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I wanted to write about the WPATH leaks: the cancers and the shrinks debating over how many of a 12 year old's "multiple personalities" need to be transsexual before they should give them hormones and surgery.
I wanted to write about a woman I know who just got a $90,000 government grant for her instagram hobby farm, alongside hundreds of other fake businesses like "the Black farmers collective." Taxpayers gave her more money than her business will ever have in revenue to play upper-middle-class status games while the few remaining real farmers around her are going out of business.
I wanted to write about watching my friend once again change all the grocery store tags because prices keep skyrocketing as talking heads insist we're imagining it all and everyone's actually getting super rich.
I wanted to write about my state banning non-"cage free" eggs and claiming it won't increase prices... because they negotiated a kickback deal with the remaining suppliers to eat the cost until after the '24 election, after which they can harvest their monopoly rents and some lobby group can release an official report claiming the price increases were unrelated.
I wanted to write about how my state house just banned natural gas hookups and enabled pressuring companies to drop service to existing customers.
I wanted to write about the people chanting "glory to the martyrs by any means necessary" while insisting nobody could possibly suspect them of supporting Hamas, with every leftist somehow getting an identical memo about how to provide cover for them.
But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?
You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.
What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane?
Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good? Can anyone point to an example of it doing any good in the past? Has culture war discussion on the motte ever actually led to anyone solving culture war problems? The closest thing I can come up with are TracingWoodgrain's exposés, which while incredible have hardly moved the needle on public awareness.
Virtually all the energy expended here seems to be vented straight into the void, almost like it's deliberately set up to do so, keeping people arguing in circles until it's too late to do anything about it. And it's been going on for over a decade! When will it stop?
Edit:
I hope this example might get across what I mean. A few weeks ago I wasted time finding out about "multiplicity" (the new social contagion of kids who spend too much time on discord deciding they're all "plural systems" of different personalities). Did a bunch of research, got on a bunch of discords that use the "pluralkit" plugin, found examples of psychologists taking it seriously, started writing a post.
It turned out Gattsuru was already talking about it last year like it was just a normal thing that normies will learn to accept soon.
Yesterday we found out a bunch of WPATH associates all treat it like a legitimate and uncontroversial diagnosis that lots of their "trans kids" mysteriously have. It hardly made a splash in the news. Pretty soon people will be mocking anyone who cares about it.
I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.
What good would bringing it to anyone's attention do? Even the most bizarre event that would have been considered unimaginably stupid until the second it happens will just be rationalized away like it's no big deal.
There are of course many reasons to worry, but the modern US is still one of the freest and least corrupt societies in human history. We have a lot of corruption and stupidity in the US, of course. However, the average human society, either today, or historically, would be amazed at how well the modern US is doing at balancing individual freedom and collective action. I don't like wokist authoritarianism, DEI corruption, or inflation, but if you feel that they are such great threats that they are worth becoming deeply emotionally distraught over, you are doing the same thing that leftists do when they become deeply emotionally distraught over the (in my opinion, near-zero) chance of Trump becoming a dictator.
The reality is that most things are going alright. The number of minors getting sex change treatments is a drop in the bucket. All the DEI corruption in the world hasn't stopped the strongest economy in human history from continuing to innovate. Inflation sucks but we're not living through the Great Depression or anything close to it. The Hamas supporters in the US didn't get any identical memo, they're just excited about somebody sticking it to what they view as an oppressive regime and they are ignoring the various atrocities that the rebels commit... which means that, while they are not being objective, nonetheless they're just indulging in an extremely common human psychological pattern that people on all sides of the political spectrum regularly indulge in. Musk owns Twitter and Google Gemini is widely mocked, the scary predictions about how the wokes would put us all in gulags have not panned out.
Basically, things are just not that bad. It's just that they seem bad if you focus a lot of attention on everything that is going on that you dislike.
By what metrics? How do you rank the state taking away people's children and sterilizing them? It's virtually never happened before in history, although the few examples we have didn't exactly age well.
This argument seems to me like people, utterly immersed in a culture of fascism and corruption, thrilled at watching their cultural foes beaten and humiliated, musing that things aren't that bad. After all, they're doing ok.
In my experience, the claim "X has never happened before in history!" is almost always founded in a paucity of historical understanding and imagination. There is nothing new under the sun and the past contains an almost infinite well of horrors for the present to draw from.
The first sentence in the "history" section of the wikipedia article for castrato says this: "Castration as a means of subjugation, enslavement or other punishment has a very long history, dating back to ancient Sumer." Spend some time thinking about the depth and breadth of brutality and misery that sentence contains. Contextualize your breathless outrage.
I view castration as slightly different from sterilization. Mostly because you can't castrate women. Surgically sterilizing women really hasn't been around that long at all, and so doesn't have the millennia of human history to compare against or contextualize.
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I think this is basically true. If you have today's American or modern values, most any particular thing cited in this thread has something 3x worse even 50 years ago, and worse farther back. If you value things like religion, chastity, the TFR, national pride, or even go further back and value conquest and racial purity (this is not intended to be snide) things are clearly going wrong. But dumb regulations, endorsing foreign violence, corruption ... all are actually better now than eg 100 years ago.
edit: Moldbug would claim this is technology masking political/civilizational decline. This is significantly true in many of the areas Moldbug claims it in (although I don't think we're going to descend into something like South America like moldbug claims), but the political 'progress' in the last century more than compensates for it for most peoples' values. If you're philosophically willing to 'die for your freedom' and conceive of freedom the way most to today, then (purely as a comparison, this is in no way a real tradeoff) being mugged a few times is more than worth homosexuality and free love being legal.
There are definitely exceptions, like "private actors being able to build things" or "government competence at large-scale projects" or "homeless people everywhere", but liberals are in fact noticing those. Especially the first two are the kind of thing Ezra Klein wold talk about on his podcast, they're not taboo like OP complains.
And aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Dumb regulations are far more numerous and worse today.
On average, yes.
But major counter examples exist. Trucking, airlines, and beer all got significantly deregulated. We are coming up on a century past the New Deal, and a lot of big gov overreach peaked in the 60s and then Carter started the neoliberal turn.
Housing is perhaps reaching a turning point as Blue cities/states face reality that zoning is bad/racist. Not sure if building infra is going to improve in that left-on-left fight over green energy/rail vs. environmentalism.
The day to day business of a trucker is far more regulated now as I understand it. GPS and electronic logbooks mean accounting for every minute and making sure the various regs are followed is practical and practiced.
Not being able to build things mostly falls out of the National Environmental Protection Act (thanks Dick Nixon), but there's a lot of other regs like building codes and energy requirements that are continuously getting stricter.
Yeah I think you’re right about the micromanagement of truckers (and other areas with ubiquitous monitoring. We already have cheap cameras/trackers/recorders and now AI can make analyzing the data cheap too. Privacy will be so very dead in most areas of life/work soon.)
The deregulation in the 70s was more about competition between firms.
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OP:
Me:
And - It would be shocking, a complete departure from history and plausibility, if literally everything about the present was better than the past. But, by most peoples' values, the vast majority of things are better now.
I probably should've been more explicit above that I think the 'modern values' that are being satisfied are incoherent and wrong, but OP is trying to criticize the modern world on its own terms and, as a result, failing.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/microsoft-engineer-sounds-alarm-on-ai-image-generator-to-us-officials-and-company-s-board/ar-BB1jrH1c
The government is going to make sure that every AI is exactly like Gemini. The entire US media has, in total lockstep, taken the position that:
I just saw a motte post from JTarrou saying how we have finally seen "peak woke"... two years ago. Things keep getting worse, people here keep coping, nobody seems to remember anything.
Everything happening today would have been considered an impossible joke even two years ago, and yet here we are. What good did any of those discussions do except to ease us into accepting every new Current Thing as it happened?
I do not believe I am "coping", and while my memory is not infallible, I think it's pretty good.
I think my predictions from two years ago hold up pretty well, and am expecting them to hold up even better by this time next year.
Personally, I think it helped me gain an understanding of what is happening and why.
To what end? Understanding what is happening and for what reason is only useful if you can actually do something about it. It does no good to understand the "whats and whys" of something unstoppable and unavoidable.
Understanding what is going on, understanding that the experts are not to be trusted, understanding that the elites are not the best and brightest, understanding that the authorities are not there to serve and protect you, can make very real difference in your personal life, even if you are alone or one among very few with such understanding.
Just one random example.
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First, the current situation was neither unstoppable nor unavoidable. True, those things didn't happen, but that doesn't mean it was never possible.
Second, I don't think understanding is really ever useless. It can help you formulate a strategy for next time. It can help you to sway others to your point of view. If nothing else, people generally like closure and understanding can help provide that. Understanding has value even if it didn't help you to avoid an outcome you consider bad.
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How would they do that? The government has limited control over private individuals' local AIs. As for the big corporations, the more they go woke the more it creates both a monetary and an ideological incentive for competitors to offer non-woke AIs. Not only that, but China will probably offer its own AIs that will be politically correct in CCP ways, but not in the US way.
It's possible that we did see peak woke two years ago. Musk owns Twitter now and it's pretty much a Wild West of opinions. 4chan is still chugging along. TheMotte and rDrama got off Reddit. /r/europe is full of open anti-immigrant sentiment. A bunch of highly progressive US city subreddits regularly hate on progressive ideologues for taking things too far when it comes to law enforcement policies. Biden is at least trying to look like he is clamping down on immigration.
Two years ago? In 2022? How? Give me an example.
It's a lot better than it was, but it's nowhere near what people are making it out to be. Shadowbanning shenanigans are still afoot over opinions that offensively milquetoast.
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Hell, didn't Goody-2 come out less than two weeks before Gemini, and everyone was laughing at the absurdity of an "ethically responsible" chatbot that refused to do arbitrary things? The parody became reality overnight!
Look at the example I edited into the bottom of my OP. A few years ago people were calling that a slippery slope hysteria that would never be a thing, because it was just conservatives exaggerating Some Kids On Tumblr.
In fact, Tracingwoodgrains actually tried to pull the "lol at least we can laugh at conservatives who think Plurals are a thing" gag recently on twitter, and his replies had people going "actually it is and accommodating them is just Basic Human Decency." It happened so fast one end of the leftist tail doesn't even know it's wagging yet!
Canada's bill C-63 is going to criminalize basically all dissent in the country, the UK is... jesus, just look at them. Germany is going to ban its largest party to keep the immigration coming. How are things getting any better?
What are you talking about here? Last time I recall mentioning systems on Twitter it was to marvel at the way some people take the whole thing seriously.
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The distance was so close that for a moment I thought it was meant to parody Gemini, and I didn't get the joke. It was surreal.
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I think people were laughing at it because it was already kind of true.
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