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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26852 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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NPR is in the news lately. First because they have a new CEO, who tweets like a parody of white liberal women. OK those were "in the past" but they were only 4-8 years ago... has she matured at all since then? So far no sign of that.

Secondly was this essay by Uri Berliner, their longtime senior business editor, creator of the popular "Planet Money" podcast, and one of the very few white males/not-super-liberals still in a position of authority at NPR. I really recommend this essay. He lays it out how, sure, NPR was always left-leaning, but it had intelligence and integrity. It's changed.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

...

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

He was suspended for writing that essay (edited- he has since been made to resign: https://archive.is/YR3LB). NPR claims it's not about the content, they just don't allow their workers to write for outside publications without permission. Benjamin Mullin has the story in the New York Times

(edited to remove something wrong)

For my own part, I grew up listening to NPR and I used to love it. The voices, the production value, the journalism, all of it was high-quality. It really stood out in the world of FM radio, where everything else is staticky, ad-filled garbage, and tends to play the same basic pop-classic rock-rap top 40 garbage over and over. In the world before podcasts and sattelite Radio, NPR was the only halfway intellectual content on the radio. Now it just feels like a podcast from some random student activists who have been triggered by Trump to the point that they're on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. I seriously can't stand listening to it anymore, it's just amazing how deranged and annoying it's become.

If you want more examples, Peter Boghossian has a series of podcasts about it: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYNjnJFU-62s5cNuqeB-D-7QPymF6myk_. I'm guessing that most of this won't be very shocking to the people here. But still, it's nice to feel like "I'm not alone. there really are a lot of other people who used to like NPR and now hate it."

NPR very clearly has a mission of political advocacy. The angle on literally every single story is “how does it affect people of color/women/minorities”. Frequently, resulting in bizarre, inappropriate, or completely uninformative segments.

This is the segment when I turned off marketplace for good - which advocates for “prioritizing black women” via the “black women best” framework. In the whole segment, no policy position or course of action is actually advanced - at all. Very little evidence is offered to suggest that prioritizing black women will actually benefit everyone (trickle up) or that any interventions would be cost effective. The guest even goes as far as to suggest nothing at all will work:

The system of, like, systemic racism and just embedded discrimination in our economy is, it is multifacited, it is, like, self-reinforcing. I imagine that if somehow we could break it down it would, like, re-create itself. It’s so many things at once.

…with the only proscription being:

Jones: It really does have to be a true conversation about power. I think it’s a lot of people who are holding positions of power really just like being willing to share that, being willing to share that.

The segment is so off putting that I come away taking the position opposite than it advanced even though I agree it’s not great that black women have a higher unemployment rate.

https://www.marketplace.org/2020/09/01/why-centering-black-women-in-the-economy-could-benefit-everyone/

My turning point was in 2017 when they had a guest on that was advocating that parents put their privileged kids in the worst schools possible to help out the poor black kids. She was supposedly doing that herself, I wonder how it worked out? I think I even found the story. It was a "driveway moment" for me just because I was amazed at what this woman was saying out loud. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/509325266

Its easy to put your kid in a terrible school, its difficult to keep them there if you have the choice. Mommy forums back in 2020 were filled with anxieties about Covid affecting school choices and whether their precious darlings were going to be stuck in 'bad' schools. Liberal truisms about 'all kids are equal' tend to wither in the face of discipline realities in 'urban' schools.

Planet Money is still (mostly) worth listening to, or at least they confine the woke talking points to the episodes that telegraph it in the title so you can skip them right from the start.

triggered by Trump

Yea, it's this. I've been listening to NPR daily for 2 decades, and I can't back it up with citations, but I know this shift happened in 2016. They went from giving a left-leaning viewpoint that still had some contact with reality to a fully cultural Marxist worldview where they would tell outrageously one-sided stories, lie by omission, and on occasion lie outright. Maybe they thought they were doing the right thing by aligning against Trump? I think Trump broke their principles. It's been a downhill slide ever since.

makes sense. I think Trump has some sort of weird polarizing energy, where some people really love him and others really hate him. NPR has attracted a core group of the latter, and they just can't think rationally anymore. I do agree they think they're "doing the right thing" by doing whatever they can to attack Trump, I just think it backfires because of how insipid and repetitive their messaging has become.

Breaking news: Uri Berliner has since resigned. I have to assume that "resigned" here is the usual thing where bigshots are allowed to resign to save face and avoid the public spectacle of being fired that any normal employee would face.

One thing I should add, which I didn't know earlier: some of this is being driven by this guy: Christopher Rufo. He was apparently important in proving that former Harvard president Claudine Gay plagiarized her PHD thesis and getting her fired/resigned, and recently has been posting a lot of Katherine Maher's most ridiculous tweets to make people realize what kind of person she is. He's been getting signal boosted by Elon Musk. This gave some of his tweets, as he put it, "10 million views, compared to NPR which gets 8 million listeners per week." So it's not like this stuff just randomly came up, there seems to be an organized conservative effort now to headhunt these woke progressive leaders.

Damn if this is the first you're hearing of Christopher Rufo, this forum is really not doing its job. He's been easily one of the top 10 most active live players in the Culture War for the last several years.

Rufo is a talking head in the right leaning intellectual spheres, not exactly the ground most mid2010s-style refugees would find themselves inhabiting. Most forays into the 'other' side would lead to the usual shitposters on 4chan or Bodybuilding or the spiciest being Kiwifarms. No one actually goes to the Front or the spicier discords/telegrams/forums (not shared due to foulness). The reality also is that the intellectual CW right often has its successes claimed or attributed to boosters like Musk or Rogan simply for name visibility. Few people seem to know or care about Rufo or Loury or even Mcworther Sowell and Fryer. Which is a tragedy, but also totally expected since most of us have lives and aren't terminally online outrage bait biting retards.

To be honest I don't really understand what you are trying to say here.

Eh, my rambling was quite the soup of stupid, so I apologize for that.

To be extremely simple, Rufo simply does not have visibility. Any victories he gets are attributed to other actors (if any), and the reasons for that are varied.

Uh, Rufo is quite well known among at least the activist bases on both sides.

I don't know who Rufo is, and I'm deep, as it were, in the shit.

Something new you learn every day.

If John Oliver is doing segments on you, you're in the mainstream even if you're not quite a household name.

Tbh i just joined this forum recently. Ive been deliberately avoiding culture war stuff most of the past few years.

If it helps, Rufo is probably the singular winningest fighter against the progressive side of the culture war in quite a while. He's mostly working with DeSantis in Florida and the online front at the moment. I can only hope he gets a spot of power in a future GOP presidential admin where he can go after progressives nation-wide with some real teeth.

Rufo actually seems to possess brain cells still, unlike the weird degradation of Peterson and the embarrassing emotiveness of Alex Jones, Glenn Beck and other frothing conspiracists. I did harbour hope that DeSantis wouldn't pussy out and Rufo would be a czar with teeth, but DeSantis turned out to be the spineless Rubioesque shrinking violet I feared him to be, and Rufo does not seem to have kissed the o-ring of Trump so far to get a spot in any circus cabinet there.

Rufo actually seems to possess brain cells still, unlike the weird degradation of Peterson and the embarrassing emotiveness of Alex Jones, Glenn Beck and other frothing conspiracists.

The problem with a lot of the former type isn't intelligence. It's a weird sort of...effeteness? Peterson might actually be better than most here, since his messianic tendencies make him disagreeable

But you see it a lot with the "IDW" - everyone in it is likely smarter than average - where they basically seem to see the dirty work of politics to be beneath them. Instead, they just want to...talk. Uncharitably, because it'd require them to truly break with their original tribe (who they disagree with on a pivotal but small set of issues). Charitably, they've been burned and it isn't really their thing.

The IDW are largely asocial introverts like most academics who recuse themselves from transitioning to administration. Socially competent introverts still prefer to avoid dealing with people, and they thus have ceded the communicative tasks to their more socially extroverted fellow travellers... who for the IDW are largely insane blowhards.

So it's not like this stuff just randomly came up, there seems to be an organized conservative effort now to headhunt these woke progressive leaders.

One big change that's happened since 2022 is that conservatives have an eye of Sauron now too.

Breaking news: Uri Berliner has since resigned. I have to assume that "resigned" here is the usual thing where bigshots are allowed to resign to save face and avoid the public spectacle of being fired that any normal employee would face.

I sincerely hope this leads to a wave of resignations within NPR, with everyone saying “Ich bin ein Berliner” as their parting words.

I sincerely hope this leads to a wave of resignations within NPR, with everyone saying “Ich bin ein Berliner” as their parting words.

I think this is the wrong end of things. Berliner was the last jelly donut to leave, not the start.

Alas, a Dunkin’ lover can dream

Secondly was this essay by Uri Berliner, their longtime senior business editor, creator of the popular "Planet Money" podcast, and one of the very few white males/not-super-liberals still in a position of authority at NPR. I really recommend this essay. He lays it out how, sure, NPR was always left-leaning, but it had intelligence and integrity. It's changed.

Not having read this essay, one thing that really stands out to me about the headline and the URL is how it frames NPR as the active party that "lost America's trust." This is in stark contrast to 99% of the recent mainstream narrative about people coming to view journalists and journalism outlets with mistrust and even disdain, which is more along the lines of, "Why do these dumb ignorant fucks not trust what we publish, when we're doing everything right? Clearly they must be getting manipulated by disinformation merchants who just know so well how to appeal to their tiny little minds." Back when journalists being less trusted by the public was becoming an issue during the Trump administration, I recall thinking that this should be a time for introspection for journalists, for them to question why they - literal professional writers and speakers - were just so bad at communicating that they were losing out not just to a politician but a politician of the dishonesty level of Trump. Such introspection has been rare indeed, and it's both nice to see it here and unsurprising that this guy was penalized for performing it.

For my own part, I grew up listening to NPR and I used to love it. The voices, the production value, the journalism, all of it was high-quality. It really stood out in the world of FM radio, where everything else is staticky, ad-filled garbage, and tends to play the same basic pop-classic rock-rap top 40 garbage over and over. In the world before podcasts and sattelite Radio, NPR was the only halfway intellectual content on the radio. Now it just feels like a podcast from some random student activists who have been triggered by Trump to the point that they're on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. I seriously can't stand listening to it anymore, it's just amazing how deranged and annoying it's become.

I used to listen to NPR a ton as a kid in my parents' car and also in my young adulthood which was 10+ years ago now. The rare times I drive these days, I still put on NPR, but I honestly can't stand it either, and I'm not sure if it's because I changed or because NPR changed. On Reddit's /r/stupidpol (subreddit for leftists who consider identity politics to be stupid), I read someone say they play a game whenever putting on NPR to see how many minutes it is before there's some mention of a racial or sex/gender-related angle to whatever story they're covering, and they almost never go past 5 minutes; ever since starting to play the game myself, I actually rarely go past 1 minute these days. Could just be coincidence given, again, I rarely listen to any radio anymore these days, but I suspect it's not.

At least, the few times I tune into Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, it's still mostly enjoyable. The kind of self-satisfied smug "obviously the mainstream progressive Democrat narrative is the correct one" attitude can be kind of annoying, but it honestly doesn't seem any worse than when I was a kid - I've just become more aware of the biases I used to have - and I still find Paula Poundstone hilarious.

I read someone say they play a game whenever putting on NPR to see how many minutes it is before there's some mention of a racial or sex/gender-related angle to whatever story they're covering, and they almost never go past 5 minutes; ever since starting to play the game myself, I actually rarely go past 1 minute these days. Could just be coincidence given, again, I rarely listen to any radio anymore these days, but I suspect it's not.

My commute is short - when I couldn't even tune into the further and more rural station to make it to work without this being the dominant angle 5 days in a row, I had to excuse myself from listening.

Now I get to listen to Spotify's "Discovery" queue instead of learning about the world, which while great is still a downgrade.

Not having read this essay, one thing that really stands out to me about the headline and the URL is how it frames NPR as the active party that "lost America's trust." This is in stark contrast to 99% of the recent mainstream narrative about people coming to view journalists and journalism outlets with mistrust and even disdain, which is more along the lines of, "Why do these dumb ignorant fucks not trust what we publish, when we're doing everything right? Clearly they must be getting manipulated by disinformation merchants who just know so well how to appeal to their tiny little minds." Back when journalists being less trusted by the public was becoming an issue during the Trump administration, I recall thinking that this should be a time for introspection for journalists, for them to question why they - literal professional writers and speakers - were just so bad at communicating that they were losing out not just to a politician but a politician of the dishonesty level of Trump. Such introspection has been rare indeed, and it's both nice to see it here and unsurprising that this guy was penalized for performing it.

Well yeah, introspection is hard, and being smart doesn’t make it easier.

I had to look up Ray Kroc because there was something I was guessing that has a good culture war angle not discussed. Foundations and donations over the long term seem to always end up in the left camp.

Ray Kroc my intuition was telling me he would not be a leftist. To no one’s surprise a small business owners political philosophy is described in Wikipedia as

“A lifelong Republican, Kroc believed firmly in self-reliance and staunchly opposed government welfare and the New Deal. Kroc donated $255,000 to Richard Nixon's reelection campaign in 1972”

I guess it was actually his widowed wife’s estate that donated $200 million to NPR, but still seems there is a conservative can create a foundation and 30 years after their death the money ends up supporting everything they were opposed to.

I wonder how much of NGOs being left dominated is driven by the fact that women outlive men. And therefore when wealthy couples die and leave a decent chunk to an NGO, it is generally the woman who is the last to die.

Also to be frank I'd expect interspousal transfers to skew male -> female in terms of who created the funds. For every Mackenzie Scott there's hardly a counterbalancing force of... I don't know, Travis Kelce deciding to donate future Taylor Swift's money to the NRA.

Definitely possible. I would say maybe 33% from this hypothesis. And the rest is liberals just take more of these positions and slowly move the foundation into their taste.

People seem to be indicating that NPR was closer to the middle back when she died and left them money. And the change in NPR occurred 10-15 years later.

Probably a good job hunting search for clearly right people to look into these sort of jobs. If an old dude is like 80 and you are mid-career 40 there are likely a lot of opportunities in being the head of the foundation with clear right side traits.

I also want to point out Bezos seems to be going the opposite way with his wife. Old wife spending on leftist causes. I don’t know Lauren Sanchez current politics but they just bought a huge house in Palm Beach. Rich Latin women in Southern Florida screams conservative. Her friends will be. I feel confident predicting the Bezos will be solid GOP donors within about 10 years.

random side note... is it weird that all three figures in this drama so far are Jewish?

I don't think Maher and Mullin are Jewish, or at least I wasn't able to find anything indicating they are on short notice. Their names aren't very Jewish, anyway.

Maher as a name is Irish; Bill Maher came to mind as a Jewish Maher, but his last name is obviously his father’s, who was an Irish-American Catholic. The New York Times says Katherine met her (Indian New Zealander) husband at “a friend’s Seder”, which could be mild evidence in favor, but then it’s clear she had no Jewish elements to her wedding (while her husband’s Hindu contribution is mentioned) and she was married by a friend who got a marriage license, which again tilts against. Katherine is also a relatively uncommon Jewish name; not to the extent of something like Christina or Christian, but it’s unusual.

Ok, i guess i was wrong. I was also thinking of bill maher, but i guess thats his irish father's name.

Going by surnames they're Irish-Americans.

I have to say that I used to consider NPR’s bias much more egregious than I do now.

I had assumed that like most public broadcasting networks (which one would imagine that ‘National Public Radio’ was) it was entirely an organ of the government, like the BBC or CBC or (Australian) ABC and so on. But it turns out that NPR is essentially just a charity radio station that gets like 10% or maybe less of its funds from the government. The US’s actual state broadcasting network (VoA) doesn’t really have any media presence domestically, and while it is broadly globalist liberal, as one would expect from the State Department, it isn’t really close to NPR anyway.

Their funding is very confusing.

They get very little direct money from the government. But they license out their content to a bunch of small and tiny radio stations that wouldn't exist at all without government money and grants.

So whenever the topic of funding comes up they get sort of talk out of both sides of their mouth . They'll say "we are mostly supported by donations", but then also say that if you cut government funding they'd have to drastically reduce their programming.

I suppose they could both be true if the donations are mostly for a few very popular radio programs.

The US’s actual state broadcasting network (VoA)

Huh, TIL. I had never heard of that thing before. But yeah, NPR isn't really that "national." I guess they used to be, but the government funding was mostly taken away in the 80s. They got a huge boost in the 2000s from the estate of the widow of Ray Kroc, the McDonald's founder. They don't have ads, exactly, but they do have corporate sponsors who are allowed to make statements on the show- the distinction is murky.

It’s the successor to Radio Free Europe/Asia, part of the funding deal is that they’re not allowed to broadcast to Americans.

When your propaganda is too toxic for your own consumption...

VoA is, surprisingly, a lot more balanced than most mainstream media (although of course it reflects US priorities). It serves an actual purpose, and to achieve that it can't just be American Pravda.

VoA is high quality precisely because it is bound by mandate to not broadcast to Americans. Its a bit anodyne and obviously fully asspuppeted by the State Department, but it is honestly refreshing to read articles about international issues and how it relates to US interests without the stink of culture war blanketing the presentation.

NPR is in the news lately. First because they have a new CEO, who tweets like a parody of white liberal women. OK those were "in the past" but they were only 4-8 years ago... has she matured at all since then? So far no sign of that.

I hope the irony of dragging out her tweets from 5 years ago isn't lost on us.

On the one hand, that bridge was crossed and burned a long time ago, so I guess sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. OTOH, this makes a mockery of conservative opposition to cancel culture.

At least Rufo is earnest in his contempt for free expression, so I'll begrudgingly grant him that.

OTOH, this makes a mockery of conservative opposition to cancel culture.

How long do you have to warn people "don't do this or the same tactics will be used against you when the tide turns" before it's ok to make good on the warning?

Yah, it's sauce for the gander and all that.

I think it's stupid when people bring up one random no-context tweet or private joke and use it as an excuse to cancel someone. That's not really what this is though. It's a whole series of tweets, stretching across years, which perfectly match her entire career and worldview. This is who she is.

Also, there's no real pressure on her yet besides people on right-wing twitter dunking on her. She's still very much in charge. It's her underling who got fired because of one essay (admittedly an essay where he publicly broadsided the entire organization).

Doesn't everyone that brings up a tweet or private joke instead to say "this is who they are"?

Free expression is fine. She's saying she will run her organizations according to those arguably illegal principles.

I wouldn't want to fire a guy for tweeting "There Might Be Niggers Here, He Thought to Himself etc."
But if the chairman of the national science foundation started posting "don't feel like giving any grants to niggers this year lmao" there should be questions asked about whether he's violating the law.

At least this is the distinction being used to justify his tactics among liberal types. After the New York Times went after middle school girls for singing along to rap lyrics I'm personally happy to make them eat their own shit for eternity.

On the one hand, that bridge was crossed and burned a long time ago, so I guess sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Precisely. This is just an attempt by Rufo to (as Alinsky put it) “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” It won't work, probably, because NPR is not just OK with those tweets but finds them an absolute positive.

On the one hand, that bridge was crossed and burned a long time ago, so I guess sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. OTOH, this makes a mockery of conservative opposition to cancel culture.

Or was it a "I give the Devil the benefit of law" thing? If the expected benefits never come in, behavior naturally changes.

But I'll bite the bullet: yes, a lot of the conservative opposition to "cancel culture" is at least partly dishonest because sometimes the issue is merely that they think X tenet of the prevailing view is just wrong and no one should be punished for violating it. It's not that it's wrong for a company to fire someone for X take on gender they had three years ago on Twitter based on some appeal to fundamental rights (surely cons have weaker tools here than progressives), it's just bad that the company culture has polarized so much from what conservatives consider correct thinking. Cancel culture is bad both because it involves inquisitorial behavior and what that behavior is aimed at.

But then, a lot of progressive appeals to safety or whatever are also self-serving lies. Everyone is trying to appeal to some overriding principle because the common ground is shrinking.

But I'll bite the bullet: yes, a lot of the conservative opposition to "cancel culture" is at least partly dishonest because sometimes the issue is merely that they think X tenet of the prevailing view is just wrong and no one should be punished for violating it.

Oh, well you'll be happy to know Rufo is completely 100% honest that this is his view. Quoting directly

It's not the same thing, at all. And I do not recognize "cancel culture" as a valid, coherent concept. Every culture cancels—the point is who sets the terms, on which hierarchy of values. Do try to keep up.

NPR is too far left? That's certainly a take.

I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible, with token discussions of "diversity" or minority rights while completely eliding any structural issues or suggestions for real leftist/progressive reform. Often so blatantly that it feels like the editor deleted the paragraph discussing them and immediately hit publish.

  • -29

"Looting as praxis to demolish late stage capitalism" is centrist now?

I am beyond frustrated at dealing with "nothing is ever leftist" deflections. It never seems to matter how far an institution falls into embracing leftist dogma, you will always be told "that land acknowledgement where they called you a settler colonist of Turtle Island whose whiteness is violence isn't real leftism according to this week's redefinition."

NPR has objectively moved so far to the left that its current editorial positions would look like cringe parody to its 2014 listeners. It doesn't matter that whatever progressives you hang out with have gone even more mask-off re. "settler children get the bullet too" (see Ian Golash and the hezbollah-flag waving demos); a fringe demographic of online leftists is not allowed to dictate where the center is.

I honestly cannot even fathom being unable to see NPR's shift in the past 8 years. Someone has to have a bare minimum of observational skills and long-term memory, and then it should just be patently obvious.

Thank god Uri brought some actual statistics to bear. Otherwise, this sort of gaslighting would perhaps have some effect because even after being constantly deployed in far less obvious cases.

I listened to NPR almost every day in the car. I fucking donated! It's now an intolerable shitshow of constant white-guilt signaling shoehorned into every single story. It went from being a bit too dry about too-boring topics to matching the hysteria level of MSNBC with maybe a half-step richer language.

Nothing is left there; it's just another empty mouthpiece I'm being forced to pay for.

I honestly cannot even fathom being unable to see NPR's shift in the past 8 years. Someone has to have a bare minimum of observational skills and long-term memory, and then it should just be patently obvious.

I've never had a car commute, so I haven't listened to NPR on radio regularly since I was a child. My exposure to their current slant is mainly by reading articles and occasionally listening to podcasts. So I don't know what their day-to-day news coverage is like for the most part, which makes it harder for me to notice a change. But my interpretation of their bias is from articles of theirs I've read in the past few months.

If you’re consuming articles and not shows it might be hard to see the difference. Their articles tend to differ little from what you’d see coming from one of the wire services.

What a take, indeed. What exactly would NPR have to do to qualify as 'too left' in your book? Softly recommending guillotines for the rich in the coming socialist revolution? I bet even that wouldn't count!

Look, we get it. There's about a dozen principled leftists that are keeping laser-focused on 'real issues' who don't truck with facile wokeness. They never count for shit, and the ones who do show up are seemingly always Squad-type woke/socialist hybrids, but they have my sympathies. However, wokeness is a thing absolutely concentrated on the Left, and I don't think you get to cleave yourself from it so cleanly just because you too don't like their company.

token discussions of "diversity" or minority rights while completely eliding any structural issues or suggestions for real leftist/progressive reform

There's nothing "token" about it, that's their central framing for basically every single story. It's relentless. I do agree that they elide any real structural issues or serious suggestions for reform, but that's because it's all so stupid that they don't think to ask those questions.

I do agree that they elite any real structural issues or serious suggestions for reform, but that's because it's all so stupid that they don't think to ask those questions.

My working assumption has always been that not having to have those difficult discussions about class/real structural issues is one of the big reasons for the focus on privilege and identity issues. If you're looking at reality, a redneck from Appalachia whose local economy got destroyed by outsourcing and now has a massive fentanyl problem is actually substantially less privileged (in the actual sense of the word) than a pretty young girl going to an elite university. Focusing on the fact that the redneck is a white male allows people to ignore their own actual privilege, and while I'm not going to claim that that's the entire reason for those beliefs, I think that use gave it a lot of staying power.

It also allows them to continue harboring their intense classism and hatred of people like white appalachians and poor southerners. I agree there are some criticisms you can make of those groups -- some of those very hard-hitting -- but the criticisms made by elites are often far more gutteral and contemptuous than grounded and sympathetic. I would not be surprised to hear some references to "scum of the universe".

The real thing that distinguishes this to me, though, is how it contrasts powerfully with the attitude towards other poor groups; I can't tell you how many middle class+ white people I know will talk endlessly and with great care about being respectful towards AAVE speakers, and then in the next breath make fun of backcountry white dialects that are similar in many respects. It's not the kindness or politeness that grates me, but how selective it is. I dislike the sort of smorgasbord contempt you get from some of our more... elitist posters, but I can at least respect the consistency.

Poor white people are the only people you get to be prejudiced against nowadays, and people are eager to use them to fulfill their innate desire to look down on and insult people they see as lower than them. Compare the valence of the phrases "white trash" and "black trash."

I don't think it's that they're stupid, it's that talking concretely about reforms invites infighting. Everyone in those orgs can agree racism is bad / the problem, but they've learned that talking about specific mitigations is a recipe for drama.

I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible,

This was true, but even then, NPR would be "too far to the left" since it is selling itself as a politically neutral, government funded non-profit and so ostensibly would be taking a position at the American political center, not the Democratic party center.

But even to the extent your critique was true, it is a stale critique.

The entire 'corporate Dem' position has moved sharply to the left in the past ten years (that is, it has moved left of where the American center was in 2010), and these political positions have enormous real world impacts. It's not just cheap signaling. For instance, the massive inflow of migrants we see are all downstream of NPR et al spending years denouncing necessary border enforcement as being inhumane in some way. We also see stats like how percent of white men among TV writers has declined from around 60% to 35% in the past 10 years. That is a major change with major impact for the media environment we all live in. There were many policy changes around police stops and bail reform and public order enforcement, etc, all downstream of NPR/NY Times media coverage on police shootings, and those policy changes have had massive real world impact. I could go on and on.

During the Trump admin, I had a job with a really long 1-hour commute and I would keep NPR on. I played a game "is it possible for me to do my commute without NPR doing a story on Russiagate heavily insinuating that Trump colluded with Russia", and there were only 2 or 3 days where that happened. That is my anecdote, remembering how Russiagate took all the oxygen out of political news for a solid 2 years.

I appreciate you for being here.

I think your take on this is remarkable in 2024, long after “nice polite Republicans” was what NPR could be accused of.

It’s interesting to consider what NPR would have to do such that you would not accuse them of being centrist as opposed to actually progressive.

Is there a relatively prominent media source they could model themselves on?

I have never heard of Nice Polite Republicans til today; that's a fun bacronym. My favorite is Neutered Pacifica Radio.

I'd say ProPublica, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all mainstream left-leaning news sources I expect to do a better job of analysis than NPR. With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP which I expect to be relatively trustworthy on the facts (of course with some bias on which facts they report and precisely how they present them), but analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.

You expect ProPublica to do a good job of analysis? They're the ones that broke my faith in in-depth journalism with this article. I'd recommend reading it yourself to see if you can find their trick.

Spoilers: The tool works perfectly. 25% of "risk 1" and 80% of "Risk 10" offenders go on to reoffend, regardless of race. They then calculated "Of the [Race] criminals, X% of the [non-|re-]offenders were labelled [high|low] risk" to obscure that fact. I went into it more here, on the old site.

They certainly know how to tell a compelling story, but that's all it is: a story.

I used to read The Atlantic fairly regularly, but that was a while back and so I don’t know how they are in recent years. I know they have some quite left and still some not-so-left writers.

I’m quite surprised you list The Economist here, since they are typically considered fairly neoliberal in their stances, and so not leftist friendly. The fairly recent not-pro-trans article they had rocked the world of a lot of /r/neoliberal.

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/v5d0hp/executive_editor_of_the_economist_on_eliminating/

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/uo2ghw/the_economists_record_on_trans_issues_setting_the/

Like I agree that a lot of NPR analysis is pretty shallow, even if you stripped out any overt political valence, but I guess I don’t quite understand your complaint and/or your particular progressive stances on any given issue.

(For context, I used to be an Obama-loving left neoliberal and now I’m a ~Romney-loving right neoliberal, but I’ve always been annoyed with progressives.)

I do note that Economist and Atlantic have more authors pushing back against DEI slop, usually couching their counterarguments in some hard numbers before going 'this is not how we help (insert chosen minority)'. Still ostensibly on Team DEI, but less wedded to the distasteful tactics normally employed.

With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP; analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.

Technically, Reuters does have an opinion section, Breakingviews.

For better or worse, DEI identity slop is now considered left wing, and NPR has oodles of that, regardless of whatever other establishment propaganda it peddles.

DEI identity slop is now considered left wing

When wasn’t it?

It’s fine if you want to distinguish between the parts of the culture war that do and don’t directly relate to material issues, like overthrowing the capitalistic system we’ve all come to know and love, but don’t pretend there isn’t a correlation there that’s been left-coded for decades, and that NPR has moved down that path significantly in the last decade.

The DEI stuff is built around internet fads, upper-middle-class pretensions/narcissism, and establishment imperatives. The terms left and right are malleable and relative, so it's both left-wing and not-left-wing. In any case, it's very convenient for the knowledge worker class and the giant institutions they serve, as it not only leaves their deeper structures and economic advantages uncontested (while merely arguing for superficial alterations), it also argues for increased power to be given to these people and institutions, as their credentials, HR departments, teams of lawyers and such are put forward as the necessary cures for 'systemic' bigotry or whatever.

What 'true' leftists, which exist only as fully as true rightists, lament is that there aren't strong working-class involvements in this new left, and indeed it lacks much revolutionary spark at all. It's not about solving or changing modern society so much as it's about keeping things in place and expanding the purvue of some of its most powerful factions. I think it deserves to be treated as a process of its own, best understood as a unique development that began around the 1960's, rather than something that matches patterns as broad as 'leftism'. Although, I can see the propagandistic appeal of accusing them of being false leftists, given that the term left enjoys positive valence with many of the people who would benefit from more working class, economically focused initiatives, such that it's a way of signaling to them that they are missing out. It's a matter of brand manipulation rather than objective understanding.

The left does not want working class involvement, they want working class buy-in. The presence of the working class as adherents serves to launder the appeal of DEI paeans, hence the lumping of 'class economics' as a reason to support DEI on the surface. NPR like NYT serves as a sanity washing machine, packaging untenable ideas with somewhat reasonable or appealing ones and textdrowning readers in softly persuasive language to slowly edge the overton window one article at a time.

What 'true' leftists, which exist only as fully as true rightists, lament is that there aren't strong working-class involvements in this new left,

I'll grant you that there's like, 3 trotskyists and a tanky who lament the lack of working class involvement in the modern left. But the mainstream of the modern left has no love lost with the people who stand up to work. Uncharitably, it's a class interest movement for people who believe that possessing a college degree entitles them to baaskaap over the less enlightened masses, more charitably it still doesn't want any contributions from people who sweep floors or turn wrenches because leftism really believes in the value of the institutional academy, including the parts that were pulled out of someone's ass to declare himself an expert in it, and doesn't think that it's possible to have an informed opinion about anything at all without thorough knowledge of rape culture in dog parks.

It sounds like you're talking about "social justice" progressives, i.e. the group RedRegard is contrasting with "true leftists" (sarcasm quotes his).

It's not about solving or changing modern society so much as it's about keeping things in place and expanding the purvue of some of its most powerful factions.

In other words, progressivism is a highly right wing (conservative) movement. The meta-level of statements like DR3 is that the correct model for progressives is the one they claim owns the world, and given their attitudes towards things like development of resources and blocking any meaningful reform of any kind that doesn't come from their own tribe (as in, things conservatives do to hold onto their privilege past its expiration date), well.

The dominant left wing (progressive) movement today is what's commonly called "the alt-right". The leftist goal in the 1900s was equalizing the playing field between men and women because women are objectively the more oppressed/discriminated against gender in an industrial economy. The leftist goal in the 2000s is doing the same thing, as men are objectively the more oppressed/discriminated against gender in a service economy.

As for why the woke don't realize it... difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it, and that describes half the nation for various reasons. As for why the alt-right don't realize it... well, that's mostly to do with co-ordination and the fact their enemy [falsely] describes themselves as being on the side of progress (which is effective at confusing the moderates/liberals/the people who are doing most of the work).

"The competency crisis" is calling out a problem created by conservative privilege. It is a leftist meme.

...Are you Hlynka?

You actual experience of NPR varies a great deal by the specific member station you listen to. Here in Appalachia its just the standard news programs, classical music, and bluegrass/old time country music. There is a cooking show on the weekends. I've lived in blue cities though, and driven through even more of them; its basically completely different station in those areas and imo deserves the criticism it gets.

In the past I've heard a lot of jokes about "The People's Republic of Pennsylvania". I don't know much about the state, but the Secretary of Agriculture has been making news lately.

The latest evolving story is about Rusty Herr and Ethan Wentworth who ran a bovine reproductive services company called "NoBull Sires, LLC".

The dispute arose back in 2010 because the Ag Department sent them a cease and desist plus a statement of fine on the grounds that using an ultrasound was practicing veterinary medicine without a license. The counter argument was that the Ag Department was out of scope of the law. Routine checks don't meet the requirement of "diagnosis and treatment" for practising veterinary medicine, even if they involve an ultrasound machine.

Notably the Ag Department seems to have never filed the paperwork with a court, which is a prerequisite for enforcement. So they were likely aware of the legal issues. In 2020 the Pennsylvania Veterinary Medicine Association sent a complaint to the Department of State.

On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.

So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.

There is a culture war angle here. The press seems to be reluctant to get involved for a few reasons. These days they like to defer to the bureaucracy, particularly when the Governor is from the right party. Plus Pennsylvania is in play for 2024 so they are reluctant to kick up a fuss that could help Trump.

I'm only finding coverage in the farming press right now and they don't really dive into the legal issues.

https://www.lancasterfarming.com/farming-news/news/livestock-ultrasound-operators-jailed-accused-of-unlicensed-vet-practice/article_39004570-fcd8-11ee-8396-1f8ec41b214f.html

https://agmoos.com/2024/04/17/pregnancy-is-not-a-disease-two-men-jailed-without-bail-for-repro-ultrasounding-of-dairy-cows/

On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.

So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.

This is what pisses me off so much in the relationship between government and citizens, is that government officials has free reign to do abuse their power pretty much however they want (short of personal enrichment, and even then) because the worse that happens to them is punishment to their office, not to them personally. You can be absolutely certain if those two guys had unlawfully sequestered an employee or official of the agricultural department for 30 days, they themselves would be sentenced to a lot more than 30 days in prison. But we all know that the worst that's gonna happen there is the office gets told they can't do this, maybe someone or two lose their jobs (and don't worry, they won't have any trouble finding another) and maybe Pennsylvania's taxpayers have to foot the bill on some damages (and don't worry here either, approximatively 0 democrat voters in Pennsylvania will change their vote just because their party's officials unlawfully throws people in jail).

If this case isn’t it, then there is no case.

I would love to be proven wrong and for the officials and the police officers who went along with this to be thrown in jail, but at worst the police officers might be sacrificed. And while they shouldn't have executed unlawful orders, I have a harder time blaming them as it seems likely their fault is mere carelessness and not checking that the order was legitimate (after all, the government probably almost never sends bogus warrants to them), while the Agricultural Department would have to be power tripping for things to have happened as they are alleged to have.

The Ag Poole re the ones who should spend years in jail

In my experience, dairy farmers (and beef cattle farmers) doing their own ultrasounding is very common... When you have herds of hundreds of cattle that you are regularly artificially inseminating, it's just not practical to have a vet out to the farm to do routine preg checks. I can't speak much to the culture war angle, but this really just seems like unnecessary bureaucracy impeding on extremely anodyne agricultural practices

The issue isn't that they were doing their own preg checks, it's that they were operating and advertising a business that did it for other people for a fee. You can write your own will, for instance, but if you write wills for other people it's the unauthorized practice of law. Now, we can make the argument that that requiring a vet to do this is both unnecessary and outside the bounds of the statute, but there are two general problems I forsee with that.

The first is that the introduction of technology makes a lot of things that used to be the domain of trained professionals increasingly accessible to the general public. Take land surveying. Anyone of average intelligence can pull a deed from the courthouse, buy pro-grade survey equipment, and locate a pin, which is probably enough to do the trick if you're trying to see where you can put up a fence on your own property. But the field is deceptively complicated, and when the same guy decides to go into business for himself as a surveyor with no more training than basic YouTube tutorials, he's asking for trouble. The second problem is that most professional fields are so varied that it's impossible to define every specific thing one needs a license to do. The legislature can't run back into session every time someone comes up with a new medical procedure to make sure that you need a license to do it.

As for specific problems with allowing unlicensed people to do preg checks as a business, I can't comment on because I don't know anything about vet science. But if this is something that's plausible then the solution is to lobby the state legislature to clarify the law to specifically allow it; God knows the farm lobby in PA is powerful enough to make it happen if there's that much of a call for it and the only real opposition is from vets that don't like it. But the solution isn't to start a business doing it and ignore the state when they tell you to stop.

The legislature can't run back into session every time someone comes up with a new medical procedure to make sure that you need a license to do it.

Yes they can. Because "you may do nothing without a license unless we specifically say so" is not the law.

The issue isn't that they were doing their own preg checks, it's that they were operating and advertising a business that did it for other people for a fee.

Isn't the complication here that they were running an AI service? So maybe as part of that it was "after your cow is inseminated, we'll do a follow-up check to make sure she's in calf, no foal no fee" arrangement? They weren't selling pregnancy checks as a separate business. I don't know the fine details and there must be more going on here than we know about.

The first is that the introduction of technology makes a lot of things that used to be the domain of trained professionals increasingly accessible to the general public. Take land surveying. Anyone of average intelligence can pull a deed from the courthouse, buy pro-grade survey equipment, and locate a pin, which is probably enough to do the trick if you're trying to see where you can put up a fence on your own property. But the field is deceptively complicated, and when the same guy decides to go into business for himself as a surveyor with no more training than basic YouTube tutorials, he's asking for trouble.

This seems fine? So long as that person is not allowed to claim to be a licensed land surveyor who's surveys will be accepted by, like, the Land Titles Office (much less the neighbours) -- consumers can probably decide for themselves whether such a survey is of value to them? (hint: the only time anybody is likely to get something surveyed it's because some government agency (or maybe the neighbours) is forcing them to; if that agency won't accept the results the survey is worth zero dollars

So again we see that whatever the supposed rules and procedures about how these things are “supposed to” work, in reality what matters is what you’re able to get men with guns to enforce. (As I’ve said before, a lesson I learned in 7th grade.)

And this gets to one of my common political arguments and frustrations — the perennial criticism of my support for restoring human authority and decision-making. In (the portion I watched of) Benjamin Boyce’s interview with Aydin Paladin, he makes this standard argument against her monarchism: but if you have a king, then won’t he become a tyrant, and take away people’s freedom by enacting a parade of horribles… all of which, Aydin pointed out in reply, are things which democratically-elected governments have done. People ask ‘what if the local aristocrat makes an unfair/unjust/tyrannical decision?’ as if modern bureaucracies can’t do the same (and throw in all the sorts of mistakes and irrationalities — like the classic ‘you must fill out and submit Form A before we can give you Form B, you must fill out and submit Form B before we can give you Form A’ class of problems — of which only bureaucracies are capable).

What if Baron Such-and-such throws you in the dungeon without trial? Well, what if the Pennsylvania Ag Department does it? The difference seems to be that the bureaucracy adds diffusion of responsibility. If the Baron locks you up, everyone knows who to blame. But when it’s a faceless bureaucracy, full of jobsworth human cogs, who ‘don’t make the rules, just follow them,’ where nobody is to blame; and, like @pigeonburger notes below, nobody in government really suffers serious consequences.

Some people talk about “Brazilification,” viewing us as moving in the direction of that South American nation. I say should be worried less about becoming like Brazil the country, and more about becoming like Brazil the Terry Gilliam film.

How are kings and nobles going to run anything except through bureauracies? These were things created by kings to run their countries. Kings and aristocrats will still need bureaucrats and courts to run things, your just changing who gets to decide what the laws and regulations are, not the need for them.

I believe the answer from a leviathan shaped hole perspective is that the local baron is a face to be appealed to directly who can solve the coordination problem leading to arbitrary tyranny directly.

I've met elected officials, I've met aristocrats(well, pretenders to the same- individuals with the bloodlines to call themselves nobles but without the state recognizing their title). Honestly I can't tell you whether the graf von whatever or the representative for bumfuck wherever is more of a reasonable person on average- I suspect they come from basically similar social strata and are basically similar people. But an aristocrat at the very least has a bigger bully pulpit to get bureaucrats to back down on their vogonity and probably has legal privileges in a monarchist society to effect the same.

Now in practice I think it's more complicated; 'if only the tsar knew' is a meme for a reason. But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.

Now in practice I think it's more complicated; 'if only the tsar knew' is a meme for a reason. But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.

You don't seem to be advocating one man rule. You seem to be advocating feudalism. China had formal one man rule and this rule was carried out by a massive, powerful bureaucracy. Same thing in France, Britain or Prussia. Whether the state was being run by a parliament of nobles, an elected parliament or just a king. They all needed bureaucracies once they became centralized.

You seem to be advocating feudalism.

I don't know if @hydroacetylene is advocating it, but I am.

But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.

Not clear that's true. Insofar as power is concentrated, it is easier to identify who you have to bribe. Things like monopoly concessions in return for money (formal and informal) happened a lot in e.g. Elizabethan England, and (I am no expert) presumably other cases of one-man (male or female) rule. On the other hand, that could be attributed to the problems that feudal rulers had in obtaining tax revenues.

However, from an incentives standpoint, it seems that the more powerful the state and the more concentrated that power, the greater the gain and the lower the cost of outsiders corrupting those with power. That's leaving aside "power tends to corrupt, more power tends to corrupt more" considerations.

What does "leviathan shaped hole" mean here?

It's a reference to hlynka(RIP) and also to Leviathan, the 'somebody's gotta do it' defense of monarchism.

What happened to hlynka?

He got permabanned.

What an odd choice. I didn’t always agree with him but he was genuine and a different thinker.

More comments

Permananned for being naughty while arguing with the HBD people.

yes but he was equally obnoxious when arguing with the HBD people about any other topic too.

More like permabanned for being naughty over and over and over again arguing with everyone.

My understanding is it's saying that the situation calls for a protective institution that doesn't exist or isn't doing it's job.

https://www.themotte.org/post/832/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/180922?context=8#context

https://archive.ph/hLXHa

How are kings and nobles going to run anything except through bureauracies?

I'm mainly going off of Max Weber's ideas of Modernity as marked "rationalization" and the resulting bureaucratization. A king and his aristocrats may need a veritable army of clerks and petty officials (emphasis on "may"), but those need not be bureaucrats.

The key here is the element of "rationalization" that is the replacement of human judgement and leadership with the implementation rigid, "impersonal" procedures — in short, with algorithms, whether carried out by a computer made of silicon and metal, or one made of a mass of human "cogs." It's the same phenomenon that drives "software eating the world" and much of the "Seeing Like a State" problems — you've got to sanitize your data, reduce the dimensionality of the problem, and lump things together before you can enter it into your spreadsheet, feed it into your algorithm. It also relates to the late William Stuntz's lament that our justice system chose the route of "procedural due process" over the alternative of "substantive due process." It's what leads to the archetypal "Karen" asking to speak to a manager — that is, someone with actual human authority, rather than a meat drone of the Machine.

You can read online about any number of kids suspended or expelled from school for absolutely stupid reasons due to "zero tolerance" rules. Why do schools enact these rules? Because it lets teachers and principals evade any responsibility, which would come with the exercise of even the slightest common-sense discretion (which the lawyers advise, to avoid lawsuits). It wasn't this way in schools a century ago, was it? Teachers weren't always this allergic to exercising authority, were they? And if it wasn't always this way, then it doesn't have to be this way.

To quote Wikipedia:

Weber described the eventual effects of rationalization in his Economy and Society as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" (or "steel-hard casing") of rule-based, rational control.

and:

Although he was not necessarily an admirer of bureaucracy, Weber saw bureaucratization as the most efficient and rational way of organizing human activity and therefore as the key to rational-legal authority, indispensable to the modern world. Furthermore, he saw it as the key process in the ongoing rationalization of Western society. Weber also saw bureaucracy, however, as a threat to individual freedoms, and the ongoing bureaucratization as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in a soulless "iron cage" of bureaucratic, rule-based, rational control.

Weber may have thought this inevitable, but I disagree. Do we really need the buck-passing jobsworths "born to be all obsessive and snotty" (to quote Hermes Conrad)? How many of the sort who will argue it's not his fault he tortured a man to death because someone else brought him the wrong person, so their heart condition wasn't on the paperwork. And even worse, the petty tyrants who aren't simply enforcing the rules, and merely use such as cover.

How far apart are "I don't make the rules, I just follow them" and "just following orders," really? Zygmunt Bauman seems to have had similar views. Again from Wikipedia:

Bauman's most famous book, Modernity and the Holocaust, is an attempt to give a full account of the dangers of these kinds of fears. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno's books on totalitarianism and the Enlightenment, Bauman argues that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather, he says, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorization of different species, and the tendency to view rule-following as morally good all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass.

How much of this kind of bureaucracy did societies before the Enlightenment and Modernity really have? You say even kings need such to run things. How many of this sort of bureaucrat did Genghis Khan have? Magnus the Good? Alexander of Macedon? Tarquin the Elder? Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui? Sargon of Akkad? How many were in the court of King Kamehameha I? How much bureaucracy does the average Amish community have? How much did the Iroquois Confederacy have? How much do you suppose the builders and inhabitants of Çatalhöyük had? How much bureaucracy do the Sentinelese have?

I've spent much of my life fighting intransigent bureaucracies, and the useless meat machines and petty tyrants that fill them, starting with Anchorage School District administrators. I've spent most of the last year fighting with either Social Security, Alaska's Medicaid department, or both. And I have plenty to say about especially the incompetence of the Anchorage SS office.

I'm tired of these people, and the system that empowers them. I don't want to navigate a stupid "for inconvenience, press 1" automated phone system, I want to talk to a human being. I want to speak to the manager. I want someone to be in charge, someone to be responsible, someone to blame. Whatever it takes to get rid of the Dolores Umbridges, the Carol Beers, even the Hermes Conrads. So many of the people discussed on that "Rationalization" page point to "modernity" and the "Enlightenment" as the root of this process; which is Reason Number One I want the entire Enlightenment project destroyed.

To quote God-Emperor Leto II (from before the awful prequel books retconned the history):

The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines. Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.

Whatever it takes to get rid of the Dolores Umbridges, the Carol Beers, even the Hermes Conrads.

It is worth noting that Dolores Umbridge and Carol Beer are very different phenomena, and the only thing they have in common is that they use femininity as a way of making their obnoxiousness less obvious. But you are not the first person to lump them together - the comments to Scott Aaronson's "blankface" post are a dumpster fire because Scott chooses a word that suggests he is talking about Carol Beer and then writes a long post insisting he is talking about Umbridge.

The basic difference is that Dolores Umbridge does, in fact, have agency, and is abusing it. In Order of the Phoenix Umbridge is a senior official who is given broad discretionary authority by Fudge to root out Hogwarts-based opposition to the regime, and does in fact try to do that (ultimately unsuccessfully) while treating the opportunity to sadistically abuse Harry as a fringe benefit. In Half-Blood Prince she fails upwards to become Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic - which to someone familiar with British bureaucratic titles is a high-level policy making role at the same level on the org chart as a Deputy Secretary or Assistant Secretary in the US executive branch. (The equivalence is complicated by the complete absence of political appointees in the Ministry of Magic), although in so far as we see the internal workings of the Ministry she actually appears to be functioning as Scrimgeour's chief of staff. Umbridge is useful to Power, and Power supports her in her abuse of Harry, and would continue to do so even if they knew everything.

If Curtis Yarvin or Peter Theil was critiquing Fudge's performance, they would see his decision to appoint Umbridge and let her get on with it (including backing her up as necessary when she is e.g. accused by Dumbledore of sadistically abusing students) as a relative high point in his career - he actually tried something that could have worked, and would have worked if Fudge hadn't been forced to resign because Voldemort showed up in person around the time Umbridge was completing her takeover of Hogwarts.

Carol Beer, on the other hand, is a shit-tier grunt with no authority. Her only source of power is that she can refuse to do her job some non-zero fraction of the time without getting fired - and it isn't even clear if she is refusing to do her job, or if she is unable to do it because she does not even have sufficient authority to override the computer. But assuming the unfavourable interpretation, Beer is useless to everyone, and the only reason she gets away with her petty sadism is because her uselessness is beneath the notice of Power. If Karen managed to speak to the manager, Beer would be fired. I suspect if Curtis Yarvin wrote a review of Little Britain, he would say that someone in Beer's reporting line was asleep at the wheel, and needed some encouragement.

The two failure modes (evil backed by Power, and evil operating beneath the notice of Power) both function in the same way regardless of whether Power is personal or bureaucratic. The fundamental case for the Rule of Law and bureaucratic process is that it constrains Dolores Umbridge. The case being made against it in this thread is that it creates Carol Beers. This is a trade-off, and the trade-off is real and is not one-sided in the real world. To give a recent notorious example in the UK, Dominic Cummings noticed and has repeatedly blogged about the legal-accountability-driven incompetence of UK government procurement, including how it was likely to kill people during the COVID-19 pandemic. So during the pandemic he used emergency powers to throw out procurement law and allow the government to just buy PPE from willing sellers. The result was a spectacular feeding frenzy of peculation as people with the right connections realised that selling to the government was now a pure matter of getting into the ministers' in-tray, and that anyone who could do that could buy non-working PPE at retail from dodgy Chinese websites and mark it up even further to the government. The total loss to the taxpayer was c. £4 billion, with the £200 million paid to shell companies linked to lingerie entrepreneur and Tory peer Michelle Mone for unusable PPE being the headline example

There are two sayings I sometimes to use to think about this trade-off:

The Cossacks Work for the Czar. To paraphrase Brad de Long, it isn't immediately obvious if the Cossacks who raided your village are:

  • working for the Czar, and fucking with you because the Czar wants them to
  • working for the Czar, and fucking with you because they want to, and fucking with people like you is within the scope of their delegated authority
  • bandits who the Czar has for some reason failed to hang, who are fucking with you because they can.

What de Long means by "The Cossacks work for the Czar" is that above a certain level of sophistication (which a band of raiding Cossacks crosses), Carol Beers have been weeded out, and you can assume that what the system does or fails to do is the result of (often foolish) choices made by the people in charge of it.

It cannot deal with plain error. The full quote from Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism is about the necessity for both political and legal accountability.

Political accountability must deal with gross errors of judgement, unworkably drafted legislation, and measures which cannot be enforced. Legal accountability can deal with gross abuses of power and with breaches of clear legal principles. It cannot deal with plain error.

Not firing Carol Beer is an example of plain error. An awful lot of what goes wrong with modern bureaucracies (State and private sector) is that trying to create legal remedies for plain error creates more problems than it solves. But the world where the local Boyar enjoys a de facto droit de seigneur over the peasants as long as he remains useful to the Czar is worse.

Great setup for the Brazil joke, but I'm inclined to agree with Hyperion here. There is still a giant bureaucratic apparatus in a monarchy, and you can't even vote out the head of it.

Shouldn't their lawyers be able to file a writ of habeas corpus with a real court?

The cease-and-desist simply says to cease and desist illegally practicing veterinary medicine; it doesn't name specifics. Since the whole dispute is over whether ultrasound for pregnancy is "veterinary medicine", for them to stop the ultrasounds in response to that cease-and-desist would be to concede their case.

I suspect ultimately there's going to be some petty corruption here, with local vets being buddies/business partners of the Ag Board members and/or the local sheriff.

Yes, they just got a lawyer a few days ago. Robert Barnes found out about it because he was in town working the Amos Miller case and he wanted to verify some details before he filed anything.

So things are moving but I posted it here now to see if anyone had any interesting takes and also to set up an update post later if there's political fallout.

The situation seems to be that the Secretary of Agriculture has financial links to the major milk producers and is trying to shut down the small Amish farms. The Amish don't like to sue for religious reasons so he's getting away with a lot.

Yes, they just got a lawyer a few days ago. Robert Barnes found out about it because he was in town working the Amos Miller case and he wanted to verify some details before he filed anything.

Oh god. How does this guy keep grabbing these cases up?

Come the hour, cometh the man?

Am missing something here or how do you get jailed for contempt of court in nonexistent proceedings?

Isn't that just literal kidnapping or false imprisonment?

Do cops who enforce this get any immunity since they're not actually enforcing any legal order?

Apparently the arrest warrant just said "the court" without any reference to a specific court or case number so everyone involved should have known is was invalid. No criminal liability but they are going to be sued individually.

Farmshine has learned that these fines were ignored on advice of their former attorney, so as not to admit guilt. After all, why should Herr and Wentworth admit guilt for actions that have become commonplace and are open to interpretation of the state’s vague and archaic veterinary law in regard to defining ‘diagnosis’ — especially since pregnancy is not a disease to be diagnosed, but rather a condition to be observed?

This advice is so fucking stupid they should be suing whatever attorney gave it to them. I am not a barred lawyer in PA but I am confident that the proper response to "a state executive agency has inappropriately levied a fine and injunction on me" is "file suit challenging the action in a court of competent jurisdiction" not "ignore it and hope it goes away." All that notwithstanding, reading the Veterinary Medicine Practice Act, it sounds like the board has not followed the legally required procedure for enforcing its judgements. Unless there have been some proceedings initiated in a PA court that are not being mentioned.

So... don't walk in a bad neighborhood if you don't want to be raped?

So... don't walk in a bad neighborhood if you don't want to be raped?

A better analogy would be: "If a cop stops you unjustly, don't ignore them or resist, but comply politely and address the issue through the proper channels."

However, it is also not wise to walk through a bad neighborhood alone and unarmed. Someone might do it anyway, but it amounts to bad advice for an expert in that neighborhood to recommend that someone do it.

A better analogy would be: "If a cop stops you unjustly, don't ignore them or resist, but comply politely and address the issue through the proper channels."

Which is a lie Americans tell themselves. Once you comply politely, if you're not arrested, the issue is over. There are no proper channels to go through that will impose any consequences on the cop.

Furthermore, if you do comply, and you are arrested and charged, and you complain, the courts may find that your compliance made the whole thing voluntary, and therefore you have no grounds for complaint.

More effort (and, perhaps, tact) than this, please.

good use of commas!

Wut?

He is suggesting you are blaming the victim. Though really the analogy would need to be: Someone walking in a bad neighborhood was raped, so their lawyer suggested showering afterwards, not calling the police and simply hoping the perpetrator was caught.

I think it would be reasonable to criticize the lawyer, while still being aware that the rape was bad in and of itself as well.

What Jeroboam is trying to say in a very crass and shocking way (he has me blocked and I like it), is that he feels you are victim blaming the guys giving ultrasounds.

I can't find any records involving either person in the Pennsylvania court system, though given how crappy most court records are, that doesn't mean much.

The underlying complaint is here, and seems to be resting heavily on past adjudications by the State Board in 2010 (for Herr) and 2018 (for Wentworth). Like most state licensing laws, the definition of veterinary practice in Pennsylvania is very broad :

"Practice of veterinary medicine" includes, but is not limited to, the practice by any person who (i) diagnoses, treats, corrects, changes, relieves or prevents animal disease, deformity, injury or other physical, mental or dental conditions by any method or mode, including the prescription or administration of any drug, medicine, biologic, apparatus, application, anesthetic or other therapeutic or diagnostic substance or technique, (ii) performs a surgical operation, including cosmetic surgery, upon any animal, (iii) performs any manual procedure upon an animal for the diagnosis or treatment of sterility or infertility of animals, (iv) represents himself as engaged in the practice of veterinary medicine, (v) offers, undertakes, or holds himself out as being able to diagnose, treat, operate, vaccinate, or prescribe for any animal disease, pain, injury, deformity, or physical condition...

It's not obvious that ultrasounds (or possibly(?) selling bull semen?) are covered, and there's not a ton of great pragmatic arguments for it, but the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders. And for a wide variety of reasons this sorta thing is near-impossible to practically challenge even were courts willing to push back on it.

Given some of the coverage, though ("both men were advised by their former attorneys not to pay the fines or appear in court"), I'm not sure what happened was completely without any court behavior -- this may be referring to the 'court' of the board licensing group, which is more court in the kangaroo sense, but it also could be about enforcement summons for a conventional court. An actually fake arrest warrant wouldn't be unprecedented, but it's left me noticing I'm confused.

That said:

Rusty Herr was arrested the very next morning, April 11, at 6:30 a.m. at his home in Christiana.

godsdammit.

...the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders.

While I don't expect a total fix anytime soon, this is why I'm hoping for rollback on Chevron deference and related doctrines. To oversimplify, I want to shift from a position of tie goes to the government to tie goes to the private party. If a court can't figure out whether the regulatory body is correct and the regulatory body can't providing compelling factual evidence for their assertion of power, they should just lose, not get to claim that they have special expertise that's just too special for a non-expert to understand.

Roberts won't do it. He'll "lay the groundwork" forever but never pull the trigger.

Maybe. There's a lot of people who came away from Loper v. Raimondo thinking that SCOTUS was pretty willing to toss the Chevron under the bus, but then Cargil had a place where the regulatory agency claims to have read the law wrong for twenty-plus years, disclaims Chevron, and most tea-leaf-readers are thinking it'll come out okay. It's just too useful to leave the actual law to the regulatory agencies.

But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

In the past I've heard a lot of jokes about "The People's Republic of Pennsylvania".

I have never heard of that in my life. Pennsylvania is the quintessential purple state, with no one party dominating the state government for more than a term in decades (and that was a Republican trifecta) and it being close to a century since there was permanent partisan control of the sort you see in California or Massachusetts.

Overzealous bureaucracy knows no partisan bounds.

I've heard it before and thinking it over it's poor phrasing. It was always used in reference to bureaucracy.

Specifically back when this was in the news, https://reason.com/2014/12/20/pennsylvania-couple-seeks-return-of-wine/

People were posting about their own stories.

Like many people, in the summer of 2016 I signed up for "Pokemon Go." I'd previously spent a couple of months playing Niantic's "Ingess" and though it got me out walking a bit, I lost interest in less than a year. I hoped Pokemon Go might help me re-gamify my preferred approach to light cardio. However, the game servers were apparently potatoes so after the first day, I never played again.

When the COVID pandemic hit, I took up walking again, and decided to give Pokemon Go another try. I was far from alone; the game's revenue went from $650 million in 2019 to over $900 million in 2020, only to drop off just as steeply in 2022. It did tend to keep me out walking longer than I otherwise might; I've now been playing the game for 30-60 minutes daily for a couple of years, in conjunction with my exercise regimen.

The game itself is aggressively mid. I've only played through one mainline Pokemon game (Diamond, if you care)--because I felt like I ought to have played through at least one Pokemon game, given their popularity. But I gather that if you're a real Pokemon afficionado, Pokemon Go ("PoGo") is borderline offensive in its implementation. The Pokemon formula is catch-and-brawl, but while the "catch" portion of PoGo is basically adequate, the "brawl" portion is genuinely terrible.

The explanation is, essentially, "Niantic." Ingress, the game on which PoGo was built, seems to have existed primarily to gamify pedestrian data collection for Google Maps. Niantic spun off of Google in 2015, but has kept its "data collection" DNA; one thing PoGo players can do to advance in the game is scan locations with their phone cameras and submit the info to Niantic. Publicly, Niantic is always talking about finding ways to improve the "get outside and gather with others" aspects of the game. Some changes made during the pandemic allowed players to gather more virtually, and these were hugely popular; when Niantic rolled these changes back, the playerbase revolted and Niantic partially restored the functions (while making them more expensive to use).

Well, this is all pretty boring corporate stupidity, so far. Not many serious culture war angles; it's a game targeted at Millennials and their kids, and it's barely playable outside of fairly densely-populated cities, and beyond that the company behind it had more "big data" DNA than "makes fun games" DNA. PoGo is successful, truly, in spite of itself. None of Niantic's other offerings have ever really taken off as they'd like.

And then today, everyone got new avatars.

Previously, the game had two base avatars--a male and a female. These had slightly different, but mostly overlapping, clothing options. Beyond that you could set hair, skin, and eye colors. You could freely switch between male and female.

There are several things I noticed immediately about the new avatar system. First, there is no longer any distinction between sexes. Rather, the system offers a number of body "presets" as well as a custom body slider. All of the bodies are monstrous; 75% are noticeably obese. The sliders do nothing to address this. All settings are vaguely androgynous; a slender female waist or strong male chest are simply out of the question. Many new faces and hairstyles are available (albeit none with facial hair), and all are creepy and doll-like.

Skin and hair color options have also changed. Most of the options are weird and strictly inferior to past options (avatars can no longer have striking red hair; a dull auburn is as close as it now gets). "White" skin comes in "pasty" or "jaundiced" only. But especially weird--the selection palettes appear to just be randomized. They do not cluster dark skin with other dark shades, or light skin with other light shades--it's just a mess of brown tones, in no particular order.

The clothing--most of which players must purchase using premium in-game currency--hangs oddly; every pair of pants looks like someone is wearing an overloaded diaper. Every shirt hangs like drapes. Previously "sexy" clothing now just looks ill-fitting; muscular male outfits are now vaguely flabby, curvy female outfits are flat or distended.

Discussion has raised a variety of points about Niantic possibly recycling assets to cut costs, or relying on AI conversions, or seeking to tap the Fortnite crowd with more Fortnite-esque physiques. Memes are dropping. Complaints are dropping. Waistlines are dropping. And dropping. And dropping.

Theories, too.

I don't know what will happen next. It doesn't matter very much to me, except insofar as I have a distinct preference against the new avatar system. But the culture war angle just seems so glaring. Perhaps because of the target demographic, though, I don't see a lot of discussion of it. I kind of assume that Niantic is ready to deploy the "racists and transphobes hate the PoGo update" press releases, though I haven't seen one yet. But basically everyone hates the body updates, even if they are glad to have more hair options. I think my favorite comment on reddit was here:

"As a nonbinary player I always wished they'd remove genderlocked customization"

One finger on my monkey's paw curls inward

It would also be interesting to know more about what's happening internally at Niantic--like if the work here was done by AI, or by diversity hires, or what. I've heard completely unverifiable rumors that Niantic management is outrageously out of touch with reality but also petrified to kill their golden goose, so it is hard for me to imagine them green-lighting these changes without culture war blinders on. But maybe they really are just terrible at their jobs?

Well, there's your tempest in today's teapot. Such a small thing! And yet so clearly intended to make the game less pleasant to the San Francisco outgroup. Perhaps I will rethink my position on the possible existence of microaggressions.

Wow, those avatars are ugly.

Have you tried bird watching? It's like Pokemon Go in real life. It's a great excuse to go for walks and explore new areas. Want to scratch that collector itch? Everytime you see a new bird, add it to your life list. See how many you can collect. Also, birds are just amazing and beautiful unlike those fucking avatars.

If you want there's a free app called Merlin that will help identify birds and keep track of your list. It's totally free with no ads. I'd also recommend a pair of binoculars.

Yeah, but can birds shoot fireballs at each other?

In your imagination, sure. Just like imaginary monsters.

By this reasoning, it's pointless to even read a fiction book, since you could imagine things that might have been in the book, and the book is imaginary itself.

Nuh uh, they're real

I wake up -> there is another psyop. Thanks for the post, I'll be sure to skim /vp/ for funsies for a couple days now.

As someone who actually played PoGo before I got locked out of it, for me this is 95% in line with my interpretation of Niantic's total mismanagement of the game. The gender removal is the only real brow-raising part, but even then I vaguely remember that the in-game clothing store was a thing, and it was gender-locked to hell - many gender-exclusive items had no genderswapped version and about the only unisex things were the accessories. I can squint and see a parallel universe where lifting that restriction is a net positive thing, but modern Pokemon-related things are not known for enjoying extra bare minimum work to make the transition (pun not intended) actually work, and it wouldn't be their first mind-boggling fuckup with models anyway.

I've heard completely unverifiable rumors that Niantic management is outrageously out of touch with reality but also petrified to kill their golden goose

PoGo is the definition of "failed potential" in all respects, including this one. Even as jaded as I am I'm willing to believe this is mostly sheer, genuine incompetence, ticking the boxes with as little effort as possible. Actual directed effort to advance CW causes seems far beyond the corpses propping up the game's steering wheels.

Tangential but in its time it really opened my mind to how little effort is required to run an almost literal free money printer (and still fuck it up from time to time), as well as how shit a game can get before I drop it in disgust because I still think the core gameplay loop of "walk around, collect pokemon" is genius and at one point it was almost the only thing that forced me to walk out and interact with my local community. It really is a milestone in gaming, just not in the usual way.

I’m placing my bets on incompetence. Is this really different than Oblivion’s potato faces? I understanding is that was an outsourcing problem. Something about FaceGen.

Really, this comes down to whether you think Niantic could culture-war their way out of a paper bag.

If what you say about locked accessories is true, this was probably seen as the cheapest way to double the number of custom options available to each player.

I would take the other side of that bet. What makes it different than Oblivion's potato faces is that they already had good art, and replaced it with bad art. The difference is not subtle, so a lot of people knew in advance that the new art was bad, which would obviously undermine any plausible benefits to the change. Nor is there any serious technical challenge to hide behind; these are low-fi models and textures implementing what is probably the single best-understood and simplest-to-implement 3d art style there is. There's a DEI entity being paid by the company to propose CW changes to the game, and this matches quite well to a DEI change. Having been involved in the sausage-making for DEI-mandated changes to video game art in the past, that's what this looks like to me.

If what you say about locked accessories is true, this was probably seen as the cheapest way to double the number of custom options available to each player.

I'm sure that's roughly accurate to how they sold it to management. From experience, my guess would be that the artists got their marching-orders from management, decided it wasn't worth fighting, and did exactly what they were told with full knowledge that they were making trash, given that the alternative would involve a direct threat to their employment for a ~zero-percent chance of achieving anything. Your boss paid money for the bad advice because it's the bad advice he wanted. Having paid for the bad advice, he's not interested in you telling him that it's bad. Shut up and push the buttons, art monkey.

Hey! Morrowind’s faces were…uh…they were definitely the best part of the character models.

Point taken. I agree that it’s plausible, I’m more like 70-30 against. Maybe 60-40, at this point.

yeah, I'd be about the inverse. It's entirely possible that it's just sheer incompetence. Stranger things have happened.

Having been involved in the sausage-making for DEI-mandated changes to video game art in the past

I would love to see an effortpost on that sometime, if you're up for it.

This thread might be of interest to you. I'd be happy to elaborate if you have further questions.

Pro-trans advisors have been proven to collaborate with Niantic. Erasing the gender binary raises increases the perception of inclusivity of the game in the eyes of such consultants.

Niantic could culture-war their way out of a paper bag.

Niantic isn't apolitically standing on the sidelines.

It’s possible. The elements are present, and I can’t say I’ll be surprised if there turns out to be a press release condemning the transphobic userbase, or whatever.

I find it more likely that this is a lazy solution to technical debt or to giving players “more” by reusing assets. That’s the kind of mundane blunder that happens all the time, San Fran or not.

I work for a defense contractor halfway across the country. We’ve got a DEI statement or three on our website! But if we ended up in the news for making ugly software, let alone an ugly plane, there would be a dozen reasons I’d suspect before asking if it was done to promote idpol. There’s just…so many other considerations.

That Twitter account says Niantic hired a DEI training company, and also that they’re in San Francisco. Neither of those things is enough to explain screwing up your flagship product! Perhaps there’s a simpler explanation?

But he’s also making it his job to piss people off. If there’s a reasonable explanation, you’re not going to hear it from him.

But if we ended up in the news for making ugly software, let alone an ugly plane, there would be a dozen reasons I’d suspect before asking if it was done to promote idpol.

idpol has an issue with human bodies that it doesn't have with planes.

cue NCD aeromorph fans raging autistically

I fucking hate it. They removed the anime cartoon style and replaced it with something that is NOT Pokemon. Now I just look like some kindergartener who bites people at school

My gut hurts from laughing, but to be fair, I think the kind of 10 year old willing to go engage in dog-fights and clobber wild animals senseless probably did bite people at school.

The new "female" model is just the male model with boobs stapled on

Oh no no no, they can't just bait like this, it's not sporting. And the worst part is PoGo is one of the few videos games that has an actual female player base rather than male not-models with boobs strapped on.

It'll be interesting to watch the universal condemnation turn into "only the chuds hate this" after the articles come out. It happens every single time, like people just forget what they used to think.

I was wondering why my avatar was suddenly an anemic 12 year old boy! Did not expect to find the explanation for that here at The Motte.

There's definitely a non-binary bent to it. I got three options of faces, one of them is boyish and the other two are feminine. I thought maybe trying a slightly bulkier body style would make me look less like a tween, but while my body bulked my head remained the same size, making me a microcephalic.

I don't think I've ever played a game before where I actively hate seeing my avatar's face.

Perhaps I will rethink my position on the possible existence of microaggressions.

Honestly, I think microaggressions are best modeled as "real, but 100% projection/revealing too much about the speaker/thief thinking everyone steals".

I propose "micro-defection" for this, or enshittification-by-social-capture. The "my patients/students/customers are [not my favorite race or gender], so I won't try as hard serving them; what are they going to do, fire me?" effect. The woke are more correct than the mainstream in asserting that the sum of micro-aggressions is outright aggression- it's just that the only people who really care to micro-aggress are the woke (which we see in stuff like Covid vaccine distributions, grading disparities by gender, etc.).

"As a nonbinary player I always wished they'd remove genderlocked customization"

Failure to acquire properly-fitted women's clothing generally blows ex-men's cover even before you see their face (ex-women don't have this problem since women's clothing is a strict superset of men's clothing). It is strange that there doesn't seem to be anyone trying to fix that problem (or if they are, they're on the down-low/everyone who wears it passes so well they're invisible?).

Though, I do have to say that the disruption is even-handed enough (and not just "ill-fitting female clothes on the male model") that I don't think it qualifies as "micro", since even the models that transpeople would prefer are ruined by this change (being they would already have picked "attractive model of the opposite gender").

I have always preferred calling them "micro-aggravations". Yes, it's a real thing, but it really says more about the aggravatee's psychology and what they find annoying/unpleasant than it does about anything that can be properly called "aggression". One can still care deeply about reducing their impacts, even on a society-wide basis, but I think this terminology more appropriately captures the concepts that they use to describe the phenomenon and avoids the horrific conflation with literal violence that plagues the rest of the associated political movement.

The woke are more correct than the mainstream in asserting that the sum of micro-aggressions is outright aggression- it's just that the only people who really care to micro-aggress are the woke

Ah yes, only your outgroup performs a basic-but-ubiquitous behavior like minor acts of aggression.

Care to provide counterexamples? Preferably the official policy of a multibillion-dollar system.

What's your ingroup?

Counter examples would require ingroup to be identified, but give us one of reasonable scale and it's generally trivial to find some policy or practice that can framed as an act of aggression towards others. Even hobbyists can rightfully be accused of taking money that could spent to benefit starving people and squandering it on unnecessary self-satisfaction instead.

Let's go with "Non- or anti- woke Americans". Which examples are as good as redirecting COVID vaccines to the less-vulnerable?

That would be the micro-aggressions that the woke-americans claim are being conducted, obviously.

Such as...

The others tend to be a bit more overt about doing it and don't care as much about deniability; the entire premise of "micro" is that the action is either minor enough to be completely deniable, or apparently neutral on its own but not in aggregate. That is, far as I can tell, unique to woke; though that may simply be due to who is and isn't in power at the moment.

From a redditor:

When you try and make the hips bigger, it makes the hands massive.

More just dumb than clearly some ideology. Unless the ideology is merely that ugliness is desirable.

They don't think it's ugly. They actually prefer it. They are the ~1% approve at the end of any poll about do you prefer building A or building B.

People like Ozy really exist. They really do have actual disdain for things a statistically normal person finds beautiful. From Ozy's own self-description:

"One could very reasonably make the case that the natural human aesthetic sense prefers realistic paintings of beautiful landscapes with water, trees, large animals, beautiful women, children, and well-known historical figures"

"However, art of this sort leaves me cold"

"The first time I saw it, Joan Miro’s The Birth of the World moved me to tears from its sheer beauty. I make a special effort to visit it every time I am in New York City, including taking my husband to see it on our honeymoon so he could understand my aesthetics better. "

This is Joan Miro's The Birth of the World

To them uglyness isn't ugly. It's genuinely mindnumbingly beautiful.

In Malcolm & Simone Collins "A Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality" they model sexuality with two polarities, one for intensity and one for Yes/No. So most people have an inborn strong intensity towards Bloated Corpses and that is often paired with a disgust reaction. Makes sense evolutionarily. But evolution is a blind idiot god without context. So sometimes the intensity meter stays the same but for the Yes/No marker the 1 becomes a 0, and they become sexually attracted to Bloated Corpses with all the intensity that most people are repulsed.

Is this just possibly the mid wit phenomena where they understand enough to know the art is “prestigious” so they trick themselves into liking it whilst looking down on bourgeois taste?

I experienced transcendence the other day watching SM64’s Invisible Walls Explained Once and for All
The meticulousness, the detail of the tooling, the sheer effort put into breaking down every type of wall into something imminently understandable, the ineffable beauty of a person who watches a man die to an inviswall at world record pace and then decides to spend 10 months bring such trivial suffering to an end "Once and for all." And the feeling of seeing those invisible lines, now, even when they are no longer shown, the simple bliss of knowing. Of this world never feeling the same again.

The epic journey through each piece, culminating in the final victory lap- a reimagining of the SM64 ending cutscene, but here playing that welling music over each and every conquered inviswall.

Alternatively. This is a 3 hour video about polygons. What you take out depends on what you bring in.

The sheer effort, technical skills, and dedication required to make that video are admirable and beautiful things (even if they're largely dedicated to something mundane and mostly worthless). I can't say the same for modern art, where literal trash piles left behind by accident by the janitorial staff are mistakenly assumed to be part of the exhibit (or the other way around, where art exhibits wre mistakenly assumed to be trash by the janitor).

I get that that's a thing but I'm generally skeptical. Until there is good evidence otherwise I take it for granted that people are honest about their aesthetic preferences.

Surely these things aren't mutually exclusive, but rather in concordance with each other, right? Which is to say,

they understand enough to know the art is “prestigious” so they trick themselves into liking it whilst looking down on bourgeois taste

is the mechanism by which they arrive at their genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences such that

They don't think it's ugly. They actually prefer it.

...

To them uglyness isn't ugly. It's genuinely mindnumbingly beautiful.

I mean, you see this talk about manipulating, say, straight men into genuinely, honestly believing that fat women and transwomen are beautiful and sexy by putting them on magazine covers or pushing them to watch porn featuring such people. If one believes that such manipulation of one's genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences are possible, it's not unexpected that they themselves have undergone such intentional transformations of their own genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences in order to better conform to what they believe is socially just or whatever.

Social Construction radicals have to attribute all thought to social construction. They can't admit to any inbuilt preferences, only social constructs. So when they find someone's who has 'converted' they can't attribute it to helping someone who was already inclined to like X realize who they are. Instead it has to be that they finally broke through their socially constructed preferences into liberated ones.

In my personal experience with these types of people there is a strong case of "my expansive preferences are natural, which is proof that your narrow preferences are socially constructed." Similar to the 'well obviously we'd all fuck dudes if we could, but society would collapse so we need social pressure to keep men straight' phenomena. Just a total inability to model other minds. Very similar to polyamory people. Their end of bell curve genetic inability to feel jealousy is obviously perfectly normal. Your jealousy meanwhile is a patriarchal social construct you can be liberated you from.

For people on the tail end of the bell curve the typical mind fallacy is a hell of a drug.

I do think Tumblr took these people's pre-existing preferences and intensified their conviction of their moral superiority. AO3 is not Pornhub and everyone used to understand why they attracted different sexes. It took tumblr to convince people that the only reason men don't rely on AO3 is because they've been socially constructed not to. For the average person of this 'if we just push body type X enough people will change!' mindset I think it's more likely that they went to tumblr because they had a predisposition to like the art there and then got socially radicalized. Not that they were a straight guy who got converted and now wants to spread the good news.

Perhaps this is true of the most extreme radicals. I've never seen one, and would disagree with them.

But as a substantially less extreme radical- I'd like to highlight that though inbuilt preferences are largely genetically constructed, the pressures that drive genetics are in part socially constructed. Even things like trees have genetic structures that are derived from a sort of negotiation between different forms of life, the trees and their pollinators, via the process of sexual selection. And then the appearances they settled upon drove our aesthetics.

Which is all to say that even these things aren't just one way. There's a negotiation between the genetic and the social going on here. Sexual selection means that the aesthetic really can drive the genetic in the tail end.

If these "radicals," as you call them, stuck to Bene Gesserit-style multi-millennia plans involving eugenics in order to manipulate the genetic causes of the individual/cultural preferences, I think this aspect of the culture wars would be significantly less contentious.

Fat women can be charming, within a certain threshhold. They have a certain gravitas about them (pun not intended, believe it or not).

Do you not differentiate between what's beautiful in nature and what's beautiful in art? I guess I am in your 1% since I vastly prefer that Miro image to a typical watercolour of a pretty landscape. But that doesn't mean I don't find nature and the other things people have evolved to be attracted to incredibly beautiful (or that Miro doesn't agree or Ozy don't agree, for that matter). It's just that representing one's preferences in 2D in such a basic way seems crude, unimaginative and close-minded.

I'm really sorry if this post is too long. I hope it will be at least interesting. I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'representing one's preferences in 2D'. But if you find me crude, unimaginative, and close minded perhaps this post will be morbidly fascinating for you. Regardless, I'm thankful for your pushback.

I think what people find beautiful has a basis that is like 80% human nature, 20% human culture. An extreme example of the influence of culture. Japanese teeth blackening!

But I would find it strange if every human culture recreated it. Black teeth don't touch on the human nature nerve ending. It's a cultural influence on aesthetics that seems to die out when not constantly reinforced.

Meanwhile on the human nature aspect I think each person's aesthetic sense is the same filter that applies to nature as it applies to art. Thing's arn't beautiful and then we discover them. It's the reverse. We have beauty preference that reward or discourage us when we find them. These preferences reveal to others what our individual dispositions towards the environment are.

In the beginning there is an advantage for living near running water. That advantage builds into a reward signal for things that indicate running water, like shinyness. "Find running water" is too complex but 'happiness chemical reward for seeing shiny thing' is simpler to build into our nature. So now we have a preference for shiny things and we encounter Jewels. It's a worthless hunk of rock but that doesn't matter. It activates the same 'reward shinyness' part of the brain that is contextless.

It's the old AI joke. "Instead of programming AI to make people happy, why not program people to like Hydrogen. Afterall, there's a lot of hydrogen."

There is a reason we don't get happy about hydrogen. And it's the same reason why people worldwide like shiny things.

So what's beautiful in nature vs what's beautiful in art? Well if our aesthetics are our human nature with individual variation, mediated by culture, then the answer is nothing. Its the same sense organ applying to both objects.

which is why autistic people love Brutalism.

see the following image

On the left is a heat map showing where someone with a typical brain will focus their attention. On the right is how someone with ASD views the same house. Here's what Sussman and Chen state in the article:

Notice how a person on the autism spectrum, at right, avoids details like windows (which might suggest eyes) while a typical brain instinctively goes straight for them, without conscious awareness.

Pause here for a second and imagine Jane Jacob's eyes on the street concept. It's comforting for me to walk down a street full of windows and houses with front porches and pleasant symmetry. I generally welcome the interaction with my neighbors and, while not creepy about it, can't help but glance over now and then to see if I can catch their eye. I think that is typical.

Now imagine that your brain doesn't work that way. Imagine that your brain is completely overwhelmed by the eyes on the street. It's too much to take in, even just the buildings. Or it's an uncomfortable reminder that someone (unfriendly) may be tracking you. Now, is it possible you'd find some comfort — or perhaps just a noticeable reduction in tension — passing a building that instead looked like this?

So there is an instance of nature very strongly affecting preferences. Normal people like buildings that align with our caveman brain's constant search for faces. Austistic people hate making human eye contact. So now the whole world gets to endure Brutalism.

But then there is culture! It can't be thrown away entirely. Turns out we can break people's brains with enough repeated influence. My sincere apologies for the extended quote but it bears repeating in full. Bold parts were added in by me.

In Architectural Myopia: Designing for Industry, Not People we find that

, Gifford et al. (2002) surveyed other research and noted that “architects did not merely disagree with laypersons about the aesthetic qualities of buildings, they were unable to predict how laypersons would assess buildings, even when they were explicitly asked to do so.” The researchers traced this disagreement to well-known cognitive differences in the two populations: “Evidence that certain cognitive properties are related to building preference [was] found.”

Training to See a Parallel Reality.

Training is required to induce “architectural myopia” in a student, as the research suggests. The reason is that the peculiar industrial aesthetic now considered normal within architecture runs contrary to our physiological needs (Salingaros, 2006). We humans have evolved inside a complex, fractal, structurally hierarchical environment, so that our neurophysiology responds positively to and receives sensory pleasure from natural environments. Traditional architecture and urbanism in all of their multiple variations manifested over millennia and across geographical distances precisely follow this natural geometry, which is why our brains recognize them and respond to them.

Training adds additional layers of preference on top of our instinctive, evolved responses. Architecture school invests several years conditioning the student to respond preferentially to abstract industrial forms and surfaces. At the same time, this industrial aesthetic is touted as superior to all previous, traditional expressions of built geometry. Elaborate theories of history and technology are given as apologias for this now-correct aesthetic, solely appropriate to this wholly unique climax period in history (Banham, 1960; Giedion, 1941; Gropius, 1965). All of this effort creates individuals that see things differently from the rest of us.

This long-term program of psychological conditioning, has, since its development in the original Bauhaus, turned out to be extraordinarily effective. An architect experiences the world in a very different manner to any person who has not undergone the same training. By internalizing preferences derived from abstract images that override our neurological structure, over time, responses become automatic and crowd out other, more innate responses. The result of this aesthetic hegemony is the phenomenon of “architectural myopia”, an interpretation of reality that conforms to ingrained beliefs.

In those situations where emotion isn’t triggered instinctively by human physiology, our evolutionary makeup is not decisive and can be bypassed. Thus, in front of drawings or designs on a computer screen there is sufficient emotional isolation, and an architect judges the industrial, minimalist, “contemporary” designs positively as isolated objects possessing a pleasing clarity and monadic legibility.... At the same time, anything that resembles the complexity of traditional architecture is automatically judged negatively (its meaning is supposedly associated with reactionary or philistine culture) and it is rejected without any reflection.

In summary, yes. What's beautiful in art is what's beautiful in nature. It's the same instinct, influenced by culture. When you reveal a beauty preference you unavoidable reveal an aspect of how you perceive the world. All that's left is to discover is what percent of that is your predisposition or cultural molding.

Thanks for posting that architecture writeup. It links to this debate which has some nearly supervillain-tier speechifying from the pomo side.

PE: Why does Chris need to feel comfortable, and I do not? Why does he feel the need for harmony, and I do not? Why does he see incongruity as irresponsible, and why does he get angry? I do not get angry when he feels the need for harmony. I just feel I have a different view of it.

Someone from the audience: He is not screwing up the world.

PE: I would like to suggest that if I were not here agitating nobody would know what Chris's idea of harmony is, and you all would not realize how much you agree with him ... Walter Benjamin talks about "the destructive character", which, he says, is reliability itself, because it is always constant. If you repress the destructive nature, it is going to come out in some way. If you are only searching for harmony, the disharmonies and incongruencies which define harmony and make it understandable will never be seen. A world of total harmony is no harmony at all. Because I exist, you can go along and understand your need for harmony, but do not say that I am being irresponsible or make a moral judgement that I am screwing up the world, because I would not want to have to defend myself as a moral imperative for you.

CA: Good God!

Wow, I just read that debate, and it's truly fascinating and somewhat distressing. A lot of the anxiety I have about culture at large comes from the idea of post-modernism, something only truly accessible and enjoyable to a select few, but forced on the many. And somehow it has come to prominence due to the fact that the aforementioned select few are often in places of prestige and power. And more than that, it's self-sustaining; not, as is said in the notes on that debate, simply within the circles, but in society at large. A lot of people are swept up in liking, or at least defending, these inexplicably ugly tastes, which is much more offensive than those styles merely existing.

Interesting and a lot of the story as you tell it I agree with, but there is a bit of a perspective of 'overriding what's natural = bad' in your post that I don't agree with.

I can't reply at length right now, but just a few thoughts:

-We are constantly learning to like things we might 'naturally' dislike, and that's good if we're not blind to how we're being changed. (Kids don't like coffee.)

-Watery, glittery beautiful landscapes (real ones) are essentially unfakeable. Their rarity and the knowledge that they are real healthy ecosystems that have developed over millions of years and offer our bodies and communities good things is part of their beauty. Pictures of the same are available in plentiful supply and these days are entirely disposable. I think the abundance of such images is a large part of how they strike us. Looking at a beautiful lake is a sublime experience but looking at a painting of one usually does little for me; the latter has a copied, possibly manipulative nature that is just as loud as if it were covered in neon graffiti – it overwhelms any latent aesthetic appeal the image may once have had.

-Architectural myopia may be real and bad. But that doesn't mean just making buildings the way we used to is better. There might be learnings from traditional and learned notions of beauty that can be combined into something better that would not read as plain mimicry.

-We live in a world where screen-based imagery is cheap and increasingly has no limit in its abundance or ease of production. Living in this visually unprecedented world is constantly updating our sense of what is visually pleasing, whether we like it or not, and we can constantly learn from this experience. This is the process of becoming visually literate in 2024. Which is different from the process as it was in the time of Rembrandt, and again from the same process in the time of Miro. While I like the Miro image, I also find the idea of being moved to tears by it completely ridiculous, but I accept that it may have hit differently in decades past. Being able to actively learn from imagery around us in its full social context can open up new worlds and communicative possibilities, at least if we are alive to what is happening inside of us and don't just internalise a false ideal (as I tend to think some brutalist architects of the past did).

I find your comments intriguing, because I have the opposite reaction you describe. To me a well rendered painting or drawing of a landscape is often more attractive than an actual landscape. Or if not more attractive, more pleasing in a slightly different dimension. Have you ever felt a desire to be inside a picture: not literally, but to be in the place the picture is depicting? That the art is trying to communicate something higher and better than anything we can actually find our our normal existence? That the artist is taking what is beautiful and good about a landscape but crafting it in a way that no real landscape can match up to, throwing out the small bits of ugliness that is inherent in any landscape we can actually see and replacing it with the ideal? Because that's something like 70% of my aesthetic preferences. I want art to be more beautiful than life, more transcendent, more glorious and inspiring.

What do you see attractive about something like Miro painting? To me there's no real attraction at all. It does not show me anywhere I would want to go, any emotion I would want to feel, any state of being I would want to inhabit. I don't find it repulsive, but I don't see the point of it at all. What's the draw for you?

I'm not immune to the idea of a landscape that draws you in and in the past have liked such. These days I'd mostly prefer the landscape to be quite unusual or presented in the right context. I kind of like the Lo-fi girl videos because they seem especially well calibrated for the mood they are trying to create; I loved Scavengers' Reign because of the continual newness of its alien landscapes and wildlife. Whereas simple beautiful photos of earth's landscapes have been so abused for the purposes of marketing, screensavers, etc that they have in general lost their charm for me unless curated/displayed just so. Or else I feel that they are trying to suck people in to look at them as distraction, instead of in relation to the place where they're displayed (a pet peeve is places that display photos of the cities where they actually are, like a London cafe that has photos of London on the wall, a sure sign that you are in a crappy tourist spot.).

As to why I find the Miro piece attractive, hmm, hard to articulate, but I guess I like its choiceful colour combos, its combination of crisp shapes with rich more naturalistic textures. It feels like it abstractly represents elements of thought being observed, like when you close your eyes tightly or meditate. I find in it a sense of soft motion and microscopic scale interaction, like we're in some kind of primordial soup or subatomic field that could run on peacefully for millions of years. But I ain't gonna pretend this doesn't sound a little pretentious. In the end it just feels like Miro caught onto a certain wavelength and was able to share it at a time when it hadn't been captured so well before.

Kids don't like coffee.

Yeah, but they're right to dislike it (that's why everyone puts cream and sugar in it). It's actually kind of strange that energy drinks (that are just... better coffee/tea) took so long to appear on the mass-market, since aside from maybe Jolt they were very much a creature of the mid to late 2000s. Which is unfortunate, since there were far more drink companies and varieties to choose from whereas now it's all just Monster.

at least if we are alive to what is happening inside of us and don't just internalise a false ideal

The thing about beauty is that creating it requires serving others (if not created, simply possessing/being something other people want). Thus, those who think they know best cannot create beauty; that is why the master morality modes generally create ugly things (brutalism, Christian Rock, Steven Universe, etc.). It's just cognitive differences: servants specialize in creating the beauty, leaders specialize in refining it. These modes of cognition aren't equally represented across/between genders.

Living in this visually unprecedented world is constantly updating our sense of what is visually pleasing, whether we like it or not, and we can constantly learn from this experience.

Well, that and our art is more beautiful (our tools to make it are way better, we can spend more time on it due to post-scarcity, and unlike Medieval artists we have photos and videos as reference material), so much so that it's just background noise. Scream just doesn't really fit on a body pillow the way anime girls with... similar expressions do and I'd actually rather look at the latter than the former. Yeah, something something superstimulus, but all beauty inherently exploits that.

The thing about beauty is that creating it requires serving others (if not created, simply possessing/being something other people want). Thus, those who think they know best cannot create beauty; that is why the master morality modes generally create ugly things (brutalism, Christian Rock, Steven Universe, etc.).

I agree with this. Equally, though, a subservient mode of creation is just going to generate more of what people already like, and ultimately end up disappointing them. I feel like the most genuinely pleasurable experiences come from creators who serve both an inner master and the public too.

How would you apply this model to music, where the direct imitation of nature is naturally more of a niche thing (though it can be quite nice in some cases)? And why are rugged, mountainous locales so popular in landscape painting -- maybe that too is a cultural idiosyncrasy and things like the Lascaux cave paintings represent art in a more pristine state? What makes symmetry pleasant?

Teeth blackening is unusual in that it resembles "naturally" blackened teeth, which are disgusting. Most art fads aren't like that.

I think you give nurture short shrift. The thing is, so does post-modern art, which by prizing novelty (and sometimes ingenuity) over all else, simultaneously rejects the fruits of both biology and culture.

As always posts like this that equivocate "attraction to bloated corpses" and "making vidya game characters a bit more aggressively bland" leave me thinking that the gamergaters are not the ones with a normal scale of beauty.

The kind of people who unironically claim Zendaya is a 3/10 are the 1%ers.

  • -12

https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/architecture-poll.jpg

80% prefer left. 20% prefer right. When presented with other aesthetics I'm willing to bet that the 20% people will not dissolve randomly into like this or that. Their preference for uglyness will correlate. They'll find themselves saying 'you like Right? did you like B in the A/B painting over there? Omg I liked B too what are the chances'.

High. The chances were high.

I'm afraid I have no idea who Zendaya is.

Zendaya

Google her. Or don't. All you need to know is she's an actress who could definitely win a keynesian beauty contest or ten.

just googled her. Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests. Anyone describing her as 3/10 is definitely outside my comprehension.

Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests

Show me those AD-AS curves, baby...

Same Keynes, but different context. I'm actually curious about what @CloudHeadedTranshumanist meant by that qualifier - that even if Zendaya might not be the most beautiful in many particular judges' minds, she would clearly be the most widely-perceived as widely-perceived as beautiful?

She toned it down for Spider-Man: Homecoming (where her character wasn't supposed to be a Love Interest yet), with just hair/wardrobe/body-language choices that you'd think would be another "Hollywood Homely" trope but which worked okay, but even there claiming only 3/10 would be silly.

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I'll climb aboard this train. I saw the recent Dune movies and she is a very plain woman. She's lean in a bad way I don't like. She's entirely flat and lacks a feminine figure. Her face looks decent in photos. But I'm wondering how much careful makeup and editing went into the photoshoots. Her face looks much worse on film.

Comparing her against women her age: she's in the bottom third. Not ugly, but aggressively plain and flat in a unattractive way.

And that's fine for an actress. Not every woman in Hollywood needs to shapely and big breasted.

Not every woman in Hollywood needs to shapely and big breasted.

No, but damn I miss the days when there were more of them in our media.

The very fact that she’s not fat surely puts her in the top half for women her age.

Usually I would agree. But she is so thin and flat that she lacks a feminine figure. She's way too far in that direction.

Ahh I'm sorry if I gave that impression that I find these things equivalent. I was trying to use extreme examples to illustrate a point that the same trait that exists in the extreme also cascades down into the merely uncommon. I don't think most of these people are Bloated corpse tier, though those absolutely do exist. It's more a natural consequence of my point about propensity to intensity and yes/no being separate traits.

I think of it as a bunch of brackets. First there is the building that 70% of people prefer A to B. Then there are the aesthetic tastes of those who find themselves in the 20%. Those in the 10% minority opinion etc etc.

So for example I mostly find Stevens Universe to be ugly, but I get why it works and am willing to put up with it. Most people probably find it neutral. There is a certain person who adores its style and hates on actual beautiful things. I'd put them in the 30% bracket.

Then there is Ozy who appears to be the 5% bracket. Everything evolution selected for us to find beautiful/important, symmetry indicating health, indication of running water, open plains allowing for awareness of both predators and resources, kin to treasure and protect, Ozy's mind finds completely unstimulating.

Then there are the people who shudder with delight at the idea of fucking amidst flies over a bloated corpse. Sub 1% bracket.

Dunno if that changes your take on my take but I hope that clarifies my own intuitions on the topic.

Zendaya isn't outright ugly, but something about her is strongly reminiscent of an Olmec head that had its face flattened with a frying pan

"Corpse" is quite defensible in regard to the "white" skin tone; it absolutely does look like "has been found dead, completely drained of blood!". Not sure about "bloated", although I know my taste runs fatter than most men's so I'm maybe not the best judge of that.

Unless the ideology is merely that ugliness is desirable.

This has been a conspiracy theory on the right for a while. “They” are trying to demoralize you by insisting that ugly things (architecture, art, music, people) are beautiful. Very common /pol/ thread topic. Also comes up whenever female video game protagonists are mid. I don’t quite understand the objective or mechanism here but this is a very mainstream claim among that crowd.

Twitter.com/Artiah669/status/1778933764984320157

It's been a real thing for years. The call is "NORMALIZE X", where X is a deformity, mental illness, obesity, etc. it's the natural result of "representation matters.".
You can see it in all the comments: "Damn apparently every character needs to follow strict societal beauty standards rooted in white supremacy" etc. etc.

Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate.
Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.

Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate. Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.

I find this apparent feigning ignorance endlessly frustrating. The writers and academics who call themselves "progressive" are very open about their desire and willingness to manipulate the populace into believing things they want them to believe by putting in certain tropes into the fiction they write. This is justified on the basis of their stated belief that all fiction manipulates the audience, and so it's better to do it with conscious intent for causes they consider socially just instead of doing so unconsciously while merely focusing on creating an entertaining/meaningful work of fiction which they contend inevitably reinforces the status quo which they find bigoted and intolerable. It's not always possible to nail down this as the cause of any given individual case of uglification, but given the prevalence of these types of people in fiction production and the ubiquity of this narrative, I don't think benefit of the doubt is at all justified, and it's perfectly reasonable to default to the presumption that any specific case was due to ideological intent until proven otherwise.

And if we were to follow the same standards by which such people deem fictional works as "white supremacist" or "patriarchal" or "heteronormative" or whatever, there would be no question that we could conclude that these were caused by ideological motives: as long as someone can write a convincing-sounding essay connecting some work of fiction with these concepts they consider bigoted, it doesn't matter what the creators were thinking or intending, these works are ideological and for a bad ideology. If the creators had nothing but pure entertainment-focused intent or even if they were actively trying to send a message of equality, then that just means that they fell prey to their implicit/unconscious biases which proves just how entrenched white supremacy/patriarchy/etc. really is. But double standards are also justified on the basis of relative power and such (which themselves are justified by someone writing a convincing-sounding essay).

You see this more broadly with people claiming not to know what "woke" or "critical race theory" mean. It's a kind of dishonest bit of self deception that fools no one other than themselves. I just wish they would loudly and proudly stand up for what they believe in, proclaim that they are trying to manipulate the populace for the purpose of a better, more socially just world, and let the chips fall where they may. I find Scott Adams to be... a very silly person not worth paying attention to, but when he said that he was hypnotizing people, including through the very same message of informing them of this hypnotism, because his hypnotism would work even if the audience was consciously aware of what he was doing, I could at least respect that more than this shell game of implausible deniability many writers and activists on the left like to play of openly claiming a desire to manipulate the audience and then acting shocked and appalled that others would accuse them of making creative choices meant to manipulate the audience.

It bothers me immensely and I'm struggling to finish an essay trying to explain it clearly.

Do you know Lewis's "The Inner Ring" speech? I think it's related to how concentric rings of social circles form, with people at each layer sneering at those in the outer layer, while apeing the fashions of the inner layer they're desperate to be inducted into.

The other (hierarchy) is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks.

It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names...” From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness!

The "shell game of implausible deniability" is how people advance in leftist circles. The dev I mentioned must affect all the correct mannerisms to be admitted to a higher circle in his ideologically captured industry. But to name that circle would be unthinkably gauche!
To label it with a term like "woke" announces you're an outsider, the worst kind of scum who has despaired of any social advancement, and anyone hoping for admission must publicly shun you.

Normalize healthy BMI and smooth skin! Wait why am I being dragged to the ludovico theatre? Oh no its the Tess Holliday swimsuit special!

From Bauhaus: A Graphic Novel, pg 50-54

"I saw them all, their faces as they crossed the threshold, their hands gilding over the textiles searching for the weave, their eyes reflected in the chrome plating as they let their certainties fall away....their certainties about what a house is, or an object...what a human being is, when there is no gender. In the 'Triadic Ballet' I want to show people move in space. The geometric forms represent the rationality that humanizes and merely stages physicality....and I wondered if, when they left the last room and went back out into the world, they would be able to look at it with the same revolution in their eyes.

The exhibition didn't convince the Landtag, which decided to shut me down: too expensive they said...but I was uncomfortable politically: the right-wing parties won the elections and we were bizarre and revolutionary creatures with socialist leanings. The masters' contracts were not renewed, and the Weimar experience ended on the first of April 1925. I was only six years old! Isn't it the same for everyone? You can still become anything but they tell you you're wrong....that you need to color within the lines, that geometry offers only a limited series of shapes, that words are to be written on the lines of a page. The control exerted by the outside world forces you to define your identity, while all you want is to experience yourself in the world. Your freedom is frightening for them.

This a very common sentiment in extremist left circles. Anarchists in particular. Shifting aesthetics first in order to subvert the current social order and show people that another world is possible. It's not intended to be demoralization, no one actually sits down and goes bwahaha now I will make the world ugly to demoralize my enemies. It's exaltation. Revolution. Religious ferver. It's the sincere conviction that they are breaking people out of Plato's cave and liberating them.

Destroy 2000 Years of Culture is a prayer, not a conspiracy.

I want to be clear though. This doesn't mean the average person making this kind of art is thinking in these terms. That's an entirely separate issue. It's more like how the average conservative might say 'washington is holding back Americans with too much red tape' and then when you keep digging at where that phrase came from you eventually find a Mises Libertarian arguing with a Ancap. Or how a normal left leaning person might say "Healthcare is a human right. We have to help everyone" and then when you keep digging at their phrase you find a Kropotkin-poster arguing with a Noam Chomsky fan about whether the point is to liberate humanity from all Social Exploitation or if it's about liberation from all Material Inequality which Generates Social Exploitation. The tails tug at the core.

'We are hated and (((they))) are destroying things we like'.

That is the basic aggrievement of the polack. Many modern culture war aspects map fairly neatly into the antipolack position, and polacks are largely losers who lack escape mechanisms from the assaults on their favourite escapes. A redneck in his cabin can still go out and drive his coal roller, an Indian can turn to the pro-India internet to get his ego reinflated, a Chinese can continue ignoring the incomprehensible west, but the polack can only suffer within the communication environment he is wholly nestled within and which he has little alternatives to enjoy.

it makes the hands massive

But the real question: does that happen in reverse?

It would be darkly humorous for a yaoi fan to create a male model with large hands (I don't know why they do this) only for the final product to more closely resemble the unflattering physical stereotype of yaoi fans.

I was surprised by the hate for the new avatar system when it came out, but I suspect the issue is a mismatch between goals.

It looks to me like niantic have tried to make it so you can make your avatar look (by degrees) like a stylised version of you. Sure there's a few wonky edge cases, but it's got sliders, it's got range, you can mostly make it look like you.

The trick is most players don't want it to look like them; they want an anime avatar. They want skinny waists and bold hair colours, despite that not being what they look like. Niantic expected people to make themselves, and took away tools that wouldn't achieve that.

Of course there's some grounds for incompetency - the way the clothes have adapted is non-ideal, and the sliders don't have enough range as the art direction (and the old avatar models) implies. I suspect that, over time, more colours/styles and more slider range will be added back in; possibly yes, for a cost.

Gotta be honest this seems like a very mild culture war angle. The models were already quite androgenous and subdued in their sexual characteristics (certainly there was no option to look like Schwarzenegger or Parton). The one clear CW aspect is the removal of distinct genders... But c'mon. Have you met the Pokemon go community?

The pictures of the new models linked look just look like garden variety incompetence. Yes the waists are wider but there's also just a general reduction in detail and quality. Looks like someone decided to cut corners, maybe chose the cheap 3d modelling house.

The one clear CW aspect is the removal of distinct genders... But c'mon. Have you met the Pokemon go community?

I would add that the skin tone "randomized palette" seems like a pretty clear CW angle as well.

Gotta be honest this seems like a very mild culture war angle.

I mean--I did characterize it as a "small thing!" But when a (widely known as incompetent) video game company feels comfortable removing distinct genders from what is sometimes characterized as a "kids game," that doesn't seem like a completely empty data point, either.

I prefer to posit that the accidental noticing we are performing is unfortunately more reflective of our biases and sensitivities than a concerted effort being shoved down our face.

The more likely reality is that a series of parallel incompetencies all got baked into a product by vague statements being proposed and implemented poorly, and the proposers being unwilling to look stupid by saying 'shit this was dumb shut it down'. We only see that sort of shutdown when it is high profile, like the Batgirl movie, and there are plenty of examples of these 'project managed by committee' products coming to market with clearly observable yet individually minor deficiencies.

When these organisations play the culture war angle, there is usually zero subtlety because they think consumers are idiots. Dragon Age Inquisition hit us over the head with fan favourite voice actress Jennifer Hale voicing Krem, a transwoman (transman? I couldnt fucking tell) whose dialogue options specifically highlighted her transness. Mass Effect 3 specifically highlights the homosexuality of Cortez and Traynor to scream 'HERE BE GAYS' at every opportunity. I'm sure theres some retardation about racism and species in some games, but the main example, Warcraft, shit the bed on its analogies so badly that its not worth repeating. (ok a brief one: being racist against orcs bad because thrall good. yet the orcs ravaged stormwind, teldrassil, the entire draenei species... as a racism analogy warcraft orcs are pretty fail. this point is weak, if I get loredumped in a followup rest assured I will roll over and immediately surrender because blizzard games are only good for porn and not worth my brain cells defending or attacking).

Finally, the fuggofication of video game characters which is the specific bugbear of this thread is certainly deliberate for a large part - there is no need to make women fat - but I would also argue it is a consequence of improved technology for face rendering. Old tech had blocky faces with clean lines, but the faces tended to be symmetrical and smooth even in uneven lighting since there wasnt enough power to render small details like cheek lines or sellions. Now with dynamic HDR and higher resolution facial textures we can see every stupid wrinkle and line moving. Combine that with facial capture tech honestly still being ass (requires artificial boosting of detected movements to cause the algo to change) and we get clown faced movements that trip straight into the uncanny valley.

No, I think Niantic hired some true believers are consultants and then took their advice.

https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1780987222835232771

I think that things happen because people want them to happen, and people work for them to happen. Not everyone gets their way, but someone does.

Gaymers got their way on this. Gamers, and women, did not.

I would add that the skin tone "randomized palette" seems like a pretty clear CW angle as well.

I'm not seeing it. Can you explain what you mean?


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