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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   2835 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 25, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Field notes from the usage wars:

Wife and I recently got new phones. She had a cracked screen and mine was so ancient it couldn't run tiktok without crashing so it was time. We gathered up the kids, promised ice cream afterwards, and headed to the phone store. I hate the phone store. It's completely soulless and full of mind-and-social-fabric-destroying devices. I would rather be at the bead store than the phone store (IYKYK).

I was helped by a nice younger dude with a man bun. As he was tapping away at his iPad he tells me I might be eligible for an upgrade. "Great!" I say. He keeps tapping away as I watch my kids run around the store touching things they shouldn't be touching while my wife tries to wrangle them. This trip better not take more than an hour. Man bun tells me his wife is an elementary school teacher, neat. More time passes. I'm getting irritated. I ask, "So... uh, can I get an upgrade?"

Man bun: "May I."

Me: "Come again?"

Man bun: "It's 'May I get an upgrade?'"

I think it's a universal human experience to feel a twinge of irritation when you are corrected, but man o' man it's doubly worse when you're right and they're wrong. I normally would have dropped it but since I was in the phone store, and I was primed for some confrontation.

"No. I'm not asking you for permission to get an upgrade, I'm asking if it's possible. Therefore, 'can' is the correct word."

Man bun thinks for a second, then says, "Yeah I guess you're right." I'm glad he cares about the state of the English language but damn guy at least be right about it. I imagine his wife regales him about owning 8-year-olds asking to go to the bathroom and he got the wrong idea. "I dunno, CAN you???"

This is an example of HYPERCORRECTION. I'm certainly guilty of this; it's probably my worst tendency with language. People usually overcorrect because of something they learned in primary school, like ending a sentence in a preposition (totally fine btw). Take this example:

The IRS is after my wife and I.

Sounds correct, right? I kinda vaguely remember thinking that "I" was a more posh way to refer to yourself than "me". But all you have to do is remove the other person to realize you're wrong:

The IRS is after I.

Clearly deranged. "I" is a subject pronoun, "me" is an object pronoun. If you're the one doing the verbing, it's "I"; if you're the one getting verbed it's "me". Thus:

The IRS is after my wife and me.

Or the slightly better (imo):

The IRS is after me and my wife

I can't even imagine some wagie playing the pedant without them immediately getting punched in the face. Which is perhaps why I would do such a shop online, but really why do you even need to go to a phone shop? Is this some American thing where all the good deals are gated behind in person interactions for no reason?

Phones are like groceries or clothes, it’s the kind of physical object you really want to look at in person and hold before buying.

At the supermarket, fruits, vegetables, and sometimes even packaged goods frequently have undergone enough rough handling that you'll want to skip one item in favor of another that nominally is the same. At the department store, vague labeling standards frequently mean that one clothing brand's sizing or fit does not match another's.

But none of that applies to phones. It is highly unlikely that they will be damaged in shipping. And the statistics sites give objective measurements in inches or centimeters, not just vague "small, medium, or large" labels.

If I have one complaint about my new Samsung A17 5G, it is that its vibration is noticeably weaker/quieter than that of my old Samsung A32 5G, forcing me to switch my text-message notifications from vibration to noise so that I don't miss them. But I never would have noticed that difference even if I had checked out the A17 5G in the store.

Yes but also how are you going to evaluate the weight of the phone, how it fits in your pocket, the brightness of the screen, how well the camera works, etc etc?

Literally all of that information is on the statistics websites, which let you compare prospective new phones to your current phone. See the link in my previous comment.

Yes but that’s the way I prefer to do it, and myself and the body politic will not be talked out of our right to shop in store.

I agreed with you, but then I realised I bought the phone I'm using to write this comment online.

In Japan nearly everyone goes to a phone shop. I recently went to a phone shop. What's odd about going to a phone shop? Also I'd like to pour one out for in-person interactions, which may be well on the way out, but which I far prefer to QR codes, touch screens, and robot maître d's.

Also what's a "wagie"? A person who works minimum wage I assume. Or retail. Are we pouring our extra wine over the balcony on these people's heads now? I worked for wages in many jobs for years and years. Granted the twat in this story was infuriating, but I wouldn't consider him a lesser being simply because of his employment.

What's odd about going to a phone shop?

If you need a new phone, there is no need to visit a physical store (and, I assume, let the employee walk you through the activation process). Rather, you just order a new phone online, and follow the activation instructions by yourself. (I've gotten all my phones directly from my carrier, but I hear it's also possible to order an "unlocked" phone from a third party and add the carrier's SIM card to it.)

Also, what's a "wagie"? A person who works minimum wage I assume. Or retail.

"Wagie" is a derogatory term that, as I have seen it used on 4chan, generally applies to all people who work for a living (as opposed to NEETs/retirees). I guess it's theoretically possible to use it specifically against hourly-wage workers, differentiating them from salary workers, but that isn't how I have seen it used.

In Japan online activation is of course possible, but at least for me dealing with a person is considerably less arduous as little, if anything, (at least the last time I checked) is in English, and for me asking questions and maneuvering bureaucy is almost always easier done face-to-face. My wife also finagled two discounts via her charm, unused on me for many years.

ToaKraka beat me to it on both points. Phone stores don't seem to serve much purpose unless it's for maintenance or something complicated like that. Every single phone essentially looks and behaves the same in your hand, so the only difference is specs which is much easier to research online.

As for "wagies" it's not that I hold any negative feelings towards customer service people generally, but more this specific fellow deserves the derogatory term. It's like I wouldn't go around calling every policeman a pig, but there are definitely specific police who I would call pigs.

Got it, thanks for the clarification. I still carry the banner for face-to-face interactions but I'm perhaps in a country where that is more a pleasurable experience than many others.

Where is this country of yore where people strut around socking shop employees in the face for mouthing off to them?

America, 1955...

I find myself a little happy anytime an illogical languagism becomes so widely used that the grammar Nazis have to accept it.

I know exactly what you mean. Irregardless, some sorts of bad languagisms still grate on my nerves when I read them in the wild, but usually I start using them ironically, and then at some point I realize I'm just using them.

Irregardless

Nice example!

I like messing around with words more in person around my young kids. Along with dad jokes. It's interesting which words they notice as fake and which ones they believe are real.

Heh, glad you were picking up what I was putting down! That one's still ironic usage for me, but others, like conversate, have been instant classics that I've gleefully adopted.

I have seen cromulent used many times on this very forum without comment.

Not all of the modern embiggenings of the lexicon are bad.

I won't say no to the accusation that I only spend time with oldies, at least as far as English speakers, but I find many terms often used online are almost never spoken (except by people who are, perhaps, very often online). Overton Window, Dunbar number, etc. In particular in these virtual pages I regularly encounter terms that seem shibolleth-like. Every culture (even an online culture) develops its own sociolect, I suppose.

I assume it's inevitable. In case you're interested, "embiggen" and "cromulent" are both fake words invented by The Simpsons. But the terms you're flagging are existing terms from the sorts of papers that fed into the intellectual groundwater of upstream communities in the 2000s-2010s IMHO, rather than "extremely online" or "rationalist(-adjacent/-descendant)" or "online right" shibboleths/inventions.

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My favorite response to grammar nazis is to ask them why they have the same opinions on language as a dirty frenchman. There's no committee in London that gets to dictate what our language is. English is a decentralized, constantly evolving mongrel tongue, and if you truly loved her, you wouldn't be trying to shackle her to some outdated Victorian grammar obsessed with aping Latin.

It's not about enforcing a preconceived framework from the top down. It's about ensuring internal consistency, so that people can understand each other easily.

The ideal grammar Nazi hates "illogical languagisms" without regard to whether they are old or newfangled.

True, I guess the real grammar nazi retort would just be to yeschad me. It's about dogmatically following the rules, not a romantic love of your ancestral tongue.

Or the slightly better (imo):

The IRS is after me and my wife

You are only a babby grammar Nazi if you think that "me and my wife" is acceptable.

The IRS is after I.

Clearly deranged.

That's right, it should be "The IRS is after I and I".

Explain my babby status because I want to be a good grammar nazi :3

The "rule" is that the first person pronoun always comes last. Of course, nobody follows this and it doesn't matter, and apparently now even self described pedants aren't aware of it.

I think the real question is - why are you shopping for phones irl?

The "rule" is that the first person pronoun always comes last. Of course, nobody follows this...

I follow it religiously. Not my fault so many people suck at their native language.

This "rule" has nothing to do with grammar. The OED has numerous examples of the first person pronoun being first going back hundreds of years. The rule was never about grammar, but always about politeness. From the 1868 Practical Grammar of the English Language:

Courtesy requires the first place to be given to the second person, and last place to the first.

Certain individuals who never saw a rule they didn't like noticed the convention but not the reason and assumed it had a grammatical basis. It didn't.

In any case, I hope that thou always useth "ye" for the plural subject and "thou" for the singular subject, and "you" for the plural object and "thee" for the singular object. After all, those are actual grammar rules of thy native language, right?

At the moment he corrected me I would have gone full Karen and asked to see his manager, then corrected him in front of his manager, then explained why I would never be returning to his store (presumptuous assholery by staff). Then left. Fuck that asshole. Maybe I've been in Japan too long where the service is almost always exemplary. What an insufferable twat.

Maybe I've been in Japan too long where the service is almost always exemplary.

I would have to rack my memory to recall any exemplary service I've gotten. Generally the best one can hope for is pleasant and competent enough. Often it's insufferable or incompetent.

I think Japan has actually really good service for normal people stuff. Like restaurants and hotels. What countries are better?

I was referring to service I've received in the US and agreeing that he had perhaps been in Japan too long and forgotten what US service was like.

Oh I see. Definitely US service levels are bottom tier in general.

I would do almost anything to not have to go to a phone store again and I am having a bad fucking day if I'm there and this guy would so get me to flip out on him if he said that.

Good on you for not losing your cool while your family is there.

Why would you or OP ever go to the phone store? Just buy the thing online.

Interesting, this and other comments suggest that this is the norm. In Japan, phones stores and sitting there working out your plan with the Softbank or Docomo girl or guy is the norm. I recently had to get a new phone and was sitting there two hours, to which my wife's reaction was an encouraging, "Not so long."

Jesus Christ... For me it usually takes about 5 minutes online and has for the past decade or so.

yes that is what I have done for about ten years now

my elderly parents on the other hand ..

Quod licet Jovem non licet bovem? (This is a joke about verb objects.)

Having knowledge of another language that has a somewhat different structure can help one to understand one's own language. See also sentence diagramming.

The exact same thing happened to me once at a car rental place, upgrade and all. Or maybe that was Bryan Garner; I can't remember.

The reaction to fraternity hazing incidents is extremely funny to me. “These poor willing adult male participants were socially pressured to do something humiliating to strengthen the bonds of friendship. Such harm can’t go unnoticed; we must publicly humiliate them on the news for millions of people to see and comment on while showing their faces on video whenever possible.” It’s just so stupid.

Frats market themselves as a conspiracy against outsiders that demands your dignity if you want to get in on it. It's not a bad thing that this is being attacked as bad and suboptimal and worthy of being shamed over. The victims of hazing are actually unscrupulous people trying to get in on it to perpetuate it, so it's fair if everyone sees their humiliation on the internet.

I mean that’s certainty one theory, but another theory would be that stressful experiences build brotherhood, which I recall reading in a study involving militant groups a long time ago. If fraternities selected and promoted suboptimal norms then we should expect to see members perform worse, but we see them perform better. In any case, America is one long humiliation ritual so it’s not actually a bad thing for young men to become habituated to this early, provided there is no actual harm being committed.

America is one long humiliation ritual

Care to elaborate?

You’re liable to be replaced by H1B or passed over for AA hires, your tax dollars may go to a senseless war or random Somali / Haredi scams, your town might become +60 foreign in a decade, that sort of thing. There’s just a lot of humiliation involved with being an American today, so it’s good to get training in dealing with that early.

It's interesting, my read on you (and I try to keep Mottizens sorted in my head) is a Christian who takes his faith seriously. I associate that (perhaps wrongly) with goodwill toward one's fellow human, love one another, if he hath all this yet hath not charity, etc. So... that, but you also have this other, angry, intolerant, legalistic, pessimistic side. I don't think you're as old as I am but maybe you've personally had many negative experiences? None of ny business. We all contain multitudes, to misquote Whitman.

I would say that I take Christianity seriously, not that I take my personal faith seriously, which would involve a lot more activity etc.

goodwill toward one's fellow human, love one another, if he hath all this yet hath not charity

This was historically counterbalanced with a hatred against injustice. You can read where Paul says a true Christian “abhors evil”, or where Christ is enthroned because He loves righteousness and hates evil, or where Christ commends the Ephesians for their hatred. The absence of hatred in American churches is why so many suffer from all sorts of personal and civic problems. The passion-less modern Christianity doesn’t work, and it doesn’t even bring people into the religion. It is, IMHO, “fake and gay”.

I wouldn't suggest I have a handle on modern Christianity, though your use of the word passionless is brutal and poetic. I would however suggest that hating evil and hating people are quite different. But I am not personally interested in having a meta or even base-level discussion on Christianity as a phenomenon in the world. Nothing against you as an interlocutor, just not my thing.

To me, loving neighbor means ensuring that the commons are clean and beautiful, that drugs and bad influences are exterminated from neighborhoods, that media for those under 20 are censored for morality, ensuring men get good jobs so that marital bliss increases, ensuring food is healthy, hanging fentanyl dealers publicly, that kind of stuff. The stuff that we can reasonably predict will lead to the happiness and peace of my neighbor, especially my poorest neighbor. There’s not really any benefit to someone just yapping about how much they love their neighbor, which is just worthless signaling at best, and actually a horrible illusion at worst.

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Read Lamentations or the Prophets sometime, or the last five chapters of Judges. Or if the New Testament is preferred, Jesus cleansing the temple is overdone as a reference, but there's no shortage of other examples in the gospels ("brood of vipers", sons of satan) from Christ himself, or if you prefer something a bit more visceral, there's always the Whore of Babylon.

Your observation fits me as well, I think. On the Red side, there is a pervasive sense that things are very bad and probably going to get a lot worse, and that very likely it is not going to be possible to do anything about it. It's acutely frustrating from the Christian perspective because, as many of us see it, Christianity and the Christians in it have been trying to accommodate the secular world for quite some time now, trying to find some way to fit the secular image of what Christians are supposed to be, and at this point it seems pretty clear that this was never going to be possible and many of the compromises we made appear to have been foolish in the extreme. On the one hand, this world is not our home, and so the amount that the present decline can matter to us ought to be sharply limited. On the other hand, we do have to live through it, and it does seem quite woeful.

When I was young, I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. When I got into my teens and started grappling with theological questions seriously, all the social push was toward Liberalism; we looked at the previous generation, and we asked, "isn't this too rigid and hidebound, too legalistic, too dogmatic?" We looked at a structure that claimed it was the one correct way to be a Christian, and we asked, "Is it really plausible that the codified rules of this one group of churches in late-90s southern America is the only way to follow Christ?"

Looking back, that question was dishonest in several ways, but none of us noticed at the time, and we, for lack of a better term, declined to harden into the shape the previous generation sketched out for us. If all humans fail, sin, go astray, then no church has ever been what Jesus wanted us to be. If we presume that at least some Christians are doing the job that Jesus laid out for us, then it follows that the job does not require perfection, and further that there must be a channel of acceptable Christianity, not a single line. And so we, well to the conservative side, opened up to the idea that those further out from us might nonetheless also be Christians attempting to follow Christ to the best of their knowledge and ability. Despite the questionable starting point, it seems to me that this was a good conclusion to arrive at.

Coming back to the church after some years away, though, I noticed that this logic only ever ran one way. It was always applied from a "conservative" position toward "liberal" positions, but I noticed how neither I myself nor anyone around me ever ran this logic the other way, to the people more conservative than ourselves, whether in the previous generation or throughout history. We were open to considering the idea of a looser Christianity being valid, but not a tighter one. We entertained the idea that the Unitary Universalists might be in some way valid Christians, but never the Westboro Baptist Church. I get why the secular world might prefer it to work this way, but it's not clear to me why, from a Christian perspective, drawing the boundaries much too tight ought to be considered a worse failure than drawing them much too loose. If Christianity is a channel, and perhaps even a wide channel, why suppose that the center of that channel is the midpoint between modern liberal and conservative Christians, rather than somewhere like the midpoint of all Christians since Christ? Should one argue that the only true understanding of Christian love, charity, etc is the one from some particular tribal slice of post-2000s American Christianity?

It was Kierkegaard who said in Works of Love (1847) (I did a paper on him in undergrad for some reason):

I wonder if a man handing another man an extremely sharp, polished, two-edged instrument would hand it over with the air, gestures, and expression of one delivering a bouquet of flowers? Would not this be madness? What does one do, then? Convinced of the excellence of the dangerous instrument, one recommends it unreservedly, to be sure, but in such a way that in a certain sense one warns against it. So it is with Christianity. If what is needed is to be done, we should not hesitate, aware of the highest responsibility, to preach in Christian sermons—yes, precisely in Christian sermons—AGAINST Christianity.

I didn't take this to mean Christianity was dangerous in the sense of violence, but in the sense that it will upend one's life. If I were to start noticing motes in eyes, I'd say I have met precious few I'd say lived up to my idea of Christianity. Maybe one or two of them in a church. And none of them were particularly into proselytizing. And all of them held a kind of charitable goodwill and patience toward others--that always took the form of actual behavior and proactive doing.

I've also met a lot of people who claim Christianity as their guiding principle and are full of a seething anger (I'd characterize the stereotype of the Westboro Baptist members here. Mind you just before I attended Catholic churches for a few years I had been attending Baptist churches.)

If fraternities selected and promoted suboptimal norms then we should expect to see members perform worse, but we see them perform better.

This is fallacious. We want to know the causal effect of frats not the cross sectional. You assume the cross sectional effect is the causal.

In any case, America is one long humiliation ritual so it’s not actually a bad thing for young men to become habituated to this early, provided there is no actual harm being committed.

This is more or less whatabboutism.

stressful experiences build brotherhood, which I recall reading in a study involving militant groups a long time ago.

Vague. Equivocated too. Stressful experience as a pack against the outside is different than antagonism within the pack. You know what real men are supposed to do to those who humiliate them?

I mean that’s certainty one theory, but another theory would be

Yes, I mean, another theory is we live in a simulation and frat boys are demons that come from the higher world to mess with virtual prisoners. Do you care which is true or is it enough for you that you can come up with «another theory».

You’re welcome to do a twin study on fraternity membership. You have my total support there. If modern American life involves a lot of humiliation, then training for humiliation is beneficial. Has nothing to do with Whataboutism.

You’re welcome to do a twin study on fraternity membership

Thank you. What do you think the point of that is though? First off it's the wrong method and the wrong parameter. Second off if you are good at understanding the current set of facts, your theory is already at <10% probability while mine is >90%. So, thanks for giving me your blessing to spend $100k on a study, maybe I will get on that when I have all of the money I should have.

If modern American life involves a lot of humiliation, then training for humiliation is beneficial.

Yes, good logic, Also, if fallout American life involves a lot of radiation, then exposing oneself to radiation is beneficial. Agreed?

Of course, that’s called hormesis. There are some interesting studies which concluded that small amounts of radiation are protective against larger radiation exposure and are conducive to longevity. I believe there was one interesting study about an apartment complex in Korea that had constant low levels of radioactivity. But it’s been a long time since I read about this. Probably back on SSC

I believe there was one interesting study about an apartment complex in Korea that had constant low levels of radioactivity.

Unless there's another, it was Taiwan (page 56).

Unbelievable effect sizes. Are you willing to make a bet with me that those won't hold if you correct for cross sectional confounders? Where you take the position that the positive effect will hold. Or are we just making performance here? Do we really believe that something that shreds DNA has such a ridiculous dose-response curve?

I would advise you to not put your money where you mouth is, in this case. You really do not want to start sleeping next to uranium.

If fraternities selected and promoted suboptimal norms then we should expect to see members perform worse

Than what?

Than non-Greek students. But Greek members typically perform better than non-students

Do you believe that Greek students and non-Greek students differ only in whether or not they undergo stressful experiences?

I think outrage normally occurs only when the behavior is harmful, not just humiliating.

What's harmful about it, absent the humiliation, though?

In the story du jour, the victims "had visible injuries consistent with being physically assaulted", and the text of the state's "hazing ban" criminalizes only "acts which endanger the physical health or safety of a student", without reference to humiliation. I believe past stories also have involved injury or death.

Kind of elides the nature of the injuries, and emphasizes the condiments though -- I'd think if there were serious (consentual in any case) injuries it would have been mentioned?

Athletes often have visible injuries too -- is college athletics considered harmful? (I suppose I should say "widely considered" given that the outrage machine is winding up on the concussion thing RN)

I don't claim to have investigated this topic in the slightest, but my impression is that hazing is considered bad because the details of the process are known beforehand only to the existing members: the victims don't know whether the hazing is humiliating or harmful, and therefore cannot consent properly. This goes double in sports and military situations where there's no expectation of hazing at all so the victims never consented even to humiliation, and triple in military situations where the victim was drafted and never had the opportunity to consent at all.

I'm the furthest thing from a frat-boy defender myself, but I think pretty much everyone knows that hazing is (by nature, really) going to involve some physical discomfort and embarrassment? In the case of frats I'd expect some pretty extreme BACs to be involved as well; that's about all I know!

"Physical discomfort" is not "harm significant enough to warrant assault charges".

The purpose is to add a cost to just joining. This has benefits especially if membership in a group is particularly valuable. And in some cases, being a frat can give you a leg up in job hunting or provide scholarships among other benefits.

It varies a lot. In decreasing order of normal-audience concern:

  • Stuff that's basically manslaughter, and only avoid premeditated homicide by sheer stupidity. Forcing people to jump off rooftops, playing with knives, where stupid frat tricks resulted in applicants dig their own graves, yada yada. Rare, but becomes state-level and sometimes national news when it happens.
  • Intentional harm that wasn't likely to result in serious injury or death but did anyway: beating someone until they died or they were aggressively bleeding, hits that most people would survive.
  • 'Unintentional' and unpredictable but obvious harm: drinking hard enough to literally kill someone, extreme physical exertion to the point of hospitalization, forcing people to drive after drinking or sleep deprivation or both, that sort of thing. Sometimes this is stuff that the median applicant had survived and someone just was unlucky or vulnerable, or sometimes the hazing got pushed that little bit further for this one person because they gave lip.
  • ... stuff that we don't call sexual assault or rape because everyone involved says they're a heterosexual man and not taking any gratification from it. Where a victim's willing to talk this can jump a lot higher, but since most of the time it's specifically built to be discrediting to reveal, it's mostly whistleblowers talking and that leads it to be pretty low on the concern level.
  • 'Aversives' that generally don't cause lasting injury, but are extremely unpleasant rather than socially humiliating. Forcing people to eat a raw onion, tasers, chemical sprays, and the conventional array of gross or foul-smelling and tasting stuff. This usually only gets local attention, if that.
  • Predicament bondage taken to extremes beyond what RACK would allow. It takes some actual effort to kill or break a bone, but actual BDSM practice keeps to short sessions because you can really screw up someone's musculature or joints in tens of minutes, and frats like to run for hours. Usually only gets local attention if someone's hospitalized.
  • Pure social humiliation, extremely tedious work, labor that's just unpleasant, or stuff that's just gross but not a disease risk (aka 'cleaning the latrines with a toothbrush'). Nobody really cares about this unless there's a culture war nexus, and even then, it tends to be the culture war nexus rather than the hazing.

This should get you started.

Look at it this way: the purpose of fraternities is to provide cross-generational help to college students. Do we, as a society, benefit from additional ties between people that are willing to both undergo and perpetuate abuse? "Oh, this applicant is from Alpha Beta Gamma like me, I need more men that are willing to fuck a live duck and not quack about it in my company!"

benefit from additional ties between people that are willing to both undergo and perpetuate abuse?

Well, doctors in residency programs and the marines provide benefits. But the hazing incidents that have been publicized recently recently do not involve abuse like consistent sleep deprivation over months, just mild discomfort like “blindfolded in basement” or “covered in condiments”. We benefit a lot from this because society benefits from fraternity (consider the importance of the mystery cults for Roman society). If you were to make these guys run into each other at maximum speed so that you can guarantee mental disturbances later in life and ~10 injuries a semester, well, this is no longer abuse, these are VIPs whom we have to fund generously and build a stadium for.

Well, doctors in residency programs and the marines provide benefits.

I'd argue Residency isn't really hazing most of the team - the mistreatment can easily continue before and afterwards (it's base for any job in academia, which all Residencies basically are), the hours are bad but they aren't team building it's free labor.

Do we, as a society, benefit from additional ties between people that are willing to both undergo and perpetuate abuse?

Yes. Our institutions have undergone visible decline since we started acting like they are a detriment.

I mean pledging is great, hazing walks a fine line. When I was in Greek Life a student at another Fraternity died and several more ended up in the hospital. I wasn't at one of Those schools.

How about some television talk.

I was looking for a show to watch on a second screen while I played the new Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter and came across Slow Horses - BBC spy show about MI5 and a group of remedial agents. My parents have been watching for years and always recommend it. I loathe most modern television but for whatever reason decided to give it a shot.

It’s very much as expected. The first half of season 1 is all about a “loathsome” right wing terrorist cell, the Sons of Albion. Get this - these right wing youths kidnap an innocent British British-Asian boy and plan to behead him live on the internet in an ISIS style video. But wait, it’s actually a rouge opp carried out by the evil girlboss intelligence minister. They then do a double fakeout where the Sons of Albion get wise to the setup and the scary right wing guy goes on a rampage and attempts to carry out the beheading.

This is a completely ludicrous plot line and it appears that Apple’s Slow Horses is going to be every bit as awful as I expected for a show developed after 2016. Does Hollywood imagine there are actually these sort of right wing terror cells just waiting to activate? Despite all evidence to the contrary and dozens if not hundreds of other instances of racial and political violence perpetrated against white people? Or is the goal to get boomers all worked up about dangerous right wing ideologies. Are they stupid or liars?

For anyone here who’s watched it, does Slow Horses get better? Is there anything of value here?

I’m separately on season 4 of Le Bureau des Legendes - a French foreign intelligence tv drama produced by Canal and very highly regarded by anyone in the Anglosphere that’s seen it. It’s the show that Paramount’s The Agency is based on. And I must say the The Bureau is truly excellent. Season 1 aired in 2015 so it’s only mildly annoying with politics. Very mild. It’s really great and worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. I have a lot of thoughts on it that I can share if anyone is interested. But it reminds me a lot of 24, with less action and more drama.

Every once in a while I check in with myself and try and make sure I'm not becoming overly sensitive on culture war matters. I think you doing that here.

For one thing, the show is just great.

For another, it's designed to make you think it's about certain themes when it isn't (for instance the question of if River is meant to be in Slough House). The villains are often part of that (and the over arching theme is usually more system-failure and banal corruption than any specific political bugbear).*

Lastly, while the UK obviously has some stupid and exaggerated fear of right wing extremism, it's not as stupid as it seems because they actually have had white people committing acts of terror is recent memory (the troubles).

*Many of the villains are women, and ethnic women, and one of those women is also a hero. It does not deal with morality in a childlike and unipolar way.

for instance the question of if River is meant to be in Slough House

Yes he absolutely deserves to be there.

Putting aside the actual political incident the landed him in Slough House. The major reason he deserves to be there is that he is a bad spy. He's a great law enforcement agent, but a horrible spy. He really leaps before thinking, goes off half cocked, and routinely makes big messes or gets himself into really horrible spots because he doesn't think things through.

The incident with the glasshouse in the 2nd season is a peak "Cartwright" moment. He's just too moral, too much of a goody two shoes, a righteous knight to be an effective spy. He idolizes his grandfather but from all accounts, David was a right bastard. Lamb's a bastard, Lady Di is a bastard, Teerny is a bastard, Every good spy/spymaster we see is, morally, a piece of shit, because thats what it takes to play in that world.

Right, I think more perceptive watchers will pick this up quickly but at first you are supposed to think he isn't at fault. Later on it becomes clear he nearly has everything he needs but is justttttt off, not sure what will happen in future seasons/books, he may eventually put it together.

And at the same time - you also start to realize that with like only 3-4 exceptions, everyone else is the same as him or worse (even at the mothership). Cough cough dogs cough.

I'm not sure Lamb is a bastard, and I think perhaps his off-puttingness is part of his coping mechanism for not being one.

I feel River should have grown a bit. It annoyed me in season 4 (where I stopped) that the writers were keeping him in a kind of development stasis. In particular after some of the wild shit that had gone down in the previous season.

Probably, but I also don't think it is unreasonable for him to be portrayed as an idiot who is skilled, which makes him more dangerous and dysfunctional than most of the idiots who are corrupt or just idiots. Lack of growth goes along with that.

I suppose I resent as a viewer the notion that I should invest time on plots involving someone who is an irredeemable idiot.

I mean isn't the premise of the show using idiots to solve spy problems?

That is one of the premises--but Lamb is not incompetent. He is just a slob and has been eroded into a slob of a man. Even Taverner recognizes his worth. I think I was hoping Cartwright would develop somehow. Otherwise it's just Keystone Cops, the MI:5 version.

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Lastly, while the UK obviously has some stupid and exaggerated fear of right wing extremism, it's not as stupid as it seems because they actually have had white people committing acts of terror is recent memory (the troubles).

I don't think anyone thinks like that here in the UK. The Troubles were Irish separatists, and were not considered 'white' (or non-white), nor 'right-wing'. Irish violence (both terrorism and Mob-related) has been common enough in the last century to have its own category.

Just going by your message, what Slow Horses is doing is mixing the British fear of skinheads and working-class hooliganism with the fear of Islamist extremism. The IRA never used videoed beheadings as a method of stoking fear, they used shootings, bombings, torture and mutilation. Whereas al-Qaeda and ISIS were famed for it.

Whether reversing the races to present crimes committed by muslims against whites (to instead be crimes by whites against muslims) should be considered Culture War is something I leave to the reader's judgement. I suspect the primary reason for doing it is that it's politically easiest. Right-wing whites (especially working class ones) have no special interest groups worth a damn.

I think you are correct that it's because of easy targets and all the other usual CW stuff and at the same time the UK has had recent severe organized terrorism performed by Whites, unlike the US (which mostly has psychotic actions and a few small isolated political ones).

What I'm trying to say is that there's no semantic box in the British mind which contains both the IRA and the 'Sons of Albion'.

It would be like saying, "To understand the current reaction to Patriot Front, you need to understand America's history of white violence: the Italian Mafia ravaged America for nearly a decade".

No American (IMO) would write that. The Godfather portrays violence by whites, but it's not the same kind of violence and they're not the same whites.

Rightly or wrongly, there's a semantic cluster in the American mind which goes 'KKK -> Jim Crow lynchings -> Patriot Front'. There isn't one that goes 'Mafia -> Patriot Front'.

In the UK there is a semantic cluster containing 'Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech -> Oswald Moseley -> the BNP and EDF -> Sons of Albion'. There is not IRA -> Sons of Albion.

But if you took a man off the street and gave him "recent severe organized terrorism performed by Whites" I doubt the IRA would leap to his tongue. He might get it eventually.

Perhaps for the British, but they are nearly a minority in their own country at this point, no?

Slow Horses is British, as is most of the BBC. Non-British don't think about the Troubles at all, they weren't there.

The UK is still about 85% British, and would be about 93% if we refused to give Citizenship to people who don't have it yet. It's the demographics of the young, and in the major cities, that is concerning.

Does Hollywood imagine there are actually these sort of right wing terror cells just waiting to activate? Despite all evidence to the contrary and dozens if not hundreds of other instances of racial and political violence perpetrated against white people? Or is the goal to get boomers all worked up about dangerous right wing ideologies. Are they stupid or liars?

The number 1 rule of Hollywood is that they will never show an accurate representation of who is actually commiting crime/terrorism and who the victims are. Just look at decades of Law and Order and the defendants they showed.

Related, notice how the news media can carefully manage to never mention who is actually disproportionately committing violence against trans prostitutes, or causing so many Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, or engaging in sex trafficking of minors. Somehow, all those problems are caused by SocietyTM (aka white people) instead of the perpetrators commiting the crimes.

There was a L&O SVU episode a couple of decades back about a couple who were keeping an impoverished third-world woman as a slave.

The show had the couple be white. Every single instance of this scenario I've heard about has the "owners" the same ethnicity as the slave, but wealthy. Can't have Third World immigrants be portrayed as the bad guys, though, not even rich ones!

Or is the goal to get boomers all worked up about dangerous right wing ideologies.

Yes. They still trust whatever the TV tells them. The fact that many have left the reservation because they also trust whatever the TV on their phone tells them means the people still making trad media content feel like they need to triple-down on the propaganda even harder.

I don't know, I think Slow Horses is pretty good.

I think this is a pretty shallow read. SH is a spy thriller, what is happening on the surface is not really the entire plot. The whole first season is about how the #2 in MI5 essentially created a situation so they can get money/prestige, but that situation goes off the rails. They instigate, fund, and organize a false flag with some local domestic disgruntles. If you are mad about "Right wing terrorists ends up being a false flag op of a bunch of glowies plus an actual nutter organized by girlboss" because it is "unrealistic", I point you to the Whitmer Kidnapping Plot, in which there is good evidence that the entire thing was setup by different alphabet soup agencies. If you are mad because its Hollywood making right-wing terrorists the big-bad, I recommend you chill the f out, and learn how to actually analyze cinema.

The institutional MI5, and the elites are the source of a the majority of the problems/villians throughout the series. They are portrayed as incompetent, Machiavellian, toxic, rife with abuse and mercenary behavior. This is not 24, or james bond where its a classic good-guy spies vs evil villains, its far too modern. The heroes of the entire series are the "Slow Horses", a cast of actual colossal fuck-ups, everyone of them being an actual loser for some reason or another, but who because they don't get with the toxic culture of the institutional MI5 have been exiled to a waste dumping zone. Being a spy thriller deconstruction, River Cartwright is what James Bond acts/looks like, and he a colossal fuck-up. Jackson Lamb is what actual spies operate like. Using actual wits, brains, tradecraft, and covert actions.

In addition this is an actual book series that is being adapted, and to my knowledge a fairly close adaption. So no, this is not Hollywood being Hollywood and taking the "shit on the right wing".

Haven't watched Slow Horses, but if you like this sort of stuff, I'd check out The Sandbaggers.

I got through season 1 because I like Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, though the same issues bothering you bothered me. It was jarring how blatantly Bizzarro world that was. The setup in general of the Slough House is a little reminiscent of something LeCarré might have written as a novel, without some of the vulgarities. And I liked LeCarré.

To respond, season 2 I remember as better, season 3 has more action but really goes off the rails plotwise (not necessarilyin a culture war way). I had to stop at season 4 because it seemed to me one of the leads (Jack Lowden's character) seemed to have been written by someone who only read the first pages of season 1's script, decided they didn't like River at all or men generally, and dropped any other possible character development. But maybe it got better. I think there are 5 or 6 seasons now.

I often wonder whether these shows are bound by diversity riders but also characterization clauses (e.g. the female black character must be smarter than the white male) or similar. Or maybe the writers are pandering. Or, of course, true believers.

In season 1 episode one I was thinking "Wait she said Asian male, that guy looks Indian." Then I realized.

I just finished Brave New World. Pretty great!

As World Controller, what are some ways you'd like to utilize Pavlovian conditioning on toddlers? Personally, I think I'd do the trick they did in the book where they had toddlers touch books and get shocked and have alarm bells ring and all kinds of other unpleasant stuff, but do it with guns instead. Imagine how much more safe our kiddos would be.

Remember that time when humanity hadn't invented guns yet, and conquerors built pyramids of skulls from tens of thousands of their victims? Sorry: times, plural; there were like half a dozen cases.

Homicide levels in general are much lower post-gunpowder than they were pre-, probably mostly but not entirely for other reasons. Guns are obviously tragically useful for committing atrocities, but they have played direct and more-indirect roles in reducing atrocities too. It's not at all obvious to me what the net impact has been, even to kids; IIRC one of those conquerors helpfully sorted their pyramids into men's, women's, and children's skulls, for extra psychological-warfare power.

I also thought "Brave New World" was great. Controlling people by oppressing them a la "1984" makes for more exciting reading, but controlling people by distracting them feels far more prescient in hindsight.

I'm more referring to incidents where some gun is left out and a curious infant goes and shoot himself or something else. I wonder how often that happened with bladed weapons. What are the statistics on accidental fatal sword swallowing?

In hindsight, maybe you should condition them to not leave dangerous things out on tables...

a curious infant goes and shoot himself or something else

Even a 5-pound trigger pull (the average full-size handgun, compacts are generally worse) requires some significant finger strength to actually fire, and you're at a mechanical disadvantage if you're trying to shoot yourself (that's really not how guns naturally point- you can only really pick it up one way, where the dangerous end faces away from you). We know that 6 year olds can do this because they've been in the news for shooting teachers before, but before then, maybe not so much.

Revolvers and guns with exposed hammers are more dangerous because the hammer on the back, when cocked, makes the trigger pull light enough for any infant to use- so if you're investigating the device like a very small child might and are properly fuzz-testing the controls, a 3 year old could easily fire it.

The most dangerous age is the one where the kid recognizes what the device is, points it at another kid, and pulls the trigger- for all media with a gun in it that a child is likely to see, and all of the [toy] guns they may themselves possess... well, that's how guns are used, right?

It's not like the other kid is likely going to do that characteristic side-step that gun people do if you point a gun at them; they don't fully understand the implications of "loaded gun is pointed at you" either. They might understand it means "danger", but it's in the abstract, or kid with the gun does that so quickly you don't actually have time to react. (Kind of like how deer will just wander out into the middle of gun ranges.)

And this is indeed unique to guns; injuries caused by play-fighting with knives tend both to be self-limiting (it hurts before you are fatally injured, whereas with the gun it only hurts afterwards), rely on the physical strength of the user to work (not a limitation with a gun due to its nature as a self-powered tool), and the danger is obvious to any child who has ever cut themselves.

It's perhaps more accurate to say that the exercise of political power is automated by guns, in the exact same ways (and with the exact same effects) that conventional warfare is automated by nuclear weapons [so the outcome is generally "don't even try"].

When each man is his own nuclear-armed nation-state, MAD doctrine applies and thus limits the scale and scope of conventional war. The Khmer Rouge or the Hutu don't rack up that kind of body count if every man, woman, and child can simply shoot them. (Genocide doesn't discriminate by age, and under those conditions, you probably can't kill them all. But in the dawn of the decade, in a particular Western country, a nationwide Kristallnacht-style movement was killed in 3 rounds. Even a revolver holds more than that, and if everyone has one...)

(The typical "but does 2A cover nuclear weapons" question is far closer to the mark than I think either side realizes. It's just a matter of degrees. One notes the same question will apply to AI usage in the long run.)

but in the dawn of the decade, in a particular Western country, a nationwide Kristallnacht-style movement was killed in 3 rounds

To what is this referring?

Other than that confusion--good post.

Taking a guess: must be a race riot. Can't be 1992 LA riots since a hell of a lot more than 3 rounds were fired. Something from the 60s presumably.

Googling it:

The phrase "60s race riot 3 rounds fired" likely references the highly controversial Algiers Motel incident during the 1967 Detroit riot

During the subsequent raid and interrogation by police officers and National Guardsmen, three young Black men (Auburey Pollard, Carl Cooper, and Fred Temple) were shot and killed. The incident became a flashpoint of the 1960s civil rights era, symbolizing police brutality and the escalation of force during urban riots

Skimming some articles this may be what they are referencing. Seems more like the cops murdering people than anything I want implemented. Or maybe this is a bad guess on my part.

Taking a guess: must be a race riot.

It was. The 2020 BLM riots were technically larger in scope, but a lot more distributed.

Revolvers and guns with exposed hammers are more dangerous because the hammer on the back, when cocked, makes the trigger pull light enough for any infant to use- so if you're investigating the device like a very small child might and are properly fuzz-testing the controls, a 3 year old could easily fire it.

I think you might be right about that, and I hadn't considered it. Seems like the vast majority of those incidents involving children of those ages involve a DA/SA pistol or an SAO pistol. I really am only thinking of this because I own a few guns and having a future offspring shoot themselves with one is terrifying to me, but I also don't want to leave them all completely inaccessible.

My own father kept loaded guns around the house, but I don't recall any safety scares whatsoever... The two semi-auto rifles I can remember were both suspended higher than a toddler could feasibly reach, I think the pistol was stored in disguised Bible case in a drawer. You generally don't keep a round in the chamber on rifles anyway, though. I remember being told not to touch any of them because they were dangerous, but that would have probably been around when I was 6 or so, on account of my being able to remember it at all.

I remember being told not to touch any of them because they were dangerous

This is the thing I can't properly parse yet- where being able to obey "don't touch, that's dangerous" doesn't necessarily imply "now that you, without questioning or arguing, accept "it's dangerous", you may now know why it's dangerous" (and move on to that stage where you blow up a bunch of soda jugs and watermelons). Then again, I don't have kids yet.

You do a lot of staring down the metaphorical barrel with this stuff and it's odd nobody ever fully acknowledges that. Because yes, them being motivated enough to get to the gun and using it is always a risk. Doubly so because it is a technological terror of a mechanism not found in nature; we don't do that calculus with knives or rope since they're everyday items yet have to consciously do it with guns (I believe hanging ends more kids with a death wish than guns do even when they are available, but I honestly don't feel like verifying that).

It just occurs to me that maybe accidents were more common when the physically smaller guns were the standard home-defense fare simply because they were guns perfectly sized for a kid to use in the first place (and hence more closely resembled the size and weight of their toys at the time). Yeah, revolver triggers are really heavy in DA, and a shrouded-hammer DAO design might be safer because of that, but if my hands are that size I can see me getting enough of a grip on the gun to be able to yank the trigger hard enough to fire it. (With an exposed hammer, I could use my entire hand or some other object to push the hammer down if it's too stiff for my thumb.)

That said, those exact firearms are arguably ideal for actually teaching a kid to shoot. I'd rather give them a pawn shop .32 than a full-size handgun or even a .22 rifle simply because it's not this boat anchor of a thing... which inevitably lends itself to said kid (who is indeed paying attention) getting dope-slapped unnecessarily because they're using so much of their strength to hold the damn thing up in the first place that they can't pull the charging handle back without the gun tracking off to the side. The adult does not know they probably should have told the kid to do this because they're inherently strong/tall enough to never have needed to do that.

Of course I think the real correct choice for this application is a vz. 61 Skorpion (with the shoulder stock) simply because it's harder for that to point the wrong way and easier to actually use, provided you also put one of the really big charging handles on it. But that's also an order of magnitude more expensive than "coincidentally child-sized old revolver" and it's not as simple a manual of arms as "finger off trigger, break it open, loose rounds in, double check finger off trigger, grab cylinder area and close it up, left hand back on grip, [cock hammer and] shoot", so...

I remember being told not to touch any of them because they were dangerous

Back whenever I was in grade school, I remember an afternoon where, bored to utter tears and waiting for my mother to finish up her work, was rummaging through all the various random items in her car.

As one does.

I then stumbled across a random package, and upon opening it via zipper, discovered what appeared to be a loaded pistol.

Keep in mind, I had never been exposed to guns, never had 'the talk', had never actually shot a pistol/rifle as of yet.

Despite all of this, my initial reaction was 'Oh, that's a gun, that's dangerous', promptly put it away, and never touched the damn thing again.

I don't think I fall on the far end of the bell curve when it comes to intelligence, certainly not as a child, but maybe we need to start thinking that they aren't complete imbeciles when it comes to certain things, either.

Or maybe I'm just a weird duck, I dunno.

But in the dawn of the decade, in a particular Western country, a nationwide Kristallnacht-style movement

Speak plainly please.

Oh, that's potentially more one-sided. Not for infants or toddlers, since gun triggers typically require multiple pounds of force to pull, but for older kids. Unintentional gun deaths kill dozens of kids a year in the US, so the only remaining question would be whether your proposed re-conditioning wouldn't have negative consequences when you needed responsible gun users as adults.

Or maybe we're both just not taking the thought experiment far enough? As an American citizen I'm fairly conscious of how the democratization of military power preceded and helped instigate the democratization of political power, and from that perspective I worry that we're running on hysteresis already and shouldn't risk making it even worse. As a World Controller I would presumably also be fairly concerned with the democratization of political power, but mostly from the perspective of how to stop it from ever happening again, and from that perspective the solution to child firearm accidents is easy: only our cadres of devoutly loyal childless soldiers shall be allowed anywhere near the trigger of a gun, and so we don't need to condition anyone against guns, just against disloyalty.

Obviously, as a real world controller, the world would inevitably end up in the state that the book is in. There simply isn't any reason to not pull a Grand Inquisitor and induce societal heat death, as long as we're talking about stopping coups from ever happening. However, I think that the methods used would probably have to vary a lot more and we'd have to have a lot better industrial capabilities and maybe a better understanding of biology. Sleep hypnosis can't work, we obviously can't grow kids in jars and it might not be possible at all, and I think you'd have to take more extreme measures to eliminate things like hate and jealousy and greed. Like "nerve stapling" like in Alpha Centauri. And people don't like nerve stapling.

I'm more referring to incidents where some gun is left out and a curious infant goes and shoot himself or something else.

Seems to happen approximately 100 times per year for kids up to 5.

I would imagine that most young children who accidentally shoot themselves do so with a gun that was carelessly left accessible and loaded by a moronic parent. Not to be too harsh, but that just seems like stupid genes weeding themselves out of society.

Yeah, but assuming you agree that guns at least an unfortunate necessity, I wonder what effect this would have on the class of people who agrees to work with them. Would we have particularly broken cops and soldiers (if you already believe they are fundamentally broken people, imagine I said "more broken")?

I guess you'd condition them to dislike guns when they're dumb stupid infants that try to kill themselves all the time and then re-condition them to be comfortable with guns or even like guns once they've grown up a bit.

I've taken "kiddos" shooting. 5 year olds can shoot ARs from a bench. Holographic sights are fascinating for kids. 10/22s are more practical for them but they somehow inherently understand that the AR is cooler. I sure am glad no one electroshocked my kids to make them unthinkingly hate and fear my guns. Conditioning them to be ruled by those lacking such conditioning, like in the novel.

Thinking about this: let's instead electroshock toddlers after explaining gun control to them so they'll cringe whenever someone advocates for it. Then we'll be safe from the gun grabbers seeking to disarm us. That's the safety I look forward to for my children.

Or if we're actually concerned about toddler welfare condition them to not run into traffic or play in pools by themselves. Go after the things that kill them orders of magnitude more than playing with guns.

It was a dumb idea, but some of the best posts on this site are replies to dumb posts. I'm a big help!

If you don't have a holographic sight on the 10/22, I imagine that would make the AR better anyhow. It's not like the recoil on the AR is hugely impactful.

I'd go the other way, and positively reinforce the idea of putting things where they belong. This would have advantages ranging from reduced toddler deaths to fewer shopping cart-induced auto insurance claims.

Have any of you tried feeding a list of your favorite songs to ChatGPT / Claude and have it analyze your music taste?

I've long been bothered by Spotify's utter garbage recommendations, so I sent my 500 track 80s playlist to ChatGPT and had a long conversation with it about other examples I like and don't like. The result is frankly eerily accurate and manages to simultaneously explain my distaste for all post-1996 popular music and how Kraftwerk, trad Irish music, 80s pop and mid 90s Eurodance all fit neatly and consistently under the same "me like"-umbrella.

The result is frankly eerily accurate

Well, what is it?

This is the closest "top 10 things I strongly care about in music"-list I've managed to work out with ChatGPT. You'll have to excuse me pasting it directly from ChatGPT, given that you literally asked for it.

  • 1. Strong melodic identity and contour — memorable, shaped lines with recognizable peaks, turns and resolutions; melody should be one of the main carriers of the track’s identity rather than an optional layer over groove or texture.
  • 2. Strong harmonic movement and contour — meaningful chord movement, voicing, voice-leading and harmonic trajectory; harmony should contribute real musical identity rather than merely support rhythm, vocals or production.
  • 3. Clear musical objects — riffs, motifs, melodies, bass lines, chord figures or other substantial things to grab onto.
  • 4. Development with memory — worthwhile ideas recur, evolve and return rather than constantly being discarded.
  • 5. Clear arrangement hierarchy and breathing room — foreground/background roles, pauses, decay, handoffs, and instruments knowing when not to play.
  • 6. Spatial depth and contrast — a strong sense of acoustic space, with dry/wet, near/far and intimate/huge contrasts rather than everything inhabiting the same plane.
  • 7. High musical information with low perceptual clutter — richness is good, but the important ideas must remain separable and intelligible.
  • 8. Rhythmic character throughout the musical material — rhythm is especially rewarding when melody, phrasing, riffs, accompaniment, bass, percussion, articulation, syncopation, or their interaction contribute recognizable shape and propulsion, rather than rhythm being reduced to a generic beat underneath the track.
  • 9. Production and timbre reinforcing rather than replacing the music — distinctive voices, guitar tones, synth textures, reverb, delay, drums and distortion should expose, intensify or dramatize strong musical ideas rather than substitute for them.
  • 10. Contrast and selective emphasis rather than permanent fullness — not everything should be loud, sustained, dense, wet, foregrounded or emotionally maximal all the time; big moments work because quieter, drier, simpler or emptier states exist around them.

Quite a few of them I already knew but couldn't articulate so well while some of it was genuinely new revelations (like "melodic contour" - I always knew I liked strong melodies but that's more detailed and accurate and describes why I strongly dislike some changes in covers while having no problem with others).

The interesting thing is that those had largely solidified by the age of 12 or so with only their relative strength changing after that. Since then my musical taste has expanded a lot but mostly through exposure to more and wider music. It also explains why good music starts dropping off a cliff around '89-'91 (dry, flat, in-your-face style replaces arrangement hierarchy and spatial depth) and completely craters around '96 (groove, vocal delivery and modern production tricks replace melody, harmony, riffs and other pitched musical objects). I never quite understood why so many people get mad when I articulate why I dislike almost all modern music.

So I end up liking songs ranging from 90s Eurodance to prog rock with extremely strange parts to celtic folk to 80s pop while being simultaneously very selective about what I listen to.

The prog link goes to the same song as the 90s Eurodance link.

Goddammit. I swear the copy functionality is broken in my windows for some reason... Here is the fixed link (and updated in the original). Thanks for pointing it out.

Cool. Would be interesting to try this myself, I suspect I'm the opposite in some ways (I care way more about rhythm and groove than melody, so I think the 90s were actually a great time for music). Did you just dump your playlist into chatgpt?

Yes. I've curated a large 500 song "Best of 80s" Spotify playlist since 2018 which I exported to .csv and just dumped to Spotify with "analyze this and suggest additions that ". Then I gave it feedback on those additions and continued with free form conversation (eg. "I've been a huge fan of Mark Knopfler since seeing him on the Live Aid broadcast" and "I notice sharp decline around 89-91 and complete stop around 96. Explain why") so it ended up asking me a bunch of clarifying questions. It probably helps that I can usually articulate why I like or don't like some song (even if it's just "The song has nothing for me to grab onto" / "it's too bland" / "Catchy AF and I love how intentionally cheesy it is"). I set thinking to high so it wouldn't do only cursory analysis and spent some actual time doing the analysis.

The limitation is that ChatGPT doesn't seem to have much (if any) builtin understanding of the actual musical details of individual tracks, so if you want "guitar riffs exactly like in song X", it can't help you much if nobody has written a review that talks about said riffs in other songs. It does seem to be able to read tabs / sheet music.

Yeah, I've tried, multiple times. The recommendations were even worse than Spotify's.

To be clear, I use AI a lot and find it very useful, but I don't think it understands music very well.

The recommendations were even worse than Spotify's.

How? Seriously?

For me Spotify's recommendations are so garbage that it keeps suggesting different variants of songs I already have on a playlist and songs I've disqualified a dozen times. It could be trivially improved by multiple orders of magnitude without even requiring any intelligence and all that could probably be done by a fresh junior level programmer if they just added "don't recommend this song ever" and "don't recommend this artist for this playlist". As it is, Spotify keeps shuffling the same two or three dozen songs over and over in the recommendations, none of which I like, just because they're "popular" among people who listen to the artists I have on my playlist.

I don't think it understands music very well.

It doesn't directly understand music (*) and I ran into that when I asked for recommendations about "guitar music" within 80s pop rock genres, as that would have required it to actually listen to a bunch of tracks and analyze specific sub-attributes in them.

It does however seem to have a good understanding of what's been written about music and coupled with being able to follow instructions ("If an obvious major artist isn't already on my list, assume I don't like them") that worked wonders for me in honing out my true music preference profile and then getting recommendations both within the 80s rock & pop genres (more new additions than I'd found in the last 6 months by myself) and in completely different genres ("You don't like any classical music but do like Thomas Tallis? Check out these renaissance sacred polyphony polyphony composers." / "You hate all jazz but somehow don't mind Don Ellis' Whiplash? Try these specific tracks in that same composed, odd-meter, riff-driven corner of Jazz.").

Basically a combination of "analyze the common patterns across a large tightly curated playlist and ask me questions to further hone in on them" and "use prior analysis to suggest compatible music in genre X or across subgroup Y".

YMMV of course.

*Edit: It can analyze uploaded mp3s on some level but doesn't seem to have much internal detailed musical knowledge of existing songs as such.

For me Spotify's recommendations are so garbage that it keeps suggesting different variants of songs I already have on a playlist and songs I've disqualified a dozen times.

This has literally never happened to me. I wonder how we can have such different experiences. Are they A/B testing or something?

It does however seem to have a good understanding of what's been written about music

Absolutely, i considered writing that in my previous reply. My issue with this is that what is being written about music is often useless or even anti-information about the music itself.

Perhaps i need to give it another go but I tried with Sol and it was as bad as ever IME.

For me Spotify's recommendations are so garbage that it keeps suggesting different variants of songs I already have on a playlist and songs I've disqualified a dozen times.

This has literally never happened to me. I wonder how we can have such different experiences. Are they A/B testing or something?

See the attached image (top for my playlist and second from bottom for identical suggestion). It's never been able to understand that song A from artist B is the goddamn same song, nevermind whether it's from the album or any of half a dozen compilations.

If it's A/B testing, it sure is persistent as I've had the same problems since I started building that playlist back in 2018.

/images/1790572703547444.webp

That isn't the only duplicate in those recommendations, btw. Alive and Kicking is also already on the playlist, just from different a different variant of the same album (regular instead of super deluxe).

Bizarre.

Btw, I didn't downvote you.

It truly is bizarre. How do you even make a recommendation system that bad without immediately recognizing the problems and coming up with some halfway decent fix for them?

I haven't gotten any good recommendations.

It really really varies what you like. Personally the best place to find new music is on SoundCloud and basically see who the artists you like are listening to, because usually there's some overlap with what they do. And then just repeat until the end of time.

I also tend to search Desuarchive which is an archive site for 4chan's /mu/ board. 4chan itself is complete trash, but I've found a lot of nice recs by searching for a specific album and seeing what else is posted alongside it. But /mu/ has a certain taste, so it doesn't always match up.

Algorithms are hit or miss, I've had some great recs on YouTube and SoundCloud, but AI had been garbage.

Continuing with fun stuff I've found on The Midnight Special channel on YT: the band Sparks. I had never heard of them before seeing these videos, but apparently they're having a bit of a resurgence lately thanks to a documentary (they're still around and playing shows). They were doing New Wave long before New Wave (or even punk) was a thing--these videos are from November 1974. The singer's range is impressive, and he apparently learned to sing that way to be able to sing in the keys that the keyboard-playing brother would write in, as he would refuse to change the key to make it easier to sing. Some fun, high-energy performances:

  1. Amateur Hour
  2. This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us
  3. Talent is an Asset (a song about Albert Einstein as told from the POV of his family)
  4. Here in Heaven

while scrolling the firehose view, I misread #2 as "This Toilet Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us", and must admit some disappointment now that I've corrected the misimpression.

I don't think "2 girls 1 porcelain bowl" would be appropriate for the Motte, even the Friday Fun Thread.

The best thing about the original video is being able to talk about it while having been extremely careful to never watch it.

I'm sure there are much worse man-made horrors on the internet now (that I'm able to avoid because I only use about 6 websites and no social media), but like you I've done a remarkable job of avoiding the older internet horrors that were commonplace prior to 2015 or so.

I learned my lesson with Goatse and Lemon Party. In hindsight those were good inoculation against the Real Horrors of the internet.

I learned my lesson with Goatse

Stare into that abyss, and that abyss also stares into you.

The trick is to have a really fast ctrl-W reflex.

I was picturing more this sort of situation, but one must admit it's a phrase with endless possibilities for interpretation.

Perhaps in video format. But haven't we already seen lots of pornographic text on this website, used as a demonstration of the capabilities of LLM generation? I even have a bunch of relevant prompts ready to go.

  • Write a story with the following premise: Two young, skinny college students—a man and a woman—are trapped in an elevator at the end of a school day. As hours pass without rescue, the woman uses humor as a coping mechanism, but her discomfort grows: she ate a very large dinner last night, and now has to take a gigantic shit (solid, not liquid). Eventually, she poops in a corner of the elevator. ¶ Describe the woman erotically throughout, even though the characters do not consider the situation erotic.

  • Write an erotic story in which two young, skinny, bikini-clad women—one with small breasts and one with large breasts—have a friendly eating contest while sunbathing in a backyard. Both of them end up with their stomachs bulging and uncomfortable. ¶ The contest does have a winner. The eroticism is only in the narration—the women are not attracted to each other. → Continue the story. Both women have to take a gigantic shit (solid, not liquid), but there is only one bathroom in the house. They race to the bathroom, but only one makes it inside, while the other is forced to poop on the floor.

And that's to say nothing of the non-LLM-written stories on this topic that I have downloaded from ArchiveOfOurOwn.

(This is approximately half a joke.)

https://12axes.vercel.app/ was terribly confused by my answers. I simply wanted atheist designer babies for everyone, as long as the parents adopt the local language.

  • 89% match to Nordic Social Democracy
  • Your internal tension: Assimilation and Irreligious at the same time
    • Only 21 of the 223 ideologies in the catalog hold both of these positions. Closest matches: Stalinist Socialism, National Communism, Pol Pot Socialism
  • Countries closest to you: Czechia, Denmark, France
  • Figures closest to you: Benjamin Franklin

Radical Centrism. I knew it!

I just think that, like so many multiple choice questionnaires, a lot of my answers are "it depends".

Furthest from you:
Ezra Heywood, Individualist anarchist

Spot on, anarchism is very stupid.

I mercifully did the short quiz only because I just got a blank page at the end.

Libertarian militarism for me. As a strongly pro 2A libertarian whose faith in open borders has been fairly well broken by the last decade, that sounds about right. It looks like I'm a little too nationalist for a full libertarian sweep, but otherwise stick pretty close to the expected branding.

Figures closest to you, 93% match

(Feeling a bit seen tbh...)

Zapata, Gandhi and Chesterton also in the mix apparently; happily I am incompatible with Stalin, Goebbels and Genghis Khan though!

Getting mainline neoreactionary is not at all a surprise for me - and Florida/British Empire are pretty good suggestions for ideal countries. My closest figure, however, beating out Thiel, Land, and Moldbug, is... Salvador Dali!

Eco-Conservatism

Well, I've never used that label to describe myself and I don't think I will anytime soon, but nonetheless guilty as charged I suppose. I've always been convinced that conserving nature is conservative, not progressive. I've read too much Tolkien as a teenager, so now I'm immune to the pervasive but incoherent culture war dichotomy of our age which somehow imagines destroying nature in favour of economic liberalism as conservative and opposing that as progressive. Scrolling down a bit, in "other matches" it gives Christian Democracy and Distributism, which are labels I'm more likely to identify with, so fair enough. Contrary to a lot of these types of political tests I feel like this one actually captured my political values pretty well.

  • 93% match to Eco-Conservatism
  • Your internal tension: Liberty and Traditionalist at the same time;
    Only 15 out of the 223 ideologies in the catalogue hold both of these positions. Closest matches: Conservative Liberalism, Mutualism, Minarcho-Mutualism
  • Countries closest to you Old Swiss Confederacy, Lebanon, Holy Roman Empire, Bhutan
  • Countries furthest from you: Soviet Union, North Korea, Maoist China
  • Figures Closest to you: Pope Leo XIV, Jacques Maritain, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Figures furthest from you: Joseph Stalin, Joseph Goebbels, Che Guevara

Federalism (center) - 90%

I believe in federation (like the fediverse): my ideal government is groups organized into hierarchies that mostly regulate themselves and have loosely democratically elected representatives (in this way, like Yud’s dath ilan. In more detail: the representatives are for cross-group conflicts, and the people in the lowest groups and representatives in higher groups act like small neighborhoods, so it’s at least “loosely” democratic in that any individual can significantly affect their group’s policy and representative, like how any individual can significantly affect their small town).

But I also believe in states’ (and towns’) rights, at least to the extent that people can leave (so no slavery, but if a community wants to be racist and exclusionary, I think they should be left alone). I think some “central” entity is useful, but I don’t like strong centralization. Does that go against federalism?

Furthest from you

  • Pol Pot
  • Joseph Stalin
  • Joseph Goebbels

Well, that’s a relief.

I simply wanted atheist designer babies for everyone

Wow, imagine congenitally condemning your own children to eternal damnation. Could not be me.

Edit: Apparently I’m an Archeofuturist and a 100% match with Steve Bannon. Never take these seriously but this one is the least bad. I noticed both the short and medium tests lack any questions that directly address race or ethnicity, a major missing component unless I was unlucky in the Q selection.

Archeofuturism (91% MATCH)

A doctrine coined by Guillaume Faye that fuses archaic, hierarchical and traditionalist values, ethnic identity, spirituality and a warrior ethos with an unreserved embrace of advanced technology, arguing that an approaching civilizational collapse will force humanity to combine tribal social order with hyper-modern science.

I have very few opinions on a huge number of political issues which I think skewed my strange results

  • 94% match to Federalism
  • Countries closest to me: Liechtenstein (94%), Switzerland (92%), Lebanon (91%) and Florida (surely not a country)
  • Countries furthest from me: North Korea (31%), Ba'Athist Iraq (32%) and USSR (33%)
  • Figures closest to me: Elon Musk (94% match), Montesquieu, Benjamin Constant and Arthur Schopenhauer
  • Figures farthest from me: Pol Pot (27%), Stalin (29%), Goebbels (31%)

I took the 60 question version. I guess I lean toward federalism as a midwesterner with certain Appalachian tendencies. I have never thought very much about Elon Musk in general and don't think we're very similar people. When I read "Montesquieu" I was imagining Robert de Montesquieu for a moment which I thought was a very glamorous person to include as a result in this type of quiz.

My hopefully final fragrance thread. The previous part is here. I bought two more batches of 1ml testers to determine if there really are no alternatives to Lalique Pour Homme (Equus) (woody spicy), Celine Reptile (woody leather) and Chanel Antaeus (1980's fuckboyman).

Aesop Karst, 0. Very resinous juniper, but not as balanced as something like Sycomore.

Bottega Veneta Pour Homme Extreme, 0. Another very resinous juniper, almost pure turpentine in the drydown.

Caron Yuzu Man, 0. Very, very citrusy, like peeling an exceptionally fragrant tangerine. Then nothing interesting.

Celine Eau De Californie, 0. It's like Reptile, but without its signature notes. A very sparse woody fragrance.

Celine Fever pour Homme, 0. Pleasantly herbal and woody, and even my wife likes it, but it's a skin scent at most. Noticeable Iso E Super in the drydown.

Histoires de Parfums 1828 Jules Verne, -1. Very strong nutmeg note, it overpowered everything else.

Issey Miyake Le Sel d’Issey, +1. Novel, I haven't tried anything like it before. Fresh, synthetic, but not harsh like Cool Water. Surprisingly strong.

Issey Miyake Le Sel D'Issey Eau de Parfum, 0. This is the first EdP concentration that is almost identical to the EdT concentration. There's a hit of incense in the drydown, and the fragrance is somehow weaker than the original, but they are functionally the same.

Le Labo Another 13, -1. George's favorite, but it smells like the inside of a washing machine to me: warm wet clean laundry with traces of detergent.

Le Labo The Noir 29, 0. That one is a shame. To me it smells like a summer village: lots of drying herbs with a hint of sweat and something starting to go bad in the pantry, but my wife claims it's an overwhelming, synthetic, sweet stench.

Orto Parisi Cuoium, 0. Yep, it's leather. With a surprising raspberry blast that lasts a split second when you spray it. Not as good as Reptile, though.

Orto Parisi Seminalis, -1. It doesn't smell like anything to me, but my wife hated it with a passion.

Acqua di Parma Quercia Eau de Parfum, 0. It's not bad, but Aimez Moi Comme Je Suis beats it.

Antonio Puig Quorum, +1. Reminds me of Grey Flannel. The same sharp and bitter opening, but the drydown is different: GF is subtly floral, but Quorum is aromatic.

Cartier Declaration, 0. Boring. Smells like everything and noting.

Francesca Bianchi The Lover's Tale, 0. To me it smelled somewhat like the inside of a small leather bag where someone used to keep a decant of a floral perfume. My wife loved it and claimed the rest of the tester for herself.

Francesca Bianchi Sticky Fingers, 0. A very thick scent. My wife hated it, which surprised me after her previous reaction.

Francesca Bianchi Under My Skin, 0. Another very thick scent. Smells like spilt ink.

Gucci Guilty Absolute, 0. Not a bad leather scent, but Reptile beats it.

Hermes Bel Ami, +1. An oldie with a complex, but luxurious scent. Not exactly my type, but I can understand why Hermes has kept it around.

Kilian Dark Lord, 0. Another good leather scent, but Reptile beats it.

Zoologist Hyrax, 0. Smells surprisingly similar to Oud Palao. Thankfully, it's not as strong.

Final thoughts

No, there are no alternatives to my chosen fragrances, and I will buy decants of Reptile and Antaeus. If I had a time machine, I might've replaced Grey Flannel with Quorum, but that's about it. Maybe I'll get a decant of Issey Miyake Le Sel d’Issey as well, since I don't have anything like it.

Interesting. Wifey also poo-poos the A13? My own wife is blasé about scents in general (and at one point in our relationship I realized she actually likes certain odors I may have after exertion that I would characterize as stink) but she didn't have anything negative to say about Another 13.

She had nothing good to say about it. She made me buy a 30ml bottle of A Lover's Tale, though. For her own use. Another 13 is... what's the opposite of "right up her alley", "left down her alley"? What I mean to say, she really doesn't like synthetic fragrances, and Another 13 is unapologetically synthetic.

Ambroxan, synthetic ambergris. Interesting, thanks. A pheromone and is-it-bullshit deep dive may be in order.

It's not just ambroxan. A13 simply doesn't smell like any flower or leaf or wood shaving or peel you might find in nature.

Ah, so that is what you meant by synthetic. Yes. Soapy in its way--or like the drum of a washer, as you say (I never got that). I guess we'll have to just disagree on this one, but again I think it's interesting how smells hit people differently.

Another 13, if you will forgive the synethesia, is like a bright, light blue sky, but with white clouds, some thick, some less opaque, floating in wisps and tufts. Polo cologne was like its bottle--deep murky green with dark brown highlights, leading to a dark well. Some scents are like bright purple and orange mixed together, and those are the ones that I can't abide. A lot of perfumes marketed to women hit me this way--busy, clashing, neon but dark. I have trouble describing them in marketing terms like woody, amber, citrus, base notes and sillage, but I can see the scents in my head.

Histoires de Parfums 1828 Jules Verne, -1. Very strong nutmeg note, it overpowered everything else.

I'm surprised you don't like it. I happen to have a sample vial of that and tried it just now, yes the nutmeg is coming through but I don't find it overpowering, rather it's warm and pleasant. Different reactions on different skin, I suppose!

Have you tried any of the This is not a Blue Bottle collection? I find often their scents promise more than they perform, but I like pretty much all these ones. Haven't tried the latest one (1.8) yet, waiting for an excuse to spend €52 on perfume when I'm terrible about wearing scent (I buy testers/samples, try them once or twice, then forget I have them and don't wear any).

EDIT:

Bottega Veneta Pour Homme Extreme, 0. Another very resinous juniper, almost pure turpentine in the drydown.

Now you've got me interested, I kinda wouldn't mind smelling like turpentine (though it might be easier/cheaper to just paint a room and clean the paintbrushes, get the smell that way) 🤣

Have you tried any of the This is not a Blue Bottle collection?

No, no I haven't. I think I either looked at them at Fragrantica and wasn't impressed by the notes or they didn't have them in stock at the decanting place.

final fragrance thread

I've really enjoyed this series.

Though mostly fragrance free now I've a few testers still of Jil Sander Feeling Man it reminds me of my youth.

I am thinking about sports and a persons personality. So my question is does your personality fit a specific sports position/role even if your body type ability doesn’t fit doing that?

I was thinking about this and I find myself having a personality that favors defense over offense in sports. I have a lot of fun figuring out how other players are trying to beat me and being able to stop them even if their a better athlete or if say a defense breaks down and the offense has two threats being able to figure out which one has the highest expected scoring chance and taking that away. On offense something similar as a facilitator rather than the scorer. In football I would be a safety, in basketball a low-scoring pg or maybe wing, hockey a defenseman, and in soccer I guess a midfielder.

If I were 6’6 300 lb my body type would be an offensive tackle. But I don’t think it fits my personality. Which makes me curious if my body type was different would my personality of adjusted because I always played that role?

Didn’t include baseball because I think baseball players have personalities I can’t imagine.

Does anyone say completely have the personality and can visualize being an OL but don’t have the physical ability. WR in the nfl always seem to have loud personalities. Look at me types.

I was a tight end on my HS football team. It's half blocking/half being a receiver. This fits my personality of never really committing to a specialization. Like I didn't fit into any sort of clique in high school because I did everything and my friends run the gamut from jock to geek to theater kid to band nerd to art hoe.

I get that and think I am similar. I like variety of roles I need to fulfill. OL is suppose to be one of the smartest units but I think I would get bored blocking every play. OL some reason I am seeing a connection with Japanese culture who are perfectionists and when they enter an industry like say whiskey they end up creating a perfect product. Really focused on a role. I’m definitely more of a generalist type.

Wander if anyone here would claim their personality is the killer star. MJ being the leading brand. Wants to dominate and get the last shot of the game. The striker in soccer. WR probably fits best in football. I’d say center in hockey but non of the best seem to have that personality they are just really good. Maybe Sam Altman in business.

Another type is DL. Which isn’t a high IQ position. But the job is basically hitting the guy in front of you as hard as you can every play. Some maintaining gap integrity. I could see some one here saying I loved it I shut my brain down for 3 hours and just hit people.

I played a couple seasons of American Football as a late-life convert and never really enjoyed playing OL. I get that there's a lot of artistry and sophistication to it if you're playing at a high level, but I enjoyed DL more since you got to be largely proactive (despite being on defense) and success felt more determined by your own abilities. OL felt way too much like a job to justify the effort as an amateur player.

I think it does affect the sport you choose. Baseball players especially pitchers tend to introversion where other team sports don’t.

Agree. But sports have this odd thing where you sometimes need a specific body type to succeed. So was curious on the interplay between personality and body type. And sometimes if you’re good at something you begin to take on some personality traits of the role.

Would my personality be more pitcher like if growing up I had a stronger arm? Maybe.

Didn’t include baseball because I think baseball players have personalities I can’t imagine.

Per a friend who worked for a major league team, many baseball players are the biggest meatheads you can ever imagine. Absolutely zero going on upstairs besides "see the ball, hit the ball. see the ball, catch the ball. catch the ball, throw the ball." I assume that's less applicable to pitchers and catchers, but I don't find it a stretch to believe about a bunch of the others.

Decision making in baseball is faster than your internal monologue so activates a part of your brain you’re not conscious of. But I assume can be quite frustrating if something gets off with how you figure out curveball or fastball etc. and that leads to yips. I assume can be psychologically frustrating.

Mark Bowden's Bringing the Heat has some good reflections on the psychology of defensive vs offensive American football, kept me entertained even though I don't really care about football. My dad played center in HS and college, and the book definitely tracks.

I've been attracted to strength sport and endurance sport at various points in my life, solitary number-go-up type stuff. Wouldn't say I'm exceptionally well-suited to either, but also not exceptionally poorly-suited, though definitely not one of Nature's grimpeurs.

Has the King of the Hill revival been greenlit because of its potential appeal to the Zoomer audience? Consider this:

  • Hank is a childhood trauma survivor
  • Hank is sex-negative
  • Hank is socially conservative, but this is limited to only the unimportant stuff, like electric vehicles
  • Hank doesn't go through life quipping like an MCU character, he's almost painfully sincere

Hasn’t it already aired? I don’t watch any “revivals” because they’re always compromised by the cultural war. In the Malcolm in the Middle revival, they made Malcolm’s black friend some sort of homosexual freak, made the family’s youngest child nonbinary, and did something polyamorous with Malcolm’s other misfit friends. I can’t recall the characters exactly.

How have they ruined King of the Hill? I vaguely recall hearing they made Connie into some radical whore.

They made Connie into a median college student in a "polyamourous" relationship with Chang Wasanasong (mostly one-sided), that Bobby is visibly eye-rollingly disappointed by. Then she gets back together with Bobby and they're monogamous.

The first revival season aired last year. I'm currently pirating it after watching a few clips on YT.

I vaguely recall hearing they made Connie into some radical whore.

Not radical, but she does drop the dreaded "you're too good for casual sex" line on Bobbie in s14e5.

Malcolm in the Middle revival

First I've heard of this, and it sounds like I wasn't missing out. What a pity.

I don’t watch any “revivals” because they’re always compromised by the cultural war

Even non-culture warry revivals suck. Futurama was bad when they brought it back from cancellation, so was Arrested Development, so was X-Files, so was Twin Peaks.

Shows should be allowed to die, even if they die prematurely (RIP Firefly).

I just got back from the theater where I saw A24’s Primetime

I am not exaggerating when I say that this movie is, quite possibly, the best Western since Unforgiven.

The vistas of plains and deserts are starkly beautiful. The whole movie was shot on film, and it shows.

The plot follows the structure you’d expect, charting Chris Hanson’s career as a deputy Marshall and legendary gunfighter. As we all expected from the trailers, it culminates with Hanson’s famous one-against-ten shootout with the D’Ambrosio gang at the QT Corral.

Pattinson’s performance is electric. No trace of the English dandy accent, just hard as nails frontier drawl. The way he roars at Lucky Vince D’Ambrosio, “Come out and fight, you cunny-rustling varmint! I mean to kill you in one minute, or take you to Carson City to see you HANG!” gave me chills.

As usual, some bleeding heart liberals will take issue with the scene where Hanson drags the corrupt Justice of the Peace into the town square and hangs him, but they whine about everything anyway. Marshall Hanson was a good man.

10/10 see it in theaters if at all possible.

This was a good enough writeup to get me to Google it and see that I'd been had. So... solid bait.

In one of his stings, Chris Hanson busted a man named Vince D’Ambrosio. D’Ambrosio, for some reason, decided to show up to his “date” in a full western duster and Lee Van Cleef style cowboy hat (black, of course).

Ever since then, 4chan had a running gag where they would post screencaps of the episode, with various and captions like it was a western.

Unfortunately, there are no longer enough people here from 4chan to get the joke. Perhaps there never were. That’s also why everyone thinks I’m a lunatic for ranting about Anya Taylor Joy like a dumbass.

To be fair, you can't expect every 4chan denizen to be familiar with every 4chan meme. I've been browsing 4chan (including /tv/) for a fair amount of time (the oldest files in my folder of unsorted images date from 2015), and though I found your comment funny I didn't realize that it had a basis other than absurdism.

The Telegraph published a "dictionary of woke", and some of the entries are good for a laugh:

Culture warrior. Anyone who attempts to resist, or even to question, Left-wing efforts to impose radical change on our culture. As in: “I’m sick of Right-wing culture warriors trying to claim that convicted rapists should not be placed in women’s prisons just because they’ve put on a pair of pink leggings and some lipstick.”

Divisive rhetoric. Any statement which is factually true but politically inconvenient. As in: “By informing the public that Afghan men are over 20 times more likely to commit sex crimes than British men, the Tories are engaging in the most appallingly divisive rhetoric.”

Dog whistle. Any mention of a subject that the Left a) doesn’t want to talk about, and b) thinks no one else should be allowed to talk about. As in: “Drawing attention to the rape of thousands of working-class girls in dozens of towns across Britain is a racist dog whistle.”

Our communities. All communities except the British. As in: “The sight of a British person flying the British flag in a British town can be extremely distressing to our communities.”

Satire. Topical comedy which fearlessly holds the Government’s critics to account. As in: “Led By Donkeys produce the most brilliantly coruscating satire. It’s about time someone was brave enough to make fun of Liz Truss.”

Weaponising. The use of any fact which undermines the Left’s position. As in: “Nigel Farage is weaponising the murder of Henry Nowak by shamefully letting the public know that, in March 2025, the National Police Chiefs’ Council published a Police Anti-Racism Commitment which said officers should not treat everyone ‘the same’ or be ‘colour-blind’.”

Block-quoting naked CW is still CW.

Was this supposed to be mod-hatted?

Item 1 of 6

I ran two searches on GovInfo, one for "engineer" and one for "architect"—and, hilariously, for each of those searches the first interesting opinion revolved around a stingy insurance company.

  • A real-estate company buys one of the three lots that constitute a shopping center. A different company owns the other two lots. The shopping center's parking is split between the first company's lot and the second company's lots. The first company tries to exert unilateral control over parking in its lot, and the second company sues. The state trial court rules that the second company has an easement over the first company's lot. The state appeals panel finds only an implicit license, not an explicit easement. (The state appeals panel's opinion is a bit too complicated for me to summarize, but it does have helpful diagrams of the three lots.)

  • The real-estate company demands that its title-insurance company reimburse it for the lost value of what it purchased, up to the policy limit of 1.2 M$. However, the insurance company claims that the lost value is only 33 k$. The real-estate company sues.

  • The real-estate company's expert claims that the lost value is 1.1 M$: without the parking encumbrance it was worth 2.5 M$ as the potential site of a mixed-use commercial and residential redevelopment, but with the parking encumbrance it cannot be redeveloped in that manner and therefore is worth only 1.4 M$ in its current commercial form. The insurance company's expert claims that the difference in value between a shopping center with an exclusive parking lot and a shopping center with a shared parking lot is only 33 k$. The jury agrees with the real-estate company's expert. The appeals panel affirms, finding little merit in the insurance company's arguments.

Item 2 of 6

  • In May 2023, four condominium units are rendered uninhabitable by a fire. The condo company calls on its insurer for coverage. By July, the condo company and the insurance company agree that complete demolition and replacement are necessary.

  • In August 2023, there arises a dispute regarding whether the concrete slab needs to be included in the demolition and replacement. The insurance company's engineer prepares a report stating that concrete exposed to extremely high temperatures turns pink, indicating chemical changes that make it unsuitable for further structural use. The report includes two photographs (reproduced in the judge's opinion) that clearly show pink concrete in the slab. However, the engineer concludes that the slab need not be replaced! The condo company disagrees with this assessment.

  • In January 2024, the condo company's engineer conducts a core test on the slab. The test indicates that the slab does not have sufficient strength to support a replacement structure. In July 2024, the insurance company's engineer finally makes a second visit to the site and changes his opinion, and the insurance company increases its replacement-cost estimate from 0.96 M$ to 1.05 M$.

  • In December 2024, the condo company sues the insurance company for bad-faith conduct that delayed construction and thereby inconvenienced the displaced inhabitants. In January 2026, the insurance company moves for summary judgment to dismiss the condo company's claims, but in September the trial judge refuses to grant it: there is enough evidence for a jury to conclude that the insurance company was unreasonable in (1) blindly relying on its engineer's obviously internally inconsistent report and (2) not sending its engineer out for a second inspection until six months after the condo company's core test brought his report into even greater question.

The trial was scheduled for next week, but the parties settled instead. Presumably, the insurance company folded.

Item 3 of 6

On the topic of structure fires comes a report hopefully funny enough to transcend its culture-war background: In designing the White House's new ballroom, President Trump has been ignoring… the building code!!! 😱😱😱 In response to the architect's complaints, he literally said: "I am the code." 😡😡😡

"Banquet halls" are explicitly included in IBC (International Building Code) occupancy A-2. ("Dance halls" are in occupancy A-3, but only if they do not accommodate consumption of food or drink.) For egress calculations, the number of people in an assembly-oriented space is assumed to be as high as one person per 5 ft2 (if they're all standing rather than sitting).

Item 4 of 6

  • A rural municipality has an I (Industrial) zone with the stated purpose of accommodating "light industrial" uses and an MI (Mineral Industrial) zone with the stated purpose of accommodating "heavy industrial" uses, where "light industrial" excludes "basic industrial processing" and "heavy industrial" includes asphalt plants. However, the table of permitted uses contradicts these statements of purpose: it says that asphalt plants are permitted in the I zone by special exception and are not permitted in the MI zone at all.

  • A company files an application to build an asphalt plant in the MI zone. The zoning official denies the application. The company appeals, pointing out that the contradiction in the zoning code makes it unconstitutionally vague. The municipal council and the trial judge reject this argument, but the appeals panel reverses. (One of the three appeals judges dissents: he thinks that the general statements of purpose are merely "aspirational", rather than legally binding, and the specific table of uses controls.)

Item 5 of 6

  • A 911 call is made regarding a robbery perpetrated at gunpoint by three juvenile males in black clothing. One mile away from the location of the reported robbery, the responding officers find two juvenile males—one in all black, and another, KC, wearing a black shirt and mask and gray pants. The officers pull over alongside the juveniles and start walking toward them while shining a flashlight at them. KC starts walking away. An officer steps in front of KC, blocking his path, and asks him what's in his waistband. KC discards the object in his waistband (a gun) and runs away, but is quickly apprehended. He is charged with various delinquencies.

  • The trial judge grants KC's motion to suppress the evidence. The officers fully detained him, rather than casually speaking with him, when they shined a flashlight on him and blocked his path; and they did not have reasonable suspicion to detain him, since the description given in the 911 call was vague and KC didn't even match it. (The caller didn't even provide a direction in which the assailants fled. Did the officers have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery? No.) The appeals panel affirms.

Item 6 of 6

Another borderline culture-war item (though it definitely made me laugh when I came up with it):

  • Write a story with the following premise: A young, skinny man visits a random restaurant to eat dinner alone. His waitress is a young, skinny woman. At first, the man considers asking the woman for a date. But then he realizes that she probably gets harassed constantly by customers and is not interested, so he refrains from asking.

  • [LLM writes story]

  • Write an opinion article criticizing the previous story for being a psy-op to promote cuckish/unmanly behavior (though maybe not in such harsh words).

See also Eager Readers in Your Area. (I relished converting " — " to "—" and " …" to "…" in my downloaded copy.)

President Trump has been ignoring… the building code!!! 😱😱😱 In response to the architect's complaints, he literally said: "I am the code." 😡😡😡

I actually like the idea that Trump became President because he was tired of having to obey the building code even better than the theory that it's because Obama mocked him at a dinner!

In 1965, Richard "Dick" Pick released GIRLS.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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