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The Culture War thread has been heavy on War and light on Culture of late so I thought I might offer this as something of palette cleanser.
I've been playing through the original Halo trilogy in split-screen co-op mode with my kids and while I hesitate to call one of the most successful franchises in video game history "underrated", I do feel like people sleep on just how tight and well executed the story-telling in it was.
Clint Hocking, whose work on the Far Cry franchise probably deserves its own essay, is credited with coining the term "Ludonarrative Dissonance" to describe a situation where in a video game's narrative elements are contradicted by the game's ludic elements IE the player experience. What Halo has is the opposite of this. A "Ludonarrative Harmony" if you will, where in the experience of playing the game reinforces its narrative themes and vice-a-versa and I don't think I consciously appreciated it until I was looking at it through fresh eyes. So lets talk about those themes...
The Year is 2552 and humanity is at war with an interstellar empire calling itself "The Covenant", a war that humanity is loosing. (Gamers of a certain age, please stand for your national anthem)
Our story begins with a lone starship, the Pillar of Autumn, fleeing a terrible battle and choosing to strike out into deep space rather than risk leading the foe back to Earth. The first lines of dialogue we hear in the entire franchise is our captain asking, "Did we lose them?" only to receive a negative response. In their flight our unwilling Argonauts have come upon the titular Halo, a Bishop Ring with a suspiciously Earth-like environment complete with California Redwoods and 9.81 ms^2 gravity. The ring was built by an extinct race known as "the Forerunners" (names in the Halo series tend to be a bit "on the nose") who the Covenant worship as divine beings. Mankind's Science and Intel officers believe that the ring might hold some secret that could change the course of the war and given that this is a war that humanity is not only losing but losing badly anything that might change the course of the war is naturally a top priority. And thus, we are introduced to our player character...
"Spartans" are surgically enhanced super-soldiers who are apparently kept on ice (IE in suspended animation) until needed. A "break glass in case of emergency" type deal. You, the player character, are woken to act as vessel/avatar for the Pillar of Autumn's resident AGI Cortana. Cortana being entirely software, cannot leave the ship or even press a physical button without someone to carry her and act on her behalf, and so she needs your help to investigate the ring, and by extension, hopefully save humanity.
Ultimately, Halo is "a big dumb shooter" in the same way that Gladiator is "a big dumb action movie". That is to say that, yes, it is big, it is dumb, but above all it is fun. and yet there's also a lot more going on under the surface for those inclined to dig which is where I feel the idea of "Ludonarrative Harmony" comes in.
One of fundamental problems that games like Wolfenstein and Call of Duty have is that it's very difficult to provide a narrative justification for why the player, an ostensibly base-model homo sapien, should be able to mow down multiple battalions worth of Nazis without getting mowed down in turn, or why some basic-bitch E-5 is constantly being offered the chance to shoot the cool gun or drive the fancy tank like they're some kind of make-a-wish kid. Halo neatly sidesteps this issue by giving a clear narrative reason for why you, the player, are so much more capable than the NPCs around you. You're a 6.8' hyper-athlete in power armor who has a benevolent super-intelligence riding shotgun in your head. This is sense of capability is further reinforced by how NPCs, both human and alien, react to you. Weaker enemies flee at your approach while friendly NPCs will cheer you on and will freak out if you die. Combine this with Jaime Griesemer's now famous "30 seconds of fun every 3 minutes" principle and what you get is a power fantasy that is not only exceptionally well executed but fully justified within the context of the narrative.
While this power fantasy is what makes Halo work so well as a "big dumb shooter" it exists in tension with the broader text of the narrative. Throughout the game, we are repeatedly reminded that humanity is on the back foot, that the Covenant are both more technologically advanced than humanity and more numerous. We do not know why they seem to be intent on eradicating us, only that they are. The human forces that we encounter during the campaign are almost always outnumbered. Covenant enemies and weapons, especially on higher difficulty settings, are almost always more deadly. Musical queues are either mournful or strident and desperate. There is this subtext to much of the dialogue that the ultimate fate of our intrepid crew will not be a triumphant homecoming. We are Spartans and the ring is to be our Thermopylae (I told you that names in the Halo series tend to be a bit "on the nose").
On its face value Halo is remarkably bleak and yet it also has something that I feel is sorely lacking in a lot of modern media. Sincerity.
As I've gotten older, and especially since having kids, I have found that I have less and less patience for deconstructionist takes, and subversion for subversion's sake. I don't want nihilism and moral ambiguity from my fiction. I get enough of that from studying history. What I want from my fiction is something to inspire and/or aspire to. Yes Halo is bleak, but it is also hopeful. And yes, I recognize that this sounds like a contradiction but it's not because what Halo's story is ultimately about is what do you do when faced with frightful odds or a seemingly hopeless situation? It's about what do you when your faith is shattered, and you find out that much of what you thought you knew about how the universe worked is revealed to have been a carefully crafted lie? It's about duty and loyalty. It's about the relationship between created and creator. It's that meme about "the masculine desire to perish in a heroic last stand" in video game form. It is all of these things, and I think that is why fans keep coming back to it.
I also don't think I properly appreciated any of this until I had the opportunity to experience it again through fresh eyes.
PS: As you might imagine I have opinions about the Paramount+ adaptation and subsequent games released after Howard and Griesemer stepped down, but that's material for a follow on post
I love pedantry and homonyms, and this is a meagre response to a good post. With that out of the way.
Musical cues, like signs or signals to act, not lines to wait in. Wait for your cue, not to be confused with waiting in a queue.
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On TV Tropes they call this "gameplay and story integration" as opposed to "segregation".
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The whole series (up until that one sequel. You know which one) is a perfect example of building on success after success, improving your product whilst maintaining the core of its appeal. This is something most series (including TV and movies, not just games) of the last, I dunno, 15 years have really failed to achieve.
And the Apotheosis is in Halo: Reach, in my genuine opinion, the one that you went into knowing you were gonna end up losing, but the whole endgame was to get the Pillar of Autumn off-planet to kick off the series of events that led to ultimate victory. So its not just perishing in a heroic last stand, you get to perish in a last stand while, as the player, knowing that the sacrifice achieves something very meaningful.
ODST is my personal favorite because it breaks the power fantasy a bit and puts you in a position where you're actually NOT an unadulterated force of nature, your arrival on the battlefield would not singlehandedly shift the tides, and indeed you're kind of in survival mode most of the time because some of the enemies are a major threat to you. Lets you appreciate how dangerous the Spartans are, and also fills in the lore to remind you that there's a whole-ass military involved in this war beyond the special forces. I, personally am a sucker for video games that put you on the ground level and have you experience major events up close even while you, personally, are not the catalyst of said events. ODST scratched a lot of itches for me.
You also didn't mention one of the more iconic and important parts of the game: The Flood.
Their introduction is like the perfect and then things got worse late-game plot device to amp the difficulty, and of course a perfect answer/resolution to the existence of the Halo rings themselves.
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For years, my favourite video game ever was the game Bungie released immediately prior to this one, Oni, a Western spiritual adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. I believe Oni and Halo were developed concurrently, to the point that many art assets, sound effects and musical cues are used in both. Other overlaps in storytelling (e.g. AIs who have rebelled against their owners are said to have gone "rampant") imply that the two games are set in the same universe, to the point that Oni may be a stealth prequel to Halo.
Oni's art design, soundtrack and storytelling still hold up. Alas, I can't say the same about the gameplay. Double-tap the W key to run? What were they thinking?
Rampancy shows up in Marathon, too; it's kinda a general theme for that era of Bungie. Would make things interesting as a fan theory, though.
Oni's weird control scheme comes downstream from the melee and grappling combat, and how they borrowed from 2d beat-em-ups like River City Ransom. If you played the game like that, it worked reasonably well, if a bit repetitive toward the last missions. It's still nearly twenty years out of date compared to z-targeting from Legend of Zelda or the intentionality and diverolls from Souls-likes, but a melee-only run doesn't feel awful. It's the combination of gun combat and too-big rooms that push you to playstyles where it's incredibly annoying.
The story was fantastic, though. The Doadan is a great metaphor and plot device, and it's one of the few games to make a decision like Griffin feel genuinely right one way or the other.
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While it’s on a completely different plane (although both are notably enjoyed by stoners) I think sincerity is also the key to the durable appeal of SpongeBob.
SpongeBob came of era in the shadow of peak Simpsons and was really the opposite — a totally straight and earnest vibe.
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Halo 1 (don't remember the sequels as much) is also a fundamentally fascist story. A white-coded "Spartan" single-handedly fights off the aliens intent on destroying the universe at the behest of their superstitious foreign cult. The Flood actually infect the humans like a disease. The xenophobia is celebrated and written into the script, with the Oorah US military as the good guys mercilessly slaughtering thousands of aliens.
I understand the sequels try to add more nuance into the politics of the aliens, but a lot of the sincerity of Halo 1 is the unapologetic roleplaying of a xenophobic warrior-ethos that you won't find in modern games. Wolfenstein of course is an anti-fascist story.
Interestingly the main enemy of Halo 1 is the "Covenant", so it is indeed subversive but subversive in a totally different vector than you see in modern games. Destroy the Covenant to save Civilization from the Aliens looking to destroy it!
Edit: Went a little more into the meaning of the Covenant:
Inb4 "Joo obsessed":
From Wikipedia:
So my revisiting of the symbols in Halo 1 with a more mature perspective was on-point before finding verification of that interpretation.
But yeah, one of the biggest set pieces of Halo 1 is the Covenant ship Truth and Reconciliation in which you infiltrate and kill them all! It was subversive but from the opposite angle of Wolfenstein.
I think the novelty of this was part of why Helldivers II did so well. It's unapologetic, but rides the line on being tongue-in-cheek about it.
Yeah I thought about calling out Helldivers II even though I've never played it. My understanding is it's more of a Starship Troopers phenomenon where the writers were trying to subvert the "xenophobic warrior-ethos" but they accidentally made it too cool so that players unironically like it. So I would call that more of a subversion that backfired, in contrast with the sincerity of Halo 1.
Or maybe, most likely of all, they were trying to cash-in on that pulse while having plausible deniability!
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The interesting thing about Halo and the TV show 24 is how they were both thematically and tonally a perfect fit for the aftermath of 9/11 and the beginning of the war on terror, even though they were both written before it happened.
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Oh wow, I remember playing Halo with my young nephew lo, these many years ago.
We didn't manage to finish the game since he had to go back home with his parents but it was fun.
And I still think Pillar of Autumn is a very beautiful name for a ship, when the tendency (both then and now) was to go for the likes of Terran Defence Force Starship GrimDark or HumansHellYeah!
I can't forgive Microsoft for making its first stab at virtual assistant so annoying and usurping the name of Cortana to do so.
Bungie is a master at epic sounding names.
Treads Upon Stars
One Thousand Voices
Patron of Lost Causes
Thistle and Yew
Extraordinary Rendition
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The single-player/co-op experience was pretty masterful, although I'm with the people who got too bogged down by the downer Flood levels to look forward to replaying it very much. I can't remember the specifics, but for the first playthrough and story-wise, the Flood were definitely a cool part though.
But in-person multiplayer Halo was crazy, just for how many more people it brought into gaming. I was loving broodwar and unreal tournament, and didn't fully get the appeal of PvP Halo 1 (other than the sticky grenades which were peak). But it was pretty awesome how galvanized people were to link up like 15 xboxes between a whole floor of college dorm rooms for it. Or working at a movie theater in the summer, having most of the employees show up at 1am to set up 3 xboxes and projectors to play on the giant screen. This kind of normie / less-smelly console version of LAN parties, where many girls actually found it cool, was a strange brief time (right before xbox live & online console gaming took off).
POV: we have master chief at home (CoD)
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I hear sometimes gamers talking about how Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were these seminal games and huge steps forward for what was possible in shooters, especially in terms of story. I don't know about that. I never finished either game. I remember trying Half-Life in my teens, finding it boring, and quickly giving up.
But Halo...
Halo was magic. I first played it on a friend's X-Box, and it was captivating. My experience of shooters before that were games like Goldeneye 007 on N64, or Wolfenstein 3D and Doom demos that we installed on all the school PCs, or Aliens vs Predator at home. Halo felt like a step into another world. It felt like it wasn't just awkwardly trying to evoke a setting I knew better from elsewhere. Its gunplay flowed smoothly and its enemies felt capable and intelligent. Its world felt real - there were characters, and there was atmosphere. I eventually badgered my parents into getting me an X-Box and I spent a lot of time playing it.
One of Halo's big innovations, which I'm not sure it gets enough credit for, is having a narrator or perspective character giving you voiced feedback during gameplay. Half-Life gets credit for in-engine cutscenes, but firstly those actually predate Half-Life in shooters, and secondly, even in Half-Life, those were moments where you stopped and watched something happening. Moreover, Gordon Freeeman was a silent protagonist, so it felt like just watching a cutscene only you can move the camera around. Whatever.
The Master Chief is also more-or-less a silent protagonist, but it doesn't matter, because the real first-person-narrator of Halo is Cortana, and it feels like Cortana is constantly talking to you, the player. And she talks during normal gameplay. She usually shuts up during gunfights, but before and after the fight begins, she comments on what just happened, on where you're going next, and on what this mysterious space station might be for. Cortana's feedback lets you know how to emotionally react (she goes "ahh!" at scary things, "wow!" at impressive things, "aww..." at sad things), while also keeping you on mission by constantly reminding you where to go next.
Most shooters felt very lonely, prior to Halo. Explore an environment, kill everything. Halo puts a little buddy in your head, and that created a sense of direction, investment, and storytelling through gameplay. Go somewhere, Cortana sees what you see, she helps you interpret it. Nowadays the mission control character or intercom girl is a cliché, but I think it worked really well in Halo. The missions where you don't have any commentator buddy feel silent and threatening because of it; the missions where you don't have Cortana, but have 343 Guilty Spark instead, feel slightly off. They use the dramatic device for all it's worth.
In shooters before Halo, environments felt artificial, and like just stages for killing things that you wandered around. Halo made every place you go feel purposeful. You are raiding this facility to retrieve a map. You are assaulting this alien spaceship to rescue a prisoner. You are exploring this swamp in search of a missing team of marines. You have objectives.
It felt like an animated world I was actually inhabiting. I give it tremendous credit and think it was a huge, paradigm-shifting step forward for shooters.
And yes, its story, though very basic (and I recommend ignoring people who tell you all about the Halo EU and the Forerunners; it's all so much garbage), was good and effectively appealed to what every teen boy wants to be. Halo is a story about being a soldier-explorer. It is about being this powerful masculine figure, on the front line or even behind enemy lines, resourcefully overcoming obstacles, and standing in between danger and the people you care about. And it does it with total, unapologetic sincerity. Halo does have some comedy in it (oh, grunts, you silly little buggers), but that comedy never comes at the expense of the protagonist. Halo believes in the Master Chief, which is to say, Halo believes in you.
I do legitimately think Half-Life is a groundbreaking shooter, and fun and engaging enough to be worth playing through to the end. I loved Half-Life 2 on release, but a lot of that came down to novelty: it was the first successful video game with an even passably realistic physics engine, and the facial animation was (if you'll pardon the pun) jaw-droppingly impressive – it still looks better than plenty of games released 10 or 20 years later. But the way the game introduces a whole new mechanics set every two hours is a bit gimmicky. I rather think it peaks early on in the fourth mission on the riverboat.
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I am in the unusual position that I was working on a commercial FPS when Half-Life came out in November 1998, and it had an immediate and dramatic impact on our game and all the game design that followed. Halo, later, also had some influence (specifically the rise of Halo's shield recharging mechanic for health, a heavier reliance on drivable vehicles with physics breaking up FPS levels, and limited weapon carrying), but the difference in impact between the two, at least on designers, was stark.
So let me lay out some things that Half-Life ushered in. I'm not going to try to convince you to actually like the game, but I think it's worth noting its impact.
So, the organic story telling in first person, with the camera NEVER leaving the protagonists head, was arguably something that was specifically native to games and genuinely felt new. This is actually a feature that has not often been much copied, interestingly - it's can be a really powerful aesthetic choice, but it means throwing out tons of other techniques from film for story telling. (Technically the player does black out part way through the game, and then is hauled somewhere by soldiers, so one could quibble a bit about how uniformly this constraint was followed)
This is tied in with something else HL did. Valve intentionally made the levels smaller than comparable FPS games, they made the loading times shorter, and they strung together the entire experience physically from start to end (well, until teleportation and Xen). So the player almost never loses the ability to connect where they've traveled in their head. Black Mesa ends up being, to a first approximation, one giant long thread running through space. This combines mandatory first person to make a uniquely organic experience. This is also a really severe constraint that was generally not followed by other, later games.
And then, because of these constraints, Valve worked through finding a ton of ways to provide variety in levels within the context that Black Mesa was going to be one seamless whole, instead of globe trotting to various disconnected venues. And so that meant experiential variety in level design was all variations on the various science / nuclear / industrial underground and the parched desert over ground, and the overall experience swung the player through the various environments in a particular way, building both variation and repetition to further foreground the seamless base experience. As before, this wasn't really copied broadly.
The raw game design in Half Life is also more surprising and interesting than people generally note. Parts of the game feel very much like early survival horror, with very low resources and zombies and bull squids and other disgusting aliens, and with a shattered and collapsing and dangerous environment. Parts of the game feel like an early tactical shooter with the soldiers and their aggressive AI, quite famously. But a lot of the game is quiet, and it feels more like the sort of environmental puzzle design of Out of this World or Ico, say. There's a lot more novel and varied non-enemy interaction with the game world than many other shooters of the time or since, and all of the design is organic - the designers expect the player to fiddle with the world, prod it, explore it, and puzzle out what they're supposed to do and how to do it. The lack of an invasive narrator or HUD pre-parsing the world for the player is a huge aspect of the game. The quietness and loneliness was a major part of the experience of feeling like you were having to figure it all out yourself. It has a specific element of play in its design, with finding out what to do being a core part of playing. In this sense, I think Half-Life was much more influenced by Mario 64 (which came out two years before) than most people realize. Anyway, this specific kind of organic interactive level design was very much not picked up by subsequent shooters. And the wide breadth of genres that Half-Life embedded in its levels (which often changed at quite slow scales - many of the various chapters in the game leaned one way or another) was also something that was not copied by most subsequent shooters, which tended to lean more narrowly towards variations within the shooter (tactical or otherwise) formula, and tended towards being much more directive to keep mainstream players from ever being lost or not knowing what they were supposed to be doing.
The way that Half Life treated pacing, especially in the earlier parts of the game where it works best, is, I think, something else that's often gone overlooked. This shows up in all sorts of large transitions over the course of the game, but I think it's most evident in one specific transition that did massively effect other later games, but often without them understanding why it worked. The earlier parts of the game have, as I said, a more survival horror feel, especially the enemies, who honestly don't seem that different from Quake 1 monsters. This establishes a certain pace and rhythm. This means that when soldiers finally show up (in We've Got Hostiles, I think), and they're positioned in special mini-deathmatch maps, and they move so fast and aggressively, and the game provides them with multiple paths and cover in mini-deathmatch maps, essentially, and they have radio chatter to show off that they are thinking and communicating... all of these features came together to provide an incredible experience in late 1998 about what AI could be in the future of FPS games. And in that sense, that experience totally changed how FPS games would be made going forward... so there, Half-Life was massively influential. BUT, at least from my perspective (as someone who worked on technical game design and AI in FPS games specifically), a lot of what made that experience so incredible at the time was actually about stage craft - about pacing, and about contrast, and about player feedback, and about level design that helped heighten the player experience of how shocking and different and aggressive that new kind of AI fighting was. But those styles of design, this stage craft, did not tend to be copied by later games... and indeed, even Half-Life struggled with it later in the game, where chapters like On a Rail or Surface Tension often dropped the pacing and framing work and just put soldiers in halls or other generic environments over and over, to less appealing aesthetic effect.
Half-Life also really stressed something like themed physical areas that were novel specifically because of large scale, singular interactive features. Here I'm thinking about Blast Pit, with its giant blind tentacle boss that just kind of exists in the middle hub of the level, not confined to an end of level or cutscene. It exists organically. Same with the giant boss who exists in Power Up, who you have to eventually electrocute. Same for the pervasive trains in On a Rail. Half-Life had a tendency of trying to foreground these kinds of novel, space-based interactivities and make this part of how they handle pacing. And again, in my experience, this was not a kind of design that was much picked up on, in a general sense (obviously games like Call of Duty have had set pieces, but there's something distinct, at least in my opinion, about the kinds of large scale, long term interactivity that I'm thinking about in Half-Life)
For more things that were heavily influential... the Barney's following you around as NPC buddies, and doing a credible job of being somewhat helpful and building player empathy was novel for the FPS space at the time, especially how it was implemented. So that was obviously influential. But with that said, the thing that made the Barney's appealing (namely, they were allowed to be killed, and the game didn't end just because they had bad luck or were being idiots) was often not copied for quite a while, meaning many later FPS games forced you to babysit an idiot to make sure the game didn't randomly end. So that was an important difference that was often not picked up.
I honestly think, though, that the most far reaching influence of Half-Life, really, was how it ushered in a kind of FPS design that was vastly more linear, with a much, much higher density of one-off scripted events. The kinds of shooters I was working on prior to the release of Half Life were much more influenced by Doom - so levels tended to have keys and buttons and switches, and they would unfold and interconnect over the course of traversing a level. It's a kind of design that's still popular in games like Dark Souls, although in Doom on a level scope. And this kind of design had a bunch of cool features (especially with Doom's insanely fast running speed), but it meant a lot of backtracking and players getting lost or stuck, and it meshed poorly with rich linear story telling. As a practical matter, Half Life actually still had plenty of this kind of design too. But the idea it really hammered home was the idea of levels being more linear (while hiding that linearity through clever visual design) and then keeping players entertained by experiencing scripted events that were singular. It was a style of design that converged towards the experience of hopping on a haunted house ride and then being pulled along to all the exciting string of encounters. This specific aspect of Half-Life absolutely shaped the game I was working on at the time, and all subsequent FPS games I worked on or was proximate to.
As a practical matter, Half-Life reminds me very much of Super Mario Brothers (as an absolutely pivotal side scroller) and Mario 64 (as a pivotal 3d platformer). In each case, the game was monumentally significant, and had a huge influence on a genre that would come to be dominant... but in each case, it was also the case that the developers were asking like 30 different giant, deep, fascinating questions, doing all sorts of weird stuff, and eventually the genres they cast such a long shadow in settled down to much less particular and unusual designs. Most of the interesting things Half-Life was doing were not picked up by the games it influenced.
In a number of cases, that was a good thing.
The combination of puzzles and highly-costly information is unfun. A number of the puzzles require you to commit suicide in order to gain the necessary intel. The one where you have to lure an alien into a Tesla coil, for instance - AFAIK, the only way to figure out that the Tesla coil is there is to run past the alien, get cornered in the Tesla coil, and die like a bitch, hopefully not before you figured out what the bad-graphics thing you're looking at actually was.
Puzzles plus permanently-missable information are also not nice. The part where you have to fire the rocket into the alien, for instance, has the main clue come from a Barney, who is hard to hear and AFAIK only gives it once - and you can easily save after that, without a way to progress.
And I mean, it's not like there weren't puzzle games already! LucasArts had been doing them forever, and Zork Nemesis was a 3D puzzle game in '96. Half-Life was only an innovation in trying to be both an FPS and a puzzle game at the same time, and frankly it's an object lesson in why they often don't play nice together.
(I will say, a lot of the problems it has were obviously fixable, just not with the technology - particularly the graphics - of the time. In-game maps - even literal floor diagrams, like the ones present in buildings IRL for evacuation purposes - would have helped so much.)
On the other hand, I will note one thing about HL, and particularly to @OliveTapenade - Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod.
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Maybe this is just tedious nitpicking, but... was that actually new? Did it feel new?
I cannot recall ever leaving the protagonist's head in Doom or Wolfenstein 3D or Marathon. I don't seem to recall that happening in Descent much (I guess short cutscenes of your spaceship escaping?), or in System Shock. Quake doesn't take you out of the marine's head, and Dark Forces never breaks up its gameplay. All its in-level storytelling is environmental. I don't think you leave Bond's head much in Goldeneye. Maybe I'm crazy here, but seeing the entire game from the first person perspective seems to me like it was industry standard in 1998. Games after Half-Life seem to have been the same, to me? 1999's Aliens versus Predator does the same thing; it's not until 2001's AVP2 that they introduced story cutscenes. If anything, I feel like it's leaving the player character's head for a cutscene that was the innovation!
Are you counting a text screen introducing the mission before it starts as 'the camera leaving the protagonist's head'? Because thinking back to the time, I don't remember feeling like Half-Life did anything new with the camera, and looking back today... I'm sorry, I just don't see it.
I am trying my best not to be biased. I admit that I don't like Half-Life and, no insult to you intended, I find the praise profusely heaped upon it somewhat irritating. Of course, whether or not I like Half-Life is a completely different question to whether it was an influential game, and I am probably subconsciously motivated by just not wanting a game that I didn't enjoy to be important.
Even so, it is nonetheless true that even doing my best to set all bias aside, when I think about the shooters that were popular in the years immediately before Half-Life, and I think about the shooters that were popular immediately afterwards, I don't feel a big difference.
I do see a difference between what I think of as the early shooters, through the 90s, and then the post-2000 modern shooters. I can see the difference between, say, Quake II (1997) and Doom III (2004). Something changed in shooters around the turn of the millennium, and the two most famously influential games in that transitional period are Half-Life (1998) and Halo (2001). I suppose I'm just, in the end, not sure that Half-Life was the cause of this transition or of it was one among a number of games experimenting with the genre (because, let's be honest, the shooter genre had gotten pretty stale by 1997), and it was the most famous in hindsight.
Subjectively from my end, the key thing, I guess, is that I remember playing Half-Life in the 90s, getting bored after a level or two, and thinking, "meh, that was whatever". It felt to me at the time as just another one of the interchangeable shooters in a genre that seemed increasingly out of ideas. But then playing Halo in 2001 felt like playing something from the future. It seemed revolutionary to me. Now, maybe that's just because of the X-Box, or because something had changed in me in the years 1998-2001 which made me receive it differently, or some other alchemy of chance and circumstance. But for better or for worse, that is what I remember.
The innovation is that in Half-Life, cutscenes are happening around you while you remain in first-person, and they don't all involve fighting, and they're all animated (instead of being "switches", text or terminals). The entire train ride at the start was so impressive, it showed you how the game engine was capable of doing much more than shooting and flipping switches. NPCs in shooters before were just linked to rudimentary routines that would dictate their actions all of the time, but in Half-Life their actions could be scripted and they could be animated to do all sort of movements that were not in their routines, which means at any moment you could be surprised by turning a corner and seeing one do something you've never seen them do.
The enemy AI was interesting in that the routines felt more organic than anything else before. The smarter enemies had rudimentary concepts of team tactics, and seemed to have an understanding of using cover. Halo would develop that much further. But outside of those moments, of that trick of showing the cutscenes in first person, and those carefully prepared moments where you fought the military in a space they could use to showcase their tactics. I'll grant you the gameplay wasn't too special. Guns didn't feel great to me, and the map was just a long corridor disguised to not look like one when everything's said and done. But those two tricks were extremely impressive in 1998.
Hrm! I'm curious as to what games have your favorite guns?
From roughly that era: Doom, Dark Forces, Quake and Soldier of Fortune.
Doom: the shotguns, chaingun and rocket launcher
Quake: double barelled shotgun and the grenade launcher
Dark Forces: the stormtrooper rifle
Soldier of Fortune: about everything
To me, gunfeel in games is half in the gun's sound and animation, and half in the targets' reaction to being shot. Half-Life's guns to me feel like they all miss one or both of those aspects. I know people love headshotting the headcrabs with the shotgun, but to me the hit felt spongy, like it never connects quite right. Maybe it's a limitation of the engine, you couldn't quite draw the kind of gore explosion of Doom's 2D sprites in a 3D FPS until the improvements in Soldier of Fortune, and polygonal gibs like in Quake were a bit goofy for a game that otherwise tried to look realistic.
We agree on what gunfeel consists of, but I think HL has some very good ones. Blasting aliens with the shotgun feels excellent. The huge revolver too. I struggle to think of any examples of downright bad gunplay in HL. I think it's generally quite spot on. Maybe not quite on the level of SoF, which was pretty epic.
Edit: typo.
Half Life 2 is one the few games that capture how “ugly” assault rifles and grenades feel in real life. It’s like the video game equivalent of Heat
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As someone who was a teenager gamer when these games came out, I'll add on to agreement with this. Halo was certainly a great, innovative accomplishment in singleplayer fps design, but it doesn't really compare to Half Life in that respect. It'd be like comparing Half Life to Doom or Wolfenstein 3D.
I will say, though, that HL2's ushering in of the era of rollercoaster singleplayer FPSs was an utter travesty. Even as a teenager, I could recognize how vastly inferior HL2 was to 1 in level design, making everything feel completely artificial in how it felt like Valve was sitting over my shoulder and ordering me to "Go there, not there, only here, etc." instead of shoving me into an immersive setting where I have to use my wits and tools to map out the terrain and navigate it successfully. Unsurprisingly, Ravenholm was by far my favorite part of HL2 (and I have very little love for horror games or horror tropes), and I still consider HL2E2 as the best singleplayer FPS I've played, with only maybe Metroid Prime being in the conversation as a competitor.
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Great post!
I pretty much agree with everything, though you're describing a few things that were new to me because I've never been a game developer.
I actually played through Half-Life again last year. The 1998 version, not Black Mesa (that game had annoying mouse acceleration issues). It holds up pretty well, and it's still good fun, even when you take the nostalgia glasses off. The variability in the level design surprised me though. It became more apparent to my more experienced eyes that a few of the levels in the second half of the game are pretty sloppily, borderline amateurishly put together, IMO. Maybe they ran out of time for polish before the deadline. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
TV Tropes has a YMMV trope called "Disappointing Last Level" for when the end of the game doesn't live up to the same standard as previous sections. The ending of Half-Life where Gordon travels to an alien planet called Xen is such a notorious letdown that this trope used to be called "Xen Syndrome".
IMO it wasn't just Xen. There's some odd sections before that, like when you're going through the hydraulic stamping machines and when you're calling in artillery fire outdoors. Those were some that stood out to me.
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I think I heard Xen suffered from that (Black Mesa tried to "fix" this and utterly ruined it by packing way too much content there - I quit after 2+ hours in Xen, likely only a few hours away from the ending, having grown fatigued of that area). It's kinda crazy to think that
HL2(correction: HL) came out just 2 years after Quake, the game whose engine it was partially built off of (I believe id gave Valve access to some Quake 2 engine material too). In 24 months, they had to put all of that together, enough levels to fill 15-20 hours. Compare that to the amount of content that games with 5+ year development times have today, when building using far more mature engines and tools, as well as well-established blueprints for game design.HL2? You mean, HL (1998) came out two years after Quake (1996). I heard the same thing; HL was built on a mix of Q and Q2 engines.
Too many cooks in the kitchen these days, maybe. It's a little odd how much more time everything is taking. Implementing a set of ideas shouldn't take 3x longer just because you need more advanced graphics. More hires should be able to get that task done in a set amount of time, and they do hire tons of people these days.
Similarly to how more women should be able to birth a child in a set amount of time.
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I think people too often forget that video games as an avenue for storytelling is actually a fairly recent thing in the full analysis of its history. John Carmack (one of the co-creators of the original Doom) once said: “… story in a video game is like story in a porn movie. You assume it’s there somewhere in the background but it’s not primarily why you watch it…”
I never thought Halo had a great story - I thought it was boring at best; but it was most definitely fun playing when it originally came out. And when it spawned off Rooster Teeth and the creation of Red vs. Blue, its capacity for storytelling expanded into other areas.
Childhood favorites of mine like MK2 on the Sega Genesis were iconic for the blood and violence every physically energetic young boy could exact on his opponent. Steve Ritchie had one of the greatest in-game voices ever performed for a video game. He was actually a legend in the pinball scene who once said he regretted playing the voice of Shao Kahn; because he would go to pinball events and conferences and nobody in the Q&A ever wanted to ask him about pinball stuff; fans of his came because they always wanted to ask him about the voice of Shao Kahn. I think overtime he came to accept it with a smile and just go with the flow.
Oh, great. We're now at the age where we have to explain who John Carmack is.
As a zoomer, I'm more familiar with him via this quote than I am with his games. Though I have played a little bit of DOOM.
How does a zoomer choose a Star Control reference for a username?
It's a classic video game that is still very playable today vis-a-vis graphics and can be obtained for free from Steam as Ur-Quan Masters, I don't find it particularly surprising.
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How did I only just now realize that the Mortal Kombat voice is also the Black Knight voice.
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I don't know if this is true across modern media, but modern Hollywood is definitely poisoned by irony. If you won't take your movie seriously, why should I?
From Lays of Ancient Rome:
Sadly, I was never able to play Halo (or other highly acclaimed FPSs like Bioshock) due to an unusually high sensitivity to motion sickness; I wanted to throw up after 30 minutes.
I am not super prone to motion sickness in general, but I have historically dealt with it in first-person video games. Modern, high-FPS (120+ frames per second) gaming monitors really do help.
Edit: Also, adaptive synchronization, where a game doesn't drop to a de facto 30 FPS as soon as it falls below 60, is a big part of that.
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I really wanted to work Macaulay's poem into the post somewhere but in the end I elected to call it and just ship what I had in the interests of getting something out.
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Ludonarrative dissonance is, as far as i can tell, fully accepted terminology at this point. Clint saw a phenomena that we all felt and put a (kinda nerdy) name to it. Culture was formed when he decided he wanted to talk about why we kill everyone who looks at us funny in games yet we are the protagonist.
Anyway, Halo 3 was the only one i played a bunch of, and it must have been 20 years ago now, jesus. The stand out feature for my young mind was the online service, xbox live. Original xbox live chat was so far removed from any modern version of internet culture that it would baffle the sensitive minds of todays youth. Taking offense to something was a sign of weakness (as it ultimately is) and talking shit was just part of the game (rip).
blah blah blah i wish i could still call people retarded yada yada im old and lame.
God Xbox live. Great time to be a teenager. I remember the tea bagging after killing or getting killed.
There was about a 1.5 year period when I was had a passionate love affair with Halo 3 on 360, the last time I devoted any amount of time into an online competitive shooter. I've heard that they've become a lot more sanitized since then, and it's a bit sad that kids these days don't get to have that only weakly-filtered experience of calling and being called "nigger," "faggot," and the occasional "kyke" regularly in a light-hearted competitive environment. The world would likely be a much better place if that were a much more common experience.
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I brought up Ludonarrative Dissonance specifically for the purpose of positing an opposite "Ludonarrative Harmony" which is an idea that as far as I tell is far less accepted but the phenomena is no less real.
ok and i talked about videogames. are we mad at eachother?
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Well put, and refreshing as intended. Truly great games, and I agree with the sincerity and simplicity. I was recently thinking about this quote from the author of Redwall on how he approaches his good guys and villains:
I think this is the key area where modern narratives have lost the plot. Without a backdrop if simple black and white narrative, deconstructive takes just become overly meta BS. It was interesting at first, now it has devoured the platform it stood on.
Also, from a gameplay standpoint, the Forge mode and custom maps on Halo 3 was genius. In general, like with Warcraft 3 or Skyrim, when a game allows for custom maps it often goes incredibly well, and a ton of genius works get produced. I had a blast on those custom maps back in the day.
And then he wrote Folgrim the Otter, Veil the Ferret, and perpetual fan-favorite Romsca.
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Its funny you should mention that because ironically I feel like the original Halo trilogy has one of the better executed "are the baddies really the baddies?" twists in recent memory.
Spoilers for a 20-year-old game & tie-in novel, but you spend a decent portion of Halo 2 playing from the Covenant's perspective, and it was a complete blindside. That said, the reveal that that the two sides have been manipulated into fighting each other by malicious (some might say daemonic) forces allows the real "baddies" to be be "the baddies", and the individual characters who valued life and fought with honor to still be "the goodies" of a sort even if circumstances had placed them on opposing teams.
Fair I totally forgot most of the plot I have to admit. But still, Halo FEELS like one of those stories at least.
I agree that it FEELS like one of those stories and because our heroes, the Master Chief, Sgt Johnson, the Arbiter, Et Al are all unambiguously heroic.
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I think Halo has a genuine love for people who, out of a sense of principle, heroically place themselves in the way of danger for the sake of their people. The potential for sympathetic Elites, therefore, was there from the very first game. Elites are pretty obviously to the Covenant what you are to the humans, so even if they are on the opposite side, they are displaying the virtues that this game esteems - courage, discipline, self-sacrifice, honour. Once the lies were exposed, of course they became co-heroes.
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There's also a more esoteric level in what's going on. I recommend Mandalore gaming's Marathon Review/Bungie Rabbithole series on youtube, though it does review just about everything except Halo. Bungie were very into the heroic myth, the archetype that Masterchief plays into. His name, John 117, is a reference to the book of revelations (written by John) 1:17. The verse reads, "I am the first and the last" and sure enough he is the last Spartan II...
I am familiar with Mandalore's work and I am a fan.
I thought so but I didn't spy any links to it in the post so I thought it was worth bringing up.
I had a bunch of additional stuff that I would have liked to have mentioned, but I also wanted to get the post done in a reasonable amount of time.
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Bungie comes by it honestly, given how they cut thier teeth on such luminaries as 'Pathways to Darkness' and later on 'Marathon', which the first teasers for Halo hinted directly at. And both of those games are quite the rabbit hole in and of themselves...
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The division of societal surplus in the gerontocracy
One oft-repeated epithet on the left is that we ought to be working 10-20 hours a week due to productivity increases. I always found that this is kind of funny or misguided, as we have kind of done just that - we just decided to give the surplus of productivity to the old (30+ year boomer retirements with eye-watering healthcare costs and redistributive transfers) and the young (10+ years of schooling and an adolescence that now almost lasts until you are 30).
I often think about how societal surplus is spent. If you look at the fastest growing sectors in most western countries, it's almost always healthcare and related professions. This is probably due to a whole host of factors but a big one is something akin to the median voter theorem; the median voter is most western countries is now very old and wants a lot of money spent on healthcare. Hence you get 10% to almost 20% of GDP (in the US!) going to that. As someone in their late 20s who hasn't seen a healthcare professional in more than a decade, that's wild. Healthcare has a low fiscal multiplier and is often purely a consumptive good, but people rarely think we spend too much on it per se - critiques are often made at nebulous administrative bloat (which when examined is often less of a good narrative than people think it is).
Another thing is immigration. Looking at it at face value, all western democracies are addicted to it. Even though right-wing culture warriors often single out Japan or SK, even these places have seen significant immigration (and concomitant pushback) in the past decade. Even places like Russia or Belarus do it. Again very often in service of aging populations - in order to stem inflation, keep asset prices high, etc.
Many western countries now how a U-shaped happiness curve - happy when young, happy when old, relatively miserable in old age. The meme "Nick 30 ans", perhaps not so common in the US, embodies this. If you are Nick (male), 30 years old and working, you are paying into a system that benefits everyone but you, chiefly the old, the the young, then women and then maybe the unemployed. I am one of these Nicks, I am 28 years old and I pay, for the country I reside in, a massive tax bill (probably 5-6x the median) and see nothing for it.
If the purpose of a system is what it does, the the purpose of modern western democracies is to drain young people (chiefly but not exclusively young men) and give the surplus to the old, the infirm, the antisocial. There is some rebellion or exit (people moving to Dubai etc.) though it's often hard to effectuate and sometimes punished by the system.
The striking thing is that when polled, most Nick 30 ans type people think old people are something like hard done to, think they deserve their pensions, think that the issues are not structural or redistributive but something to do with greedy corporations and the rich. I think some economists, Stiglitz or Friedmann or such, predicated concentration camps for the old due to accumulation of wealth and power, but young people do not rebel, they mostly submit and place the blame on other things as the system or the rich.
I sometimes wonder what the optimal thing is for someone who is the target of redistribution is to do. NEETdom is probably rational in many cases if you are not exceptional. I also wonder how various kinds of nationalists square the fact that their elders are quite happy to sell out their country, culture etc. for yet another cruise.
Ok, but average life expectancy is ~80. If we assume retirement at 65 and full time employment starting at 21, that's 44 years of full time work vs 36 of nonproductive time. So a forty hour workweek is still far more than 20 hours of productivity not allocated towards old age.
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I'm pretty sure that young men have ALWAYS created a surplus which was used to support the young, the elderly, and women. The difference is that in the past, this surplus was distributed in a way that was less formal and more voluntary. Before social security, it was pretty normal and common for adult children to financially support their elderly parents; before AFDC women were far more desperate to marry and had far less contempt for men; a few hundred years ago, families were ecstatic about the birth of a healthy baby boy. In part because having an able-bodied man in your family could easily mean the difference between life and death.
So perhaps your real complaint is that your hypothetical 30 year old working man is not getting the respect he (arguably) deserves.
Maybe they should have a special express lane on the highway for people who pay more than $50k a year in taxes.
Exactly this too, it's not a new phenomenon. You were always having to take care of your elderly parents and your children, and often your wife. Now even back then it wasn't enough for most men to work just on their own, child labor was the default whether it be at a factory or on the land with their dad and women did lots of hard labor at home like hauling firewood/water/sewing clothes (did you know households used to spend a higher percentage of their budget on apparel than they do now on cars?)/cleaning which was way harder without modern chemicals and machines like washing machines/dishwashers/vacuums/etc, but it was the default that the man was the main breadwinner for any outside work.
We've helped to diffuse that responsibility through welfare programs instead, and technology freed women's labor from domestic chores to be used on outside work too. And everyone has become so much wealthier that we now consider it as immoral to have our kids work, despite being necessary throughout almost all of history.
It's not as if the people 200 years ago hated their elderly parents and left them to die. It did happen more frequently than it does now, but you've always had that responsibility to your elders. They give birth to you and raise you, and you work for their benefit the same way you have children now who will hopefully love you and help take care of you when you need it. The same with the sick and infirm, there was always cruelty to the disabled but they were often someone's sibling or cousin or parent or whatever who had the responsibility to take care of them.
I think people forget about how much labor household appliances have saved, and how poor a lot of people were until relatively recently. I deposed a guy who grew up in West Virginia in the 40s and 50s in a house without running water and he talked about how every Saturday his mother did the laundry and he, his dad (whose clothes were filthy from the mines) and all his brothers and sisters would spend half the day hauling buckets of water from a spring in the woods behind their house so their mother could heat the water on a stove and do the laundry with a wringer washer.
And besides just the hard work there, knowledge spread a whole lot slower and in much lesser quantity. The number of women with stories about coming from laundry day with their hands burned on the lye improperly mixing it and thinking that was normal is astounding. Even with labor that is still around, you were likely doing inefficiently and taking more time with more suffering than you do nowadays.
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The problem is that the lack of respect is there because we've made it non voluntary. You seem to see this as a good thing, can I ask if you are a middle aged man who pays a lot in taxes?
What does this mean exactly? If your parents don't respect you, then it seems like a you and your parents issue. If you mean that older generations kinda look down on younger ones, I'm pretty sure it's always been that way. If anything, young people are more free in this sense considering the traditional view is to respect your elders and obey their authority.
I explicitly said I am against most welfare, but I can acknowledge the areas where it does help like with my own extended family members. And I don't think that governments should just shrug and not fulfill their promises.
I'm not "middle aged", younger, but otherwise yeah my family does.
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I'd add to this that there really weren't that many completely infirm/economically useless people back then either. Without modern medicine, even assuming you got past childhood mortality, there were very few people who would've made it to their 60s since a lot of things we handle nowadays, such as early heart disease or infectious disease, would've just been fatal back then. In addition to that, while there was always some degree of welfare in states, the destitute likely would die within a decade due to their weakened constitutions.
It's a good problem to have that tons of people who would've been dead in the past are alive thanks to modern economics and medicine. That being said, their continued living does necessitate a societal negotiation on how resources are distributed.
Also a good point, like the down syndrome life expectancy went from their mid 20s to their 60s in just a few decades.
And in the same way with other disabled/elderly, those down syndrome people are our friends and family too.
Even if the numbers are inaccurate a bit, lots of Americans know someone with down syndrome and I doubt most would be too be happy to see those people get locked up or killed. So the "let's lock up or kill anyone with disabling down syndrome" isn't gonna get too much widespread support.
We've improved the life conditions of disabled people a lot, and through technology a lot of folk who wouldn't have been able to work before now can (although likewise a lot of people who were just barely able to work can no longer compete in more complex jobs), but even more than that we've just helped them live a lot longer than before in general. And we did that, because we want that. Because God said so/we evolved to be empathic for some reason/whatever you believe to be the cause, it is the truth that humans are generally kind and caring like that.
But it does mean they're a financial drain for longer.
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I’d settle for a plaque from Lockheed Martin/Raytheon/Northrup Grumman every time I pay enough tax to fund a new Tomahawk or something
Worth noting that more of your tax dollars are going to buy diapers and nursing for old people than those Tomahawks. You'd get more plaques for each bed year in a hospital you pay for.
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There's no need. When the support was voluntary, respect was required because the support could be withdrawn from the ungrateful. Now that it's mandatory, the supporters are merely slaves (or "tax cattle") and need no respect.
Young men were not an esteemed group in the past when that support was voluntary.
They absolutely we're. Strong young successful men were at the apex of social status historically in almost every culture. What makes you say this?
The apex of social status was filled by strong young successful men; it does not follow that the majority of strong young successful men, or even a significant fraction of them, were at the apex.
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30 year old working men were not considered "young men" when that support was voluntary.
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I was born after the welfare estate was established, but my grandmother lived her youth at a time when there was no social security, no AFDC, etc. She was overjoyed to have a healthy young man as a grandson, to the point where it really annoyed my sister. I think this was a pretty common attitude among people of this generation. Has this attitude changed? My general impression is that it has changed quite a bit.
I am open to alternative explanations, but to me the obvious explanation was that back in the day, having an able-bodied young man in your family could easily mean the difference between, on the one hand, malnutrition and grinding poverty and, on the other hand, eking by.
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I'm generally against welfare but I do think it does have some actual value even to us who pay for most of it, a more stable and protected society. The default of the world is not modern peace, but more something like a third world country where gangs rule and government is basically just the biggest gang around. It's not perfect in the US, but for the average American crime is not actually that meaningful of issue anymore. Like as Cremieux covered on X, even things like murders are extremely hyperlocal, focused down to specific streets. Unless you go looking for trouble, you'll rarely ever get into it.
A typical leftist claim is that crime comes from poverty and need. I agree that a lot of crime would come from that, but one issue is that poverty, true deep poverty does not exist in the US anymore. The only people who do not get help are the ones who explicitly choose to forego it. There are no hungry orphans left needing to steal bread, our poorest children if anything get too much food now. Crime and antisocial behavior has been reduced only to those who want to do it, not those who are forced into it. And that is at least in part because of our redistribution. I have an aunt who went crazy in her early 50s (I presume in part from the severe abuse that my own father as the oldest was just barely able to escape albeit it with multiple scars, + her possibly being sexually abused) and for some reason in the past five years she somehow just got better? She's not great, but she went from not wanting to do better and living on the streets> wanting to do better, and now she has a shared apartment, a bus pass, clean clothes, food, etc other basics despite not having a job. She is on SSI now and lives in subsidized housing, with other programs like SNAP supporting her. When you want it, help is there. It is not perfect, bureaucracy would never see to that no matter the best intentions but it is there. Similarly I think that's part of why UBI studies seem to do much better in the poor countries and flop hard in the west, I. America we already have the floor available to anyone willing to stand up and work.
But what if it wasn't there for people like her? Well, I don't think she could have escaped her situation then. She's old and still somewhat unstable, I doubt she would have long term employement. Most likely she'd be either a direct parasite off of us or other family, or have to turn to crime now. The welfare services I pay into help to diffuse these costs, sure I pay a little bit to help other people's crazy aunts/brothers/parents/children/whatever relation, but other people pay a little for my family and my father is not left feeling responsible for her through the bad luck that my grandfather was a horrible piece of shit.
Do keep in mind a few things.
They do "deserve" their pensions. Either formally through pension systems or informally like the social security system, our current old people were promised their benefits back in their working years. Maybe the right thing to do is to renege on society's promise to them, or at the very least negotiate the terms better like the UK's stupid "triple lock" but it's not like I can't understand where the olds are coming from. Even Ayn Rand famously took her social security, because being against the program doesn't mean you can't ask the government to at least fulfill the promise it made when it took your money from you. She didn't think it should be stolen to begin with, but it's not hypocritical to say "then at least do what you said you would" right?
We're all going to be old and everyone knows it. A lot of the worries about social security right now I see even among young people is often that they're scared they won't be getting it. Their complaints are the same as the old people, they're just not in the fold yet. But they expect it too, so they're not willing to dissolve things and give up on their share of the promise either. Anything done to the old now is likely to be done with you too and people understand this. Like seriously, how could anyone expect concentration camps for the old unless they were delusional enough to think they'd stay young forever? What 50 year old is gonna be happy with "in 15 years we lock you up and murder you". And that's ignoring that the old are our loved ones and we don't want to hurt our loved ones. What psychopath would want to concentration camp his own parents?
The Promised argument makes it seem as if our society actually honors or cares about promises whatsoever. Social Security was Promised to never be spent on anything else. Income tax was Promised to never go above 2%.
Don't go on about Promises as if they actually mean anything when it comes to political decisions in the U.S.
I would recommend looking up how social security and trust funds work cause the funds for it have never been spent on anything else.
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Ok, the issue with the protection money argument for welfare- and I'm 100% willing to believe that certain programs reduce the crime rate- is that most of that welfare goes to criminally-uninclined demographics. Old people who can't maintain a normal standard of living are a known phenomenon, we know what it looks like, and they're not mugging people with their walkers. They're living in squalor and dying of malnutrition-worsened diseases. Sure, that's bad, but the argument for avoiding it isn't 'well it's worse when they rob a liquor store' because they won't rob liquor stores.
Again, I'm 100% willing to believe that, say, TANF reduces shoplifting and prostitution rates. But that's a completely separate argument.
Like I covered before, in modern societies you don't have to do crime for basic survival and needs anymore. It's imperfect and has some wait times obviously, but people in need like my crazy aunt can get the food and shelter and clean water they need. Modern crime in modern first world nations is a choice. Now I'm a big arguer that criminals are mostly idiots with poor reasoning and self control skills before they are particularly "evil", but the point remains that crime isn't necessary in the first world and anyone being rational wouldn't resort to it for their basic needs. The diminishing returns hit really hard when it comes to aid. People will steal and fight and mug to go from 0 meals to 1 meal. Most won't to go from 3 to 4.
"Old people who can't maintain a normal standard of living are a known phenomenon," isn't really a thing in the US and most other developed nations, at least not at all how it used to be. But regardless the welfare for old people isn't from the "protection" scheme logic anyway, social security and pensions are from the "promise" logic. Like Ayn Rand wasn't gonna go around stabbing people, but she still collected on what was promised to her.
Yes, it's not a thing in the US. There's nowhere in the world, ever in human history, where the elderly committed lots of crime to survive. They just died. The logic for taking care of the elderly is compassion, not crime prevention. There are places right now where senior citizens need to eat dog food to survive. They're not stealing better food(potatoes and shit, not steak). 'Old people suffering from malnutrition until they get knocked out by flu season' happened because they'll just suffer rather than steal/rob.
My argument for the elderly isn't crime prevention, crime prevention is for people like my crazy aunt. The argument for the elderly is that they were promised pensions or social security either explicitly or implicitly and I don't think it's right for the government to just bring back on the promises.
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Ah, the protection money argument. The thing is, the west didn't use to have to handout masses of money to people to keep them from rioting. Crime and poverty are not as connected as is often made out.
That is not "Boomer UBI". Disability pensions and the like also get abused but are the far smaller evil.
There are infinitely many options between "total boomer luxury communism" and "concentration camps for the olds". Though politically we seem to tend towards the former...
What does "deserve" mean? Pensions (and even things like 410k) are a fiction, they are redistribution from working people to pensioners. Money is a neat abstraction that allows expression of deferring consumption but if you look at the flow of goods and services it's always working -> non-working, barring AI and general (non-healthcare/welfare) capital infrastructure investment.
Of course I understand the boomers. Were I a boomer I'd have a massive incentive to believe I'm entitled to relief on property taxes, blocking development, fat pensions that grow faster than inflation, labour markets being propped up by mass immigration of "carers" without care for externalities, etc.
The social contract (as it even exists) when the boomers were working was markedly different from the one now. The boomers reneged on it already by not reproducing and offloading the resultant externalities on the next generation.
Right. Besides, what do we do to functional people who don't pay their protection money? We send men with guns to drag them off to jail. Why not skip the extra step and send the men with guns to drag any rioters off to jail? The men with guns have to be paid either way, but the rioters don't.
Actually people do have to be paid, jail is extremely expensive and even at the minimal level you still have to provide the main basics in that of shelter, food and clean water. You're just spending it in a crueler and less direct manner.
And no, "just kill them then" doesn't work because like before, they are our families and loved ones. My crazy aunt when given a little bit of support is fine enough, she's not a danger who needs to be locked up for our safety. So why would my family we want to do that to her?
My father would be appalled if the solution was to lock his sister up in jail, he still loves her as family. We would much prefer that she can get the basic needs without such cruelty, because we are not psychopaths who want to lock up our family and concentration camp our elderly.
Likewise I have an uncle (well great uncle) on my mom's side who is developmentally disabled. When left alone during the day while his caretaker (another extended family member) is at work he is fine. He can press the button on the TV to turn it on which is kept on his favorite channel. He can take a frozen meal from the fridge and use the microwave by pushing the +30 seconds button a few times but is forbidden from using the other buttons cause he'll set the time wrong and leave the microwave on for hours cause he inputted wrong and won't think about it, and he can use the bathroom on his own. But he is a man who needs great support. And it is helped immensely that he is on SSI, SNAP and has a housing voucher for shared rent despite his inability to work. It's an immense drain on the family member still, but it makes life far better off than it would have been before. We've diffused the responsibility for my uncle, and many people like him, throughout society.
And just like before, we are not psychopaths. I like my uncle, he's slow and dimwitted and can't hold a good conversation but he's one of those types who is lighthearted and cheerful anyway. I don't want him in a concentration camp or a jail because I am not a sicko. And yet if it wasn't for our family and the support systems from society, I don't know what would happen with him. He'd probably be exploited and used by criminals and end up clumsily going around trying to steal food or something until he did get locked up. Which again, is something I do not want if it can be helped cause I love the guy. And I do not want that for other people like him.
I want people like my crazy aunt and dimwitted disabled uncle to have a free life without torture if it can be helped. So does most of society, modern nations all around the world have welfare programs to help support people like them. And it can be helped, and it has been helped.
For almost all societies, there was always some form of welfare for the poor. The amount varied, but the only time I can think of when a society either showed complete indifference or actual facilitation of harming the poor was when the poor was an outgroup. St. Domingue being an example.
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There's tons of violent crime throughout history, the US itself started as a violent crime. There have been civil wars and revolutions across the world regarding civil and fiscal inequalities, and that's still putting aside that crime is down significantly since the past too.. And keep in mind, a lot of things we would deem as violent crime nowadays wouldn't have even counted in the past like capturing and enslaving others, beating children hard for not working enough in the field, dueling being a primary way to settle disputes, the honor killings. Or things that might have been technically crimes but were overlooked, like the lynchings. When 11 Italians were mass lynched future president Teddy Roosevelt referred to it as "rather a good thing" and journalist editorials while many might have hem and hawed a little often would openly support the lynchers. Or how about the many many many violent strikes and riots by worker unions. It's extremely rare for an American union to beat up the scabs nowaday isn't it? Mass widespread violence was pretty normal of the past.
Also of course one big issue here is in the inequality itself. People who don't know there can be a better life are going to be more content with what they have. There's a reason why North Korea goes to extreme extents to prevent the average citizen from seeing western wealth, because even they understand their regime is rockier and less stable if people know there is better if a revolution happens. The more people can improve their situation, the more likely they are to take action. North Korea has to constantly suppress the people to prevent revolution, meanwhile the idea of another revolution now in the US is laughable because there's not much to earn and a lot to lose. They don't have to suppress it with force, most Americans just don't want to revolt.
Imagine you get offered a service, you pay 100k now and in 40 years they'll pay you 50k a year. If in 40 years they change their mind and don't pay, they scammed you. They broke their promise. While pension services don't work exactly like that, it's a similar logic. Workers are essentially promised their pension schemes in exchange for the money stolen from their paychecks, so when the time comes they have in fact earned it. It is a scam if they are not able to collect.
Normally when this happens you get to sue them for breach of contract and you win, that gets you a piece of paper and if they have money left over you get it taken from them and given to you. However if they are out of money you just end up with a piece of paper and nothing else, the government doesn't then increase taxation on everyone else in society just to fund your agreement and make sure you are made whole. The fact that there was a promise by the other side and they broke their promise doesn't mean shit.
Something similar can be said to apply to pensions, now you may say that as long as the government itself isn't bankrupt you should get your money because pensions come from a government subsidiary and the government can always increase tax to get enough money to pay for its obligation (or just turn on the printer), but that's not how contracts work either, if you have a contract with B which is a subsidiary of A and then B goes bankrupt in normal situations you don't get to recover from A, you're just out of luck. Similarly with pensions. A government can very easily go "Our pensions department will have X% of government earnings each year, funded from general taxation, if the total liabilities are higher than this then everyone takes a haircut, end of".
In this case though it is the government itself that made the promise. And it made that promise while taxing you, but then it tries to say it can't tax others later? It's perfectly fair to call BS on that. We don't expect government to fulfill the private promises of a private person, but we should be able to expect it to fulfill its own promises. Who wants a country where the main dominant power structure keeps rug pulling its own citizens?
Which promise are you talking about? In most countries the payouts from state run pension schemes have some hard lower boundaries but are otherwise subject to the whims of the legislature and the courts. Few systems keep a personalized account that creates concrete contractual financial claims.
Even disregarding that, the promise you're asking the state to keep is not the same promise that was in effect when the Boomers were young. You can look up how much of an average worker's wage bill went to elderly welfare in e.g. 1950, 1980 or today and notice a steep increase, the idea that what's being asked of today's workers is somehow equivalent to what the current recipients paid in is ludicrous.
Which is why I said there's room to negotiate the terms. The UK's triple lock is stupid. Retirement ages need to be upped around the world as people are healthier and able to work at older ages (the general promise at least for social security was an insurance for old age, so only when old age is crippling to most should it apply). Etc other examples of ways we could better the system without having to break the promise.
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If a subsidiary of a government department or a contractor that's 100% owned by the government (we have this in the UK for certain IT and Software development functions) makes a promise and then the subsidiary fails due to lack of cash that doesn't leave the rest of the government liable and you may very well end up out of luck.
Plus we already have the government rug pulling its citizens literally every year every budget. This is something that isn't unique to a specific country or situation.
The tax collector can't count as an unrelated branch of government that doesn't have to pay you because when the government was making the promise, the government claimed that the tax collector was closely related enough to fulfill the promise. If the government now says "it's just the subsidiary who has to pay you, and the tax collector is not related to the subsidiary", the government is contradicting what it originally said about the relationship.
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1 is somewhat absurd when a huge chunk of people aren't meaningfully paying for themselves, and as a younger person I've got the full expectation that whatever current plans for funding the elderly will be nuked from orbit by the time I'm in any position to get hold of them. People simply aren't working enough years in comparison to an extended dotage of consuming insane amounts of medical spending. Something has to give.
Plus the current state of effective years of healthy living added to the end of people's lives versus 'we have continued the heartbeat at massive expensive' is not good calculus. MAID is unfortunate but to a certain degree the calculus of these efforts would work a lot better if palliative medical science hadn't responded so effectively to the gigantic pool of money on offer to squeeze another year or two out at the very end.
Already being done. They're talking about means-testing Social Security and Medicare, and proposals to tax away the houses of those older people who have paid for them are a dime a dozen.
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They did pay for themselves, they paid taxes for 40-50 years (some began working at 15 and didn't stop till 65!) to "buy into" the system.
See exactly, your complaint is theirs. "I'm afraid I won't get the due I've been told I'll get in exchange for my taxes now". It's just that you personally don't want that potential risk so you want the rug pull to happen earlier to your parents generations.
Which is why really, we should have been ratcheting up the retirement age more as people have been able to work into old age more often. The US is able to get away with this way easier than the typical pension countries even since the idea of social security was always a buy in into an insurance for people who can not work any longer whether that be from infirmity or seniority. But the latter especially is far less crippling nowadays so it's far less of a rug pull to ratchet the age requirements up. But pushing up age requirements upsets the current workers too! The 50 year old is thinking "I gotta work for 18 more years and not 15? That's bullshit" and gets angry because again everyone knows they gonna get old
No, they paid for the people receiving benefits when they were working. They didn't pay for themselves. Now workers are paying for them.
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Regarding point 2, I'm obviously not endorsing concentration camps for the old, but you're overlooking an element of vague generational moral culpability in this. The current and soon-to-be recipients of elder welfare grew up in demographically healthy or at least stable societies, and the problems with the systems that are now slowly breaking apart have been known for their entire lives, and this has been discussed ad nauseam out in the open for decades!
Yes, theoretically current young people will be in a similar position themselves later on, especially considering their even worse birth rates, but given that they already grew up in a heavily demographically imbalanced society they have much less economic slack to maneuver and a ton more social inertia to fight against to meaningfully reform these systems, with the numbers being the way they are in a democracy it's a coup-complete problem. Either you wait until you yourself can benefit marginally or you hope the eventual collapse will bring an opportunity for improvement. Meanwhile, current old people had fewer elderly people to take care of (thanks to two world wars) and fewer children to raise, they were in an historically uniquely ideal position to set up the system in a way that is more sustainable. But across the entire West they didn't, they went into a socio-economic disaster with open eyes.
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Why do you think MAID is being pushed so hard? We won't "murder" you, we'll just convince you life isn't worth living and let you murder yourself. Conveniently, we've already been abusing this method of avoiding the costs of helping certain demographics for years by ignoring the causes of elevated rates of suicide...
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You have to think in the context of the fact that most people aren't exactly "Nick, 30 ans, big net taxpayer" and of generationally falling fertility. Old people welfare and healthcare are beneficial to the old, yes, and maybe too generous, but the government subsidizing the polite fiction of most retired people being financially independent is also an implicit subsidy toward working people in that they are generally spared having to feed/house/care for their elderly relatives.
Put another way, have you ever had to pay your single mom's rent, or gotten a crying phone call from her saying "I'm about to be homeless."? For most 28 year olds, the cost of paying mom’s rent would exceed their entire tax burden. Worse, imagine the case of an only child with two parents requiring something expensive like memory care, or some other chronic illness. In that case it’s almost impossible to lose as a non-exceptional taxpayer when accounting for that implicit subsidy.
The implication of this is that as working age people are facing an ever more impossible expected task in terms of eldercare they will only become more desperate to socialize the cost of preventing this. Likely, this bargain will require subsidizing the not so needy as well. Upper middle class people want their expected inheritances, after all.
There's a substantive difference here in that Nick would have much more agency in deciding his mom's living standard and consequently the hit to his own if he had to take care of her by himself. The state is going to send thugs to collect his money regardless of whether voters, who increasingly consist of the beneficiaries of this, decide to be reasonable or to utterly drain the remaining workers.
Then there's an argument to be made that socializing these sort of costs is part of the reason why there won't be enough workers in the first place. If socialized retirement systems only covered hard and sympathetic edge cases and otherwise you'd have to rely on relations to sustain you in your old age, maybe the idea that you can forego reproduction and just stack green paper in the expectation of having your consumption needs fulfilled in the far future would be less seductive to the masses.
I agree that this is a significant issue. Before social security, it was pretty normal and common for children to financially contribute to their parents. So that in effect, social security replaced a system that was informal, voluntary, and disorganized with one that is formal, involuntary, and better organized. And it definitely seems like older people are -- in general -- collecting an amount which is not subject to the vagaries of their children's fortunes.
But still, it does seem you lose something when you switch to an involuntary system. Arguably, in a voluntary system, the hypothetical 30 year old man would enjoy a great deal more respect from his parents; his (hypothetical) wife; and the people around him. In an involuntary system, there's much less need to respect the guy since he is going to provide either way. There is some hypothetical single mom out there; he's supporting her along with some other man's child; and the mom has utter contempt for him. (Ok, that's an exaggeration, but you see the point.)
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Mom is overwhelmingly likely to be a homeowner and be able to indefinitely defer property taxes.
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Mathematically someone has to balance the books here. The total cost is the same whether it's concentrated or diffused, the difference is who pays for it.
Sure, some people benefit by having their parent's care socialised, but I think that's rarely Nick 30 ans - his parents are generally not that far gone yet and if he had to subsidize them he would at least get a say over how much, what extent, how much healthcare, etc.
You wouldn't pay Mom's rent anyway, Mom is more likely to have property, which she then might have to liquidate. Some people would have to pay Mom's rent. Mom might live a lot less well than under boomer UBI.
Most people get their inheritance in their 50s. I think on average it'd be better for UMC people to not subsidize old people for hope of a diffuse future payout but to rather get to steer the economy now.
Probably and that might mean even more immigration and at some point sovereign defaults.
Until the bond vigilantes say otherwise, this empirically hasn't been the case, as evidenced by G7 sovereign debt levels since 2000. Unfortunately, since the Silent Generation RJ Reynolds and Phillip Morris (aka. cigarettes) haven't been utilized to their full potential, and those pesky doctors have gotten better at keeping people alive, so balancing the books is getting harder even before we take falling fertility into account.
I did pay my mom's rent, because she was poorly paid, exited the divorce with no property, and, shocker, the man she divorced for being bad at paying the bills defaulted on the alimony as soon as their child was off to college and out of the blast radius. I was the only kid who wasn't still in college or flat broke ("Lying flat" is absolutely the winning strategy when it comes to avoiding familial obligations. No one expects any help from the broke fuckup sibling, but is that really how you want to live?). If not for some dubious VA disability (Semper-Fi!) my mother would presently be begging me for money. Boomer UBI just stops this from happening to a potentially large amount of people at ~65. It's easy to say "They'll just have to accept a lower standard of living.", but do you want to have to tell Mom to eat shit or move her into your house?
Maybe I'm missing something and my family are filled with an atypically large amount of fuckups (This is definitely the case for my father's side; on mom's side at least the Gen X men have their shit together.), but I'm pretty sure that Boomer welfare is the only thing sparing large amounts of the working and middle class from dealing with this sort of stuff until Mom becomes too old to live independently for medical reasons.
I'm not even endorsing fiscal gerontocracy, necessarily. I'm just giving a reason why people support it, and we haven't even gotten into how many people's jobs rely on the government subsidizing retirees' bills.
It’s almost like borrowing and dropping a bunch of cash into certain industries have caused costs to explode.
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Having moved from a Western country to an Asian country where 'elderly are taken care of by their children and tend to cohabit houses' is the norm. The latter seems verymuch more functional than the current metagame of the West? I'm admittedly fortunate in that nobody in either of my families is a high-grade fuckup and I could see how that'd cause issues with the current state of things.
I've got small children, I much prefer having access to elderly members of my wife's family within a 3 minute walk versus my parents having fucked off to Australia's equivalent of Florida that's a 2 hour flight away. There's a ton of issues created by allowing the elderly to do luxury space communism.
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Who did you think the welfare state was for? Yes, you have to pay into the system, but you have freedom not afforded to the young and physical and mental ability not afforded to the old. That's the social contract. The theoretical benefit of immigration is that you bring in people who haven't spent 18 years consuming resources and are putting money into the system immediately; of course it doesn't always work out that way.
And people here absolutely complain about the spiraling healthcare spending growth (though in the past few decades the US has grown more slowly than comparable countries). It's pretty clear that medicare/SSI are going to fuck the budget soon, and it's politically impossible to seriously cut them.
The social contract is whatever society's representative (the state) says it is, and nothing more or less.
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The freedom is not something given, but taken away.
I am aware of the concept of a social contract. But the contract here is drafted almost solely by those benefitting at this point - that's not a contract, that's coercive extraction of resources from those with power from those with none, with most people being unaware where the money is flowing and who is paying for whom.
The social contract being boomer UBI is also something somewhat unprecedented in a democracy. Maybe not in history.
Exactly. Plus the current boundaries of the amount of Boomer UBI, the age it's received and what it can be spent on (Endless arm-wrestling with the grim reaper to claw a month at a time is just not useful for anybody) can all be shifted without killing 'the social contract'. Most people are effectively not covering their own costs, retirement is a privilege.
You can also, much more easily, just end the cap on social security contributions. Sure, the high income won't like it, but an almost literal 'raise taxes on the rich and only the rich' policy would be popular enough that they realize it's not going away.
"Just" raise the top tax bracket to 50%.
Much easier than getting your government hands on the boomers' medicare.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced they are "logging off of X."
The EFF will leave the platform for others like TikTok, a choice it is careful to point out is not an "endorsement" because those walled gardens are still in desperate need of their attention. There is no mistaking the announcement for an emphatic Mission Accomplished which makes the non-endorsements more awkward. The message is also complicated by an attached blog post which offers almost entirely different reasoning. Take your pick of whichever reason for why they're leaving. I translate it as, "Celebrate, if you want, but don't worry if you don't want to celebrate."
The timing of this feels offbeat, why now and not a major exodus? There is no real additional cost involved in publishing to an additional social media platform like X. I doubt there's much additional cost in finding ways to more effectively increase reach on X, if that were the issue. I compared the EFF activity between Bluesky and X, there is no indication they interact with replies or even read them. It looks like the EFF publishes the latest release, pushes it to all platforms, and that's about it. The EFF is apparently not interested in being convinced, because they locked replies to their announcement only after hundreds of replies.
The EFF is the most well known internet rights advocacy group. At one point there was significant overlap between the Pirate Party's of the world and the EFF-- fighting against DMCA (ab)use, SLAPP law suits, surveillance, and anti-privacy laws. Fighting for the democratization of knowledge and content. By the mid-late 2010s they were already into a more progressively tinged advocacy. This 2019 explainer focuses on content moderation, but is mostly framed in language about marginalized voices, or how the bad type of content moderation that targets transphobia can harm trans people. They continued to fight against government censorship, including through Biden era "jawboning" or informal coercion, but if the ACLU is any indication this may be the result of individual interest within the organization. As these individuals age out there's fewer people willing to pick up the mission aligned, but unpopular cases on account of the organization now being more partisan.
Seth Schoen, a privacy and security consultant, worked at EFF for nearly 20 years and wrote on HackerNews about his experience up to 2019.
Seth alludes to the free internet fuck yeah coalition that helped build the org. It was a movement that had a popular form represented among a libertarian-progressive milieu. Congregants would find their way to places like reddit, where they applauded stunts that mocked state surveillence, rallied around legislation, and laughed along with the Daily Show segments at the expense of greedy corporations. A different kind of cultural moment for a different sort of culture war. Without another group to pick up the slack, as FIRE did after the ACLU's drift, the signals sent here do not provide a lot of long term faith in the they still do good work assessment.
What does "mission accomplished" mean in this context? Who would be wanting to celebrate and who would be wanting to not celebrate, in their (or your) view?
This whole thing sounds very confused.
Mission accomplished: X is free enough, or has low enough walls to the garden, where we (EFF) can leave to focus efforts elsewhere. It doesn't really make sense in context of posting to additional platform, but could be one explanation why "X is no longer where the fight is happening." This is contradicted by other parts so I can't mistake the announcement for something like it.
People who dislike X and its owner tend to treat evidence of its failure as a team win. Non-profits making announcements of departure that get a lot of attention are one type of evidence. I assumed too much that this was common knowledge. Here are a selection replies to the Bluesky post that mirrors X announcement:
'About time!' is a form of celebration with an I'm better than you caveat. People who might not want to celebrate are like Schoen, or Nybbler below, long time supporters who want them to do the EFF things that do not include confused departure announcements on social media platforms.
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Kinda overdetermined. The impression count thing is either a lie or incompetence or both, but I don't think they even expect people to believe it so much as for it to be a useful rallying cry.
Like with Julia Serano's not dismissing perspectives really being about "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups", it's interesting to see the mask come off, and with it a bit of the face, but it's kinda just making a thing that happened a decade ago common knowledge.
More critically, I'll notice that Seth Schoen is famous for the DeCSS haiku, and I can't find him mentioning Defense Distributed a single time on the entire internet. Lest that be taken as cherry-picking my fixation, looking at his HackerNews profile (and webpage, and posts at EFF) has a dearth of high-profile examples while there were a bunch of high-profile examples, and I'm noticing how carefully he dodges specifics even now.
That's not to blame him, because I were the mask in my real name too. But it's a thing that happened a decade ago.
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On Bluesky and Mastodon but not on X? Sorry, that's a damned good indication they're completely on the wrong side of the Culture War now; they've gotten their last dime from me.
Liberals? Running my nonprofit? Wha- when did this happen? How could it be?
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It is possible whoever is in charge of social media is convinced the algorithm is unfairly targeting them, or used that reasoning to convince other, more important people it was the case. That might not effect standard going on's if you've been happy as a donor otherwise. A funnier alternative is they genuinely believed they were throwing an exit post into the void and were baffled to find the site still functioned.
The NAACP uses X, weirdo DSA caucuses and committees use X, the Human Rights Campaign manages to create engagement on the platform despite their message being much more out of the favor. The ACLU, who the EFF works closely with, is not active on the site. So, yeah, it's probably not a great thing if you've supported them for the traditional mission.
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What makes sexism more tolerable than racism?
So I was watching a video the other day about being a woman in NYC. And something this women said stuck out to me, and this something I notice In liberal/Progressive circles when it comes to Men specifically:
There is often deep talk in many feminist circles, and society, generally, about how scary it is to be a women, and how fearful women are of Men. Im not here to argue that this fear is unjustified - I understand it fully, but here is what I think is a bigger problem with this: It is, by definition, prejudice. Thats honestly not the problem I have with it, the problem is a perceived double standard between prejudices.
Im sure everyone here is aware of the not so secret that Men as a group commit more violent crime than women - Mass Shootings, Rape, ect. As a response people are more fearful and more cautious of men as a whole. And for the most part, it seems that we consider this prejudice justifiable. No one would really refer to this as "Sexism"
Yet, with race & religion (and fascinatingly enough, this young women herself, despite being very liberal, is prejudice against her own race) we would reject this very reasoning. For example, according to the Global Terrorism Index, at least 75% of global terrorism comes from Islamic Groups. Yet, if some one says that they fear Muslims, or don't think they should be able to migrate into the country, many of these liberal types would revere this as a form of "racism", after all, not all Muslims are terrorist. Same for Black Men, they have a disproportionate amount of criminality, yet if you said what this young lady said as police officer, and that you profile Black Men more often because they are more likely to do it, you'd be cooked alive.
The obvious intuitive response someone could give here is that, Men & Women are obviously different in a way that people of different races and religions are not (unless you are a race realist). We know biologically that males are more aggressive, so them engaging in more criminality and being the scarier sex overall should be no surprise, thus, this prejudice isn't wrong. But the issue here is that this is obviously not a very progressive explanation, as these progressives typically believe that differences between the sexes are due to the social construct of gender, and that society is largely responsible for this difference. But this merely mirrors the same beliefs about differences we see between races and religious groups, no? If all these differences were indeed, socially constructed, and a product of patriarchy - white supremacy, etc, Than why wouldnt it follow that this prejudice is wrong too? Is it not sexist to believe that someone is inherently more likely to kill and rape you due to a immutable and arbitrary characteristic, like gender, in the same way believing that black people are Muslims are more likely to kill and rape others because of their faith & skin color, and treat individuals within these groups accordingly based on that? Its not something inherent about men (or muslims, black people) that make them more likely to be violent, society is to blame!
So the question here is this: Why is prejudice based on sex tolerable, but prejudice based on race & religion, not?
What made you come up with that observation?
Prejudice based on race and religion is not only accepted, but encouraged.
This is downstream of (I'd argue a direct result of) prejudice based on sex, which is accepted even more than prejudice on race or religion.
And that's just downstream of the fact that Cain's rights and responsibilities are fundamentally different than Abel's- so whenever you have an easily-divisible dichotomy where one side is lesser than the other, that dynamic re-emerges. Man vs. woman maps onto that pretty well (especially in the age of mechanization, and especially if Abel isn't paying attention to the downstream social effects), as does white vs. other and Christian vs. other to lesser degrees.
The Abel side has to pay attention in a way the Cain side does not. Abel doesn't need an in-group bias because he'll generally succeed wherever he goes (and developing one would be corrosive to Abel-ness); but in-group membership is life or death for Cain.
Ironically, encouraging the side of a population perceived as more likely to contain Abels to develop that in-group bias is the main thing that would destroy that perception, but the problem is only an Abel could do that.
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The problem of our modern age is that even very smart people are not very good at divorcing the “group dynamics” from the “individual dynamics”. Motte and Baileys specifically also don’t help here.
There are stereotypes, and many of them are rooted in truth. You may justifiably take some actions that reflect these stereotypes and that’s fine. What’s not fine is the small subset of people who seem to have no sense of tradeoffs - they turbocharge stereotypes with seemingly no upper bound to how powerful these stereotypes are.
Then there are your actions on a personal, individualized level. Meaning usually the recipient of these actions and attitudes. This is the crux of the disconnect. It might be fine for me as a salesperson to avoid marketing to, say, Hispanics. But if a specific Hispanic customer comes in, I shouldn’t treat them differently. Why? Well the most powerful piece is that I consider their identity as a human being to trump their identity as a Hispanic by at least an order of magnitude if not more. The second piece is that we want to live in a society that treats people fairly and sometimes it requires locally suboptimal choices to achieve a globally optimal result. This requires a degree of personal ethics.
If my neighbor goes on a rant about how Black people are bringing in all kinds of crime to the area, I might think it’s uncharitable, or maybe factually incorrect, and I might even think a little less of them… these are societal tensions that are understandable though, in the general sense. I’m not going to treat my neighbor way different based only on that. But it’s a degree of magnitude worse (or maybe two) if my neighbor then deliberately gives the cold shoulder to a Black family that moves in on our block.
Do you see what happened? He crossed the boundary line from stereotyping to personal racism. Which has a word: discrimination. This is a serious moral failing. Whereas the act of stereotyping is relatively speaking vastly more neutral. Discrimination is an action. Sure it might be sourced from an attitude, but there’s a big step there.
The waters get muddied because bad actors (and also overly defensive otherwise good people!) often retreat to the Bailey here. Some might assume that a stereotyper will also discriminate based purely on the presence of a stereotypical belief they hold. This is, well, understandable but bad, a lesser form of the same pattern of discrimination. It also provokes hard feelings because words like “racist” or “sexist” are pretty charged. On the other side of the coin sometimes a discriminator will defend their behavior by pointing to the stereotype as truth. I wish to call this out as bullshit. They are different things with different moral stakes.
And then you have a small handful of people who react to approbation with extremism. Not only are all these stereotypes true, they think, they are strong, they are universally applicable, and individualized discrimination is sometimes not even just a necessary evil but somehow good or wise. There are a few of them on this forum. Only IRL experience can pull them back from the brink, so words can’t really reach them. Usually this is a race thing, but you see the same pattern with the most notorious of incels. Think Elliot Rodger. They take some (maybe rooted in truth!) belief about women but then apply it with such a broad brush to individuals in their lives that it creates a cycle of unhappiness (on top of being unethical).
Anyways, your particular case is a classic. I would argue the woman on the street is fundamentally in a group-dynamic, stereotype paradigm. She is not levying an individualized discrimination. She’s being realistic about a mostly-true stereotype. If she were to follow up her statement with “and so as a rule I don’t date Black guys” then we have a problem. That’s discrimination because it ignores the humanity of individuals (and also creates hard feelings that are often counterproductive on a societal level). I realize this is not always cut and dry (what if she says “and so I’m reluctant to date Black guys?”) but I strongly believe we should save the vast majority of the moral approbation for this kind of specific individualized behavior. Kindness is a bit of a skill.
We (as a society, but particularly this is directed at liberals and moderates) need to (relative to current effort) speak up stronger against discrimination and not so strongly against garden variety stereotypes. It may be true that one leads to the other by tendency and in chronological order, but the focus should be on weakening the link. Conservatives by the same token (relative to current effort) need to call out those individuals that cross the line away from “mere” stereotypes and into outright discrimination better and not hide them behind a shield of persecution, victimhood, circling the wagons, or playing the Bailey card.
Why is gender “better” at avoiding discrimination? Because the link between stereotypes and individual behavior is weaker, as it should be. Women who spout off frustration at “men” as a category are one thing (common), women who treat specific men in their life like dirt because of those frustrations are another thing (thankfully less common and less accepted as morally fine). Simple as that. We should learn from this model and apply it to other areas where discrimination is problematic.
It’s late at night. You are looking for a street parking spot. Nearby an open spot, there are a group of young black men loitering. Is it wrong for you to avoid that spot and try to find another spot?
If it is wrong, then I question why being moral is even worthwhile.
I think this you're missing @EverythingIsFine 's whole point because you present this situation as a counterargument to his "we should care more about discrimination than stereotyping" spiel, but in your situation no one is actually being discriminated against. Is having a car parked next to you a public good?
If you were interviewing for a job and trashed their resumes in the basis if their race, then there would be something to talk about. But while having a particular negative attitude about some identifiable group is not necessarily a good thing (and indeed may in fact be a bad thing), the OP was very specifically saying that society should be less concerned about that than it is.
... And in any case, I think "black" is far from the most predictive factor here. "Young" and "men" are hugely predictive, and treating people differently based on their age and gender is good, actually (🇻🇦). But what decides my perception of (other) young men as safe is primarily their presentation of class status and upbringing. I would feel plenty safe around any group of young men wearing suits, carrying college textbooks, holding hobby objects (e.g. skateboards, cameras, basketballs), engaging in a church event, etcetera. I would feel about equally unsafe regardless of race around a group of young men that are drunk, smoking pot in public, blasting loud music, wearing excessively baggy clothes, etcetera. If you pressed me, I would admit that I probably felt slightly more unsafe around a low-class afroamerican group than a low class white or latino group, but race genuinely does not rank very high in my factor analysis.
By that reasoning being forced to use a segregated water fountain isn't discrimination either, as long as the water quality isn't different between the fountains.
This is the Internet autist argument. "They're just showing social disdain for black people. Social disdain causes them no material problems, so it isn't discrimination and doesn't harm them. It's just feelings! Who cares about feelings?" Avoiding people partly based on their race is race-based harm. It may be necessary under some circumstances, but don't kid yourself about what it has become necessary to do.
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No. There is a massive difference between a group of young Asian guys and black guys hanging out. Basic stats will tell you this.
Yes there are other indicators (eg if they were all wearing suits you’d feel more comfortable). But if you understand crime stats, being black is highly predictive in the same way being male is.
Do you see young Asian guys loitering in the hood often?
I wasn’t in the hood
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...Yes? Asians are tightwads, so they live in the hood, and they stay up real late and like to go out and about.
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Another race discussion, another of a slight variant on the same, very contrived "dark road at night" scenario. At some point you start to wonder if it's just a lack of originality, or there really aren't any other similar 'gotcha' scenarios out there. I welcome more substantive comments, if you have them. And I know for a fact there was more you could have responded to there.
Obviously a new spot, fine. No one is pretending that tradeoffs don't exist. Even Jesus, the super (mostly) pacifist, didn't advocate for being an idiot:
Safety tradeoffs are especially significant. Groups of men alone on the street at night is not a normal innocent thing either, that's somewhat race-independent. And it's also a group-level dynamic, at least mostly. The question is really only tangentially related to morality, and is a straw man. As the scripture says, it's possible to be wise, and also maintain an ethical purity that reveals itself in other situations. Also, we often have more than binary choices available to us, and I think people often underestimate the presence of these third-way options that leave everyone happier.
I actually ran into this in real life. Not contrived. I was dropping my then fiancé off in NYC at our apartment when I was having to drive somewhere else. I was going to drop her off on one end of the block since I would’ve had to drive around a few blocks given the one way nature of streets.
I noticed a group of young black men and re calibrated. My then fiancé asked me why I hadn’t drop her off at that end of the street. When I explained, she thought it was racist. I explained it was Bayesian and in any event did no harm to the young black men.
I’m curious if my now wife would have the same attitude today.
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Suppose one is simply walking down the sidewalk at night, hears footsteps, turns around, and is relieved to see a white person? Is that moral?
Really, this is what the entire edifice of anti-racism boils down to. Living in a white society is a daily humiliation ritual for any non-white person (east asians mostly excluded) with even a moderate sense of racial identity, especially blacks. The psychological harm from Noticing all the ways in which your people don't stack up is real1, and insofar as you place the combined moral value of non-whites above that of whites, it is in fact immoral to perpetuate the behaviors/institutions that cause such unfavorable comparisons. Hence, Woke.
1 N.B: This is why the popularization of HBD ideas will simply never happen in any non-racially exclusionary society. With the context of HBD, the message from conservatives to blacks (and other underperforming minorites) goes from "your community has serious problems, but with some elbow grease you might just be able to fix them" to "your dysfunction is congenital, your people are fundamentally lesser, and there's no way of fixing it without either Deus Ex Machina technology or centuries of strict and likely externally-imposed breeding control.2"
2 The unspoken third (and IMO most likely) scenario is that whites simply don't bother with any kind of uplift and instead resume the course of history that was set in motion in 1492 and put on pause circa the mid 20th century, as described by Teddy Roosevelt:
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Would it still be wrong to give them the cold shoulder if they were blasting loud rap music at all hours, street racing, and selling drugs? If they actually live up to the stereotypes, is it wrong to treat them differently?
Like it's one thing to give the cold shoulder to a black family that, for lack of a better descriptor, acts white. But if they actually match several of the stereotypes then I don't see the issue.
That would fall under 'the content of their character'.
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Differently from whom? Neighbors who don't do any of those things? That's it's not really about race. Unless they are/would be nice to white neighbors who "act black", there isn't necessarily a racism issue here (although someone might suspect that there is.)
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See? Again with the "them". (Genuinely not trying to be nitpicky and you didn't mean it that way - a family is a plural noun - but hopefully you'll allow the point.) I'm not talking about "them". I'm talking about specific people. I'm saying that if you see the new black family and then expect them to act per negative stereotypes and then that comes across even when you first meet them and say hi, that's bad. It's true that humans and especially modern Americans aren't super great at "firewalling" the two things, which the whole 'microaggressions' thing was a somewhat deluded and misplaced crusade at affecting, but it does take effort to extend some charity especially at first.
And of course you did list purely and universally negative stereotypes. The family could equally as well bring humor, food, a neighborly sense of watching out for the kids, hospitality, a deep faith, etc. Of course, there are some "culture-clash" values or practices that are a bit more value-neutral than selling drugs/blaring music at 2am/street racing that cause friction, sure. I'm not going to claim that all cultures and practices are of equal value either. But you have to admit starting out with "white = universally good" is not a great building block. I'll still stand by what I said though. It's really not all that bad if that's the true belief you have, but you have to be honest with yourself about whether it might bleed through or not. Only God will judge us by the contents of our heart, for everyone else in society, we have to make do with actual behaviors.
If you get right down to it most of us agree about this, but I think it's really easy to let the politically charged parts distract from it. And it tends to be a more prosperous and mentally healthy mindset to boot, when you default to trust rather than default to suspicion. That's the secret sauce of humanity's success and I don't think tech has changed it too much.
I’m just not convinced racism is the big bad. Treating a black family coldly just because violates hospitality which is its own sin.
If for any "racist" action you'd find it bad anyway through some other means, you're still opposing racism only covertly.
Well no. I actually would not want to send my kids to a school with a lot of minorities even if it were a “good” school. I think the cost to diversity is frequently higher than the benefit
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If it's woke to be against bad actions towards black people that are also bad when done towards anyone else, then I'm proud to be woke.
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I mean, if you watch the video, she basically admits to to most of her boyfriends being white, partially for stereotypical reasons. She actually has a whole video in depth talking about the issue dating black men as a black women.
I breezed through a rough transcript, but found it pretty interesting. Insofar as an internet dude can pass judgement, I think I'm actually going to declare her very much "not guilty" of the charge of discrimination. That's the opposite of her message. I ended up quoting a bit from it because I think there are some interesting nuggets of discussion inside. (I should also note that this video you linked is not the OP's video about NYC guys)
I'll say first of all, she talks about how Black women used to think about Black-Black relationships as "loyalty" but that's by the wayside - good! There's enough problems trying to find a lifelong marriage partner to have to restrict yourself to an eighth of the population (or less) out of some vague, ill-defined sense of loyalty. I think Black Power and the associated feelings were super important to the Black community for a few decades, but no longer serve their best interests so to speak.
And yes, she gets very frank with the statistics. But that's exactly where statistics should be used, yes? At least when assessing what we might call "dating strategy".
She also talks about how Black men have internalized some of the double standards that hit Black women especially hard, and you know what? That's true. I absolutely, positively cannot stand Jasmine Crockett. But I will say that the notion that, as she says, "we are never enough: we're too dark, or we're too loud, we're too demanding, we're ghetto, we're ratchet, we are all of these things" is probably tough - (especially Black) women DO need to walk a bit of a tightrope without any traits that are too "extreme". (Men actually DO have a parallel to this as well, especially when it comes to sexuality, but that's another conversation for another time). And media representation of Black women is an exercise in true whiplash (and yes, Black creators are partially to blame). The problems of race, both "self" inflicted and otherwise, are real, even if they aren't defining. Then we get I think the heart of the rant (apologies for poor formatting but I don't want to spend forever correcting the auto-generated transcript):
So basically she's saying that Black women in particular are tired of having a victim mindset. Great! I agree that's a very exhausting place to be, at the very least on a permanent basis. Does that come with some judgement for the men? Yes. But to me this is still speaking to group-level dynamics, with a dash of normal sexist-like expectations.
This makes me wonder how much of her rant is itself stereotypes, or media consumption, vs how much might be personal experience. I think that would change a bit about how I feel about what she's saying! But alas, we don't really get any extra information here. Her next complaint is, I'm going to be honest, this is just a man thing. It's not a Black man thing:
So yeah. Standard complaints with a racial undertone. She's got this aside that's a theory about the specific pairing of white women and Black men:
Honestly? Interesting theory. Maybe even true? I'm a bit skeptical still. But I think when it comes down to her main message it's pretty clear:
Love it. Treat people like people. Endorsed. With maybe a little note of you know, it takes two to tango and put investment in the relationship, but time and place and all that.
IME black men and women seem to really hate each other in a way that's kinda foreign to my (white)experience, and the hip-hop political incorrectness mentality that lots of black men have is a big part of it. Women, justifiably, don't like it very much, and mainstream white/hispanic culture is much much better about sexism coming with responsibility.
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She assumes women face oppression qua women. She assumes blacks face discrimination qua black.
Why isn’t that victimhood mentality
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I mean yeah that might be her message overall, but I cant help but feel, intuitively, that there would be a deliberate avoidance to dating black men on her part, just based on the 1st NYC video, even if she wouldnt encourage her audience to think in this way directly. It is harder to date black men as a black women, she knows this, and she very likely avoids dating black men because of it. I think that this is ok for what its worth. But I dont think she is entirely free of non-discrimination. Besides that, sexual selection is the one aspect of life that is always discriminatory, and people have the right to do it, based on race or whatever characteristics, because someone has a right to decide who they want to sleep with, period.
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To reiterate what you said because I typed all this out before my reading comprehension kicked in,
Because race isn't real, you can always draw a different line. "Oh, it's not muslims, it's Wahabis Salafi muslims. It's not B, it's A where A is a subset of B, B is not a subset of A."
This on top of race being a set of categories that is defined by exclusion rather than inclusion means that race is always fuzzy logic social bullshit.
On the other hand, sex IS real; even if it is spectrummy. You can fuck with sex by eg. cutting certain organs off or messing with hormones, but those things are actual existing structures that actually determine lots of shit about you; the transmascs among us are doing good citizen science by dosing androgens and going "Holly shit I want to fight people for standing in an annoying way now".
So: Racism is a fake and gay, but sexism (specifically against men) is based and real; so it's more respectable. Because of Woke we have to pretend that men aren't more likely in every category than women, but everyone knows that 9 out of 10 times the individual standing over the body when the cops show up has a lot more T than E.
ALSO: I want to type set runes, give me set runes, I don't actually care that much, do whatever
HTML character references work in Markdown.
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Broke: plaintext
Woke: markdown
Ascended: LaTeX
Sites need to have specific support for LaTeX. Doesn't seem like ours does.
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I think the simplest most elegant answer is that in-group bias simply doesn't work the same way for sex vs race. Almost all races have strong in-group bias. Women have strong in-group bias. Men do not. Men are more prone to liking women then men. So when women want to throw men as a group under the bus, almost every man is happy to oblige, thinking that he himself is one of the rare good ones, and that the fact that he's respecting a woman throwing men under the bus just proves how good he is.
This in turn likely comes out of the fact that men were evolutionarily in conflict with other men for resources but entirely dependent on women for reproduction. The men who had strong psychological reasons to love cherish and value women and therefore protect them and feed them, instead of hoarding their own resources for themselves, were the ones who reproduced more.
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Remember "10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman" [Reddit threads] and then the pushback when people realized almost all the cat callers were men of color?
I remember this distinctly. The glee that women had in a recorded example of their experiences, followed by a wave of deletions when the real message was realised.
It's a good example of what the OP is talking about. It's socially acceptable to criticise men for statistically backed stereotypes. It's not socially acceptable to criticise minorities for statistically backed stereotypes.
Similarly, the quick death of #StopAsianHate as it became too undeniable who was actually committing the acts of Asian hatred.
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I think it’s context. Intraracial relationships are contextualized by the fact that a person of the opposite gender but the same race is part of the same community. I am much more likely to have a brother or spouse or husband who is male than I am to have a strong relationship with someone of a different race or religion. So there’s a sense of this being friendly fire rather than othering. You are talking about your own tribe, not someone who out there. It’s not a threat because every black woman complaining about a black man or white woman complaining about white men are in some relationship with those men.
I think the flaw with this explanation specifically is that pretty much everyone on the planet has a close relationship with the opposite sex by default, due to the fact that everyone has a mother and father, and has had at lease one romantic relationship. Plenty of men have close relationships with other women like a sister or a mom, that doesnt mean that anything a particular man is saying wouldnt be called misogyny, just because they have those connections. Andrew Tate probably has had his fair share of girlfriends and has a mother, lots of people think he is a misogynistic douche. Its not like he is just telling the truth about women because he has had personal relationships with them.
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I think there's a few things going on, personally.
One is that men aren't really a group, in a sense that they defend themselves or have social legitimisation to fall back on, qua being men. Even when "the patriarchy" was a thing, "men" weren't a group, "old powerful fathers" were. Young men have historically always been shafted. Because men don't really constitute a group (in the sense of banding together or defending each other's interests, purely based on their sex), they don't and can't defend themselves very well (or at all) against being tarred like that. Women are a group, women see each other as a (weak) collective, they advocate for group interests and repudiate attacks against women-as-identity. Even when masculinity was more of a thing it was never really a thing for men for themselves (rather for family, nation, etc.)
Also, women are better at advocating their positions through appealing to social consensus. That's again because they form a meaningful group but also because they are better at some interpersonal stuff (not all of it). So they are better at making "men suck" be a social consensus thing.
Black people very much are a group. I think the study showing that black people show great in-group solidarity, greater than other ethnicities, has been shared a lot here. Black identity is something that's cared about, it's high status, it has social legitimisation, etc. Black people argue as a collective, men don't.
Muslims also are a group that strongly defends its honour, sometimes to the point of violence (cf. Quran burning). And, well, sadly that works. Politicians would rather introduce blasphemy laws than piss them off.
But black men aren't a group qua being men - only qua being black. So black women saying men suck being OK is not surprising.
Of course this all pre-supposes you don't buy into the tenets of modern liberalism at face value - that it's about people being treated equally rather than power between people (the often repeated "Who, whom?"). But I think at this point even ardent liberals don't pretend the movement is about actual equality anymore.
Notably, since then there has been a pretty effective campaign that has largely eliminated, reoriented, or discredited male-specific spaces. There are a few around still, but there were prominent men's colleges and other groups last century. Many have adapted to allow women (and I'm not sure I'm personally upset by this), but women's specific spaces (women's colleges, Girl Scouts) are still allowed.
Similar, but even more aggressively for race-specific spaces.
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This is a weird filter bubble effect. If it had been mostly white men(and there are groups of mostly white men who catcall, albeit fewer than other races), she would have had no trouble saying ‘white people’. She would have no trouble saying ‘Christians’(or more likely ‘fundies’). But conversely she’s not going to complain about women qua women.
Likewise many on the other side of the aisle would have no trouble criticizing Muslims, gays, etc. The taboo against racism is a taboo against criticizing certain specific groups, not one against ethnic prejudice more broadly.
Progressives will criticize whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians, etc, but not their opposites, is a thing thats been discussed to death.
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Because that's the historical dispensation of the modern left. There is a conservation of tribalism, people just move the groups around and emphasize identities to fit the current fashion. There is the exact same tension in the discussion of "white people's" wealth and the disparities between average whites and asians, jews, indians etc. All the structural advantages that supposedly keep the black man down in favor of the white man wind up disproportionately benefitting nonwhite or marginally white groups?
It's all just a conspiracy theory, essentially.
When faced with inequality of criminality, condemn "men" and guns. But not the most violent subset of men, and definitely don't enforce the current firearm laws harshly against that group specifically. Then, complain about different men and different guns to the ones causing the problem.
When faced with inequality of income, condemn whites and men. But not the most disproportionately wealthy groups which are no white supremacist's idea of a good time. Also no one can define "men".
It's all just a grand unified theory of white male christian hatred that explains all differential outcomes for everyone else, but only when the comparison is negative. It shifts blame from the political ingroup to the outgroup.
All this despite the obvious logical problems and the messiness of all the categories involved. This is the theology that holds the modern left together, the unified hatred of the modern global economy ("capitalism"), Realpolitik, Western civilization broadly, white people specifically, and of course men.
The progressive stack is always topped by whatever is fashionably considered the biggest opponent of these general categories. Global Warming, No Kings, Free Palestine, Pussy hats, BLM, NAFTA, MeToo, Nuclear Power, the Soviet Union, Iran etc.
The right has all the same things in places, but due to the class gap it's more drunk tradesmen and internet edgelords than senators and ivy league college presidents.
Assuming you mean Jews, they get condemned by the left and the left's allies all the time. You can bet that Trump finding antisemitism in universities isn't due to them being conservatives or white supremacists. And diversity requirements have driven Jews out of Hollywood because Jews do in fact count as white there.
I don't see this as the important part, but I mean all the various minority groups that outperform the white average. Jews are a central example, but east asians, indians, nigerians, arabs etc.
Equivocation between whether jews are the oppressed victims of the holocaust or the perpetrators of a current one is a perennial favorite. It's different things. The left doesn't like right-wing nationalistic jews (Israelis), but they do like western communist jews who never went to Israel to try their stupid ideas. Often the second group are protesting the first. Meanwhile the right understands a nationalistic western-oriented regional ally, but isn't that fond of the "jooos" in NYC and Berkeley. It's just politics, and the requisite belief systems thereof.
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Indians edge out Jews for the wealthiest group in America per capita.
Given that Jews have been here a lot longer and thus are not benefiting from as much selection effect I strongly expect that Indians will lose that edge soon enough.
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The previous paragraph says "condemn "men" and guns. But not the most violent subset of men".
By parallelism, the next paragraph implies condemning whites and men but not the most disproportionately wealthy groups of whites, even though it doesn't include the words "of whites". So I don't think it's referring to Indians.
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I’d also add that much of what is considered to be racial prejudice is actually driven by sexism or sex-based angst and insecurity, and people generally would rather profess to be racists in private than to admit to any of this. It’s a common argument, and not just among SJWs, that white-on-black racism in the American South was mostly just a result of white men’s suspicion that many of their women are susceptible to getting seduced and boned by big black studs. To the extent that such fears really were there, I’m guessing they were overblown, because we know that white women are the social group least likely to engage in exogamy. I’ve also seen the claim that many white men felt conflicted about their attraction to young black women who, unlike white women, had an allure as sexually available and lascivious vixens. (Obesity was notably not much of an issue back then, I should add.)
There’s also the case of the widespread antipathy among black women, especially young single ones, towards white and Asian women that are so-called mudsharks or coal burners i.e. driven to mate with black men. The ‘yellow fever’ of many white men is also frowned upon by women in general, the same as how the willingness of Asian women to mate with white men is reviled among Asian men.
This doesn't actually require you to believe that white women would broadly be willing. (Though people also didn't like the willing ones).
The closest modern analogue is the fear of refugees in Europe, the claim is not actually that they're especially attractive to Western women but that they won't let that stop them.
"We need to violently check these people who're prone to rape" would probably be categorized as racism rather than sex-based insecurity by most. If anything, the claim is that the inferiority complex is on the other side.
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One aspect of this is that it's plausible that men are fundamentally more violent and prone to criminal behaviour than women, outside of extraordinarily unusual cultural circumstances. Whereas it seems more likely that Islam is not fundamentally violent insofar as it can over time evolve to be less violent than other religions. It's a cultural superstructure of a type that can change radically over the centuries – we see this with religions across history in a way we don't really with gender differences.
This distinction can be hotly debated of course but one of the thoughts at play is that suspending prejudice helps allow what can improve to improve, whereas if there's not much chance of improvement, there is less motivation to suspend prejudice.
I think this is it: nobody today, even the most self-described feminist really believes in a blank slate between the sexes in areas like physical strength and capacity for violence and criminality. There was a moment where a few feminists argued against, say, Title IX sex-separated sports leagues, but realistically the consensus is that they are necessary if we want women to play sports. It's more controversial to observe differences in non-physical realms, spanning a gamut from women's chess leagues (in my observation, uncontroversial), noticing gender attendance at the local train museum (probably no complaints), and STEM jobs (controversial: see Damore).
Racial differences seem drastically smaller in most categories than sex differences, so it's easier to argue for a blank-slate null hypothesis. Even then, in areas where differences are particularly obvious, you probably won't get too much grief: "Black people have darker skin" probably has a few objectors, but likely isn't getting tarred as racism.
Many of the self described feminist, and many leftist i ran into quite literally believe this. Maybe its just been my experience, but I've ran into people both online an personally who think that men and women are essentially the same at birth, & that patriarchy makes us different. I agree this is not the case, but as I've addressed in the original post, this fact is rejected by many within our society, perhaps my experience with such people differ from yours.
A lot of the resistance to these facts probably come down to the fact that they: 1 - basically prove gender essentiallism to an extent 2 - Can be used to argue for gendered treatment of individuals. I dont think either of those are wrong, but a lot of theses types do.
Yes, but I'm not sure what information you get by noticing that, other than "people believe what is obviously self-serving/in their sociofinancial interest to believe". Which is true for everyone, including classical liberals.
No, it's avoided because it provides an alternative (or rather, the logical/unselfish conclusion) to "
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Oh boy, you haven't seen the controversy?
My sense of the story is basically this. The big question hanging over the game is, "Why do we not see more women at the very top tier of chess?" Interestingly, my sense has been that almost everyone involved in this conversation is actually perfectly fine in saying that physical sports are different (this does not hold for the general population, but it seems to hold within the community of folks who are involved in the conversation about top-level chess), but obviously, the question still lingers for what is mostly understood as an almost entirely cognitive game. "Sure, it makes sense that you're going to have differences in powerlifting, but what is the nature of the underlying cause of the observed difference in chess?"
Of course, folks consider the possible counter-examples, like Judit Polgar, who peaked at #8 in the world, and there is usually some debate as to whether she stands for the proposition that it is generally possible to have a higher proportion of women at the very top or whether she is just an outlier among outliers, the Bobby Fisher of women's chess, but that even the Bobby Fisher of women's chess couldn't reach the very top of the men. There is obviously no clear answer here, but it is a question that is absolutely discussed every time the controversy appears.
The immediate domain of the actual controversy is the question, "Should there be women-only events/sections?" On the one hand, if there aren't women-only events/sections, then folks worry that women will be mostly shut out of top-tier competitions (not due to active discrimination, but because their rating levels simply won't qualify them for many qualification criteria for open sections of closed events.
Aside, because I just said "open sections of closed events", and that sounds weird. Often times, the word "open" is used in two senses. In the first sense, it is that the tournament is generally open to all participants. This would be like "the US Open", where anyone, regardless of chess level or achievement, can just decide to sign up and play. This is contrasted to "closed" or "invitational" tournaments, which generally have a set of qualification criteria or are perhaps even more directly just a set of hand-picked competitors that are invited to play. The second sense is that many tournaments, whether "open" or "closed" will often have a women's section. However, like many other sports, they won't have a "men's" section; they'll have "women's" and "open", so that a female competitor can choose to play the open section if she'd like (and for cases with qualification criteria, if she qualifies), but is also able to choose to play the women's section.
If an event has a women's section, there's usually a side question about whether the prize funds in the women's section is as high as for the open, but that's usually a side question for the main question. Generally, one of the arguments for having a women's section is that if an event doesn't have a women's section, then with the current ratings of the populations of men/women at the highest level, most women would not likely be able to compete for a significant amount of prize money... or they'll be shut out entirely from closed/invitational tournaments because they're less likely to meet the qualification criteria. With less chance of winning substantial prize money, it would be more difficult for them to continue making a career out of chess, and the thought goes that not having women's only sections, with separate prize pools, will cause more women to leave competitive chess, which would either make the disparity worse or at least sort of lock in the disparity.
On the other hand, there's a competing theory concerning the reason why there aren't more women at the highest levels. The theory goes like this. In order to improve at chess, even all the way to the top level, you must have a lot of experience playing against top-tier competition. It is by having these experiences, seeing how they best attack your weaknesses, and learning from it, that you improve your own game. If you don't keep going at it against the best, you're less likely to figure out how you can be better. On this view, having women-only events/sessions might seem like a good idea in that it makes it more likely that they'll be able to partake in a prize pool, but you run the risk of 'quarantining' the women. Perhaps someone is currently good enough to consistently win good prizes in women's sections, but if she started playing open sections, she'd likely struggle. One might argue that she should, nevertheless, play open sections in the interest of her long-term improvement, gaining the experience of playing against the absolute best players. However, her direct financial incentive is to play in the women's section, where she's more likely to make more money now. This has been argued by some number of top female players, and a few have even eschewed women's events entirely, choosing to play only opens. So far, none have made it to the top top with the men, but a few are at least putting their money where their mouth is, in a sense, and playing only open sections in accordance with this line of thinking.
So, the controversy is a bit of a trap. Both having women's sections and not having women's sections can be 'problematic', depending on how you view it. The debate is still unsettled in the community for whether there is an underlying theory that can explain the current disparity or whether that disparity can, in theory, be 'fixed'. It's not the most public controversy of controversies, but within the small community of top-level chess, it's absolutely a controversy.
I'm confused by the quarantine idea. It seems obvious to me that the best way to grind hours of experience playing chess is by playing online, which is not gender segregated. Perhaps even more valuable is playing against an engine and doing analysis of games. Do people really think that lack of tournament play in open divisions is what's holding women back, or is this just an excuse/cover to try to get rid of the women's divisions?
I'm going to add another Hikaru video, one just released today, because he went on a mini rant about this exact topic. It starts here with another GM asking him about a possible computer line from the game he had just played (he had a smile on his face, because he knows). The mini rant ends with, "This is the problem with these games, it's that, it's like whenever you use a computer program, you really lose the human feel, because some of these moves are just not human, or they just don't feel right. They just don't feel right at all."
How to effectively use engines to improve your ability to play human over-the-board games is genuinely hard/controversial.
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There is a huge debate about playing online or against engines, and this could certainly come up in a conversation about the controversy. This requires another digression into some background on chess.
One major perennial discussion in the chess world is about time controls. That is, how much time do players have to think about their moves? There are a lot of different time controls out there that people use, and I'm certainly not going to cover the entire debate here. The most prestigious chess events are still 'classical' time control. This already gets confusing, because there's not just one single time control for classical, but there is somewhat of a range of possibilities that people generally view as 'classical'. For example, right now, both the open/women's candidates tournaments are happening. The open is using a time control of two hours with no increment for the first 40 moves, then an additional 30 minutes plus a 30 second increment added to your time for every move you made thereafter. The women's section is instead using 90 minutes plus a 30 second increment from the beginning through move 40, then an additional 30 minutes (still with increment) thereafter. But both of these time controls are still generally considered 'classical'.
Time controls are enough of a controversy that it is often cited as one of the issues that has driven a wedge between Magnus Carlsen (viewed by many as still the best player in the world) and FIDE, with Magnus giving up his title of classical world champion, participating in fewer FIDE events, and possibly(?) building groundwork for a competing organization to challenge FIDE. But that's an aside. All to say, they're a big deal.
Second is online vs. 'over-the-board'. Online chess has enabled a lot of people to play casually or even competitively. However, the online community is generally very skewed toward much faster time controls. I haven't checked the stats, but my sense is that online, blitz (approx 3-5min) is the most popular, followed by rapid (approx 10-25min) and bullet (approx 1min) in some order. There just aren't that many good players playing classical online (or honestly, that many players in general). There is huge controversy as to what extent playing much faster chess translates to success in slower chess. You can try out more ideas more quickly; you can train your instinctual or short-calculation skills; it may genuinely improve your play if you get into a time crunch in a classical game. But you don't get the experience of really sinking into a position and calculating deeply. It has not been uncommon in the current candidates tournament for players to invest 30-60 minutes on a single move that they think is critical. Recognizing when to use that sort of time and using it effectively is a skill that you simply cannot build playing blitz. But we've also seen some players get really really good at blitz first, and then eventually transition into playing quite good slow chess, so it's still a pretty open question of controversy concerning the relationship between them.
Moreover, there is a perception that cheaters (using engines) are much more prevalent online than at over-the-board events. It's already hard to find many people playing classical online; but if a bunch of them just sort of give up and start using engines anyway, are you really getting much that you wouldn't be getting by playing an engine? In fact, some people think that it's even worse if you're worried that your opponent is cheating. It's harder to stay focused; you're more likely to waste clock cycles thinking about whether they're using an engine or not rather than on the game.
That, then, brings us to engines. Engines are super super good. Much better than any human. Sometimes there are ways that you can play anti-computer chess, but even that is pretty hard. And they do not "think like humans". Top players certainly use engines to help come up with opening ideas, or they'll use them to help them improve some of their calculations, but there's somewhat of a fine line between looking at something the engine says and thinking, "Oh, that makes sense; I can maybe try to incorporate that idea into my thinking in some way in the future," and, "No dawg; even if you gave me an additional hour in a game, I am either not going to come up with that idea or not going to be able to calculate enough of it accurately to ever feel comfortable trying such a thing." Engines can help, but it is hotly contested concerning how they can help, what level players can get what kind of help from them, etc. The current classical world champion famously was not allowed to use engines at all for the first however many years of his development (I don't remember the exact number).
How to effectively use engines to prepare for human tournaments is difficult. Aside from using them sometimes for tactics or other ideas, they're probably most used in "prep", where a person makes some plans ahead of time for what they want to do in the opening phases of the game. This is notoriously difficult, even at the highest level. In this very candidates tournament, one of the most well-known players (because he's also a streamer) got into a situation where he had played his computer-driven prep, and at one point, his opponent played a move that wasn't in his prep. His next decision was a critical one, but the position was quite complicated. He spent like an hour and then played the wrong move. After the game he blamed himself and his team for not looking at that move in preparation. He thought that the position was "impossible to play" as a human, and this is one of those pitfalls that make working with engines hard. You can't download everything from the engine into your brain; you have to stop somewhere. Where do you stop? You have to be a highly skilled player with a sense of, "This is a position that I can probably figure out over-the-board," versus, "This position is absolute madness, and so if I'm not able to just memorize what the engine says, I probably won't be able to figure it out, and I may end up just lost."
All of this is very controversial on its own, and I get no sense whatsoever that these controversies are being propped up in some way to support a position on women's chess.
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Online games are faster and more casual, and typically don't involve both players analysing the game afterwards (a crucial part of chess improvement). The best way to gain experience is generally to play OTB (over the board) games at classical time controls (>=1 hour per player).
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My intuition as a complete outsider to chess is that hours of grinding online could get you from low to mid or mid to high, but to reach the truly elite levels of top-10-in-the-world, you really need to spend lots of time competing against people at or near that level. I don't think a billion reps against little leaguers would be as valuable as a thousand against minor leaguers for someone aiming for the MLB. That said, I do wonder if chess engines, given their clear superiority over any and all humans, might enable the best of both worlds, but also, as an outsider, I could be missing some important distinctions.
I'd guess it's a genuine belief in the former, for the purpose of something like the latter, but rather than to try to get rid of the women's divisions, it's to try to land at a societally mediated conclusion for elite women's evident underperformance in chess compared to elite men's.
Chess engines are simply too strong to be used as sparring partners. People improve most when they have the chance to play consistently against players at their own level or a bit higher. The main benefit of chess engines is their use as analysis tools.
Is it not possible or practical to gimp chess engines to play at a level and style equivalent to elite human players? I would have thought that lowering a super-capable tool to human level capability would be possible, but, of course, with something as complicated as chess, it's not just a matter of scaling some number down by 50% or whatever.
That's basically the issue.
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Level, yes. You can actually do an okay-ish enough job by just dialing down some numbers. The great thing about the ELO system is that you can just use results to figure out how to 'rate' a bot. Just create a gimped bot, let it play a bunch of people online, see what rating range it ends up in, and poof, you've got a bot that plays "at that level". Want it a bit higher/lower? Turn it up/down a smidge. You'd need a lot of top-level players to play along with the scheme to dial it in decently at the elite level, though. Your estimate of its level gets better as it plays more, so this is likely practical for someone like chess.com for very short games. It's harder for elite-level and longer games, just because it's going to be hard to get enough data.
Style? Not a chance. At least not right now. This is an area where a lot of folks are investing significant efforts. The hope is that rather than just using traditional engines, you can take gigantic databases of human moves, sprinkle in some ML magic, and get something that plays more like humans. My sense is that no one has been really successful in doing so yet. I haven't even heard any rumors of any top-level players finding someone who has managed to do this and then proceeding to use it. Maybe someone has, and they're keeping it top secret for a competitive edge, but if so, it's very secret, and I haven't heard a peep.
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Hm, are you pretty knowledgeable about competitive chess, and, if so, do you know if there's any controversy about transwomen competing in the women's division? I wonder if it would create a videogame speedrunner-like situation where basically every last one of the top "woman" speedrunners are male (I'm sure high correlation with autism would play a part, as well as the sex, though I'd also guess that high level chess or speedrunning tends to be disproportionately autistic, both male and female).
I've heard off-hand that men also dominate "sports" like darts or billiards/pool/snooker, despite there being minimal advantage from physical strength in those sports. If that's true, I wonder how much of that's biological in terms of men being innately better at geometry versus biological in terms of men having greater penchant for obsessing over some meaningless task until they achieve mastery versus biological in terms of men having greater incentive to become known for being great at something.
Unsurprisingly, there was some controversy.
First, some organization. The primary international organization that is involved in many of the highest-level chess tournaments is FIDE. Since I know the most about US concerns and TheMotte is still somewhat heavily US, I'll also discuss the US Chess Federation, which operates, unsurprisingly, within the US. Some international events are directly organized by FIDE. Many times, FIDE will 'rate' an event run by some other organization. USCF also does their own rating system for their own events, but FIDE may rate them, too. That is, USCF hosts a variety of events, and some of them are not FIDE rated, while others are. What it means to be 'rated' is that the organization will take the results of the event and use them to update their list of ratings for players (which is meant to be a measure of how good they are). USCF may host an event that is not FIDE rated, and just your USCF rating will update. USCF may also host an event that is FIDE rated, and then both USCF and FIDE ratings change.
The perception of FIDE is that it has many institutional connections to Russia and similar countries. The Soviet Union used to be a powerhouse in international chess, and they still have a fair amount of pull in the organization. The current president of FIDE is Russian. This is not strictly determinative of what they will choose to do (for example, at least one top-level Russian player who was an outspoken supporter of the Ukraine war was banned, and other Russians have been playing "without a flag" since the war started), but FIDE does not necessarily lean in the direction of US politics. In 2023, FIDE enacted a policy on transgender players. It was controversial, and I'll just let chess.com describe the controversy. USCF, on the other hand, had enacted a much more permissive policy that simply accepted self-identification. My understanding is that if USCF runs an event that is FIDE rated, the FIDE rules control.
There is, of course, controversy, but I think there are at least a couple factors that make it less likely to come up as much. First is that the people who are most likely to be upset about it are in the US (or perhaps in other countries that have more US-levels of pro-trans, and perhaps their own national federations have taken similar stances to USCF), and there's very little point in complaining about/to USCF, since USCF has enacted their own, more permissive policy. They would have to complain about/to FIDE. And, well, everyone seems to have something to complain about with FIDE, so it's hard to have this one move very far up the list. FIDE is also viewed as being pretty hard to influence, and so especially with such significant Russia/Russia-like connections, many folks probably think that it would be basically shouting into the void. They're probably not going to change FIDE's mind. The best chance would be to prop up a competing organization, and if that's going to happen, it's probably going to be primarily because of other grievances, so a pro-trans person may just not bother emphasizing the trans thing and just latch on to other criticisms/reasons to split, but holding hopes that if such an effort is successful, maybe there's a chance that whatever replacement organization would be more likely to be more pro-trans.
The second factor is, frankly, the vibe shift, where it seems like trans stuff has just been getting less sway in general. It's not that there's no controversy, just that it doesn't seem to be getting quite as much attention.
I'm not really aware of any high-rated male players transitioning and then winning some or a bunch of highly-respected women's events.
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You need men, you don’t need ethnic diversity. Lesbian separatism is a weird punchline, a trivia question, something from the ‘70s. Ethnic nationalism is real and has had many successful exclusionary movements execute substantial, genuine ethnic cleansing in the last century alone, if you look at tribal wars of extermination historically it’s even more common.
Women disliking men, really, is socially meaningless. What, is the kingdom of women going to enslave all men? Even legendary homosexual misogynist BAP thinks that some form of female control of men can only be achieved by way of complex psychological conditioning process called “the longhouse”, arguably a metaphor for civilization itself, not martially (obviously). Women love men and men love women, that’s biology. Patriarchy waxes and wanes as a function of technological development, primarily.
Biology has much less to say amount a society of diverse people who (at least initially) look very different getting along together forever. It doesn’t preclude it, but it doesn’t endorse it either. And the historic example suggests real, bloody conflict between ethnic groups is very much commonplace. That is why people take it more seriously, probably.
You also need women for society to function, more so, in fact, than you need men. And yet not only is men disliking women not considered socially meaningless, it’s widely considered to be as contemptible as jihadi terrorism or white supremacism. Even though there has also never been a kingdom of men enslaving all women. (Please don’t give me all the usual feminist BS.)
Some muslim societies could be argued to fall into this category as can some other places. With an extended definition of slavery I don't think that's even controversial.
Yeah, in 21st century WEIRD countries.
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There are many very successful all male societies- they need to recruit to keep their numbers up, but militaries have historically been very good at getting stuff done at the cutting edge of their society. Men enslaving women is, correct, not how patriarchy usually works- but as IS shows, it can work in a pinch as a substitute for genuine intersexual cooperation.
I think this depends on your definition of 'society'.
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Broadly speaking, I think the failure mods of prejudice against women (or indeed men) are less bad than prejudice against an ethnic, religious or economic group. The worst outcome we've seen for the former is the Taliban, the worst outcome we've seen for the latter is genocide. Not even the most he-man woman-haters social regime is going to kill all the women, but killing all the Jews/Tutsis/Kulaks can and does happen sometimes.
At least until we have access to artificial wombs.
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That is merely a difference in magnitude, and I would argue that it is not that large.
Personally, I would rather have one year as a woman in freedom than ten years as a woman married to some Taliban. If this attitude is typical, being enslaved by the Taliban robs a woman of 90% of her remaining QALYs, while being killed on the spot robs her of 100%.
My Western attitude might not be entirely representative, there is probably a woman somewhere in Afghanistan whose kink it is to get raped and bred by her Taliban husband, and whose utility would decrease under a more liberal system, and some probably get lucky in that they have a husband who is not maximally terrible, but by and large we can assume that if some alien placed these women in an enlightened state and asked them if they wanted to spend their live in Afghanistan or in a fictional version in which the Taliban believe in gender equality, they would prefer the latter by a lot.
Well, do women in Afghanistan all kill themselves? They do at elevated rates, but apparently life is still worth living for them.
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The taliban sucks for women, but I’m skeptical that maximally terrible stupid evil is a good description of the average taliban husband- most people aren’t going to go out of their way to be maximally terrible stupid evil, after all.
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Your "based on sex" is too broad: Prejudice against men is tolerated, but prejudice against women isn't. Same with race and religion: Prejudice against white people and Christians is tolerated, prejudice against black people and Muslims isn't.
I'd add that, in fact, prejudice against black men is also less tolerated than prejudice against white women.
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This is all very obvious. They are politically relevant classes from which the regime draws support. So they get special class status.
If you were to say any of this to someone in China they would say "Yes, obviously" and struggle to have a conversation about it for 30 seconds.
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You can look for, and even find, logical reasons. But they aren't the true reason, which is plain old who/whom politics. Which becomes clear when you dig a little deeper and realize it's not true that prejudice based on sex is tolerable; rather, prejudice against men is tolerable and prejudice against women is intolerable. Nor is prejudice based on race always intolerable; prejudice against white people (especially white men) is acceptable. The old liberal order of "no prejudice based on those things" was never really implemented, and what part of it was has fallen apart in the Culture War.
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I think that to an extent you are comparing applies and oranges: Prejudice against men versus prejudice against Muslims. The reason for this is that the progressive culture which is still quite influential in popular discourse treats sexism very differently depending on whether it's against men or women. The same thing with racism against blacks versus racism against whites. And the same thing for bias against Muslims versus bias against, say, Christians.
So I think a better question is whether bias against women as a group more tolerated than bias against, say, Muslims as a group. Which is a much closer call. If you are a university professor, saying something unflattering about women as a group is arguably just as dangerous for your career as saying something unflattering about Muslims as a group. By contrast, saying something unflattering about men as a group or saying something unflattering about Christians as a group.
I'll concede that possibly sexism is more tolerated than bias on the basis of race or religion (I believe that's consistent with American Constitutional concepts of "equal protection") but I don't think the difference is huge.
I am intentionally comparing prejudice against men to prejudice against Muslims because both often stem from fear-based logic.
My critique focuses on the specific progressive argument that prejudice against men is "valid" because women’s fear is backed by the reality of male-driven misogyny and violence. By accepting this "valid reason" as a justification for sexism, one inadvertently creates a logical pathway to justify prejudice against specific racial or religious groups based on similar statistical or anecdotal fears. Afterall this is the reasoning given for the different treatment of sexisms that you suggest.
The core of my point is this: if we validate differential treatment of men based on their collective actions, we undermine the fundamental argument against racial or religious profiling, as the same logic of "justifiable prejudice" could then be applied to any group.
I understand. I think that as other people have pointed out, most of the difference between societal attitudes towards bias against Muslims versus bias against men does not stem from differing attitudes between racial and sexist bias, but rather due to the fact that Muslims are a favored group and men are not.
For the most part, these things aren't based on logical application of neutral principles, but rather based on "who/whom"
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There's a joke I've seen before that is along the lines of "women be shopping = bigoted, white women be shopping = woke" so it doesn't seem to be strictly true that sexism is tolerable while racism and religionism isn't. It seems more to just be directional from minority and "oppressed" groups in the English speaking world to majority groups. That being said, it actually doesn't seem to matter too much regardless and mostly depends on the areas you traffic in. In some circles, saying women shouldn't vote is actually the correct social signal to send. In other circles, something like that would get you instantly excommunicated.
I don't think it's sexist or racist to believe that men are more likely to be violent or that Muslims are more likely to be violent. I think prejudice occurs when you go from the real statistical understanding to collective blame and group punishment, treating every man or black person or Muslim or whatever else as if they aren't an individual who holds responsibility only to themselves and not to others who they have an attribute of theirs in common with. Just because men are more violent on average doesn't make it fair to some random office worker Joe if he's treated like a violent criminal, he is an individual and if he is peaceful he should be accepted that way. Especially when there's basically no group where violent people make up the majority. Even with the worst American group, black men, most of them you come across are still gonna be generally peaceful. And just like most male violent crime, even that is pretty much just towards other black men.
Essentially it's just useful to remember. Men are more violent on average, but the average man is not violent. The average man is peaceful, the baseline of men is nonviolence and non crime.
Replace "violent" with "at the highest end of STEM aptitude" and you just got fired from the presidency of Harvard. These are somewhat overloaded words but the revealed descriptivist definition seems to include any belief in inherent differences that have clear moral valence, at least if the direction of some of those perceived differences can be interpreted as "punching down" the progressive stack.
Well, this one's straightforwardly not racism because "Muslim" isn't a race, but it is classic "Islamophobia".
It's kind of weird that we don't have a general "-ism" word to refer to religious prejudice or religious intolerance, but I guess religion is the point at which the "everybody's the same regardless" theory breaks down so badly that nobody wants to say religious prejudice is always unwarranted? You may believe Islam in particular isn't inherently more violent (it tried to be more resistant to the "evolution" that @Rosencrantz2 points out is common to religions, yet in practice Muslims' attitudes toward violence do vary greatly from century to century and place to place) But, are you going to extend that charity to every religion ever? That's a good way to find yourself visiting the People's Temple for a free glass of Flavor Aid.
Well I never said that, my belief is that individuals deserve to be treated as individuals and not purely as statistics. Muslims are definitely more likely to be violent, but there are also tons of peaceful non violent ones too. The same way we shouldn't say "this Muslim terrorist is a great person because Muhammad Ali is", we shouldn't say "Muhammad Ali is a terrible person because this Muslim terrorist is". I think individualism like that is a fundamental part of human dignity. Humanity is not a hive mind species.
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No, see, this is exactly what they were talking about, and my comment above as well. You jumped straight to a factual debate about the stereotypes but that’s not the point. The point is, you have these beliefs about Muslims, fine. You think your views are more accurate, fine. Are you following it up by treating individual Muslims as dangerous and potentially violent as a baseline belief?
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I think this is more or less the correct explanation. It really is just who/whom in its fundamental essence, and trying to make it make sense logically is a fool's errand.
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This isn't so much a joke as it is an accurate representation of how much modern feminists have "lost the plot" so to speak and gotten subsumed into the broader (pun half intended) realm of woke racial politics. You can see this clearly with the widespread proliferation of the term "Karen", which as far as I can tell, feminists never really pushed back on, and often embrace and use themselves, despite being blatantly misogynistic. Calling a woman a bitch = misogynist, calling a white woman a bitch = a ok.
It's sort of the inverse of the term "thug", which is woke from a gender politics angle (men are thugs), but un-woke from a racial politics angle, and therefore no bueno.
In a way, this observation does support OP's claim, no? "Directionally wrong" sexual prejudice is redeemed by a "directionally correct" racial component, but "bad" racial prejudice is not made acceptable by introducing a "good" sex component; ergo the racial dimension empirically matters more.
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This is actually what I meant to critique. Ill modify the post accordingly! (Although many people do think that simply believing this is wrong) Im trying to talk more about treating people within a given group differently based on these general facts. (Treating an individual man as if he would rape you, and profiling him, for example, because the majority of rape is men.)
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