domain:noahpinion.blog
crushedoranges
1d ago
I would make the argument that Gramsci's tactics are, by their nature, apolitical: and they are successful enough that even his most hated ideological enemies have adopted them because they are effective and they work. It is impossible to describe what the woke right is without describing it as a reaction to the woke left: its shadow and anima. Perhaps it was inevitable that the right absorb the insights of the left, and not stay static forever. It is an active dialectic, after all.
Note that rightists who know who Gramsci is a vanishingly small clique in any case.
But nevertheless, I wouldn't oversell the impact for 'A Case For White Nationalism' and other works like it. They are very clever works, throwing the prevailing orthodoxy's own logic against it. They have the benefit that woke structures do, in fact, exist to disenfranchise white men, and all they have to do is Observe while their opponents try to explain why their racially discriminatory policies are actually Equitable to a increasingly cynical audience. The woke right only exists in the imaginations of vanguardist liberals, kicked out of the progressive sphere but eager to gatekeep the populist right back to liberalism.
It won't work. But why it won't work is a whole essay in of itself.
TIRM
1d ago
But residents proposed increasing taxes to speed it up and the response was that won't work.
Some have suggested doubling the tax to halve the life of the project, but city officials say the disruption to traffic and available crews would make that impossible.
They're kind of pivoting from one excuse to another.
But sure, cost disease and schedule disease are close relatives. To some degree this would speed up if it was very cheap.
Maybe I should try reading the Bible at some point. Is it good literature? :P
There's some novelty in that particular human sacrifice: instead of the victim being labeled evil, he gets labeled god. Which kinda puts a finishing touch to the whole tradition instead of having to find a new scapegoat at each turning. In theory, at least.
Edit: typo
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Violent crime is one thing but who dreams of working on an oil rig? It's not even that outdoorsy, you're not in the forest or on the land.
TowardsPanna
1d ago
The juice not being worth the squeeze: That's the main idea I was left with after trying a couple of MMOs long ago. Addictive, takes a lot of time, and for what? What are you left with? You've passed a lot of time, somewhat in the manner of a rat pushing an irregular reinforcement lever for pellets, sometimes it felt fun or exciting, sometimes it was just a grind, and then what? If you got lasting friendships out of it, that's probably a good justification, but if not... ×_×
I guess it depends on what the opportunity cost is. Some people just need escapism for a few hours per day/week, at that time in their life. There's no guarantee that some other hobby would be more rewarding or meaningful for a tired body. But personally I try to cultivate long term reductions in stress and long term happiness. If the activity is only ephemerally satisfying and has a long term cost, I probably don't do it. It can be a lonelier path to tread though. Or a less crowded path, to put a positive spin on it, lol.
Either it's just an age and life phase thing, or the internet/gaming is less conducive to friendship building compared to when I was a teenager. Hm.
Yucca Mountain was abruptly cancelled for no reason as soon as the planning was done, $10 billion over decades for absolutely nothing.
On the plus side, they did figure out how to communicate the dangers of radiation poisoning to our hypothetical post-civilizational hunter-gatherer descendants from 10,000 years from now.
There's a fair criticism of pickiness, and not to put unspoken words in your mouth but if you're implying it, you're only implying it, that the righties wouldn't want the chainsmoker at the bar. A lot of those young men are picky, but it's turnabout from the woman being more picky. Not to cast blame here because there isn't blame, the behavior from both sexes results from society. But blaming society is also a folly, might as well blame the sun for rising, for the good it can do to change it.
You're right and you're wrong. We're in the most narrow slice between past and future where you will approach rightness. Some of these men couldn't get dates if they were born 10 years earlier, or 20, 30, 40, 50--except far enough back and then things change, because dating is a hyper-modern activity, as is equally the degree of autonomy that men and/but far more women, have in romance. Go far enough back and dating doesn't exist, it's courtship, a bit farther back and courtship lands between betrothal and marriage. Farther back and it's pure arranged marriage, and far enough back and it's men dragging women and girls away from the primitive domiciles of their slain husbands, brothers, and fathers.
That violence is so relevant. Most men never reproduced, each of us is the legacy of those few who had many wives and many children. Because those were the traits of our most ancient forefathers, this urge courses through our veins. We're happier and better as couples, but even while you are (I assume) a married man, and to cast no aspersions, I assume you still notice the beautiful waitress, or young woman at the gym or working as a paralegal. You're not blind, you appreciate it viscerally because it's biological. Or maybe you're better than me, which I probably believe myself; wiser, more mature, and you actually don't really think about it. Still you would understand generally men are like this, even the most faithful of husbands.
Most women did reproduce, but up until the 20th century, pretty much no women anywhere on Earth -- not enough to change the behavior of the sex -- had a choice in who would be the father of their children. Men ravished, women were ravished. This is our nature, it is what our environments selected. There was never environmental pressure nor enough advantage conferred for men, as a sex, to apprehend some ineffable and holistic quality of "wife and mother material" beyond the purely physical. She's young, she has wide hips and nice breasts, good enough. Equally, there has never been a reason for women to acquire the mirror of that trait, just as men didn't get to reproduce, women didn't get to choose not to.
Then very, very suddenly, for the first time in the history of our species, most women became the ones who chose. I don't like a lot of the points I could branch to from here, but what is certain is that no less than 50% of women simply lack the good judgment to make that decision, and oh boy is that rate identical for men. See I don't think the damage is autonomy itself, not dates, not those men who can't get dates. The damage comes from a beast of many facets, all of them culture, but the cruelness in its eyes is named fictive love and soulmate. Women look for it, men look for it, who gets it?
Based on divorce rates, the answer seems to be not very many.
CanofWorms
1d ago
This movie reminded me of the line Billy Crystal made at the 2003 Oscars about LOTR Return of the King. "It was nominated for eleven Oscars...for its eleven endings!"
Hieronymus
1d ago
Sounds a bit like human sacrifice and scapegoating doesn't it?
Unironically yes. The Bible depicts it as a sacrifice: though those who killed Jesus didn’t intend it that way, Jesus did. And if you do a quick search, you will find a million sermons with titles like “Christ our Scapegoat,” referencing the literal scapegoat in Leviticus.
Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, offering himself as a sacrifice to God the Father on behalf of sinners is the mechanism. It’s the core of Christian belief.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Is body fat percentage really very useful in women given the variable distribution?
TowardsPanna
1d ago
Isn't it a pretty wild idea that the torture and execution of a good man "saves the world"? What's the mechanism there? Sounds a bit like human sacrifice and scapegoating doesn't it? With some magic thrown in.
faceh
1d ago
But I’m sympathetic to your worries, and hope you find a woman who allows you to lay them aside.
I'M not the one you have to worry about.
The Zoomers are not okay.
And the women are not happy.
Your platitudes appear to be missing something LARGE, and it really isn't explained by men being inadequately reliable.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
From "The Right to Marry" by Sister Y:
Sensing that marriage is now an empty institution, some couples have specifically contracted for the rights marriage traditionally gave them (but no longer does). In the California case Diosdado v. Diosdado, 97 Cal.App.4th 470, a husband and wife contracted that if the husband had an affair with another woman, he would pay the wife $50,000 on top of the divorce settlement, and vice versa. The husband did in fact have an affair, but the California court refused to honor the couple's agreement. The strong California public policy of no-fault divorce, the court said, prohibited courts from even enforcing the voluntary contracts of a mature adult couple:
The family law court may not look to fault in dissolving the marriage, dividing property, or ordering support. Yet this agreement attempts to penalize the party who is at fault for having breached the obligation of sexual fidelity, and whose breach provided the basis for terminating the marriage. This penalty is in direct contravention of the public policy underlying no-fault divorce.
That's right: in California, as in other states with a strong no-fault public policy, you can't even voluntarily make a credible promise of marriage and expect it to be honored by the courts.
A few states - Lousiana, Arizona, and Arkansas - allow what is called "covenant marriage," marriage that may only be dissolved on fault grounds. However, couples may not even use covenant marriage to credibly promise lifetime partnership, because either partner may simply relocate to a non-covenant-marriage state and initiate no-fault divorce proceedings there.
No_one
1d ago
Abs on women are fairly risky. You need 10-14% body fat for that. Women with <17% body fat risk amenorrhea, and under 11% it's almost certain. Amenorrhea due to low body weight & exercise is associated with depletion of bone density, stress fractures etc.
'Relative Energy Deficiency' used to be called 'Female Athlete Triad'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_energy_deficiency_in_sport#Prognosis
OliveTapenade
1d ago
There have been people who've taken that line historically. That's the line of the Gospel of Judas, for instance: that Judas was a hero because he caused the Crucifixion, which saved the world.
However, this is obviously heretical, and to my knowledge orthodox Christianity has never had any time for it. The Crucifixion may have been the means by which the world was saved, but it was still nonetheless an evil deed.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
The Gospel of Judas did.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Woke right is not a thing: it never was a thing, because actual Nazis, fascists, and white nationalists don't use or accept critical theory. Any resemblance (da joos vs da whitey) is coincidental: the true similarity is that both wokism and fascism are illiberal, but for completely different reasons.
Neil Shenvi has a few examples, surely? He cites Stephen Wolfe recommending using CRT's premises, and taking his opponents' weapons and growing stronger by them, and he explicitly refuses to abjure a critical theory approach. Shenvi also cites Abrahamsen to the effect of there being a 'Gramscian right', and credibly cites people like Sam Francis or John Fonte acknowledging Gramsci's influence on their own work.
That seems like a pretty reasonable prima facie case that at least some far-right or white-nationalist-adjacent people are genuinely influenced by critical theory.
EvanTh
1d ago
I've never heard anyone seriously try to argue that killing Jesus was good on a consequentialist basis, anyways.
I've heard about some ancient Gnostics who argued exactly that. They got excommunicated as heretics.
yofuckreddit
1d ago
Anyone who thinks "For the articles" is just a joke may not have picked up an issue. My neighbor gifted me a huge swath when he retired. The porn is fine - some of it even crosses into "good" - but 80% of the magazine is interviews, short stories, letters, and politics.
I'd pay for a subscription today if it still existed.
You're just bringing this exponential out of nowhere, how does it add anything to what I'm saying?
"In the big picture, everything we do on Earth doesn't matter" is true but it's a pointless thing to say. Things on Earth matter to us.
"Nazi Germany didn't conquer all the way to Ceres, so they're not a threat"
"Climate change isn't going to boil the oceans, so who cares"
"Covid isn't going to turn you into a rage monster from Resident Evil so it's a nothingburger"
Statements by the utterly deranged! But if you complicate it out so that 'biology is really complicated, the immune system is pretty good, epidemics often fizzle out and it's orders of magnitude from causing a zombie apocalypse' it suddenly sounds reasonable even when the realistic stance of the problem looks completely different.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
GPT-4.5 was for creative writing and was mostly being reviewed by coders, since the AI community is mostly coders. There are a few who really liked it and were disappointed when it was taken away but most people never got a chance to use it, understandable with that pricetag attached. Plus the path seems to be scaling test-time compute, not merely scaling model size but scaling in general.
I personally think Dario from Anthropic is more credible on this kind of stuff than Scott, he's been talking about a country of geniuses in a datacentre by those kind of dates. He is at least close to the engineroom on this kind of thing.
I don't speak for Yud but if AI is where it is today in 2040 then I'll be very confused, not to mention him. On twitter he was constantly posting stuff about how rapid progress has been, that's part of his narrative.
No_one
1d ago
No ifs about it. It is increasing.
If you look at the WW2 color photos the government commissioned of daily life, grotesquely obese people were pretty rare back then, basically you can't even spot any, and there's maybe a few mildly overweight ones.
No_one
1d ago
Hence the sad and pathetic proliferation of bolt-on tits.
Well executed plastic surgery works pretty well and there's a huge undersupply of big, perky breasts.
If you were an evil genius utilitarian and invented say, a virus that'd bump up average breast size from B or C up to a G it'd cause a substantial worldwide increase in well-being of men and only a minor malus to well-being of women in that they'd mostly have to take care to do some back exercises.
Sounds like it's a college/no-kids problem to me. Why didn't she want kids with this super financially stable, nice guy? She mustn't have really loved him. Expensive wedding is also a bad sign. Obviously you know more about this matter.
Sometimes you just roll a bad woman, I think she wasn't the right class for him. There's a certain kind of highly educated woman who just wouldn't divorce a nice guy like that due to how unseemly it would be, who acts rationally (aside from more politics/feels stuff), who's well-off but doesn't need an expensive wedding. There are gradations in the upper middleclass where you find such women. On the other hand, these are the kind who'd never settle with anyone with an MBA, the kind who looks down on investment bankers for being too stupid and greedy since everyone in the social circle is assumed to be rich. Rare, perhaps vanished breed.
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