culture war roundup
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
phailyoor
19hr ago
Thought about this more and wrote a more direct response in a separate comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/2254/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348256?context=8#context
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
22hr ago
Oh, thanks for outing yourself. I already banned you for two weeks because you keep making shitty comments, but since you just admitted to being a very specific ban evader, I will make it permanent.
I don't get why you think this makes you clever, but whatever.
You've accumulated four warnings in a couple of months for obnoxious raspberries that add nothing to the conversation. And you decide you need to come back to a 17-day-old comment to say "Fuck off, retard"?
I'm going straight to a two-week ban this time, and will be in favor of escalating to a permaban next time, because you seem to be one of those people who's just here to shit on threads.
ETA: Escalated to permaban for ban evasion
Rov_Scam
23hr ago
See my Pittsburgh entry on the Hill District from back in February for a related case study.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts.
Two days ago.
Less than a day ago.
"I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using."
Both from @Amadan.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
I mean, as I said
Depends on your diagnosis of the problem. If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution. Because with that anchor tied to your feet, no state project, be it reinvigorating capitalism, monopoly busting or state run grocery stores can possibly succeed. If the labor market is flooded with lazy scammers who shameless loot the till, it's not going to matter if the grocery store is a coop, state run, unionized or anything.
I can nearly promise you, with that much state money being dumped into the project and with that little food on shelves, there is a "community organizer" driving around in a brand new BMW involved somewhere.
“We typically have the same group of offenders every week that are recognizable by face and by name, just loitering and hanging out,” he said. “A small percentage of people are ruining it for the rest of the community that deserves to go to their grocery store and their library.”
Computer, add "loiterers" to the list.
In countries like the States, seethe ensues when corporations move their stores out of crime-ridden areas. Seethe ensues when corporations stay in crime-ridden areas but put their merchandise behind protective casings. Seethe ensues when mom-and-pop stores put up bars or barriers in front of their merchandise or themselves (that's what's most Problematic about black-on-Asian crime: Asians daring to protect themselves in their stores and make blacks feel unwelcome).
Just tell us what store-owners are supposed to do. I guess, by process of elimination, keeping your store in place and enjoying the vibrancy with a smile on your face is what store-owners are supposed to do.
In that respect, state-sponsored grocery and other stores make sense. When corporations and Problematic individuals fail to be Empathetic and Decent Beings, the state would need to step-in and use net-taxpayer funds to be on the Right Side of History.
And then when the usual outcomes remain, one can bounce back and forth between the epicycles of Social Constructs, Socioeconomic Factors, Food Deserts, Food Security, Nutritional Security, Micronutritional Equity, Microbiome Equity, Factors from Other Ways of Knowing.
The state-sponsored grocery stores not delivering the promised outcomes would just mean the racists and stingy net-pax-payers prevented such outcomes from happening with their bigotry, and more tax-payer money and Inclusion would need to be devoted to the matter to pwn the racists and eat the rich in the name of Equity.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
This was a really fun paper to read, especially since I just noted that I'm going through an MIT OCW nuclear course right now. My actual knowledge on the topic still rounds to approximately zero, but it was actually enjoyable to just go through the proposed reactions/decays, just pull up the same tables they're using, do the incredibly simple energetics calculations, and see that they are, indeed, correct. I would have had no clue how to do even that just a few months ago.
So, can confirm that the stone simple energetics work; they're not so far out to lunch that they've made such a stupidly basic error (we're not dealing with total cranks). I can't say much of anything on any of the many many other questions involved concerning reactor/process design, materials handling, economics of it, etc. They do point out some prior works that had looked into this in the past, so it's also not unprecedented, but the current authors get an order of magnitude more production in their calculations. The current authors, correctly in my view, point out that the prior works (in the 80s) didn't really show their work for how they got their estimate for gold production, as they were focused on cobalt (and the current authors write reasonably significantly on mercury enrichment, which prior works didn't, and I don't have the knowledge to evaluate). There may be (and probably is?) some other technical barrier to the rest of the scheme that an experienced nuclear engineer would spot in an instant, but if not...
What a time to be alive!
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1d ago
Second: @WhiningCoil earned a number of reports on that post. He gets reported a lot as he descends further into his bitter nihilistic hole. He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit, so it's not like his seething rants about how much he hates (an ever-expanding range of people) have gone without consequences. That post (and several others of his) are in fact still sitting in the mod queue because I decided I was not going to be the one to make a decision about them.
I can see two ways of looking at this mod reply. Slightly uncharitable take: Mod leaves WhiningCoils reported message to mod queue, but has the time and join in the reply pile-on to a rage-quit message with a 3k character lecture about principles of the Motte. More charitable take, WhiningCoil's comment got both pushback from the commentariat and mod attention, so the mods feel need to point out the rage-quitter's complaints were not justified.
Speaking of the principles of the Motte ... the stated principle is "to be a place where people can say the things they can't say elsewhere, and then have to defend it". Very eloquent, but many people and groups have lofty-sounding idealistic principles that fail to produce intended results. Is the Motte a place where people come to say the things they can't say elsewhere and have to defend it? How often? Do the rules help or hinder such interactions?
Looking at the previous CW thread, I think the Epstein discussions had most back-and-forth argumentation with most genuine effort to present evidence and argue. Quickly scanning, this OP, this discussion of shot-down airplanes in Serbian war and movie script discussion yielded some discussion with occasional real disagreement. So did Turok's top-level posts, which were perhaps not the best as arguments, but they produced adversarial disagreement. Not certain if any of the rest of top-level posts satisfy the same criteria. More often than not, it looks like people chiming in with not too dissimilar opinions, not a vigorous argumentation to dismantle or defend a controversial opinion.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Buddy. Pal. Lemme level with you here.
Please don't be patronizing like this.
you did ask for an explanation of why you get downvoted so much.
I never asked for this, I asked if he had an idea why his post wasn't downvoted. The two are not congruent. It seems like you wanted to use this as an excuse to go "Oh boy, let me tell you why your posts suck. Buddy. Pal."
But OK, I'll bite. Maybe I'll get something out of this. But to do this well, we really need examples. Could you link an example of one of my posts that you think most egregiously exemplifies the behavior you're talking about? I can put forward this discussion that I linked earlier in the thread, but I'm not sure if you think that qualifies.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
2d ago
At risk of coping, I would actually contend that video games do in fact teach useful skills, just not all games do, and the skills are very narrowly applicable. MMOs are the obvious outlier here, since the social aspect plays a large part, and e.g organizing raids is quite literally management work even if low-ish-stakes (and even then people certainly get mad just like IRL), my Classic WoW-playing friends regale me with tales of literal Excel spreadsheets for loot distribution.
On another note, autism simulators like Factorio or Path of Exile are very good at teaching soulless optimization systematic thinking, "seeing through" the immediate picture and user-facing things in general to the complex tangle of underlying systems beneath, which I think is a generally useful skill in life, besides a part of my literal job description right now as a mid-tier IT monkey. I'm plenty stupid for a nerd and definitely starting to feel the IQ gate required to advance further in the field, so I wouldn't say I'm the kind of gifted person who would naturally grok such things either, my interests absolutely made a tangible difference. This is definitely not the best course my life could've taken, but it's certainly far from the worst, even just mitigating the NEET attractor and throwing myself into wageslavery already averted a lot of the worse outcomes even if I'm not always happy about it.
(Tangential and somewhat edgy but my pet theory is the "systematic thinking" part is largely why gamers are so infamously Based - as "seeing through" visual/verbal veneers to the core beneath becomes ingrained and reflexive, you start to second-guess your lying eyes and Nootice an awful lot. Unfortunately the skill at keeping your Nooticing to yourself is purchased separately.)
Feel good stories told by liberal/progressive/leftists go something like this:
To connect the dots, adoption and / or fostering seems to be a great way for this old man to plant trees, especially if biological children are completely ruled out. There is undeniably a population crisis and replacement rate is an issue, but from a (gross?) utilitarian perspective the population crisis is about productive members of society. Adopting and / or fostering well kills two birds with one stone: it reduces the population that is at-risk for homelessness, and creates more productive members of society.
Wow, very noble and inspiring. It speaks to one on an emotional level, fills you with hope and positivity for the future. There is no counter argument without being a bad person or uncouthly bringing up some giant baggage of heterodox arguments that immediately look bad and emotionally divorced.
So @WhiningCoil gave a feel bad story as a contrast. Or a 'feel reality' story. Depending on ones predispositions.
You would not be the first non-right wing extremist person to fail to engage with the direct 1:1 mirror rhetoric you would otherwise extol as just and noble. Faced with forlorn elements of reality laid bare.
One would be inclined to blame your environment for keeping you away from any competing emotionally resonating narratives, but as can be seen, you are the one picking those. And as someone who spent years of his life making the aforementioned heterodox arguments against all the feel good stories, and having that very fact used against me as an argument, I can't say I have much sympathy left to give for your self inflicted predicament.
NullHypothesis
3d ago
I looked at the three examples you provided as bad posts and they don't seem to be the same level of bad as some of Turok's post. Obviously I am biased so I may be blind to the stake in my eye but I'm going to give it some effort.
If making a statement about a group that could be considered negative is mean then you can never have any discussions about anything. The difference is the negative statements about the groups in the three posts are about specific behaviors and aren't just calling the groups names. It's part of an argument that could be challenged. And then you have to consider how people response to criticisms/challenges of an argument. I don't think I've ever seen Turok acknowledge someone made a good point and he usually only responds to direct questions. It is infuriating to have a conversation with someone that never engages or acknowledges your strongest points and only nitpicks your weakest points. Which is an effective tactic in a debate, but then it's not really a proper conversation in good faith. It's even more infuriating when the same line of reasoning that was never addressed is then repeated in future posts.
I actually didn't see anything in 2rafa's post that could be considered a generic mean statement about a group. The worst thing I could see is this statement.
An America after mass Hispanic migration (now occurring) is a poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional America
But that's actually a conclusion in an argument, something that can be challenged and dismantled if one provides evidence otherwise. It's not a statement like "hispanics are trash", even if you think it is implied that's not what is stated. If the implication is bad dismantle the argument.
Sohois says the African "immigrants are much lower quality" but this is followed by a list of characteristics that could be challenged. If the Africans in Europe aren't lower quality to hispanics in America, they must be the same or higher quality. If you take issue with that statement, can you provide evidence proving otherwise?
Worst thing I could see in Sloot's comment is this initial statement
The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, but she will complain men are BORING with no sense of irony. Men have the burden of performance.
This is a statement about a group's actions and behaviors. You can challenge this statement. Is Sloot wrong? It could be implied sloot thinks the modal chick is dumb but sloot doesn't actually make that statement.
Meanwhile Turok's post:
The issue I see here is that conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities. Instead of thinking about how to acquire power, or attract EHC who have power, they're smoking copium about how noble manual labor is.
I consider myself leaning more conservative, I went to a top tier university and I have a degree. I know many people who have gone to high tier universities. An increasing amount of them are leaning more conservative as time goes on. So from my experience his statement is incorrect. Perhaps if we really want to be technical, I'm being uncharitable here and my point doesn't actually address his claim, but he hasn't provided any evidence for his point. Are higher percentages of people with no college degrees becoming conservative? What exactly are third-rate colleges and are they producing more conservative leaders than before? He might be correct that conservatives have been losing in institutional powers like academia but that's not the claim he made here.
Also, there's something about this line of thinking that I have issue with. It's as if I said bananas are the food of poor people. Poor people do eat bananas so it's technically true. But what if I made this statement to a group of rich people using bananas as part of their morning smoothie? What was the purpose of making that statement? What's the implication here?
His statement on how conservatives are smoking copium about how noble manual labor is - this seems like making a mountain of a molehill. I see no concerted effort from conservatives in trying to push summer jobs to kids. Until conservative right adjacent sphere tiktok and social media is full of influencers bemoaning how the youth should be getting a summer job because it's going to teach them the value of hard labor one article from one conservative leaning site doesn't really mean much. I haven't seen this talking point in like years until I saw this post.
I have never heard of the group CommonPlace until yesterday. Their twitter has less than 5k followers. Linked in around 100. Facebook under 100. This is very weak evidence for conservatives as a group smoking copium. They might be a conservative think tank and maybe the people they actually reach have more influence, but until I see the messaging reach the intended audience this is nothing to me.
If you look at the parent post, his analysis is contradicted by evidence in the article itself, which I quote in my reply to him. I didn't bother touching on his 2nd paragraph earlier but I might as well expand on why I have an issue with his analysis. He makes this argument:
Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."
This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.
The causal link between higher income and going to art museums is very weak, while one can come up with a causal link between industriousness and adulthood happiness (work hard > more purpose in life > more likely to have material goods to have a higher quality of life). I don't disagree with him that genetics is a factor, but the two positions are not equivalent in their erroneousness. For them to be equally flawed statements would suggest a human being can never learn to become more industrious, and that industriousness has no effect on mental health. Yet surely we can find examples in our own lives that would suggest otherwise. Think of people that after being put into a sports team learned to work hard with a team, or even all the statement made here in the motte of people talking about how working a job helped them appreciate hard work or motivated them to work even harder to get more lucrative jobs. There is also psychological literature supporting the idea that it's possible to increase conscientiousness. I have just made an argument for why increasing industriousness can increase adult mental health. I would struggle to make a coherent argument for why subsidizing art museums would increase income.
To be honest, I should probably ask Turok to expand on his points rather than typing out why I think his argument is flawed in a post not even responding to him directly, but based on his previous interactions with others and to my post I can't say I have much interest right now in actually talking to him specifically.
If there are issues with those bad right wing posts, surely someone could put in the same level of effort I just did here to break down why they think it is bad. Perhaps my analysis is flawed, but at least I put in the effort. Where's the effort to show why these right wing posts are bad or flawed? Even if there is some level of group consensus, truth should prevail and if an argument has no flaws at that point the only option would be to ignore it or to resort to bad faith tactics and logical fallacies, and at that point it's breaking the rules and should be moderated. Upstream, there are some people making an effort to argue with that "virulent invasive species" metaphor is flawed, and I'd like to see more of those conversations than people complaining that the statement is mean. I do agree with you that people on the other side complaining about left leaning posts should also be better and try to address the argument instead of getting mad.
Yes?
If you take that random sample of 12 year olds and run them through the education system, where they are force-fed Shakespeare and algebra against their will for another 6 years, you will find that:
- Most of them fail to master the material.
- Most of them forget what little they memorize as soon as the exam is over.
- Most of them never use any of it in real life.
The few things that the average man is both actually capable of learning and truly increase his economic productivity thereby are basic literacy, addition and subtraction, and the multiplication table. The average man cannot actually learn rhetoric or geometry, and resents the attempt to teach him. More to the point, the average man never actually needs those for his job, or to function outside of it.
See "Genetic Russian Roulette", "Against Tulip Subsidies", "SSC Gives a Graduation Speech", "Book Review: The Cult of Smart", and "A Theoretical 'Case Against Education'" for Scott's absolutely brutal takedowns of the education system. Then wash it down with some Education Realist, Bryan Caplan, and Various Refrigerator.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters, while not modding posts like this? Arguably this post and this post are borderline too. If the issue with this post is that it's making a generalization of a group in a somewhat mean way, then there'd be plenty of posts the mods ought to come down on even in just the past few days. There's also WhiningCoil's post comparing nonwhites to "virulent invasive species" that's been sitting for over 24h without mod action, although you said up above that you weren't equipped to handle that one so OK I guess, as long as it eventually gets handled.
If the issue is that other people are getting triggered and snapping at him, they should be the ones to pay the price alone. Otherwise it's just an informal rule of "anyone who goes against the dominant ideology on this forum (i.e. leftists) gets banned eventually when people get mad at them". The 3 borderline posts I linked don't have this problem because they're going with the dominant ideology.
My personal opinion is that none of these should be warned/banned, except for maybe WhiningCoil's that's a little too egregious.
Goodguy
3d ago
Not sure if you would consider this anti-MAGA, but it's certainly anti-Trump: https://www.themotte.org/post/2240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/345537?context=8#context
This one is me criticizing Trump's tariffs: https://www.themotte.org/post/1812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/315024?context=8#context
Me being concerned about Trump's authoritarian impulses: https://www.themotte.org/post/1681/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/298689?context=8#context
Me criticizing Trump's desire to increase the military budget: https://www.themotte.org/post/1827/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/316103?context=8#context
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience.
This is a pretty good analogy.
I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted.
Care to share an example or two of this? My experience has been stuff like this conversation, where I said I doubted that Biden was pocketing bribes.
I've had contra-MAGA posts that go slightly positive if they're very high effort, but the difference between me posting that and say, posting an antifeminist piece is that the contra-MAGA post will be like +50 | -45, while the antifeminist piece will be +50 | -2 or something.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
This one from @WhiningCoil. I can see where she(?)'s coming from, I had my own problems with that comment's plausibly deniable undertones, but Coil's a particularly abrasive poster and I don't think the median Mottezen's opinions are necessarily "tainted by racism".
JustAGuy0
4d ago
Was Mossad actually implicated in this? Or is it just that Epstein was Jewish and had friends who were Zionist Jews (a viewpoint shared by the majority of Jews in the world)?
I haven't actually seen anything beyond Epstein himself bragging about it (while also being a pathological liar) and being tangentially connected to people who may have been but were not confirmed to be connected with the intelligence community. All second and third-order connections.
faceh
4d ago
See it sounds to me like you are trying to treat men and women as the exact same and getting frustrated that they aren't.
I have a generalized model for Western Women:
They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:
High-powered career woman (Girlboss).
Freespirited, cultured, 'independent' woman. That is, one who travels everywhere, has a fun and carefree life, and flits from party to party. Thirst traps abound here.
Devoted and effective mother.
I'm actually frustrated that they AREN'T acting more different than men, and eschewing the one role that men can't actually fill.
Women are not and shouldn't be as hardcore about discipline and working out etc. as a man. That's ok.
Yes, indeed, all a woman has to do to be considered 'fit' is 'not be obese.' Just don't be obviously and grotesquely fat.
AND YET, they're still the more obese gender.
I don't know what to tell you man, they have an overall lower bar, and many of them don't even try to clear it.
faceh
4d ago
Why would they continue to work on 'productive' labor when there is no actual purpose to doing so?
I mean that literally, why would they do more than the bare minimum, enough to keep their electricity and internet on?
Why would they do any job that carries any amount of risk or requires excess hours of their time?
And, of course, why wouldn't they just vote for the most radical political candidates in the meantime?
Its prevalent enough in Japan already that they have a term for it: Herbivore men..
Consider that there are two types of 'fuck you' money.
Being filthy rich so that you can afford to lose a bunch of it.
And being so dirt poor that you have nothing to lose and thus don't care about losing.
The only real suckers in this scenario are the guys stuck in the middle class doing most of the productive work and paying taxes whilst receiving very few benefits back.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4d ago
Knock your girlfriend out, drag her to a campsite outside cell coverage, tell her it's surrounded with bears (and hope she ends up on the right side of the man/bear question), and after she recovers her focus and executive functions, drag her to church?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
To summarize:
@faceh contended that there were about one million women who met the criteria he considered marriagable: Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified. Not ‘obese.’ Not a mother already. No ‘acute’ mental illness. No STI. Less than $50,000 in student loan debt. 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30. Therefore there aren't enough good women for all the men.
I countered that there were approximately 617,000 American men under 40 meet all the specified criteria: Single, Earning at least $65,000 annually, No felony convictions, Exercise at least once a week, Attend religious services at least once a month, Have not used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, Not classified as alcohol dependent. Therefore, there aren't nearly enough good men for even that small number of women.
I picked 65k because it's about what you make as a Cop/Teacher, or a forklift operator at a local warehouse that's always putting up billboards for workers if you pick up a little overtime.
Contingent on there be actual evidence that could tie important people to felonious activity, this was the most probable reason things have been held up regardless of who was in power.
Its why I generally don't count out the existence of major conspiracies, even somewhat complex ones, when everyone involved has either legal protection or strong reasons to be quiet. Everyone having the incentive for the story NOT to come out/be corroborated means cooperation is pretty cheap/easy... unless one of them gets investigated and pressured to flip, that is.
If Mossad can maintain a fake electronics company for years and sneak explosives into pagers sold to dozens of their enemies, well, a lot of things seem possible to achieve without alerting the world at large.
As someone who was aware of the general Epstein situation well before he didn't kill himself and became a meme, I am heartened that people are tenaciously clinging to the story even as a lot of influential folks claim there's nothing to see. Most people are doing it for misguided or outright fallacious reasons but they got the spirit and are aiming it in the general correct direction.
Of course, what are the dogs going to do if they, miraculously, catch the car? Assuming they can make sense of anything, seems like the only just and meaningful outcome requires a bunch of trials and criminal consequences, which will be litigated for literal years to come and I'd wager will result in less than half of the people named being convinced.
Me, I'd just settle for removing all those people from power permanently and banishing them from the public eye and also polite social contexts.. Castration of their status and influence, in lieu of literal castration, if you will.
But we don't have a reliable mechanism for doing that at scale.
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