hanging fruit is taken", but perhaps they're all false and the current methods of doing research are just extremely wasteful.

It's certainly both. If your grant success rate in 2025 is 16%, you just have to write 6 times as many grant proposals. Does that additional labor lead to progress? No, on the contrary.

But on the other hand it is absolutely true that the low hanging fruit are gone. Look at the first Nobel in physics: X-rays. Even in the late 19th century, a single motivated human could just go and make a cathode tube from scratch. Glass blowing, vacuum pumps, high voltage source, some simple metal work, silver bromide coated plates. It's far from trivial, but really, you could do it entirely on your own, and fast. Stuff like that is mostly gone now. You need hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the experimental equipment - because for 100 years, legions of people have tried doing frontier work with little money, and they still do inside no-name university labs all over the world. The frontier now needs hundreds of hours of work from an army of expert technicians across a dozen specialized companies just to do the first test setup. And someone needs to pay for that.

Or do you have another explanation? The reward for cheap and effective science would be enormous. If it were possible, somebody somewhere would be doing it, right?

I was thinking recently that I’m proud of what I’ve done in my short career, but that smart-ish people in their mid/late twenties to perhaps mid/late forties are in the worst position with regards to the impact of AI on our personal identities. Those much older than us have lived and experienced full careers at a time when their work was useful and important, when they had value.

FWIW a similar thought occurred to me 25 years ago -- that I might be among the last generations of people to experience the highs and lows of starting and building a business.

That being said, I think it's worth noting that feelings/predictions along the lines of "my generation is screwed" or "the current generation is screwed" tend to be very common. My generation was told there would be no way we could afford to buy a house; that social security would run out before we could collect any; that the American economy would decline and we'd all have to learn Japanese; that the smart thing to do was go to grad school and become a college professor; etc.

So based on experience, I will predict that your generation will be worse off in some ways; better off in some ways; and that there will be a lot of surprises.

Probably I am arrogant bastard, but after AI I feel just like a superhero in an origin story that has just discovered its superpower. My appetite for knowledge and understanding is voracious. I have many side projects on which I am progressing. Just waiting for some properly uncensored local models to dab into chemistry and biology.

Do I feel threatened - I don't know. I know there are turbulent times ahead. I know that being a codemonkey is no future option. But I see huge potential in the technology and I want to be part of it.

I think that AI hurts not the smart people, but Taleb's IYI class. The guys and galls for which credentialism was important.

Agreed. AI is amazing if you ask me. AI can write code extremely well right now but its "research taste" still leaves a lot to be desired. I should have a few more years of a secure job in me at least, and by then hopefully I should have enough money that I don't need to work and can focus on what I genuinely want to do myself, for which AI is a massive force multiplier. I'm not one of those people who competes with others based on the size of my bank account, to me money is what I use to ensure I can have and keep my time for myself doing what I want.

You are comparing yourself to AI at its present capabilities (or the capabilities it has that have already diffused to your interest and skills). Give it some time.

I do manage to be cautiously optimistic, though, at least for my individual future. I have no illusions that I'll be able to provide any economic value in 5 years, and I'm fine with that. And I'm excited for many of the same reasons you are: knowledge is so much easier to find and learn than three years ago, and I'll have decades to learn things about the world that no human knows today. The only question is how to protect myself from futures where we evolve into a two class society of the high and the low.

I just don't think there is any way this lasts. It's like the guys who learned that playing them + the computer edged on computer alone in chess for a period. Eventually the meat just isn't going to be adding anything and I doubt it's even that long after.

I feel roughly the same. I think that AI will destroy a bunch of jobs that were the intellectual equivalent of menial labor, but create an equal or greater number of creative jobs. If you're writing formulaic grant proposals or building websites with React then AI is coming for your job, but that's not a bad thing. An LLM can replace a web designer, but only a full-blown strong AI can replace the UX designer whose job it is to tell the LLM what website to make.

LLMs won't replace the actual nerds. It'll replace the 0.5X programmers, the offshore assets, the email-senders, the box-tickers, and the bureaucrats. On a fundamental level there will still need to be someone to tell the AI what to do.

I feel roughly the same. I think that AI will destroy a bunch of jobs that were the intellectual equivalent of menial labor, but create an equal or greater number of creative jobs.

This is only true if AI plateaus. If it gets even a couple dozen IQ points smarter, those creative jobs are gone, too. And I don't see any indication of AI plateauing.

All current generation AIs rely on someone telling them what to do. ChatGPT will do what you ask it to do and no more. Telling people what to do is surprisingly hard, and telling AIs what to do has most of the same challenges plus a bigger communication barrier.

For safety and legal reasons I would be really surprised if someone made a completely autonomous robot whose job it was to give orders to the other robots. That seems like tempting fate. On some level, bossing around a flock of robots is going to be a job until we develop trustworthy strong AI. The AI we currently have is neither strong nor trustworthy.

For safety and legal reasons I would be really surprised if someone made a completely autonomous robot whose job it was to give orders to the other robots.

if you think no one is going to do this you have not been paying attention

All current generation AIs rely on someone telling them what to do.

A year or two ago the telling has to be very specific, and even then it wasn’t a guarantee of useful output. “Write a function that takes these inputs, performs this logic, applies this transformation, return this output.”

Now it’s “make me an iOS app that does X” and the AI enters planning mode and many iterations and hours later can give you a working app, though likely won’t get everything the way you want on the first draft.

and telling AIs what to do has most of the same challenges plus a bigger communication barrier

Sure, but that's true no matter what "AIs" stand for; Artificial Intelligences, Actually Indians, Average Interns...

For safety and legal reasons I would be really surprised if someone made a completely autonomous robot whose job it was to give orders to the other robots.

I don't think that should be surprising at all. Look at moltbook - yes it's low stakes and yes it's LLMs which aren't remotely intelligent. But it's still clear that the people running it think it's cute to have the bots talk amongst themselves and everything. I think it's very likely that even if it was an actual AI and not a bag of words masquerading as one, there exist people who would see nothing wrong with doing the same sort of thing.

Also look at people running Claude in their shells with the ability to change stuff on the system. That is very obviously a terrible idea, as LLMs have no understanding of what they are doing at all. And yet, people think "yeah it's fine to let this thing touch my computer with potentially destructive commands" (and then they are shocked when the LLM deletes stuff because it's not actually intelligent). Again, if we had an actual AI then I don't see a reason to expect people would hold back from letting it touch things.

It's not clear whether or not we can develop true AI based on where the research is now. But what seems clear, to me at least, is that if we ever do develop a real AI there will be humans which are only too happy to recklessly hook it up to stuff.

I feel like this is bad for mental health/fertility unless we have off-ramps for people. I don’t think there will be enough status seats for the highly intelligent which means more artificial status hierarchy (like woke). This basically comes down to everyone needs to be a playable character. Is this a good thing in society?

Even if someone is highly agentic I feel like people need breaks in life where they can just live and not be building. It gets really hard to have a family if you always need to be in a risk seat and can never step back into a support seat doing boring white caller work.

There seems to be a similarity between AI and woke thinking in the workplace.

Right now in many businesses the expectations have flipped so that rather than being ashamed of using AI, one has to either use AI, pretend that you use it to your superiors, or keep quiet about the subject and hope it goes away. If you say out loud you don't use it, you are a drag, a buzzkill and a dinosaur (maybe a young dinosaur as I don't think intensity of AI use or AI boosterism corresponds with age).

Many people are even under pressure to use AI in cases where no one even pretends it is adding anything, so long as it gives them bragging rights to tell their bosses 'we used AI for this'.

It is/was pretty similar with woke thinking. There was a pressure to believe, pretend or keep quiet.

Both AI and things labelled woke can often get good results though.

There's certainly a lot of nonsensical pressure to use AI from executives, which all seem to drink at the same information trough that has decreed "AI is the hip new thing". I've written about my experiences with that here. That's a fad and will probably go away within a year or two.

I'd still recommend playing around with AI and finding where it can add value. I'm doing roughly 30-40% less work in my software engineering role because of it, with the savings being redirected into building more robust systems, as well as many hours into Factorio.

as well as many hours into Factorio.

Serious take: This makes you a better developer.

Heh, I'd certainly like to think so. I wish my current job had infrastructure that was as elegant and well-functioning as my train-based city blocks.

The "oh shit" moment for me in factorio as it relates to software engineering is that there is a fundamental game meta-mechanic where you have to rebuild large parts of your base. You can't not. The way the tech tree progresses, old smelters and belts can't provide the throughput as you advance. Your option is to either abandon them and make new ones or refactor the old sections. And you kind of have to do the latter because there are all of these geographic dependencies flowing into your older base (without trains and other stuff, you can't make central raw materials depots, you have to build belts straight from a coal field to a smelter).

That's literally codebase refactoring / major update / integration with new capability.

Late in the game, with robots, you can get really modular and independent. That's when you're hitting google scale and things like kubernetes actually become super valuable rather than engineer theater.

Tinfoil hat: Factorio was going to be the thing that turned every kid born after 2010 into a dev. Then AI happened and now everyone is a dev and I can build and re-build my base every 20 minutes.

I enjoyed reading this, especially the part about your CTO. I am 4 years into my career (31 is still young right?), and I have met my organizations CTO exactly once and he came across as a complete moron, but he had a helper/fixer/(handler?), who actually had real technical competency of the sort I would expect from someone with a CTO job title.

I'm glad you enjoyed reading it! And yes, it's mildly frustrating in a lot of ways to have a CTO that doesn't know much about tech. I wish ours had a handler that knew what they were talking about.

He has probably just been out of the game a long time and has specialized in non technical things like "how to manage managers/directors," "political tactics to protect the engineering department's budget," "communicating the value of technical projects to the head of accounting who does not care about tech at all," plus all the mundane process, paperwork, and ego soothing one must do to keep things running smoothly. He probably hasn't written serious code in years and may not have more than a high level understanding of what his department's tech stacks are and how its products works, but that doesn't make him a moron.

Alternatively, he may be not do any of the above and might just be a smooth talking glad-hander. Your department might be a dumpster fire and he's just very adept at shifting blame or sweeping the fires under the rug. That would suck, but it also means he is far from a moron.

That’s a fair point, if you can become the cto for medium sized organization, you must be very smart (or at least very crafty!). It would have been more accurate to say that I was unimpressed with the level of technical knowledge displayed.

This is something I've been thinking about lately, and was actually thinking of doing a WW thread because it's depressing me. I do not believe that LLMs can adequately program, but ultimately it won't matter what I think. What will matter is what the industry at large thinks, and there's a decent chance that they will believe (rightly or wrongly) that everyone needs to use LLMs to be an effective engineer (and that's if they don't replace engineers entirely with LLMs). If that happens, then I'll just have to suck it up and use the bag of words, because I have bills to pay like anyone else.

But the thing which sucks is, I like doing my job. I get a great deal of joy from programming. It's an exhilarating exercise in solving interesting problems and watching them take shape. But using an LLM isn't that. It is basically delegating tasks to another person and then reviewing the work to make sure it's acceptable. But if I was happy doing that, I would've become a manager ages ago. I am an engineer because I like doing the work, not handing it off to someone else to do.

Like I said, I'll do what I have to do. I'm not going to kill myself or go homeless or something rather than suck it up and tolerate the LLM. But at that point my career will go from "one of the biggest sources of joy in my life" to "something I hate every second of", and that really, really sucks. Of course I won't be the first person to work a job he hates to get by, but it's one hell of an adjustment to have to swallow. Right now it hasn't come to pass yet, but it's a possibility, and I'm not sure how I will be able to adjust if it does come to pass.

I do not believe that LLMs can adequately program, but ultimately it won't matter what I think.

I don't think this claim has much shelf life left <-- this is a link.

It (AI) built a C compiler.

I am more than happy to list the caveats;

  1. there was a lot of upfront context development
  2. There's a rigorous test library for what "success" looks like for this particular projet
  3. Anthropic and independent evaluators admit it is not as performant as gcc.

But, still, it wrote a freaking c compiler! This is a programming task that is out of the reach of 90% of engineers over their entire career. It did it for about $20k (and the cost of labor to write the context) in two weeks.

I wrote an article last week about how even I think that LLMs aren't ready to refactor big legacy code bases. The recent brouhaha over Clawdbot / Moltbook also show how dangerous these things can be in the hands of people who don't know / don't care about basic security management.

But the generalized claim that "ai can't write code" is just this side of "embarrassingly false." When you then consider the pace of progress, it really seems like cope. Two years ago, LLMs would make basic syntax errors in print statements. Today, they can write fully functional programs - albeit probably bloated and often security unacceptable - with ~30 minutes of prompting and system design blueprint work.

You're welcome to your opinion, but I neither share it nor am I interested in debating the topic. Literally everywhere else on the Internet is happy to have that debate, I'm content to not participate.

Do you actually like writing code qua writing? Is there fun to be found in adding every last semi-colon? I'm assuming you still use a linter and aren't manually typing out every variable, etc.

Or is the stuff you actually enjoy the planning, architecture, or problem solving? Because you can easily still take that on and pass even more of the boring repetitive tasks over to AI. Just write everything in a shorthand style pseudocode and pass that to the LLMs to fill in all the little bits.

Do you actually like writing code qua writing?

Yes, I do.

Well that will teach me to make assumptions

I do not believe that LLMs can adequately program,

They're getting awfully close, and the gap is small enough that the sheer quantity of work the LLMs can put out will outcompete what greater quality a human can achieve. At least for most applications. if you're programming nuclear reactor safety, autonomous combat drones or high-value finance, the human will be in the loop for a while longer, but for anything more pedestrian the building blocks are already in place for replacing programmers entirely. It may take another year or two to assemble them into convenient packages, but it's clearly on the horizon.

I do not believe that LLMs can adequately program, but ultimately it won't matter what I think. What will matter is what the industry at large thinks, and there's a decent chance that they will believe (rightly or wrongly) that everyone needs to use LLMs to be an effective engineer

If you really don't see LLMs adding any value, then you can just lie about using them quite easily. I think they're very useful, but can still see they've become a huge management fad, and I doubt they'll stay like that for more than a year or 2. You can just say you're using AI if they don't check, or send it off on goose chases with filler prompts that you don't actually use the results of if they do.

I like doing my job. I get a great deal of joy from programming. It's an exhilarating exercise in solving interesting problems and watching them take shape. But using an LLM isn't that. It is basically delegating tasks to another person and then reviewing the work to make sure it's acceptable.

I just don't understand this mindset at all. There's a certain elegance in the craft for sure, but the value of the end-product is what's always been truly impressive to me. It's like for an architect/builder: Seeing them swing the hammer can be cool, but it's the house that they build that's worth admiration in my eyes. LLMs have thus been a thing of beauty for me since they can get there so much faster, and more robustly. It feels like I have a cheat code to just snap my fingers and pop buildings into existence.

If you really don't see LLMs adding any value, then you can just lie about using them quite easily.

Yeah perhaps. I'm not sure if I would want to lie but it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility either.

I just don't understand this mindset at all. There's a certain elegance in the craft for sure, but the value of the end-product is what's always been truly impressive to me.

I think it's legitimately hard to cross that gap of being wired differently. My reaction is actually pretty similar to yours (but in the opposite direction of course): it's hard for me to understand why someone would care about the end product instead of the process of making it. I have never found some kind of intrinsic value in the stuff I work on, so the perspective of "I can create things faster and that's the part I enjoy" is wildly different from mine. I can understand it in a detached intellectual way, but I can't truly get it. Just different personalities I know, but I sympathize with how foreign other perspectives can seem from oneself.

I guess a lot of it comes down to what exactly you're building too. I doubt I'd get as much pleasure from the end product if I was designing something like medical device firmware that hardly anyone would ever interact with, and they mainly only get upset if it stops working. In my job I'm designing data reporting tools which let me see a big difference compared to the old version, and I have end-users telling me "oh wow, this is a lot better than what we had before". In my free time I design little video games and ad hoc apps that let me automate things I had previously done manually, both of which have intrinsic appeal.

But the thing which sucks is, I like doing my job. I get a great deal of joy from programming. It's an exhilarating exercise in solving interesting problems and watching them take shape

Not necessarily related, but DAMN I am so jealous of my programmer friends who report this. Having an exhilarating job that stimulates the intellect, that you genuinely enjoy, that gets you high social status, AND a ton of money? Good Lord... how is it even possible?

I can barely imagine having a consistent full time job as an adult that I enjoy and find stimulating, let alone all of the other goodies that seem to come associated with many of my programmer type friends. Seriously I have multiple friends making 4x my income with 3x my job satisfaction. It just seems incredibly, brutally unfair that the world is like this. Alas.

High social status? I'm basically embarrassed to tell anyone I work in tech because either they also work in tech (in which case they will probably talk my ear off about some inane office politics) or they don't (in which case they probably hate me).

Fascinating. We must run in very different circles.

High social status?

Yes. Not as high as a doctor, but absolutely. People - men and women - absolutely treat me differently (better) after learning where I work.

Money and status are too linked for it to not give status. There's some importance to it too - we (often) work on systems people know and care about. We're famously difficult to tell what to do professionally, which is itself a form of power/status.

I gotta move to your neighborhood.

Money and status are too linked for it to not give status.

Pharma sales reps would probably beg to differ.

We're famously difficult to tell what to do professionally, which is itself a form of power/status.

Or it causes people to suspect the job is in some way "fake".

Well... being a programmer doesn't get you high social status, except from other nerds. But yeah I agree that it's unjust in a cosmic sense that programmers get to do something they love which also pays very well. I look at someone like my sister, who works crappy factory jobs and gets paid 1/3 of what I do if that, and it seems to me that in a just world she would be getting paid what I do and vice versa. But that second part might come true at least... I guess we will see how it shakes out.

As I told @sarker, we must be in very different circles. Programming is extremely high status in all the circles I've been in, even at my church!

At least you are aware of your relative blessings here my man. It's tough out there. I wish I enjoyed coding, I really do. Have tried it multiple times and, yeah just not my bag. But hey for what it's worth you're a real one.

Don't be too jealous, if AI meets its promise they'll all be... well, they won't be saying "would you like fries with that" because the AI will do that too. But they might be delivering the fries until the robotics catches up.

Well, I'm a junior marketing guy so, we'll see who gets hit first. I'm thinking of transitioning out of marketing entirely, though.

Remember, it's a mathematical result that all your friends are probably more popular than you. If it makes you feel better, I was really good at programming, but it wasn't intellectually stimulating, I didn't enjoy it, I have bottom-of-the-barrel social status, and ... ok, I do have a ton of money. 1 out of 4 ain't bad.

Yeah that's fair. I also have put a ton of effort into building charisma and social capital as well, so it stands to reason that I have a high powered friend / social network. It's actually a good thing a lot of the time, I feel very blessed. But every now and then I do get quite jealous!

In a way, AI is harder on nerds than it is on anyone else.

I'd say it's actually harder on artists more than everyone else (assuming you aren't counting artists as a subset of nerds). 90% is not 100%. At least for programmers reviewing code and structuring the solution were always part of the job, people who were fond of codegolfing crud in rust (look how much more elegant I can make this by using a right fold) are going to suffer, but only a little bit.

I imagine the same is true for physicists, maybe not, but the fact that they are willingly implementing it motu propriu suggests it is.

Maybe in a few years things will change, AI will be able to do everything fully autonomously, and we'll all end up at the bottom of the totem pole (or "the balls on the dick" as some will say). But so far that's not the case and, to be honest, the last big improvement to text generation models I've seen happened in early 2024.

Meanwhile I see artists collectively having a full blown psychotic break about AI, hence indie gaming dev awards banning any and all uses of AI etc. I think this is because it changes their job substantially, on top of slashing most of them, and also because it came completely out of left field, nobody expected one of the main things that AI would be good at would be art, quite the opposite, people expected art to be impossible to AI because it doesn't have imagination or soul or whatever. In fact, the problem with AI is actually that it has too much imagination. And revealed preference strikes here too, you don't see many artists talking about how they are integrating AI into their workflow.

Artists were already in a fairly bad place, due to centuries of encroachment and ease of replication making it a tournament profession.

A normie compatible take is something like Brandon Sanderson's recent speech, We are the Art (https://youtube.com/watch?v=mb3uK-_QkOo). We've had enough content to consume or decorate with or read or whatever for quite some time. Most people who aren't Brandon Sanderson can't make a living off of it anyway. But people still want to be makers, not just consumers anyway, but it's annoying because... probably because our communities are broken, so it's not trivially easy to just give a friend a handmade thing and have them put it up and appreciate it, or read it, or write a letter back about it.

But so far that's not the case and, to be honest, the last big improvement to text generation models I've seen happened in early 2024.

People have been appreciating the new Opus quite a lot at least, and the others to various extents.

the last big improvement to text generation models I've seen happened in early 2024.

What was this?

This is an absolutely unhinged take given in early 2024 we didn't even have reasoning models at all lol

GPT-4. I found reasoning models to be a big flop. Not zero improvement but fairly small.

Have you not seen an LLM go from planning mode to functioning whole product?

Meanwhile I see artists collectively having a full blown psychotic break about AI, hence indie gaming dev awards banning any and all uses of AI etc.

It's quite revealing comparing the criticisms of AI from programmers vs from artists. From programmers the complaint is "I've tried AI and it sucks at doing X. Why are you trying to force me to use it for X?" when from artists it's "AI is bad because it steals from artists / has no soul / lacks creativity / other vague complaint. Nobody should be allowed to use AI."

Most art was already commodified, and it was commodity artists, not creative artists who got the most brutal axe.

Essentially, contrary to your point about AI having imagination, creativity is the primary skill it lacks. It's basically a machine for producing median outcomes based on its training data, which is about as far away from creativity as you can get.

But for most artists, their jobs were based on providing quotidian, derivative artworks for enterprises that were soulless to begin with. To the extent that creativity was involved in their finished products, it was at a higher level than their own input, i.e. a director or something commissioning preset quotidian assets as a component in their own 'vision', the vision being the creative part of the whole deal.

However, I do believe creative artists will be threatened too. It's a little complicated to get into, but I think creative art depends not just on lone individuals or a consumer market, but on a social and cultural basis of popular enthusiasm and involvement in a given artform. I'm talking about dilettantes, critics, aficionados here. It's a social and cultural pursuit as much as it's an individual or commercial one, and I think that AI will contribute to the withering away of these sorts of underpinnings the same way corporate dominance and other ongoing trends previously have.

So for the artistic field, I envision complete and total commoditized slop produced by machines, once the human spirit has finally been crushed.

If your market consists of 99 derivative rip-offs and one legitimately interesting and fresh idea, the fresh idea will take half the market and the 99 rip-offs will fight over the other half. If there are 999,999 derivative rip-offs, then they'll have to split their half a lot more ways but they still won't be able to push in on the fresh idea's cut.

Art is a winner-takes-all industry. The JK Rowlings and Terry Pratchetts of the world have many thousands of times as many sales as Joe Average churning out derivative slop that's merely so-so. The addition of more slop won't change the core dynamic. Fundamentally, anyone trying to get the audience to accept a lower quality product isn't pitting themselves against the ingenuity of the artist, but the ingenuity of the audience. Trying to hide information from a crowd that has you outnumbered thousands-to-one is not easy.

If you get 999,999 rip-offs the market simply collapses.

If the market collapses then you create demand for someone to create a new market with less crap.

Those markets would have to be extensively curated by some kind of central authority, an art gallery basically. More than likely only those who have already proven themselves in the pre 2022 world would be allowed to participate. Anything with an open submission process cannot survive the near future.

Those 'markets' would require nothing more than a blog or Youtube account and a well-trusted reviewer with a following.

Okay, I like J. K. Rowling, I think she was underrated back in the day by Serious Literary People, but I still feel like bringing her up torpedoes your case about more creative artists going further.

If you make more money from your book series than anyone ever has before then you must be doing something right.

She wrote the Bible for Liberal kids, effectively.

Sure, her writing's mostly pretty average (...or abominable, if you count the Fantastic Beasts movies), but don't underrate the skill of being able to wrap up a highly-anticipated series with an epic and decently satisfying conclusion. Sure would be nice if a certain "highly-skilled" fantasy author with the middle initials R. R. .... uh, whose first name isn't John ... could manage that.

Most art was already commodified, and it was commodity artists, not creative artists who got the most brutal axe.

Because creative artists got the axe a very long time ago. I expect the modal net earnings for a creative artist is already quite negative.

How much work has there ever been for creative artists? I would bet that a solid 95% of art over the last 1000 years has been one of:

  • Religious scene with fairly standardised iconography
  • Portrait of commissioner or commissioner's loved one
  • Pretty Landscape

There used to be a lot of jobs for people liks: local music hall player, freelance graphic designer, craftsman stoneworker, small town paper writer, etc. Admittedly most of those dried up long ago, though.

I was putting that in Nybbler’s ’commodity’ category. My point was that ‘creative’ ‘raw’ ‘self-expression’ Art with a capital A has always been very rare.

Eh. This is like claiming people who enjoyed traveling and being perceived as "worldly" would have been devastated by the internet allowing anyone to chat with strangers from 1000 miles away with minimal friction. Was that a thing? Plausibly maybe, but I don't recall much to that effect.

As someone who bases his identity a decent chunk around being intelligent, I'm not too worried. It turns out that a lot of it was implicitly graded "relative to other humans". I'm not to worried that calculators can do mental math better than me for instance. And smart people will be able to leverage AI much more effectively than dumb ones. We can already see that in stuff like education: AI is easily one of the best tools for learning that has ever been invented, but it's also one of the best tools to avoid learning as well. Naturally curious people will gravitate to the former on important topics, while less curious people will gravitate to the latter and suffer long-term costs from it.

It's highly unlikely that the value from human intelligence is going to 0 any time soon. If anything, AI could plausibly increase it rather than decrease it.

ChatGPT isn’t so different from, say, Jarvis in Iron Man (or countless other AIs in fiction), and the median 90-100IQ person may even have believed in 2007 that technology like that actually existed “for rich people” or at least didn’t seem much more advanced than what they had.

Eh? I'm very confident that's wrong. Normies might not appreciate the impact of ChatGPT and co to the same degree, but I strongly doubt that they literally believed that there was human-level AI in 2021. AGI was science fiction for damn good reason, it didn't exist, and very, very few people expected we'd see it or even precursors in the 2020s. Jarvis was scifi, and nobody believed that something like Siri was in the same weight-class.

To shift focus back to your main thesis: the normie you describe is accustomed and acclimatized to being average. Bitter experience has proven to them that they're never going to be an "intellectual" and that their cognitive and physical labor is commoditized. It's unlikely that being the smartest person in the room (or in spitting distance) is an experience they're familiar with. Hence they have less to lose from a non-human competitor who dominates them in that department.

On the other hand, their average Mottizen is used to being smart, and working in a role where it's not easy to just grab a random person off the street to replace them. That breeds a certain degree of discomfort at the prospect. I've made my peace, and I'm going to do what I can to escape the (potential) permanent underclass. It would be nice to have a full, accomplished career with original contributions to my professional field or the random topics I care about, but I'll take a post-scarcity utopia if I can get it.

Eh? I'm very confident that's wrong. Normies might not appreciate the impact of ChatGPT and co to the same degree, but I strongly doubt that they literally believed that there was human-level AI in 2021. AGI was science fiction for damn good reason, it didn't exist, and very, very few people expected we'd see it or even precursors in the 2020s. Jarvis was scifi, and nobody believed that something like Siri was in the same weight-class.

You have to remember that plenty of normal people (not bottom of the barrel) believe things like “the government has the cure to all cancer but doesn’t release it so that drug companies make money”, which is rather more farfetched than GPT4 existing in 2007.

I'll eat my hat if they were anywhere a majority. I'm far more inclined to believe that polling would show something very close to Lizardman's constant.

Study: As of 2013, a whopping 37 percent of USAians think that the federal government is colluding with pharmaceutical companies to hide natural cures for cancer from the public.

I've made my peace, and I'm going to do what I can to escape the (potential) permanent underclass.

Presumably via investments?

I've been... lazy in that regard. Far too much money in my account that's not accruing interest. But yes, that's a factor. I also earn an OOM more than I did back India, which definitely helps. If I was less lazy, I'd have put most of my money in the S&P500 by now, but I've already put myself in a much better place than if I'd been complacent about things.

I don't expect that this will necessarily make me rich in relative terms, I'm starting too low, too late. But I want enough of a safety net to survive in comfort for the (potential) period of unemployment when AI eats my profession whole, before we implement solutions such as UBI. Not starving, not dying in a riot, all of that is important to me.

I had a somewhat related idea to this. It's relates to ways that middle class professionals could be screwed. I haven't really hammered it out fully, but here's the gist of it. Basically, the value of automating labor is that it allows human resources to be freed up for other tasks. Rather than having one hundred artisans hand tooling goods, you have one machine operating by one engineer producing the same goods and then ninety nine people who can perform tasks in other areas of the economy.

But with AI, there will be an extinction of an entire class of meaningful work. That which is done by the middle class. There aren't adjacent fields for them to move into once displaced, as those will also be taken by AI. Their only options will be to move up or down, into different classes of the economy, and for the vast, vast majority of them, it will be a downwards spiral.

The area below the middle class economy is called the gig economy. So the value of AI is that there will be a wealth of gig workers, and thus fast food can be delivered more cheaply than ever before.

That is the one benefit of AI we are certain about.

There is a hypothetical scenario, a longstanding dream of science fiction, where with infinite labor afforded by AI there will be infinite opulence. However, some points that contest that are 1) there is only so much demand for consumables and market goods and services, so that economic demand begins to be overshadowed by status concerns and non-economic spheres of life in terms of desired things, 2) many of the inputs that go into supplying those goods and services are finite (i.e. resources) and so their creation can't be infinite, 3) political ramifications suggest reduced power and thus leverage for the displaced, and so their economic needs could easily be ignored by those who retain power.

All in all, there looks to be dark times ahead.

How broad would you consider 'gig economy' to be? Because as I understand it, gig economy means signing onto an app to become a service provider for some kind of on-site labor. It may be handyman, driving, tutoring - but it is built for "one man shows".

As far as I can tell, winning at the gig economy means securing enough contracted work to regularly delegate labor to someone else. Then (poof) you're a business. A business that's a bunch of gigs underneath a suit, but a business nonetheless. Is this business status still in the gig economy? Or has it transmogrified into something else?

My understanding of the gig economy is that it's a progressive step towards the disenfranchisement of workers caused by their weakening bargaining position as demand for unskilled or semi-skilled labor continues to fall. I do not have an in-depth understanding of it, but it seems to me that many of them occupy precarious positions, accept low wages, and lack many of the benefits workers in the past enjoyed, such as union representation, health care plans, etc., and plus have to take on the burden of supplying their own equipment (cars for Uber drivers, for instance). I think app based employment has essentially undercut the collective bargaining position of workers and empowered the huge, centralized corporations which control them.

  1. there is only so much demand for consumables and market goods and services, so that economic demand begins to be overshadowed by status concerns and non-economic spheres of life in terms of desired things

We already have, in effect, a trial run of post scarcity civilisations. Not complete or total, obviously. But western society is long past needing to worry about food and water.

I think men will play games and have fun in that kind of sci fi world. They'll find new and interesting things to pursue. They'll go sailing or rock climbing.

Women will play the status games, become depressed and create social problems via whatever the next social media is. Unless AI can turn this behaviour more productive at least.

Men's contests often don't look like rock climbing or sailing; they look like war.

But I don't think we'll get the sci-fi world. Scarcity will be with us always. Even if someone has to create it (by violently taking control or destroying the means of production), though I don't in fact think that will be necessary.

This is much more emotionally healthy than the nerd’s response.

Emotional health isn't what it's about. You've got people who work with physical things, people who do intellectual work, and people who play monkey dominance games at a high level. The latter are almost always indisputably on top, but that hasn't been entirely true in recent years; there's been significant status overlap between the intellectual workers and the monkey dominance people. AI threatens to throw the intellectual workers all the way down to the bottom -- not even so high as the privileged slave levels they had in ancient Athens, but all the way down to utter uselessness, like drug addicted alcoholic bums but not as sympathetic. The monkey dominance people are of course overjoyed at this, putting these interlopers in their place has been a nagging goal for a long while now. Nerds are more threatened by AI than normies because AI is vastly more of a threat to them.

In some hypothetical future level of development, sure. But in its current or slightly improved form of LLMs, AI is mostly a threat to midwit pencil pushers and not to any genuine expert or intellect, whether a skilled artist or an engineer.

like drug addicted alcoholic bums but not as sympathetic.

It's funny, but, some of the greatest authors of all time realized this way before computers, let alone AI. Bukowski was notorious for more or less believing that to be a true artist, you had to be a sort of social vagabond. Any attempt at real genteelness would pollute the pure art. Spengler wrote The Decline of the West in poverty and Eric Hoffer lived in a one room apartment near Chinatown, San Francisco, for decades.

If we hit vertical takeoff and the knee jerk response is a kind of poverty level AGI, we could maybe get a renaissance of true art and philosophy. That or sex robots

Even if the ai bulls were right (they're not), most of the remaining 10% of research work can still be done by grad students, postdocs, and other humans. We shouldn't expect to see any decrease in staffing at labs, but instead a huge increase in productivity.

Something I'm curious is how AI has been implemented to peoples professional workflows. My company has been implementing Ai in various places, but thanks to the level of human supervision and human-centric communication needed in my work process, I'm not convinced of significant human replacement for quite a while.

AI benefits:

  • Meeting transcriptions. Online meetings between two parties require each interaction to be recorded. Representative case notes are spotty at best, and the AI generally make significantly more complete and timely transcriptions freeing up a lot of time, and being more accurate than most human-written notes. Adoption of this tool has been spotty, but the people who are using are seeing significant benefit. Job replacement impact: 0, as no rep has someone to specifically write case notes. Benefit: significant.

  • Internal document searches. AI searches generally are better than our internal search engine in locating company documentation and resources. It is still hit or miss, but luckily the AI search provides the links it is citing, so I can go through the links to locate the specific policy or document I'm looking for. It's not consistent, but generally I use it before I use our internal search engine. Job replacement impact:0 Benefit: Medium

  • Email drafts: Great for rapid iteration of emails. They still need to be edited and reviewed, but they're very helpful if I'm having trouble finding the correct wording and I need to get something out quickly. Some people use it a lot, I use it only when I don't have a clear structure in mind. Job Replacement impact:0 Benefit: Limited to significant depending on user preference.

AI weaknesses

  • Call center redirection: Recently my company switchboard from a command-based switchboard into a AI implemented switchboard. The idea is that AI is better at directing calls than the people calling in. My personal experience is that it directs me to the wrong department more often than not and the actual calling process is slower than the older process. I really don't like it: Replacement impact:0 Benefit: negative

In the various professional careers I've held, I still don't see a significant AI impact in that it's replacing workers or reducing the intellectual motivation of young professionals. I still hold on to the idea that AI will be and is unable to innovate because it doesn't and cannot push against the zeitgeist on the data it is trained on. If AI was around during the time of the Wright Brothers, would it think human flight was possible?

The main problem of AI is people trying to use it to do their thinking for them, when it is most effective at automating monotonous tasks and increasing productivity. Maybe it's because I don't use AI in my life the same way many adopters have, but I don't see any significant impact in my day to day even though it is coming more advanced.

I'm probably in the 99.99th percentile for doctors (or anyone else) when it comes to the use of AI in the workplace. I estimate I could automate 90% of my work (leaving aside the patient facing stuff and things that currently require hands and a voice) if I could.

The main thing holding me back? NHS IT, data protection laws and EMR software that still has Windows XP design language. This means I'm bottlenecked by inputting relevant informant into an AI model (manually trawling the EMR, copying and pasting information, taking screenshots of particularly intransigent apps) and also transferring the output into the digital record.

The AIs are damn good at medicine/psychiatry. Outside my own domain, I have a great deal of (justified) confidence in their capabilities. I've often come to take their side when they disagree with my bosses, though the two are usually in agreement. I've used them to help me figure out case presentations ("what would a particularly cranky senior ask me about this specific case?" and guess what they actually asked?), giving me a quick run-down on journal publications, helping me figure out stats, sanity checking my work, helping decide an optimal dose of a drug etc. There's very little they can't do now.

That's the actual thinky stuff. A lot of my time is eaten up by emails, collating and transcribing notes and information, and current SOTA models can do these in a heartbeat.

To an extent, this is an artifact of resident doctors often being the ward donkey, but I'm confident that senior clinicians have plenty to gain or automate away. The main reason they don't is the fact that they're set in their ways. If you've prescribed every drug under the sun, you don't need to pop open the BNF as often as a relative novice like me would - that means far less exploration of what AI can do for you. Yet they've got an enormous amount of paperwork and regulatory bullshit to handle, and I promise it can be done in a heartbeat.

Hell, in the one hospital where I get to call the shots (my dad's, back in India), I managed to cut down enormous amounts of work for the doctors, senior or junior. Discharges and summaries that would take half a day or more get done in ten minutes, and senior doctors have been blown away by the efficiency and quality gains.

Most doctors are at least aware of ChatGPT, even if the majority use whatever is free and easy. I'm still way ahead of the curve in application, but eventually the human in the loop will be vestigial. It's great fun till they can legally prescribe, at which point, RIP human doctors.

Discharges and summaries that would take half a day or more get done in ten minutes, and senior doctors have been blown away by the efficiency and quality gains.

Charting is not supposed to be the majority of the job and is more or less a recent invention (in the US at least).

I find OpenEvidence and other similar tools to be relatively unhelpful, especially since I generally have to cross reference.

I don't know how my coworkers are using it, but I've been having great results with replacing "google an excel function and hope somebody else had the same problem and got it solved".

This is a gateway drug into AI

Start getting it to write you for macros for anything you do more than 3 time

It's really really good

the things most people seek from others, like physical intimacy, family and children, good food and mirth, are not intellectual.

There may be a bit too much romanticization of "salt-of-the-earth normies" going on here. Last I checked, the social atomization trend (friendship- and sex-recession) is just happening across the board, while many (most?) career-intelligentsia derive satisfaction both from their work and from those other things. It's not that one is a substitute for the other.

It seems that you acknowledge this ("This is true even for many people with decent-IQ white collar jobs"), but then you posit "someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating an identity built around an intellect that is no longer useful to anyone, least of all themselves". Who are these people, exactly?

Who are these people, exactly?

Internet nerds like us who based their lives around forums, intellectualism, in my case, literature, etc. The new AI world of dopamine cattle harnessed by the tech fiends suggests total obsolescence of any sort of life that isn't fully grounded in the concrete or else enslaved for the purpose of dopamine-slop control. Admittedly, some people here have lives which go beyond the abstract.

I find this take so hard to understand. I like talking about things, learning about things, thinking about things. The existence of vastly more minds (mind-like objects, I'm using shorthand here) with whom I can do that is great! GPT or other AIs don't mind me asking endless questions about beginner-level stuff, or helping with technical things, or working through ideas.

Granted, these AI are mostly junior partners at the moment, or at least 'experienced friend who doesn't mind helping if asked but won't do stuff of their own initiative' and perhaps I'd feel differently if I really did just become an appendage, but at the moment things are great.

Personally I don't find AIs as fun to talk to as any human. To me, they're like an interactive encyclopedia. It is fun to read and learn about stuff, but they can't stand in for the human element, either on the individual level or the level of an entire society or group (like the motte). Ultimately I find them in some sense desirable in terms of their first order effects (helping with research, etc.), but it's their second and third order effects I'm worried about, where I think, as I explain elsewhere, they will kill off large parts of human culture, remap the class system, and generally work towards all the ongoing, negative trends that already seem apparent. In a sense they are a continuation of capitalism and its logic.

any human

Does that include people with Down's Syndrome? Outright and obvious diseases aside, I can think of plenty of people who are so unpleasant/pointless to talk to that I'd speak to an AI any day instead. And even within AI, there are models that I'd prefer over the alternatives.

There was a man I spoke to wandering up and down my alley the other day. He was small by nature and shrunken even further by age. He had a walking aid and was somehow managing his stroll even though the entire alley was covered in ice.

Anyway, after he called to me across my backyard, I was engaged by him in a lengthy conversation in which he asked me about the species of pine growing in my yard and told me about how he used to raise dogs for a living when he was younger. He told me that his former best friend at one time killed his favorite pet dog by throwing it down a flight of stairs.

Originally I took him for a homeless person and he seemed a bit off owing to his advanced age, but I still found him an interesting enough person to meet and speak to, and nothing about the experience could have been replicated by AI.

People with down’s are often quite charming to speak to, infectiously optimistic and with surprisingly complex inner lives. I would find looking after a family member with the condition difficult, but not because of the conversation.

Who are these people, exactly?

Spinners and weavers from 250 years ago. Imagine that your (and your ancestors) whole identity is your skill and craft, and then some nerd invents a contraption that makes yarn and cloth faster, cheaper and better and you end in the gutter.

Easy to understand why they were angry, and also easy to understand why their anger achieved nothing at all.

There's an episode of Lark Rise to Candleford where an elderly lady's bobbin lace is no longer needed by the local dressmakers, due to the new machine lace. Also a bit of other industrial commentary in other episodes, but that one always hits me the hardest.

Who are these people, exactly?

Redditors. The irony is that their intellect was never that impressive anyway.

But seriously, there really is an entire cohort of people who were in the top five percent of their high school and college because they could sit still and gulp down boring bullshit who think they are somehow intellectually superior to the plebs they disdain. Usually it’s not actually the really smart people making big strides in science and tech.

You do realize how unconvincing it is to cite the top 5% of students as not really being all that useful? Do those people have any purpose in their existence in your eyes? Regardless of any unwarranted sense of self-worth, if they're doomed, then what hope is there for anyone?

Do those people have any purpose in their existence in your eyes?

I remember the sheer glee they had about factory workers, coal miners and truck drivers being driven out of business by automation and illegal immigration. Fuck ‘em. I hope they enjoy their brave new world.

I remember the sheer glee they had about factory workers, coal miners and truck drivers being driven out of business by automation and illegal immigration. Fuck ‘em. I hope they enjoy their brave new world.

There was limited glee (which is not to say there was none before the screenshots come out). Mostly the worst one could say is that they didn’t care much, but they’re hardly the only people guilty of not caring when bad things happen to other people.

You do realize how unconvincing it is to cite the top 5% of students as not really being all that useful?

When I worked at Google, about 5% of applicants got through the phone screen. A lot of them weren't all that useful.

Regardless of any unwarranted sense of self-worth, if they're doomed, then what hope is there for anyone?

Welcome to the black pill.

We apparently have one more update on the Braveheart Incident. Previous discussions:

  • Original story
  • self_made_human's update, where he and several posters chastized anyone who believed the pro-Braveheart story. "Of course, if you prefer your axes in the hands of twelve-year-olds fighting imaginary Bulgarian sex pests, I suppose nothing I write will convince you otherwise."
  • my update pointing out that the girl might actually have been defending her sister from a sex pest.

The latest update is a short article from the BBC:

Prosecutors allege Ilia Belov, 22, approached and followed four girls, who were aged between 12 and 14, and made sexual remarks to them before seizing one of the girls and pushing her to the ground.

His co-accused Nadjedzha Belova, 20, is accused of repeatedly seizing and pulling another of the girls by the hair, dragging her to the ground, and punching her on the head to her injury.

This is throwing me for a loop. The good news is that unlike the local news articles I cited previously, the BBC actually names the accused, the bad news is originally the adult involved in the incident was identified as "Fatos Ali Dumana", and now I have no idea whether we're talking about the same guy, and it was just a nickname, or it was a completely different person. A quick google search only turned up some indie (somewhat tinfoily) blog post, where it is indeed claimed that "Fatos Ali Dumana" is just an alias, and that the perps real name is Ilia Belov. What speaks in it's favor is that the post is dated September 12, 2025, so way before this current BBC article (and here's an archive.org snapshot to corroborate), so it's not someone trying to use the latest info to portray the original story as true. Other than that I only found some dude on Reddit urging people to look up a Facebook reel:

It's the same guy, check FB reel number 5556886374377640 - "Fatos Ali Dumana" shares a UK driving licence in the name of Ilia Kostaoinov Belov.

I don't have Facebook, so I can't confirm.

Either way, the accusations put forward by the prosecutors seem largely consistent with "Braveheart" story - girls got sexually harassed, assaulted, and one of them went for makeshift weapons in order to defend her sister / friends.

I am sure that everyone who wagged their fingers saying how "nothing will convince us otherwise", how "they knew something was off", how it's a "noble effort, but hopeless" because us chuds are too biased and stubborn, will now wag their fingers at themselves with the same amount of enthusiasm.

some dude on Reddit urging people to look up a Facebook reel

MODERATOR OF: /r/indonesian /r/BahasaIndonesia

The internet was a mistake.

This is me:

So I'm not beating up on a potential victim I'll pledge $100 to a Scottish youth charity that looks like it goes to underprivileged (white) Scots so long as we find reasonable suspicion the girl in the video is responding to immediate sexual advances by the man filming her. If there's no such of charity I'll ask locals decide where it should go.

Might have been a low bar, but I dare say I feel reasonably suspicious. If anyone can personally vouch for a Scottish charity that ticks the Scottish, youth (8-16), and/or underprivileged boxes I will likely take your suggestion. Otherwise it will be robot's choice after some vetting.

His co-accused Nadjedzha Belova, 20, is accused of repeatedly seizing and pulling another of the girls by the hair, dragging her to the ground, and punching her on the head to her injury.

That is outrageous. The presence of a woman reportedly behind the camera colored my judgment. It's not as if female accomplices are unable to help abduct girls, tolerate douchebag boyfriends, or assist in beating up pre-teens. It's just a less common combo.

I can't imagine any charity in Scotland that isn't utterly full of quangocrat shite, but Scottish Sports Futures at least does nice things for kids her age sometimes.

Ilia Kostaoinov Belov

The ID (which identifies his Bulgarian citizenship) says BELOV Mr. Ilia Kostadinov. This straightforwardly means he's Ilia Belov and his father's given name was Kostadin. There seems to be a lot of these guys. Like, here is the youtube of a Bulgarian guy named like this, but it's ancient.

How he can also be Fatos Ali Dumana, is beyond my Slavic knowledge, I guess that's just his nickname on FB. «Fatos is an Albanian masculine given name, which means "daring", "brave" or "valiant"». (Bulgaria and Albania are separated by North Macedonia). The caption on the video means something like "hey ladies, congratulations". He's listening to this crap from a duo of rappers, Turkish and German (I guess also Turkish). The ladies, surprisingly enough, do congratulate him, they seem to be family (at least one is clearly some auntie). The account is low-activity and consists of typical slop you might expect of a young low-IQ Southern Slav with Global Black characteristics trying to show off clothes and shit, or perhaps really just a Gypsy, though neither of his names is Gypsy-coded.

Looking up "Ali Dumana" floods the search with this Ilia. It's a very unusual string of tokens. If I restrict the search to a period before this scandal, I only get nonsense like this (an independent sexual allegation in Dundee, no Dumanas), somehow.

Now theCourier publishes propaganda about our "Dumana":

Bulgarian dad says his life has been shattered since a video of a Dundee street confrontation went viral after being shared by right-wing figures including Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson.

A 12-year-old girl, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, has been charged in connection with the alleged possession of a knife and an axe.

Speaking at his home, with his wife Fetka Fatosh, 19, and eight-month-old son Kostadin beside him, Mr Dumana said the abuse has left him in fear of leaving the house.

Although he speaks good English, his interview with The Courier was carried out in his native tongue and then translated by our journalist, who speaks both languages fluently.

"Fetka" is Slavic, "Fatosh" is some dimunitive in Arabic/Turkic I guess?

I particularly like this detail:

Far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Image: DC Thomson

So we get the name of the irrelevant right-winger, but the Mr Dumana remains an enigma. Brits are quite provincial, this is not exactly Soviet but pretty crude. Did they do any actual investigation?

Anyway, he's a Bulgarian citizen named Ilia Belov, he's got this weird Islamic pseudonym, he looks quite brown (without throwing any shade – that entire region is brown, I can't pin him to a specific country, between Bulgaria/Albania/etc), so I guess the girls could have panicked/reacted racistly even if he is a peaceful "Bulgarian dad" (feels weird to identify someone aged 22 as primarily "dad") and has never hurt a fly.

Very low information situation.

How he can also be Fatos Ali Dumana, is beyond my Slavic knowledge

In the 80s, Bulgaria forced name changes on Muslims/Turks among other things.

Anyway, he's a Bulgarian citizen named Ilia Belov, he's got this weird Islamic pseudonym

Could be convert to Islam. Unthinkable in trad Bulgarian culture, not(yet) common but rather thinkable in British gutter trash street culture.

perhaps really just a Gypsy, though neither of his names is Gypsy-coded.

Is it racist of me (well of course it is) that that's also what I thought when I read "Eastern European, different names in different ethnic groups"? Also, just for your information, 'Gypsy' is now regarded as a slur 😁

If they're Bulgarian, yeah there could well be some Turkish/Muslim in the mix.

feels weird to identify someone aged 22 as primarily "dad"

Be instructed by our friend DeepNeuralNetwork who is arguing that fifteen year old girls are plenty old enough to be having sexual relationships (loving caring ones, of course!) with adult men, and that young men want to be fathers (maybe husbands, funnily enough that hasn't been mentioned yet in all the talk of how getting the fifteen year olds knocked up isn't harmful to their health) with those girls. That's all that is going on there!

'Gypsy' is now regarded as a slur

Confusingly, it's a slur in America but a reclaimed community term in the UK.

Roma and Irish Travelers in the UK are different ethnic groups with similar lifestyles who would prefer not being lumped together, so there isn't a community-preferred term that covers both groups.

Irish Travelers avoid "Gypsy" - the Traveler families featured on British "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding" (which featured zero Roma) all referred to themselves as "Travelers" when speaking English on camera. Roma prefer "Roma" but seem perfectly fine with "Gypsy". Thinking "gypsy" is a slur in the UK is pathognomic for Woke Mind Virus.

"Gypsy" is also confusing in the British context because it isn't clear if you are referring to just Roma or Roma plus Irish Travelers - this is a point about accuracy and not political correctness. Given the advantage of short words for things that people want to talk about, having "Gypsy" as a generally acceptable word for Roma+Travelers (and thus a different meaning from "Roma") would be useful, but it isn't standard usage.

It is? Most Americans do not know that it is an ethnic group and think it refers to brightly dressed people who travel with circuses to pretend to be fortune tellers.

No reasonable, normal person in America would consider it a slur, in my experience. Only Karens who spend far too much time online.

Unfortunately, Karens who spend far too much time online possess a sort of heckler's veto, in that it's wise to stay abreast of what summons them so you can avoid doing it needlessly or at least be prepared for them when they show up.

Taleb calls it "dictatorship of the most intolerant" (never say he doesn't learn from his own ideas).

Far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

A relative of mine lives in the UK, and when he was last over he said that he always appreciates when media outlets point out that "Tommy Robinson" isn't his legal name. I replied "so you think it's okay to deadname him?"

What's the deal with this? Is "Stephen Yaxley-Lennon" supposed to sound dweebish and "Tommy Robinson" is supposed to be a Britonic "Chad Thundercock" equivalent? To my ears they both sound the same. Or is it just that he goes by a different name? Michael Caine also wasn't born Michael Caine.

The OG Tommy Robinson was the leader of the Luton MIGs, who were the football (soccer for Yanks) hooligan firm in Yaxley-Lennon's hometown of Luton. Organised football hooliganism was not explicitly political, but there was (and still is - there have now been two cases where an anti-terrorist have-a-go heroes in London turned out to have learned to fight with the Millwall Bushwhackers, and the traditionally rival Millwall and Charlton firms joined forces to defend businesses on Eltham High Street in the 2011 London riots) a sufficiently large overlap between organised hooliganism and willingness to engage in political violence in defence of your traditional community that both the far right (I'm talking about the BNP and Combat 18 for those who care about details, not UKIP) and the establishment left saw organised football hooliganism as far-right adjacent.

So using "Tommy Robinson" as a nom de guerre is Yaxley-Lemon's attempt to place himself and the EDL in the native British tradition of organised football hooliganism and Combat 18.

The irony in all this is that Luton is now Islamized (37% "Asian", which in practice means South Asian Muslim, and only 33% British) and the MIGs did not in fact fight this, or even try to. The MIGs main rivals were the Hell's Angels and the Millwall Bushwhackers, both of which are also all-white groups of hardmen. If white nationalist political violence was a Thing in the UK (it wasn't and isn't) then those groups would all be allies.

He changed his name so he could launch a 'political' career without people realising he had a conviction for assaulting a police officer. It worked for years.

Is "Stephen Yaxley-Lennon" supposed to sound dweebish

Hyphenated surname is posh, upper class coded, not the best for someone who stands up as champion of common man against corrupt elite.

I've no idea why he goes by that name, but according to Wikipedia he's been convicted for several crimes, so maybe it has something to do with that. Apparently he also doesn't want people to know he's half-Irish (which would undermine his anti-immigration rhetoric), and I was under the impression that "Lennon" was an Irish surname, but apparently that's the surname of his English stepfather, so I dunno.

Is "Stephen Yaxley-Lennon" supposed to sound dweebish?

To USAian ears, definitely. (Lintorn-Orman, Lloyd[-]George, Erskine-Brown…) I don't know what British people think about such names, though.

Sounds a bit like a caricature British name such as "General Sir Humphrey George Smith-Smythe-Smith, OBE, VC"

If they are gypsies - this all makes sense. And yes ... by the time they are 22 for the poorer and unintegrated part of them - which is the one that tends to flock to the west - it is normal to be on their Xth kid - although thankfully in the last years their birth rates collapse, and they participate more in the society.

My sense is that Bulgarian Gypsies comprise a very strange genetic and cultural soup, and having multiple fake names with some of them being Turkic is not at all out of the ordinary. Consult Wikipedia for the language, and maybe one of the two sources of Skibidi Toilet for vibes.

Wikipedia does not mention Albanian, but in reality they have a quite significant presence there too (some estimates say up to 5%?), so it would not be surprising to see some vocabulary backwash. In a way, there is some curious convergence between their ways and those of another famous class of rootless cosmopolitans, though of course they wind up on different ends of the social hierarchy.

I'm happy to concede if the prosecution ends in a conviction. I still think it's more likely than not that they're acquitted (if I had to put a number on it, 70%).

I'm also happy to acknowledge that acquittal doesn't necessarily mean a lack of guilt, but I don't think the British judicial system is so corrupt that it represents null evidence.

So you will go 2:1 on this?

I have 100 British Pounds to your 200 that, contingent on a trial occurring, a guilty verdict is returned. (ie. bet is off if there's a plea bargain; you can have "not proven" or whatever jury shenanigans might be possible in Scotland though)

I'm not sure I trust you enough to hold up your end of the bargain. If, for the sake of example, it was @ArjinFerman offering, I'd take it, though I'd prefer smaller sums like £50:25 since I don't care that much. If you're willing to go through the hassle of finding someone to use as an escrow, while using crypto (which is hassle on my part), sure.

If not, I care about my reputation and epistemics to happily accept being proven wrong, if and when I'm proven wrong.

I'm pretty high trust myself, and can certainly find a way to get you 25 sterling without resorting to crypto -- but if you need someone to hold the dough that's fine with me. Pick somebody and we can both send them some cash -- I don't expect the mills of Scottish justice to grind excessively fast on this one.

I can nominate @ArjinFerman or @Corvos, if they're willing to accept. I'd be happy to not bother with an escrow if you're fine with it, given the lower sums involved.

My proposed terms are clear concessions on an acquittal or conviction, and if this somehow doesn't resolve in 2 years, a general throwing up of hands and acceptance that we're never getting to the bottom of this.

I'm grateful for your confidence in me! FWIW I thought about it like Arjin, but I've given my ID to a few mottizens now and I don't really want to get into a habit of it. If it's important I certainly can, but it seems like it's not necessary in this case.

I'm fine with the honour system if you are -- thanks anyways @ArginFerman!

So AIUI -- no resolution if neither of these two is tried on these charges (ie. some plea bargain to a lesser offense would be no bet; a guilty plea on what's described above is probably a win for me though?), or if nothing happens within two years.

In the event of a trial, I need a guilty verdict; "not proven", hung jury, not guilty etc. all resolve in your favour.

If you have any other scenarios we should cover, let me know?

I don't think we have juries here, but that's a nitpick. Those rules sound fine, though I'll note that I'd want the money myself instead of a donation to a charity, though I'd donate if necessary. And if that's the case, it has to be a charity that is legal to donate to in the UK, our free speech norms are a tad limited.

"no donations to the Stormfront server fund," got it.

I'd also prefer the cash -- details on that can be TBD; it depends how private you need to be I suppose, but we can figure it out. (and I'm gonna say ~50/50 we won't have to given the "no bet" possibilities)

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I don't think we have juries here

Unless Scotland has a different judicial system than England, you do. Though you might soon be right either way, because Starmer wants to get rid of them.

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That's very flattering, but every time I looked into privacy-preserving ways of transferring money, it turned out to be a massive hassle, possibly bordering on impossibility. Personally, for my bets I prefer agreeing to donate to a charity of each person's choice, and taking the counterparty at their word (+ maybe a screenshot, though they're so easy to fake, it's effectively the same thing).

Personally, I'd say that if the police and prosecutors pressed charges against Dumana / Belov in the current political climate, the evidence against him must be pretty strong, and that would warrant a 70% bet in the other direction (keep in mind your original argument rested on nothing more than statements from the police, not official charges, or an actual convction).

But that's beside the point. I don't really have a problem with you falling on the other side of this and sticking to your guns, my issue was with your top level post on the topic, and how you portrayed anyone unconvinced by your arguments as unreasonable.

keep in mind your original argument rested on nothing more than statements from the police, not official charges, or an actual convction

Hmm? I don't think that's the case. I also heavily stressed what can only be described as "local sentiment", perhaps priors, in addition to the official story. The locals (debatably including me) thought it's more likely than not.

For example:

My own priors, which seem to match those of most actual Scots I’ve spoken to, lean toward a more mundane explanation.

and how you portrayed anyone unconvinced by your arguments as unreasonable.

That is not true. I think I made a strong argument, but I also acknowledge:

I would like to believe that this clarification settles things, but I am also not naïve. If your epistemic filter is tuned to maximum paranoia, then the absence of evidence is merely further evidence of a cover-up. For everyone else, the police statement, local skepticism, and sociological context should nudge your priors at least a little.

In other words, as a Bayesian, my opinion is that you should at the very least be slightly swayed by the argument. That is not the same as thinking that anyone who disagrees with me is unreasonable. There are actual people (living breathing humans) who are immune to any argument, probably including divine intervention. My scorn is largely reserved for them.

Similarly, the article you shared has meaningfully moved my posteriors. Back then, I expect that if anyone asked, I'd say I'm 80-90% confident of a lack of guilt, and now I've moved down to 70%. That is precisely the kind of update in the face of new evidence that I endorse and respect. Hence why I do it myself.

I expect that if a conviction is secured, I'd jump to maybe a 90% certainty that I was wrong, and if they're acquitted, then back up to 90% confidence of being correct. Feel free to tag me if something happens, since I don't really read the BBC that often.

That is not true. I think I made a strong argument, but I also acknowledge:

I would like to believe that this clarification settles things, but I am also not naïve. If your epistemic filter is tuned to maximum paranoia, then the absence of evidence is merely further evidence of a cover-up. For everyone else, the police statement, local skepticism, and sociological context should nudge your priors at least a little.

In other words, as a Bayesian, my opinion is that you should at the very least be slightly swayed by the argument. That is not the same as thinking that anyone who disagrees with me is unreasonable. There are actual people (living breathing humans) who are immune to any argument, probably including divine intervention. My scorn is largely reserved for them.

Well, maybe I took it all a bit too personally, but even with your explanation it kinda feels like you're saying that not moving your priors based on the things you mentioned is unreasonable. I happened to find the arguments you brought up unpersuasive, so their effect on my priors was mostly zilch (maybe witch the exception of the police originally charging the girl), and I think that's perfectly justifiable.

I think one thing you didn't address in your original post, that heavily informed my opinion on this story is that:

Young men are animals. Cross border, cross race, cross culture, etc. As they say, testosterone is a hell of a drug. Ages 15-25 I don't trust the sexual judgement of 90% of young men. Most of those men find a productive or semi-productive outlet for their sexual desire. I think porn has helped blunt the edge of young horny men in modern society, but the blade is still there lying at the throat of society and young women. Some number of men slip through the productive cracks, and they target younger women. Even a 22 year olds loser with no job smoking weed all day can look cool to a 16 year old dumb girl.

Much of the time its the responsibility of fathers and older brothers to protect young women from these predations. The threat of getting your ass kicked is usually enough to deter the worst dirtbags. But in the absence of these protections there are occasionally going to be cases where the young women themselves take defense into their own hands.

The base story here of young 20's man hits on young teenage girls is absolutely not surprising to me. I'd guess there are stories like this in every location in the world with more than a few thousand people. A case where there are no men around to protect the young girls is not that strange, especially in a low class area where fathers might be absentee. A case where the girls take their defense into their own hands seems inevitable, humans have a basic need for security and protection. All of that would have been a total non-story.

Its just that the young 20's man is an immigrant, and the young teenage girls are native. Which sparks the culture war aspect of this all. But those additional considerations seem inevitable in any situation where there are immigrants. Similar situations sparked off black race riots in the south (young black men hitting on young teenage white girls).

Ages 15-25 I don't trust the sexual judgement of 90% of young men.

But.. but.. but.. DeepNeuralNetwork is assuring me that 25 year old men are only wanting to fall in love with and have babies with 15 year old girls, that's all!

I mean, I agree with you, but the argument I'm currently enmeshed in seems to be falling out along the lines: girls that age are plenty old enough, men are horny for young girls because biology, girls that age can and should be having babies, parents are only trying to control their children, older women are only jealous and want to restrict men to ancient, raddled, crone pussy instead of fresh, nubile, teen pussy.

DeepNeuralNetwork is a different person who gets very little agreement from the rest of the forum.

Young men generally prefer partners about 3-5 years younger than themselves. Look at the data from any country and any age, and this bears out. DeepNeuralNetwork is mistaken or just trolling.

I'm also happy to acknowledge that acquittal doesn't necessarily mean a lack of guilt, but I don't think the British judicial system is so corrupt that it represents null evidence.

If you are using judicial verdicts to update your world view as if they were unbiased (in the statistical sense) estimators of guilt, you are doing it wrong.

Suppose a parent shows up at a hospital with a non-verbal, injured child, displaying injuries of a type which is generally thought to be caused by violence in 85-95% of the cases and accidents in 5-15% of the cases, as estimated by different domain experts. Suppose that there is no further evidence to be found either way -- the parent denies using violence, and there is no video of how the kid got injured.

The way I have constructed the example, there is only one possible outcome in a fair criminal trial: acquittal due to reasonable doubt, as the courts would rather let ten guilty go free than sentence one innocent.

A guilty verdict is very strong evidence of guilt. A verdict of 'not proven' is very weak evidence of factual innocence (as opposed to legal innocence).

I imagine this can lead to cases where two people who had a gunfight can both get away with claiming self defense. If we try A and find we have to acquit him because it is plausible that they acted in self defense, we obviously can not base a trial on B around the finding that A was innocent as far as the law could tell.

For the Braveheart thing, I do not really have a horse in the race. On priors, I would find it more likely that young men harass some underage girls than that some underage girls get out of their way to threaten some young immigrant men, but stranger things than the latter have happened.

I don't see how this disagrees with anything I've said?

The hypothetical example you've presented is probably more cut-and-dry than anything we've seen here. I suspect that it would actually be more likely to end in a conviction than you think, judges do not regularly do Bayesian calcs in court.

A guilty verdict is very strong evidence of guilt. A verdict of 'not proven' is very weak evidence of factual innocence (as opposed to legal innocence).

I agree, in fact I alluded to the same. If a video came out showing an assault by the accused and without a conviction (as unlikely as that is), then I'd be willing to accept that in lieu of a favorable legal verdict.

On priors, I would find it more likely that young men harass some underage girls than that some underage girls get out of their way to threaten some young immigrant men, but stranger things than the latter have happened.

The bayes calc on it would just be a total win for the "he touched the girls" take.

If you are using judicial verdicts to update your world view

Reminds me of the Australian SAS warcrime case. Footage was released of what was inarguably an extra judicial killing of a captured and unarmed man. Like, I'm ex Australian army and not even I could deny that these guys were guilty of murder. But there were still hundreds of people saying "they haven't been convicted yet" and "the investigation hasn't been concluded."

https://old.reddit.com/r/Military/comments/1lccwjc/australian_sasr_during_their_deployment_to/

But we could see it with our own eyes. You can see in real time the murder happening, zero grounds for self defence. In war you get away with shooting the odd POW, sure. That guy could have been making IEDs or have personally killed Australians, sure. But if you get caught on camera you go to jail. That's how the world works. Why do people insist on the outcome of the investigation or the court ruling when they can see with their own eyes the crime occurring.

It's a weird deferral of responsibility, even though we know the courts are wrong all the time.

It immediately brings to mind consummate bureaucrat Buck Turgidson:

President Muffley: General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand. I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.

Gen. Turgidson: That's right, sir, you are the only person authorized to do so. And although I, uh, hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like, uh, General Ripper exceeded his authority.

The bayes calc on it would just be a total win for the "he touched the girls" take.

I tend to agree with this. Also, from what I understand about the UK system for criminal prosecution, it seems unlikely that these charges would have been filed against these defendants in the absence of strong evidence of guilt.

It seems like your explanation covers only half the story. And the alternative explanation covers the other half. In the original video the girls are screaming "don't fuckin' touch us over and over." They're still obviously carrying weapons. Why isn't the middle of the road opinion that some Scottish "neds" were walking around with knives (your take) and were felt up by the guy at some point (braveheart take) explaining why they were yelling and brandishing weapons while backing away?

I agree that's a possibility, and if that's proven, I'd be more sympathetic. I personally disagree quite a bit with the UK's approach towards banning pretty much every form of self-defense.

Surely it seems rather unlikely that even the kind of man who feels up young girls in the street would feel up young girls already carrying knives. There's poor impulse control, and there's Darwin Award-bait.

And you believe that this is an argument in favor of your preferred position?

People win Darwin awards all the time.

There's a lot of 'worst of both worlds' possibilities here, not the least of which is they were flirting consensually until he tried to feel her up in ways she didn't like and it turned into an argument. It's not that weird for gutter trash young men to go after teens, and it's not that weird for the teens to like it up until they don't.

It's more common than you think. Some people go into primal aggression mode and will attack if the victim looks afraid, even if they are armed.

There were videos during the 2020 blm protests of people charging men with guns and getting shot when they could have just walked away.

It's been studied in neuroscience, there's a bunch of info about heart rate, cortisol, and the cerebral cortex shutting down leaving people operating with just their limbic system. But there are many people here far more qualified to dive into the details of that. My undercaffinated brain won't give you a decent summary.

I presume the kind of scottish teenagers who carry hatchets to the park are the kind who know not to brandish them as they walk down the street.

Do we know why he has that alias? I feel like the Occam's Razor solution, in the absence of an official explanation, is that he's from the Soviet Muslim tradition of having an Islamic name and an assimilated one for records. Could also be a convert, though, or some form of con artist.

His social media handle was something along the lines of "gypsy gangster". I'd assume there's something in Bulgarian yob culture (I suppose I could ask Bulgarian friends, but that feels rather embarrassing) where Muslims/Gypsies are seen as harder.

My balkaner friends have told me that gypsies/albanians/muslims are seen as, not necessarily harder(and these guys would be middle class legal first or second gen immigrants, not gutter trash) but as a whole lot more dangerous than your average street tough. It wouldn't surprise me if gutter trash saw such a reputation in a much more positive light.

I don't know if "Smoke Check" has the same meaning or connotations in Turkey, Bulgaria, Chechnya, or wherever these guys hail from, but "Ali Smoke Check" just sounds like an alias that an edgy 22 year-old would come up with to me.

What is a "smoke check" and what does it have to do with "Fatos Ali Dumana"?

In engineering it means to test something to the point of failure (IE till it smokes or catches fire), but it is also used in the US as slang for killing somebody.

I've only heard "smoke test" for the first sense. But I still don't see the relation to this guy.

While I would Romanize it a bit differently, when spoken aloud the alias sounds a lot like "verified to the smoke" in Turkish.

Don't know the relevance, but "smoke check" is US military slang for shooting someone. Dust flies off clothing/skin when a bullet impacts, can leave a little cloud behind briefly.

This won’t be particularly substantive but hopefully it’s enough to avoid a mod-slap. Apparently a group of women customers accosted staff at a Minneapolis yoga chain and berated them for not having some sort of ICE signage up (presumably a “No ICE allowed” sign, as if ICE agents will be stopping in to do yoga).

Here is an article.

Here is a direct link to the viral TikTok in question

The video’s author is Heather Anderson, 51, essentially the archetype of the wine mom, the core demographic of the latest frenzy. She appears to be an elementary school teacher and host of a podcast Belonging in the Classroom which presents itself with this description:

Belonging in Classrooms: Stories of Anti-Racism in Minneapolis Public Schools How do we practice belonging in one of the most segregated spaces in America? Who are the people challenging the systems? What do they do differently? What do they wish you knew about their experience? Join us on a journey to tell the stories of educators, students, and community members working to dismantle racism in Minneapolis Public Schools.

Of course this dovetails nicely with our discussion of another winemom-cum-podcaster, Jennifer Welch and her open calls for Republican blood. In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now? Have Democrats effectively weaponized Karenism?

The incident reminds me almost exactly of scenes that we saw in 2020, like this similar incident you surely remember of diners being surrounded and screamed at for not raising their fists in solidarity with BLM..

There is much endless discussion of peak woke, but to me it feels almost exactly like we are back in 2020, if not for the historic cold weather of the last few weeks and general time of year, I imagine it would be nearly identical.

There are people screaming about how it's current-era politics, the Trump administration being uniquely terrible, the culture war at fever pitch, so on and soforth...

I prefer the simplest explanation, Karen's Law. Privileged white women, the Karens, the wine moms of the world, are the fucking worst. As reductive as it can be, I believe quite firmly that every miserable authoritarian impulse levied over modern Western society can be laid at the feet of a Karen somewhere who found someone else happy, and upon realizing that someone other than her found some small modicum of joy, decided that something was wrong with the universe, because clearly if she can't be happy nobody else should be.

I have no genuine explanation for why this is, other than vague suppositions about female insecurity trying to wrestle with the fact that certain groups of them belong to a class so privileged that there might be no equal in all of human history. Inventions and conveniences freed them from drudgery, the state and the corporation freed them from a livelihood tied to marriage, the century of the self, widely available birth control and large pools of cheap immigrant labor freed them from responsibility of raising the next generation. Men, and their inventions, free them from war-making. Communities and communal decision making free them from decisions. Maybe if I was a wine mom I could explain it sufficiently to this forum's satisfaction, but I doubt I'd even be here in the first place if I was.

I don't think this is unique to the modern era. However, the internet and memespace egregores and the social media companies have outsized network effects. A Karen today simply has significantly greater social reach than her finger-wagging forebears.

Interesting. To me the current situation also feels like 2020, but because of coronavirus lockdowns. Again we are being expected to tolerate draconian government interference with our daily lives, because of some supposed threat. Watching people leap to the defense of the ICErs reminds me of how people cheered when Australian police were beating anti-lockdown protestors. Again it feels like the whole world has gone insane, and nobody is willing to do anything about it.

Here is a tweet with 5k upvotes saying that "ICE should start sl**ghtering liberals for no reason at all." I remember seeing opinions like this about anti-maskers, and thinking how weird it was for this "edgy", "transgressive" humor to be deployed in support of government power.

Except that the median American finds out about ICE from social media. The median American found out about the covid lockdowns from leaving their house.

Or, in the case of China, being prevented from leaving their house.

...coronavirus lockdowns. Again we are being expected to tolerate draconian government interference with our daily lives...

How disruptive are ICE's activities in Minnesota? I have a hard time imagining that they create 1/10 the interference of the COVID lockdowns (averaged over their respective worst month-ish, counting everyone in the city except those properly targeted for arrest, and not counting the actions of protestors).

How many businesses are shut down? (Probably some, because their employees got arrested) Are they required to get identification and documentation before they serve customers? Are the schools still open? Can you visit your friends?

I'm not on the ground there, so I don't know exactly what's happening (or what their COVID measures were, for that matter). I'd just be very surprised if it was even in the same order of magnitude as the lockdowns.

While the governmental interference in people's lives doesn't sound half as draconian or invasive as the worst excesses of Covid hysteria (it's not as if, in the interests of combating illegal immigration, Minnesotans are being prevented from hiking on mountain trails or attending their spouses' funerals; nor has their full participation in public life been made conditional on their undergoing a specific medical procedure), I nonetheless agree with you that many of the people cheering on ICE are motivated by a similar kind of spite. As a committed civil libertarian it's always disheartening to find out what a large proportion of my ostensible fellow-travelers really just want the boot on the other foot.

Yeah, one of the most depressing occurrences of my adulthood has been realizing that approximately nobody in America actually values freedom. Most of my countrymen seem to be authoritarian in their hearts, and the only question seems to be who/whom.

I mean principles erode in war time and the culture war is a war - I'm very free speech, live and let live etc but I see what the woke have done and feel it is toxic to society etc.

If principles erode based on what others do, then they were never principles - simply what was convenient to do at the time. A principle is something you always uphold.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

The real world is complicated and messy.

Pacifism is good until you run into an African Warlord or Cartel.

Free exchange of knowledge is good until everyone has a matter printer and can destroy the planet.

Don't lie, cheat, or steal is great until you are an Oskar Schindler trying to save lives.

Sometimes your principles are worth dying for, but making other people die for them isn't really right either.

Shit is complicated.

May I suggest that it's more about When/Why? For example, I found myself becoming very authoritarian about immigration and drugs and trans, and I thought 'guess I'm not a liberal after all', then genAI happened and it turns out I'm still very libertarian about software and AI, which was kind of pleasing to me. @FtttG is generally quite liberal but was quite clear in the trans thread that (s)he doesn't think it's okay to write anything you want on a government form just because it makes you happy, and generally also doesn't particularly seem to like people traveling across borders as they please. (I criticise neither stance, I'm just noting.)

Who/whom correlates to some degree with this but doesn't actually match it. It's a bit like the saying that everyone is conservative in their area of expertise.

Don't know if you find this reassuring but maybe worth bearing in mind.

Interesting point! I think that is a valid alternate way of looking at the situation. Not that it necessarily makes things right, but it's something to mull over.

I'm a guy. Although I find it amusing that I apparently have such an – androgynous? – writing style.

@FtttG is generally quite liberal but was quite clear in the trans thread that (s)he doesn't think it's okay to write anything you want on a government form just because it makes you happy, and generally also doesn't particularly seem to like people traveling across borders as they please.

I find this characterisation interesting, as while I certainly think of myself as a run-of-the-mill 90s liberal and don't think any of my political opinions would be outside the Overton window for, say, a Democrat or Labour candidate circa 2000 – nonetheless, in my personal life I'm routinely accused of being a crypto-conservative (or even, rather laughably, "far-right"). I certainly don't dispute that I'm more conservative than many of my friends and family, a lot of whom are passively woke, though I still think I'm probably less conservative than the median poster here.

I will freely cop to the former characterisation of my opinions: government forms are for cataloguing demographic data, not for making people feel "validated", and governments should not concern themselves with cataloguing their citizens' unfalsifiable claims about their internal mental states. (Or rather, their citizens' unfalsifiable claims about their internal mental states should not supplant or override objective facts about the compositions of their bodies. "Identify" as whatever you please: that doesn't change what you are.) But when you say I "[don't] particularly seem to like people travelling across borders as they please", I'm a little taken aback. If all you mean as that I'm not an advocate for open borders, that's fair: per an article I read the other day, in order to have laws you must have jurisdictions, to have jurisdictions you must have borders, and if you have borders they must be enforced. But I get the impression you're imputing a stronger claim to me, namely that I'm opposed to immigration into Ireland in general, including legal immigration. If so, that's not how I would describe my own worldview. For example, I live with my girlfriend who's a first-generation migrant who was born and raised Muslim (though no longer practising); of the three long-term romantic relationships I've had as an adult, only one was with a fellow Irish person while the others were with first-generation migrants; it's been nearly a decade since I was physically intimate with a fellow Irish person, with virtually all of the people I was intimate with since being first-generation migrants; I would say a significant proportion if not an outright majority of my close friends are first-generation migrants.

That being said, I'm not going to pretend that all immigrants are created equal; I do think that a significant proportion of immigrants to Ireland (as in the rest of Europe) are a net drain on the public purse, not to mention responsible for a disproportionate share of violent crime; I have a big problem with people emigrating to Ireland solely to claim social welfare indefinitely and never make a positive contribution; and the progressive news media's habitual obfuscation about migrant crime and its wholesale importing of American racial grievance politics are long standing bugbears of mine. Immigrants who come to Ireland with the goal of assimilating and working hard without demanding handouts (either in the form of social welfare payouts or "ethnic spoils" sinecures) are entirely welcome, which is why I get particularly angry when I see immigrants meeting that description (e.g. Ireland's growing population of recent Indian migrants) receiving abuse and harassment from the native population. If you got the impression that I'm opposed to immigration into Ireland on general principle, I'm legitimately curious as to what gave you that impression (and not in a defensive how dare you! sort of way).

I'm legitimately curious as to what gave you that impression (and not in a defensive how dare you! sort of way).

What I meant in the context of my last reply is that you clearly not an advocate of totally open borders. That is, when it gets right down to it, you advocate for forcefully (if necessary) preventing people from voluntarily going to certain places, taking up certain jobs, etc. even when they wish to. It makes you less liberal in that area than somebody like Bryan Caplan. Whereas in some places perhaps you hold more liberal opinions around say free-speech on the internet (I don't know). This argument was in service of my overall point that I think the vast majority of people want government force used to bring the outgroup to heel and to enforce their will sometimes in some areas.

On the more general level, I had a vague image of you not being super-keen on immigration partly because I vaguely recall you reporting on the anti-immigration riots in an 'interesting, let's see where this goes' way and partly probably because I am projecting and I have difficulty seeing an intelligent person be super jazzed about the type and level of immigration we're getting in UK + Ireland. I might be wrong about that.

Immigrants who come to Ireland with the goal of assimilating and working hard without demanding handouts

I'm okay with this provided that they and their immediate descendants are capped to approx 2-3% of total population which is, aha, not what we see. I have described elsewhere that I think that there is a slippery slope / addiction mechanic involved with immigration and I am keen to forestall this even when I like and approve of many of the immigrants involved on a personal level. I don't know your feelings on the matter.

I have described elsewhere

It's funny: while writing my previous comment I was thinking of this exact comment, but didn't realise it was you who'd written it!

I agree there's been a great deal of goalpost-moving on the topic of immigration, especially from those in favour. I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of Ireland, and specifically what immigration implies for the Irish national identity, or lack thereof.

What is the Irish national identity, really? Certainly no one would claim that it's based on ethnicity: even the farthest of the far-right would never dare to suggest that e.g. Denise Chaila is anything other than Irish, no hyphen necessary. (As pointed out by Angela Nagle, there's a bit of historical revisionism going on here, with modern Irish progressives loath to acknowledge that the Irish republican movement was always an unabashed, unapologetic ethno-nationalist movement.) It can't be based on a language that almost no one can speak, not even at a conversational level. It can't be based on a shared literary tradition (if the average Irish person has read an Irish novel in their lifetimes, it was probably by Sally Rooney, and I suspect the only dead Irish writer most Irish could name would be Joyce) or a musical one (most Irish people are proudly dismissive of their native musical tradition, and the most popular Irish musicians have always been those who aped sounds coming from the UK or the states). It certainly can't be based on Catholicism, with weekly attendance figures hovering around a quarter of the populace (a figure which is bound to shrink even more dramatically as the older generations die off).

At the height of the clerical abuse scandal (but, I believe, several years prior to the legalisation of gay marriage and abortion), I remember reading an opinion piece in the Irish Times noting that, of the three traditional pillars of Irish society (the Catholic Church, the Fianna Fáil political party and the Gaelic Athletics Association), now only the latter still retains anything like the kind of power and cultural influence it once wielded. After the clerical abuse scandals, the Church's reputation lay in tatters and attendance figures have been in freefall for decades, while it's been nearly five decades since Fianna Fáil secured an outright majority. The tone of this opinion piece was more than a little triumphalist, but in retrospect one wonders why the columnist wasn't a bit more concerned. Yes, these once-powerful institutions are a shadow of their former selves – but what are they going to be replaced with?

I know this is the story of every Western nation in the twentieth century: we gleefully tore down all the old institutions without giving any thought to what we ought to replace them with, and now we're experiencing a crisis of meaning. But I feel like the absence is even more keenly felt in Ireland, given how thoroughly we've deprecated everything else that might have served as a placeholder for a national identity while we got to work building new institutions. Woke progressives often talk about "culture" as if it's just another name for "language, cuisine, music, dance, fashion, sport": when they talk about "multiculturalism" and respecting different cultural practices, what they really mean is "you can speak any language you want, as long as you use it to respect everyone's preferred pronouns". But language, cuisine, music etc. is just superficial window-dressing: when we talk about "cultural differences", what we really mean is that people from different cultures have different moral values, and different assumptions they take for granted. Culture is why Arabs throw gay men off of buildings; culture is why Kenyans cut off their daughters' clitorises; culture is why disgraced Japanese people kill themselves rather than bringing dishonor on their families. With the hollowing out of Irish cultural institutions, whatever moral values and base assumptions an Irish person can be assumed to have are functionally indistinguishable from the European average (and, more to the point, the British* average). But unlike France, Sweden, Germany and so on, we don't really have much in the way of "culture" in the superficial window-dressing sense either. What native cuisine we have (aside from the obvious) is limited to coddle, colcannon, and bacon & cabbage; Irish dancing is that thing you're forced to do in Irish college over the summer before you can get back to kissing girls; language and music were covered above; the less said about Irish fashion the better. The only one in which we can really hold our own in is sport, and even then I'd hazard a guess than an order of magnitude more Irish people follow English club football exclusively than follow GAA exclusively. It's for this reason that Irish people tend to sound so faltering and unsure of themselves when attempting to explain what's unique and peculiar about their own culture, and what makes it meaningfully distinct from that of our nearest neighbour. "Emm... mammy'd have the wooden spoon after you, haha... flat 7Up when you're ill... Bosco on the telly... forgot to turn off the immersion?"

Sometimes you can detect the tension underlying all of this when Irish people talk about Irish history. Opposition to British rule occupies such a central role in the Irish psyche that it's almost impossible to overstate, and when pressed for examples of how oppressive said rule was, one will invariably be the penal laws, which placed heavy restrictions on Catholic practices in Ireland. But when you ask the person citing this example what they personally think of the Catholic Church, they will surely reply that it's a repressive homophobic misogynistic patriarchical institution made up entirely of kiddy-fiddlers whose theological beliefs are incoherent nonsense. In sum: "the Brits were bad because they tried to stop people practising Catholicism; also, the Catholic Church is an evil institution which ought to have no power". This cognitive dissonance is almost never remarked upon.

Ireland spent centuries fighting to protect our native culture against attempts from without to destroy it – then, almost as soon as we had won, we decided our native culture wasn't really worth defending in the first place, and tossed it aside in favour of generic, undistinguished universal culture. More provocatively, one could say that Ireland spent several hundred years ruled by a colonial overlord (Britain), finally achieved full independence in 1949, and in 1973 (barely a generation later) voluntarily submitted to being ruled by a different colonial overlord (the EU). Joining the EU was a sound decision from the perspective of economics, living standards and so on. But it's hard to dispute the idea that it ultimately compromised whatever sense of a distinct Irish identity still remained. The average Irish person's worldview owes far more to a gaggle of unelected administrators in Brussels than it does to Michael Collins, Daniel O'Connell or Charles Stewart Parnell, and that goes double for the hordes of woke West Brits and East Yanks who call themselves Irish but have nothing but scorn for every extant Irish institution or cultural practice. Listening to them speak, they don't even sound Irish. I'd imagine that most of them would know who Washington D.C. is named after, but not O'Connell St or Parnell St.

(Keen to hear @HereAndGone2's thoughts on the above.)

*Regardless of political stripe, Irish people can be relied upon to become very irate when you point out alleged commonalities between our culture and British culture. This defensiveness, in my view, has more to do with the narcissism of small differences than with any real factual dispute. Ireland has its own culture distinct from our nearest neighbour's only in the sense that we have an army and a navy: nine times out of ten, what's true of British people can be assumed to be true of Irish people also.

What I'm finding funny is the re-appropriation of traditional culture but stripping out the religious connotations, see the recent St Brigid's Day stuff. Now it's become a proper bank holiday, but along with traditions such as Little Christmas/Women's Christmas, it's being recast as some sort of proto-feminist, New Agey style feast. There was a completely dreadful 'icon' of St Bridget (very much in the Wiccan style) accompanying one such online article about 'traditions and customs and what we can do today'.

Nobody is going to be making Brid's Crosses out of rushes anymore, but what is left then? Fake Celtic paddywhackery. Deracinated for the natives, and nothing there of any substance to appeal to our new immigrant populations as shared culture.

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I think there is much to what you say. A few minor comments occur to me:

even the farthest of the far-right would never dare to suggest that e.g. Denise Chaila is anything other than Irish, no hyphen necessary

Do you mean that they would never dare in public because they would be crucified, but secretly they believe it? Or that even the far right don't believe in an ethnic conception of Irishness?

Ireland spent centuries fighting to protect our native culture against attempts from without to destroy it – then, almost as soon as we had won, we decided our native culture wasn't really worth defending in the first place

I am reminded of the end of the Cold War. No longer having an adversary really made the West lose its mojo surprisingly fast.

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One of my great fears is being caught in a struggle session like this. I'm not really kidding. I used to have nightmares about it as a kid, when I didn't even know what a struggle session was. I would dream that there was a huge crowd around me and they were angry at me, and someone that was my friend would be interrogating me with inane questions that seemed to have no right or wrong answer, but no matter what I answered the friend would announce it to the crowd with disgust and I'd be booed and jeered. Just complete lunacy.

I put myself in the yoga studio manager's position and wonder what I would say. The troll in me would lean into it: "do you stupid motherfuckers think we took the sign down because we're trying to welcome ICE agents to do yoga? do you think they do yoga?" and "so, what I'm hearing is you're mad that we had the anti-ICE sign up but had to take it down? how mad are you at yoga studios that never had the sign up to begin with?"

But I realize the right move would be to say "actually, " lowering voice " one of our dark skinned owners is anti-ICE, but she's afraid her green card will be revoked if ICE finds out she had that sign up. Please be her voice out there, because she cannot speak for herself, here" and then we all :resist-fist:

Of course this dovetails nicely with our discussion of another winemom-cum-podcaster, Jennifer Welch and her open calls for Republican blood. In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now? Have Democrats effectively weaponized Karenism?

One of the most scathing critiques of Social Justice is that the same kind of busybody middle class older women who would report young women to their landlords for having a male visitor in their room in 1950 are now ostracizing people for doing a racism or whatever.

In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now? Have Democrats effectively weaponized Karenism?

I traveled up to a nearby city a handful of times last year, and every time I had to drive past one of the popular protest spots. The protestors were interesting. I'd estimate 90% of them were old. Gray hair was the most common shade I saw. The average age was clearly 50+, and may have honestly been 65+. The other thing I noticed was that 75-80% of the protestors were women. Of the men, I'd estimate that three quarters of them were there with their wives, and the men were usually sitting on a stone wall that stood next to the sidewalk rather than holding signs and screaming at cars.

I'd also hazard to guess that most of the protestors were affluent. Each individual piece of clothing they wore probably cost more than my whole outfit. The street where they were protesting was lined with parked BMWs and Audis when it would usually be Fords and Hyundais.

I think all those facts might be related. If you're old enough and wealthy enough that you don't have to work anymore, it can be a shock to your sense of identity. What do you do with those extra 2,000 hours a year? Even if you are still working, your risk profile changes a lot when your "I got fired" strategy is to just move on to a life of leisure.

I think it's the same reason that the HOA busybody and Church lady archetypes are usually older. I think all three might be culture-bound expressions of the same thing.

I traveled up to a nearby city a handful of times last year, and every time I had to drive past one of the popular protest spots. The protestors were interesting. I'd estimate 90% of them were old. Gray hair was the most common shade I saw. The average age was clearly 50+, and may have honestly been 65+.

We live the same life in some ways because I've done the same thing and noticed the exact same thing.

The other thing I noticed was that 75-80% of the protestors were women.

The Greeks spoke of this.

What are you referencing re the Greeks?

A joke about the origin of the word "hysteria."

The average age was clearly 50+, and may have honestly been 65+. The other thing I noticed was that 75-80% of the protestors were women. Of the men, I'd estimate that three quarters of them were there with their wives, and the men were usually sitting on a stone wall that stood next to the sidewalk rather than holding signs and screaming at cars.

That’s a good sign. If there were hordes of military aged males out on the street, the chances of civil war would be a lot higher.

If there were hordes of military aged males at all, then we wouldn't be here.

Population aging (both due to declining birthrate and rising life expectancy) is the fundamental fact about Western (and first-world Asian) societies from which everything else follows.

I think all those facts might be related. If you're old enough and wealthy enough that you don't have to work anymore, it can be a shock to your sense of identity. What do you do with those extra 2,000 hours a year?

I can just imagine society finally becoming wealthy enough by 2035 that we could institute a sweet UBI for all, and then by 2037 we have the most brutal civil war because we believe we're the most oppressed people ever.

This would IMO be a great premise for a Star Trek episode. Or maybe a sci-fi novel.

This is the plot of the Terra Ignota series. It's quite good.

I mean... it's not exactly "because we're the most oppressed people ever" but it's about how war arises in an approximately post-scarcity society.

I have mixed feelings about Terra Ignota, because there's a lot of it that's good and interesting, and a lot that's garbage, and a lot that's somewhere in the middle.

In this case I think one of its flaws is that you can't really describe it without being incredibly misleading. You have to describe the setting, and the setting gives the impression that this is a story about what happens in a world where you can choose your nation, or choose what set of laws to live under, or what a world without borders is like but people socially define themselves by household and elective community, or what war looks like in a world that doesn't have geographic nations, or re-learning war in a world that has had no weapons or violent conflicts for a lifetime, or, etc., etc.

And Terra Ignota is not actually about any of that. Sure, it's in a world where there are no nations and instead people join elective 'hives', which define the laws of their society, but the books clearly do not care about that, and have precisely zero interest in interrogating how that system could possibly work. Sure, the story involves the hives going to war and then flailing about in confusion because none of them know what war is (I particularly loved a bit where people dress up in military uniforms and assemble in groups and march up and down in front of each other, and then just kind of look at each other awkwardly and disperse, unsure of what they're supposed to do next), but none of that is relevant to what Terra Ignota is about.

Terra Ignota is a story told by an extremely unreliable narrator, who is at least partly insane, who has a bizarre fetish for 18th century France. The story is about Mycroft, and once you understand that Mycroft is firstly batshit and secondly a LARPing pseudo-intellectual, you notice that the events of the story don't matter that much, and in fact don't even make sense. This is a psychodrama.

I don't know if I learned anything from Terra Ignota, other than "Ada Palmer be weird, yo". But Ada Palmer is definitely weird, yo.

Oh, and Utopia sucks. As far as I can tell responses to Terra Ignota are bifurcated along several axes, and one of the big ones is whether Utopia is the coolest thing ever and a beautiful dream you want to pledge your life towards (somehow Scott is one of these), or whether Utopia is a bunch of incredibly cringeworthy nerds who need to be given swirlies (this is the camp I'm in). There are people who seem to think Terra Ignota is a beautiful small-u utopia, revealed to us by brilliant and inspiring prose, and I do not understand these people at all.

Is your reading that all of the supernatural stuff is in Mycroft's head?

I kind of love the "Ada Palmer is weird, yo" aspect of the whole thing. It's like she had a list of interests:

  • 18the century France
  • Sex and gender
  • Enlightenment metaphysics
  • Utopian technology
  • Novel political systems
  • Ancient Rome

And decided to throw it all together in a book. And, idk, my take is that she did it quite well! Some it is a little hard to believe, but I still think it's a world that "fits" and makes sense. What aspects of the hive system do you think are underdeveloped?

Not so much in Mycroft's head as irrelevant? The whole story is in Mycroft's head, and we have no way of sorting what's 'true' in the context of the imaginary world from what isn't. Mycroft tells us a lot of things, most of which are to some extent completely implausible, and often it's the non-magical parts that are the most implausible. Is it plausible that, say, a midget clone of Achilles pilots a giant robot magicked into existence from a kid's reading of some guy's awful Iliad fanfic in order to deflect a couple of nuclear missiles away from Mars? Well, no. But then, is it plausible that the whole world is run by a conspiracy of half a dozen people who all go to the same weirdly-specific brothel where people dress up in 18th century outfits, as part of some lady's attempt to control the world by addicting its leaders to a fetish for gender roles? If anything that part is less plausible! Who's more plausible, Bridger or JEDD? Bridger is the one to whom Mycroft attributes explicit magic powers, whereas JEDD is just an extremely mentally ill person, but nonetheless JEDD is the one I find harder to swallow. I can believe that a magic kid with the ability to rewrite reality exists, but I cannot believe that every world leader, much less the public, are willing to give ultimate power to a person so autistic that he does not understand object permanence.

But it doesn't matter because, well, Terra Ignota's world makes no sense. I think you have to take the whole thing as a glimpse into Mycroft's mind. Nothing here is plausible except insofar as it makes sense to Mycroft. And Mycroft is a lunatic.

(There is that part from 9A's perspective, but 9A's narrative voice is extremely similar to Mycroft's, shares all of Mycroft's values, and eventually 9A is turned into a Mycroft clone via Bridger-magic, so for all I know 9A doesn't exist and Mycroft is just taking the piss. It might just be that Palmer struggles to write more than one narrative voice, but there was one chapter from Martin Guildbreaker's perspective which was nicely differentiated, at least?)

My frustration with the books, really, is that Palmer tends to bring up big questions that she is either unwilling or unable to address. Is it about novel political systems? Well, she sort of sketches out the outline of one, but the system she sketches out makes no sense and she makes no attempt to answer even obvious questions about it. This goes for legal questions (hang on, how does crime work between people of different hives?), cultural questions (somehow Brillist mind-reading remains an exclusive Brillist secret, even though you can change hive at will, there are millions and millions of Brillists, and the skill requires no technology or assistance of any kind? no one has stolen this technique yet?), or economic questions (there's that chapter with the yakuza human traffickers; wait, why is human trafficking a thing in a world without borders? how is crime even possible in a world where everyone wears tracker implants anyway?). The idea of opt-in legal systems and non-geographic nations is interesting, but once you start asking questions about how it actually works, there are too many questions that Palmer just glosses over.

There's a certain type of science fiction author who comes up with an odd idea and then spends all their time trying to break that idea. Isaac Asimov is probably the most famous example of this type. He produces an elegant system and then repeatedly puts that system under stress. He pedantically looks for every place the idea might fail and then sees what happens when it does. Ada Palmer is the very opposite of this type of author. She throws out big ideas, does not bother investigating them at all, and then jumps to the next big idea. The result, at least for me, is a book that has the appearance of depth but not the reality.

One example, for instance, might be her interest in gender. She has a lot in Terra Ignota about the concept of gender and its cultural power. Gender and religion are both, in Terra Ignota, concepts that nobody is willing to talk about in public (gender is just crass; religion is actually banned), and yet the shadows of those concepts hang over the text. Gender and religion both matter even though nobody can admit to them mattering. This is interesting, except that the shoe never drops. By the end of the fourth book, the place the books get to on gender is, "huh, gender is interesting, let's have a committee to keep the conversation going". Really, that's the conclusion? The spectre of religion comes up repeatedly, but it never goes anywhere.

This is most obvious to me when it comes to the books' central conflict. By the end of Perhaps the Stars, the war is about two issues. (Three if you count "should we make JEDD unaccountable dictator of the world", but apparently everybody is in favour of that. It's bonkers.) The first issue is O. S., and the question I've often seen asked along the lines of, "Would you destroy this world to save a better one?" Does the end of preserving Terra Ignota's current political order justify a very small number of political assassinations? JEDD promises to reorganise the world's politics so as to make O. S. unnecessary, but refuses to explain how he's going to do that, or what his new constitution would be. The second issue is the trunk war - should the future of humanity be brain uploading or space travel?

But neither of those issues are actually addressed in any depth. JEDD does take over the world, but his new constitution is to just make some minor tweaks on the existing system, none of which seem like they obviate the need for O. S. How does making the Cousins into a strat, merging Mitsubishi and the EU into a super-hive, capping the number of Mason senators, and adding representatives from the Reservations to the senate address that issue? That seems just as unstable as the prior system. It seems strange that after a thousand pages and a global war over the issue of O. S., nobody actually answers the O. S. question. How does this world remove the need for O. S. again?

And the trunk war is simply bizarre. There doesn't seem to be any reason why the Brillist and Utopian paths are incompatible - heck, Faust himself says that there is plenty of time for space travel after digital immortality is achieved. This 'conflict' is two different research projects with different priorities; the only actual clash is that both parties think the other is being somewhat wasteful in the face of their grand dream. The Brillists believe there is a pressing global imperative to abolish death, and the Utopians believe... er... they never get to this part. But they think that going to space is very important. Maybe there's a contrived conflict because both groups want to study Bridger's relics, but... what, we're going to have a world war because NASA and MIRI couldn't figure out how to share? It makes the conflict seem bizarrely petty.

At any rate, the fundamental problem there is that no one ever makes the case for Utopia. Here I'm just recapping Balioc, but I think it bears mentioning again. All the narrators are passionately on the Utopian side, and portray the Utopian dream as beautiful and heroic, and the Brillist dream as contemptible and narrow-minded, but no one ever reflects on why Utopia's dream is so important. It just axiomatically is.

I guess the problem I have is that Terra Ignota is, fundamentally, a bunch of things that Ada Palmer thinks is cool, all free-associated together. It never really coheres into a world or even really into a story.

There are a lot of things in the series that are difficult to swallow, but make sense once you realise that it's not trying to be a realistic work of political fiction. Something that struck me was that Terra Ignota is a world of utter sincerity. There are no liars or cynics; no world leaders who just opportunistically cheat. The closest you can find to that is Perry-Kraye, and even he's deeply embroiled in romantic melodrama. The Mason hive is an absolute dictatorship constrained only by the leader's determination to hold true to an oath that nobody but himself has ever read, and apparently this works! But every single character is like that. No one is corrupt. Everybody deeply believes in this or that philosophy. Mitsubishi are a bunch of calculating corporate imperialists, and yet when JEDD questions them, every member of the board is able to wax rhapsodic about the spiritual value of land. The blacklaws come together and make this lovely idealistic city called Hobbestown, rather than being the sorts of poorly-educated low-impulse-control people you might expect to live outside the law. Moral suasion is an incredibly powerful force in Terra Ignota - this ties into all the incredibly ropey gender stuff about the power of women and seduction and Marie Antoinette. It's just a world without cynics; a world without pragmatists.

I suppose I'm just ranting incoherently at this point.

My point is that I think Terra Ignota is an interesting look into Ada Palmer's brain, conveyed by way of Mycroft's brain.

I don't find it particularly sensible as a story or as a world, though.

JEDD does take over the world, but his new constitution is to just make some minor tweaks on the existing system, none of which seem like they obviate the need for O. S.

Yeah, this bothered me.

Thanks for all your other thoughts, no particular comment on them.

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Older, affluent women are, and have always been, ideological enforcers. That's true regardless of where you go. In blue tribe suburbs they're screaming at people about ICE; in the Arab world they're lecturing their (grand)daughters about the hijab.

Indeed. "Men build civilizations, women build societies." (I read this on a Manosphere blog ages ago.)

I don't have much to add other than I've also noticed that there are lots of old people at the big protests that get a lot of coverage. My impression of the previous century's protests is that they were attended by young people. Are they...the same protestors? Has the same cohort been bullying our politics for decades? Or does the timeline not match?

I have a sensitive distaste for old people who can't help but weigh in on the current outrage. Conservatives and liberals. All the old ones have very nasty ways of expressing their opinions. If it's not super cringe it's very ugly. I think people gradually lose the skill of persuasion as they ossify, or something. There's something there.

It reminds me of how the Hollywood studio system had grown stagnant in the 70's and 80's, which allowed up and comers like Spielberg, Lucas, and Cameron to innovate and eventually take over the studio system themselves. Only now, 40 years later, it's still a lot of those same up and comers from the 70's clinging to power and not letting up and comers displace them. I think there are similar trends in politics and activism.

From the more rightwingish side of things, a lot of people from the Nixon era (including Henry Kissinger) were still power players in the Republican party and various GOP administrations all the way up until the 2010s, and even if they hadn't aged out they were effectively forced out by Trump and the MAGA movement.

I have little doubt that there are similar dynamics on the progressive protest everything activist side of things.

Only now, 40 years later, it's still a lot of those same up and comers from the 70's clinging to power and not letting up and comers displace them.

I think that the issue is more that a lot of the up and comers who do replace them, come from within the same structure, having worked with the big directors, rather than having made their own way. Kathleen Kennedy never made something by herself. She was always the one who enabled others to do great things, but she didn't have a good creative vision of her own, nor was she able to spot new talent. Perhaps Dave Filoni will be better. At least he actual creative work on new IPs.

I think there are similar trends in politics and activism.

Perhaps that is because most of the elite is in the thrall of illiberal activism, so they are innately opposed to the idea that 'the people' get to have a say. So instead of giving a chance to directors/writers that punched above their weight on smaller projects, they select people that only appeal to them and their agenda. And even if these people turn out to be good by chance, they sabotage them with bad instructions, with bad advisors, etc.

Something similar seems to be true in politics.

It reminds me of how the Hollywood studio system had grown stagnant in the 70's and 80's, which allowed up and comers like Spielberg, Lucas, and Cameron to innovate and eventually take over the studio system themselves.

Your timing is off a bit there. The studio system declined in the late 1960s. "New Hollywood," incl. the Spielberg/Lucas class, got started circa 1967 and rose to prominence in the 1970s (Jaws / Star Wars), and then dominated the 1980s. Cameron rode their blockbuster wave a bit later, making his first big splash in the mid-80s.

I don't think it's exactly the same cohort; somebody who was active in the Days of Rage would be in their 70s or 80s now.

Right. It's later boomers and first Xers larping as civil rights and anti-Vietnam war activists (who were mostly silents and older boomers).

Yeah, the people of Minneapolis seem to have been spiraling for years now, and despite having lived nearby, I don't really have a feeling for it. I have a middle aged female relative, in a different part of the upper midwest, who's been broadcasting some of this energy over the past half decade. She's since blocked me on social media, but appears to be influencing my mother in law, who is cowed into just not saying anything about her at all. Back when we were talking, my impression was that she is, in general, kind of boring, and living a fairly boring, constrained life, lacking traditional middle aged woman outlets like running a church ministry, generating cultural output, and mentoring/getting help from younger women. She had a baby in her mid-thirties, and has been trying to "gentle parent" it, which sounded like it was going rather badly. I think she had the father of one of her children leave her for a man. I think there's a lot of sublimated anger going on, but the culturally approved expressions are only political. Rene Girard would probably have something useful to say about it.

Edit: Another woman I knew in Minnesota, who seemed generally like a nice person, had her husband and the father of her very young children decide he was a woman. She took her baby and toddler to pride demonstrations with her spouse, and posted about it online. That seems very stressful, but she probably can't really complain about it, he has the right to become a woman if he wants to, and seems to be still helping to care for the children. It's probably the Right's fault that the situation is uncomfortable.

It's probably the Right's fault that the situation is uncomfortable

Well yes, it is. Transgenderism and homosexuality are traditions in our culture dating back to Roman and Greek times. If we weren't being subjected to Judeo-Christian values, her ex-wife wouldn't have felt the need to repress being transgender in the first place. And it wouldn't be such a big deal for a relationship to end because one partner evolves. All of the supposed problems with that situation are caused by artificial right wing judeo-christian morality.

  • -20

And it wouldn't be such a big deal for a relationship to end because one partner evolves.

...? You're arguing that in the ancient world a woman with young children being abandoned by her husband wouldn't be a big deal?

nobody is being "abandoned", the trans parent can just continue parenting without pretending to be a perfect judeo-christian Family Man. What's the big deal? Most marriages end in divorce anyway. I would have preferred if my parents got divorced right away rather than screaming at each other for 15 years, and they were both transgender heterosexuals, they just didn't get along. Imagine growing up with a dad who was so cucked he wouldn't even let himself be the gender he wanted.

Edit: snowflake mods banned me, so don't bother responding. Imagine being so sensitive you call a slight difference of opinion "trolling"

You should ask Elagabalus how accepting the pagan Roman world was of gender non-conformity.

The difference is that the romans would just call Elagabalus a fag and laugh about it, then go back to having anal sex with their femboy harems. I wouldn't have to listen to endless christwoke virtue signalling about family values from coping closeted homos like JD Vance. People could just do what they want without the insufferable handwringing.

  • -12

Between this post and this one, I think it's obvious you are trolling and you've been given enough charity.

One week ban. Future bans will escalate sharply.

ETA Permabanned after threatening to troll harder if he was banned.

Since the Roman pagans accepted E's gender nonconforming hijinks for four years, we can call ancient world pretty accepting.

It would be unthinkable for medieval Christian ruler get away with such lifestyle even for four days.

Since the Roman pagans accepted E's gender nonconforming hijinks for four years, we can call ancient world pretty accepting.

That argument is not as strong as you might think. Roman emperors had a degree of liberty that regular Romans couldn't dream of.

The sole surviving roman novel is a comedy about roman men competing for the affections of a sixteen year old boy. I'm not sure about transgenderism, but pagan Rome does seem to have accepted homosexuality among the plebs.

If we weren't being subjected to Judeo-Christian values, her ex-wife wouldn't have felt the need to repress being transgender in the first place.

Just remember, folks, trans rights will not affect your ordinary lives at all! Ignore the sixteen dozen examples of where exactly that is happening, you're just imagining it, or making a big deal out of "the biological father claims to be the mother and wants that to be legally recognised", which is nothing at all exceptional, right?

I think there's a lot of sublimated anger going on, but the culturally approved expressions are only political. Rene Girard would probably have something useful to say about it.

Memesis? Please elaborate on your thought here.

I think she had the father of one of her children leave her for a man. I think there's a lot of sublimated anger going on, but the culturally approved expressions are only political. Rene Girard would probably have something useful to say about it.

Edit: Another woman I knew in Minnesota, who seemed generally like a nice person, had her husband and the father of her very young children decide he was a woman.

What the hey is happening in the Midwest? Is there something in the water (turning the frogs gay)? I'm not laughing at your relative or friend, this is a hell of a shock when your spouse/partner suddenly turns everything upside-down but if you don't treat them like the hero(ine) of the story then you are a bad wicked phobic bigot who needs to be cut out of everyone's life with your toxicity.

I think it's conceivable in the 2nd case that the man has long checked out of the marriage mentally and emotionally, knew that there is a heavy social and legal penalty for a man who abandons his family, but years of trans propaganda and the social normalization of transgenderism made him notice that him claiming to be a woman is the one option he has to shield himself from those penalties. In the first case I think there is also some chance that the man in question decided to just fake gayness.

Most simply, Germans/Scandinavians are hysterical conformists with a tendency to go Way Too Far on whatever the current dominant ideology is. Luckily this one doesn't seem to involve any panzers yet. The Midwest more generally is always about 5-10 years behind the coasts culturally (5 in big cities, closer to 10 elsewhere), so the Great Awokening is really hitting them now.

I'm sorry, but this is a profoundly historically uninformed take, and one almost hilariously so within the context of Minnesota. The Germans who settled Minnesota are, perhaps, the most decidedly non-conformist of the whole bunch, given that they're largely descendants of the failed revolutionaries, both liberal and socialist, who tried to make a constitutional German Empire back in 1848. You know, the Frankfurt Parliament, the "crown from the gutter" that Frederick Wilhelm IV rejected? That's why the Farmer-Labor Party has always had such a strong presence in Minnesotan politics, and you didn't see it go the way of the Dakotas, or Iowa or Missouri. These are the descendants of radicals and dissidents, not conformists.

>mfw Germans will literally have entire revolutions just so they can find an ideology that lets them be even more conformist

>mfw they did this like eight times

Though, to be fair, there was a properly independent-minded strand of German society that did emigrate here. You can see it in Texas, the Mountain West, rural Wisconsin, etc. In Minnesota it's drowned out by Sw*des and other Scandis, who are now the world's poster boy for "very nice but mildly stifling high-trust society that falls apart catastrophically the moment someone comes along and starts defecting."

Texas Germans are incredibly bureaucratic and conformist, they just vote republican. The Texas hill country is a Norman Rockwall painting with the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Hill Country, Fredericksburg, etc. are like that because they're affluent second home/tourist traps. Stay out late in a small town and you'll see the frontiersman admixture - or, as Mann's Satan quoted Bismarck, that "the German is never himself until he has half a bottle of champagne in him".

I think this is bubble effects for an affluent, socially liberal stratum. Trailer trash is also dysfunctional(as you presumably know well, you post about the Irish equivalent often enough), we just expect it because they're dysfunctional poor people. I have female relatives who would claim to have similar socially liberal beliefs but they won't walk the walk- when you've lost the internalized socially conservative views you'll fall for totally stupid stuff that usually affects the dysfunctional underclass.

Fifty year old upper middle class women being karens is the sort of thing that requires more of an explanation if they don't do it, you notice it from the left because of 1) lies about ICE and 2) media focus on the protestors, not what they're protesting against.

Case in point of the below discussion of algorithmically delivered biases, my recollection of 2020 was a constant stream of videos of 50 year conservative women acting crazy, which is the origin of the word Karen ime. It’s interesting if you at the same time were seeing a bunch of videos of 50 year old progressive women behaving badly. Maybe the conclusion is not that the conservatives or the liberals are ‘weaponizing’ 50 year old women but rather “the algorithms are driving everybody insane”.

Contra a few posters below, this isn’t nutpicking, and I consider that term to be more often an asymmetrical dodge than helpful clear thinking.

Why isn’t this nutpicking? Because it is pretty within the general zeitgeist of what is currently happening. It’s not some outlier story that doesn’t fit or alters the narrative.

Nutpicking would be focusing on the schizophrenic protesting ICE because Zorblog, king of the lizard people is behind it.

We have a coordinated group of activists doing stuff like this, at enough of a scale that it is controlling a large portion of the media and political reaction. This example might have some outlier characteristics, but it doesn’t distort, change, or amplify what’s in the water. And to dismiss it as an anecdote is to attempt to tell people that the clear pattern in front of the can’t be extrapolated from or examined.

We just had a comment about some apparently prominent guys blogpost about how him and his wife are basically spending their winter vacationing through these protests.

In isolation, Pretti is a ‘nut’. Statistically what can we infer from a divorced murse with a gun getting in confrontations with ICE. Good is a ‘nut’, a newly lesbian widow, with children form multiple fathers, who gets involved with blocking ice with her vehicle.

Yes every anecdote has nutty contours, and no nobody here has “statistics” on just how many Karen a Karenchuck can Karen.

But the leap is to then, “you can’t notice what’s happening, who’s doing it, and the effects it’s having” is less than useless. It’s active attempts to disperse conversation from reaching “conclusions”. Some of it is malicious, a lot is “um ackshully autistic im-so-smart contrarianism”, a lot is quokkas gonna quokka.

But this anecdote here is not baseless, not nutpicking, and we’re well past the hour of avoiding noticing social trends and associated demographics by calling it “just a few kids on college campuses” metaphorically or not.

I really don't comprehend how you and @The_Nybbler think the argument is "It's a few kids on college campuses" (well, I do, I think the attack is disingenuous, but that doesn't get us anywhere). No, it's a not a dodge. It's, as for example @Jesweez pointed out above, largely a matter of what you notice more (and what you choose to or want to notice). If you think bitches be crazy, you will see a lot of crazy bitches, and social media will feed you more and more of them. If you think specifically 50-year-old liberal women are losing their minds, you will see lots of 50-year-old liberal women losing their minds. If you think right-wing e-thots are on the rise, you will see lots of right-wing e-thots. I don't think I have to repeat myself about how easy it is to convince yourself that conspiratorial Jews or murderous black cannibals are everywhere.

Show me some "clear thinking" that shows specifically that 50-something women are increasing in both mental instability and liberalness because Minneapolis videos are trending.

Show me some "clear thinking" that shows specifically that 50-something women are increasing in both mental instability and liberalness because Minneapolis videos are trending.

I mean, the stats about progressive women's mental health tanking are out there. Its just whether you personally want to connect that, and other statistical facts with the viral videos and think the world makes sense. Or, if you think the videos are basically algo-slop and totally disconnected from progressive women's mental health, the fact that the governor of the state had been in Little Rock 1950s mode for 3 months, etc.

I really don't comprehend how you and @The_Nybbler think the argument is "It's a few kids on college campuses"

Because that's what they're getting told, and I'm getting told, and everyone who posts an example of 'real world effects' is getting told: this is nothing, this is just a few kids on college campuses, this is only an exceptional edge case, nobody is saying that, nobody is doing that, it won't and doesn't affect you at all, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam.

EDIT: Whoops, I forgot the ever-popular "Well nobody I know said/does/thinks that!"

Post example where this does have an effect on 'ordinary life' - get told 'you are engaging in boo outgroup'.

Post second example - get told 'why are you obsessing over this fringe trivial thing?'

Remaining options: continue trying to demonstrate with examples from real life why you think this is a big thing and get routinely slapped down for that, or shut up and go along with the new normal (the preferred outcome for those slapping you down, so they can then say in future 'well nobody is objecting to this so it's fine and okay and widely accepted').

Be stubborn, contrarian, slightly autistic, no social skills whatsoever, probably also slightly mentally deranged, and keep doggedly on with option number one in the full knowledge you'll get called all sorts of names and have all sorts of motives attributed to you. Not claiming superior virtue or higher principles, just being the stubborn, obstinate donkey that won't be drove as ever.

Do you think it can also be the case that people show videos of the kind of people they hate to argue that the kind of people they hate are all like this?

Of course they can, and they do it on both sides.

But I also think there comes a point where the denial of "there is nothing wrong" carries on even when the iceberg has smashed against the bow. "Well we're not underwater yet, it's just a few rooms in the front!"

Okay, so you think that indeed, GenX liberal women are going crazy en mass and I am doing "It's a few kids on college campuses" when I question whether a few viral videos is evidence of this?

See, I'm early Gen X/late Boomer, depending where you draw the generational line, and I feel more Gen X. So I see my cohort around me, and they're not making viral videos, but they sure are way more liberal, more woke if you want to call it that, with very little resistance to what is being imported from America.

I honestly cannot emphasise strongly enough the huge sea change in values and social mores over the past forty years, more particularly in the past twenty years. We've gone from the Magdalene Laundries to advice columns in the mainstream media with agony aunts dealing with questions such as "my friend goes after married men for affairs, I feel I can't handle this anymore" and "my husband is no longer interested in sex, should I divorce him or just have an affair?"

That's the 80s kids (Gen X) growing up, becoming adults, and adopting liberal cosmopolitan values from the outside world as mediated to us via movies, TV, the more socially liberal society of the UK next door, and aspirations to be just like the US where a lot of people emigrated to, then maybe returned during the Celtic Tiger era (which again, in the few dizzying years of 'we're rich! properly rich!' meant people got notions, as we say round here).

So, yeah. I'm here to say "it's only a few viral videos" does not cover the whole ground of what is going on.

I'm about the same age as you. I'm going to say that growing up in a country that had the Magdalene Laundries, you probably have seen a much more massive change than I have. That said, how many GenX women in Ireland are going viral like this?

I certainly see many of my generation going woke (especially women) but I see much greater numbers of Millenials, who are the ones I mostly see going diehard woke (along with Gen-Zers, but I'm still not really sure what to make of them yet). Clinton's and Harris's margins over Trump were very slim with GenX women compared to younger generations.

I am not arguing that wokeism "isn't a thing" or that we aren't seeing more radical polarization. Why do you think I have been so gloomy lately about that very thing? I was being very specific about the sort of nutpicking in the OP, who seems to be trying to make a very broad generalization about, specifically, older women. Do I think people protesting Trump or ICE are "a few kids on college campuses"? No. Do I think a few viral Karens, including Renee Goode et al, are? Statistically, yes.

I think we should be skeptical of "pattern-matching" a handful of tragi-comic figures who happen to look like your most mockable archetypal nemeses to some general demographic trend.

More comments

I agree with @OliveTapenade. This is nutpicking enabled by modern social media. When there's a probably smartphone within range of just about anything happening in public nowadays, you can be sure that any time someone gets loud, aggressive, crazy, or weird, someone will start recording it and uploading it. This enables anyone who wants to post a regular stream of Karens Going Crazy, Black People Doing Crime, White People Doing Racism, Gen Z Zombies, etc. etc. will have no trouble finding content.

We're not going to "mod-slap" you for this, though it does border on "Can you believe what Those People did this week?" I would prefer we not have endless threads about "Look at the latest crazy thing some people did that validates my biases" but to a certain extent I understand the urge to post the latest crazy thing Those People did.

you can be sure that any time someone gets loud, aggressive, crazy, or weird, someone will start recording it and uploading it

You say that as if it was a bad thing. Frankly the world would be a getter place if loud, agressive crazy and weird people got immediately slapped (literally or figuratively) but since that doesn't look to be happening, the best we can hope is at least some face negative consequences via such videos.

You say that as if it was a bad thing.

Not per se. But if my goal is "Prove that a certain subset of people is loud, aggressive and crazy" and I can find lots of videos of people being loud, aggressive and crazy and I am always looking for the subset of people I hate doing that, it suggests that when I post those videos and say "These people are loud, aggressive, and crazy" you should be skeptical.

Okay, so how about if someone posts videos of "look at group X doing all this loud, aggressive, crazy stuff!"

You retort "This is nutpicking, this is boo outgroup, why didn't you post videos of group Y and group Z as well if you're not trying to pick out that subset group X?"

But what if they can't find videos of group Y and group Z doing the same things, because groups Y and Z don't do that thing? If the only people playing basketball are all seven feet tall, then it's not discriminatory special pleading to only have videos of basketball matches where all the players are seven feet tall, and requiring "show me the five foot tall players before I believe you are not bearing a grudge against the seven footers" is an unachievable request.

Though I guess it is refreshing, for once, to have late middle-age white women be the outgroup being booed! I feel so seen and vindicated!

Okay, so how about if someone posts videos of "look at group X doing all this loud, aggressive, crazy stuff!"

You retort "This is nutpicking, this is boo outgroup, why didn't you post videos of group Y and group Z as well if you're not trying to pick out that subset group X?"

No, I retort "Is this a representative sample or did you go looking for videos of group X because you wanted to make a point about group X?"

Why are Karens screaming at ICE more representative than all the Karens getting screamed at by younger women for voting for Trump?

But what if they can't find videos of group Y and group Z doing the same things, because groups Y and Z don't do that thing?

That might be evidence that group Y and group Z are also not doing those things much. In the case of the crazy woke agitators, though, I'd be astonished if you couldn't find more than enough Millenials and Gen-Zers to fill your feed.

Some people will never figure out that no, it's not just a few kids on college campuses. Even when they make a podcast about how they're teaching it all in elementary schools.

It is not your personal obsessive counter-argument. It's a broader phenomenon, and in terms you might care about, it's "Why is the culture war manifesting like this?" Framed as the OP did, it's "Why are 50-year-old women like this?" Using a few videos as evidence that this is a phenomenon with 50-year-old women is shoddy thinking. You are capable of reasoning this out when your fingers aren't twitching reflexively to post insults.

In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now?

That's smack in the right era for Generation X, who grew up with tales of the counter-cultural heroism of their parents, lived through recession, and became more conservative and more nihilistic: the Grunge generation.

These women are now old enough that the kids are probably out of the nest, so they can take part in the kinds of protests their parents (may) have. Time to be socially important yourself now! Think of The Breakfast Club and how these women may see themselves as heroines of that movie.

The Breakfast Club ... heroines

Princess and Basket Case were heroines?

Basket Case became an elementary school teacher with a podcast.

That movie was "the kids are all right, teacher leave them kids alone". They all had backstories explaining why they were the way they were, and the over-rigid teacher trying to dragoon them all into conformity was the bad guy. Even the 'bad boy' was secretly sensitive under it all, remember?

So if you're the right age to have been watching the Brat Pack movies during your teens/early twenties, you'll be influenced by the role models there.

I was 10 in 85, I didn't see it in the cinema.

I prefer to think of them as negative examples with backstories they fail to rise above.

Even the 'bad boy' was secretly sensitive under it all

We should excuse the acting out?🤮

We should excuse the acting out?

That was the crux of the movie! Misunderstood kids, domineering adults who didn't understand them and used them as props in their own lives or ignored them.

To be fair, this is, what, three examples? I want to at least venture another hypothesis, which is that America is a very large country and there's always going to be, in most demographics, some small percentage of people who are crazy. As populations have increased, the absolute number of crazies has also increased, but the amount of space in the media spotlight has stayed the same. (In fact it may have shrunk, due to media consolidation, and the increasing nationalisation of politics.) This makes competition for attention more intense. In times of elevated public interest in this or that issue, the number of crazies trying to get attention by exploiting that issue will be high, and the existence of YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc., allows for rapid dissemination of memes, as well as a kind of survival of the fittest optimising for the most shareable.

So it may be that nothing in particular is wrong with women in their 50s, but that nonetheless the spectacle of entitled older women yelling at poor service workers is very memetically successful. There could be plenty of reasons for that - I suggest that the power differential is a big one, with older middle-class people with money holding power over younger and poorer frontline workers - but I suspect you can colour in those blanks yourself.

It may be worth, after all, the reminder that both white women and over-50s are demographics Trump won all three times. The specific intersection of women over 50 just barely favoured Harris, 50-49 in 2024, and if you restricted that to white women over 50, you'd get a win for Trump. So white women in their 50s are not, by national standards, a particularly Democratic demographic. What's going on with 50 year old women right now? Plausibly the answer is - nothing special.

It would be interesting to see what they would think if a large group of illegal mexicans with criminal records showed up to their Yoga class. The issue with this class of people is that their worldview doesn't add up. They want to live among white middle class people who want to invite the world. This will result in them living in world different from what they want.

The problem is that while this is very true, and while they may eventually realize their mistakes (emphasis on may; there are plenty of upper middle class white libs in places like Brazil and South Africa), by that point it will be far too late to fix anything - see Lebanon. So “I told you so” is at most a brief, meaningless future catharsis in a worse world. These people need to be removed from any power now.

This won’t be particularly substantive but hopefully it’s enough to avoid a mod-slap. Apparently a group of women customers accosted staff at a Minneapolis yoga chain and berated them for not having some sort of ICE signage up (presumably a “No ICE allowed” sign, as if ICE agents will be stopping in to do yoga).

FWIW, the idea that "If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem" is an idea that has been around for a while, at least since the 1960s. And while it holds a certain moral appeal, it's easy to see how it can be abused. In fact, it's very common for totalitarian governments to require average people to show support for the regime.

In all seriousness, psychologically speaking, what on Earth is going on with 50 year-old women right now?

That's an interesting question; in my own life I've definitely noticed that there is pattern of middle-aged women who get caught up in Leftist politics to the point where they are pretty crazy. Actually, my impression is that a lot of young women as well are going this route but it seems to be the middle aged women who are more active and aggressive.

Pure speculation, but I would guess that there are two main reasons. First, women as a group are much more prone to mass hysteria. Social media and smartphones act as a sort of consensus-building machine, with the average person having a lot of opportunity to be steeped in constant propaganda. Second, generally speaking it's really a lot of fun to be a young woman. When you are constantly being catered to by society, invited to do fun things, etc. there's less time to agitate and less feeling of dissatisfaction to blame on the outgroup. That being said, my sense is that young women these days harbor many of the same feelings about the Current Thing.

There's that Orwell quote from 1984 about the young women being the most fanatical supporters of Ingsoc and worshippers of Big Brother.


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