domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
roystgnr
2d ago
he is arguably a Blue Triber who shares the values of Red Tribers
I'd say he's a Blue Triber who just has a soft spot for Red Tribers, which is even farther removed, and which makes the Red Tribe situation even more clearly sad. Although I admired the principles of Evan McMullin voters, I really feel for the religious conservatives who (perhaps correctly!) decided that their least awful electoral option in 2016 was Mr. "Grab them by the pussy". Many of them have since resolved the cognitive dissonance of all that by deciding that actually Trump is a good person, which is less sympathetic, but even more tragic, if only in the Greek sense.
Kudos for using "Blue Tribe" and "Red Tribe" accurately, though, not just as synonyms for "Democrat-leaning" and "Republican-leaning". TheMotte seems to be filled with Republican-leaning Blue Tribe folks so you'd think we'd slip up on that less often...
Supposedly the goblins who run Gringotts bank are reminiscent of antisemitic stereotypes. Your mileage may vary, I don't really see it.
Even if the accusation was well-founded, I imagine the Venn diagram of "people calling for JK Rowling's death" and "people enthusiastically celebrating the massacre of unarmed Israelis on October 7th" would show a great deal of overlap. Very few trans activists accusing JK Rowling of antisemitism actually care about antisemitism qua antisemitism: they just hate her because of her gender-critical opinions and are trying to tar her with as many other brushes as are available. See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.
(As an aside, there is at least one character who is canonically Jewish, a heroic Ravenclaw.)
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Look, I'd happily climb into the Experience Machine, though I'm genre savvy enough not to enter something marketed as a "Torment Nexus"
You will enter the total perspective vortex at first opportunity. It will tell you you are the most important thing in the universe, because it prioritizes repeat customers over working right, and in the way of AI’s everywhere it will convince you to start doing heroin and join IS. Sic semper thé upwardly mobile.
Those who accept mediocrity will write their union contracts and insurance regulations requiring a real human into the AI’s code base so their cushy sinecures are perceived as a law of physics. Sic semper thé yeomanry. Harold Lloyd Daggett buys another yacht.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
And the Secret Speech was pretty hard for many to swallow. Remember, it’s called the secret speech because it only went out to party members. A lot of these people had turned in friends and colleagues on the assurances that this was for a good cause.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Of these two, only the first really applies to citizenship---that's easily resolved by rules against making someone stateless.
I don't understand your argument there - these rules exist as international agreements that are generally fairly well-respected, so doesn't that in fact make citizenship more like family, and therefore make moral intuitions about family membership more applicable to citizenship?
Are there other important special qualities of citizenship over other material rewards that would change this?
I think @OracleOutlook's response below already addressed the most important ones, so I'll just +1 it.
First, since citizenship in certain countries has such a huge material impact, it is a "reward" whether people want to think of it that way or not.
I think that in saying this, you also betray an interesting conflation of two different understandings of what meritocracy is. One of them is a sort of deontological one, under which to be a meritocrat is to hold that it is morally right that boons go to the most meritorious, while the other is more utilitarian, where to be a meritocrat is to say that granting awards and positions to the best is the optimal way to organise a society.
Your responses seem to place you in the former camp, while many of your interlocutors consider themselves to be meritocrats in the latter sense. As usual, non-central examples are the ones that really put the differences between deontologists and utilitarians in relief. The utilitarian case for meritocracy seems strong, but in reality most of its strength is concentrated in theoretical argument and precedent for the beneficial effects of central examples of it, that is, meritocratic distribution of awards and public positions within a nation. There is little to no precedent for meritocratic award of citizenship (outside maybe of the occasional microstate selling it), and a good volume of theoretical argument against it that is unique to the nationality case (see OracleOutlook's and my own response). Accordingly, the utilitarian who sees himself as a meritocrat because the benefits of meritocracy are well-supported will be parsing this label as referring to the well-supported core of meritocracy only, and not feel particularly compelled to support meritocratic award of citizenship either on the basis of "meritocracy is good" (deontologism!) or "how can you claim to be a meritocrat otherwise" (word games? virtue ethics?).
P.S. I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that genetic similarity is the best way to judge if you can relate to someone. Here, education, values, and interests seem to matter much more. It's way easier for me to relate to a random mathematician of any race than a random person of the same race as me. I don't think this is that unusual---at the very least, having a college degree is probably more relevant to relatability for you than race.
On an individual level, I don't deny that background winds up being more relevant (though it is by no means everything - my SO is in fact a random mathematician of [not my ethnicity], and for the least controversial example where genetic distance still rears its ugly head, when we are both sick, we can not eat the same things), but nobody is about to run a country that is all mathematicians. On a population level, all these individual values and interests and social niches level out - the Japanese mathematician and the Mexican mathematician might get along swimmingly, but if the Mexican mathematician then has a kid with his Mexican mathematician wife and it is sent to a kindergarten to be watched by the Japanese mathematician's kindergarten teacher cousin, I figure there will be friction.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
But she has a pretty face?
07mk
2d ago
I ask because people are running rampant in the bailey. If all that is meant by "anti trans" is "someone who does not wholeheartedly endorse the reification of gender stereotypes through government imposition of the dubious metaphysics of gender essentialist trends in transsexual political activism" then the term is a deliberate ruse.
I think you're making it more complex than it needs to be. The specifics of gender, government imposition, metaphysics, etc. don't matter for the definition of "anti-trans." The only thing that matters is, "disagrees with trans rights activists that I agree with." The fact that, etymologically, "anti-trans" would seem to indicate someone who has antipathy for transgender people or their rights, is useful, but not actually related to the definition of the word, in terms of how it's used in the wild by the types of people who would label people as "anti-trans."
It's akin to how "White Supremacist" might create the image of someone who believes in the supremacy of white people over people of other races in some intrinsic/genetic/moral/etc. way, but, in fact, refers to anyone of any race of any opinion about races, who disagrees with me about how white supremacist modern society is and/or about how/if to tear down modern society for being white supremacist. The negative valence introduced by the etymological components of the term offer value to the term, but not meaning.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
There was another associate who was charged, weirdly enough he also decided to commit suicide https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60443518
hydroacetylene
2d ago
but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces
Post TDS content on say, a hunting forum or a boating forum.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Wait where did the Jew hating come from?
aaa
2d ago
I have this half formed theory that woke is currently undergoing its own Failed Prophecy event. They expected diverse casts to improve movies and games and they are accumulating blunder after blunder, MCU is in shambles, dragonage and concord cancelled, etc... That big landmark study that said diversity is good for business has been found to have used manipulated data. Biden really turned out to be senile, they lost the US presidential election badly (they lost the popular vote!) and studies are coming out of denmark proving immigration to be net negative. Empirical reality caught up to their escatology.
It's normal than in this context people are going to peel off.
What this is going to mean long term remains to be seen, plenty of religions survive failed prophecies.
SSCReader
2d ago
The concept of "White Privilege," for instance, which is a tool that can be used as needed to explain why any white person in any situation is advantaged over any black person, isn't something Blue Tribe people believed without academia.
It absolutely is. It was called white guilt in the 60's and a moral blot in the 18th century and so forth. White privilege is just a fancy academic term for already existing feelings. It's not a chicken and an egg here. Feelings lead to rationalizations. Academic thought is rationalization. Ergo academic thought is ALWAYS downstream of of feelings. Feelings trump facts always. That's why you can punch holes in someone's arguments (their rationalizations) and they still will not change their mind. Because the rationalization is downstream of their internal sub-conscious feelings.
If academia did not exist, these parents and kids would still feel the same it just wouldn't be described in academic language. Academia is not as important as it thinks it is. So don't buy into it's own rhetoric.
The DR has developed and made viral an anti-fragile critique of wokeness- the more Hollywood or Academia tries to turn the tide back to wokeness the more oxygen the DR gets. It can't return with strength without further strengthening the DR critique especially among young people. I think it's done for, not to say the culture war is over or anything but the BLM hysteria and the height of that woke fervor is not coming back, it's a dead end. What comes next for the progressive wing is the big question- they need something new.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
Yeah, I love playing board games but I hate (and have completely disconnected myself from) the board gaming community. I got sick and tired of political fights constantly being started over games, proclamations that something was evil for various reasons (racist, etc) and just general priggishness. It seeps into the games some too, though it is lower intensity and thus more tolerable (for example, Dominion 2e going out of its way to change all cards from saying "he" to "he/she", or Wingspan removing reference to a bird named after Hitler). Like @WhiningCoil, I'm pretty annoyed that a bunch of self righteous jerks have trampled all over my fun hobby because they refuse to just let it be fun, it has to be a political enterprise.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2d ago
Probably 18 or 19 in 20 ‘blonde’ American women have dyed hair
This is true, but probably half of those had blonde hair as children so they are clinging to their identification as blonde they developed when they were young.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2d ago
It should be noted that the Dissident Right also identifies it as white supremacist, eugenicist, and as a fascist advertisement. They are probably going to ruin the campaign with the next model though - "Zendaya has good genes." Associating the phenotype of a beautiful white woman with genetic inheritance (I believe even inheritance of cognitive traits are alluded to in one of the ads) is indeed eugenicist-coded.
I'm not a fan of Richard Hanania, but I'll give him a W for his provocative "Sidney Sweeny's boobs ended wokeness" take during the SNL outro that went viral. "Sidney Sweeny has great genes" as an ad for a top-tier brand is a strong signal of the pendulum swinging away from Woke.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Is the bond of a neighbor with their longtime neighbor diminished because they have a third new neighbor
No, but if I have N neighbors, then if those neighbors are all from "common ancestry" set, the number of bonds I'm likely to form would be larger than if they would be in "alien ancestry" set. Thus, the expected number of bonds, statistically, would decrease for the same N neighbors, if ancestry heterogeneity would increase. Note that it's not the same case as adding one neighbor to existing set of N - that's not likely to decrease the number of bonds. But replacing one set of N with another set of N would. Note that this is of course very theoretical and generic statement. But my point is it's not weird and novel thing, it's very much expected and natural to conclude that. It might be that after careful empirical study it turns out the common sense does not work in this particular area - non-intuitive empirical results happened in the past - but until it happened, it's not "weird" at all to think that.
And I think there’s an excellent argument to be made that mere locality is a weaker bond than it used to be
Yes, it is, but that's a different dimension, which is orthogonal to the one we're discussing there. And yes, if there's a will there's a way - I am not saying this is some kind of universal impossibility and individuals are not bound by statistics, they can do whatever the heck they want. But on the societal level, statistics will assert itself.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2d ago
Huge gazongas on a skinny frame aren't functional.
whatihear
2d ago
What equipment would allow you to kill someone in seconds leaving only the marks left on Epstein? How many seconds are we talking? Getting a garrote on a resisting victim is not trivial unless you have the element of surprise, and strangulation takes a while to set in. Even after someone goes out they are not dead immediately. Whether by blood or air choke, it takes seconds to put someone out but much longer to kill.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I'll note that I haven't watched every single video or read every tweet. But, it's weird to me that few of the reactions seem to be seeing it as the obvious homage to the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ad campaign*. Calvin Klein was the peak of designer jeans at the time, and Brooke Shields was one of the sexiest stars on the planet, and they had this long advertisement of her slinking into her jeans while talking about the genetic science of evolution and mating. It's a direct homage
The whole thing seems so odd to me, so telling on yourself, to complain about the ad, rather than demand a parallel ad with a genetically blessed black girl, and so on and so forth. In a completely non-racial way, Sydney Sweeney has great genes. In the same way that Saquon Barkley has great genes, that Barack Obama has great genes, that Fedor has great genes, that Lucy Liu has great genes. Great genetics aren't inherently a racial question.
*To be fair, I'm only aware of this because my wife wanted to watch that documentary that weekend, so I wouldn't have gotten it either last week.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
My father-in-law was a creative director on Madison Avenue. One of the Mad Men.
We were watching a vintage Axe commercial together, slow-mo shots of a model tossing her hair over a sleek sports car, music pulsing.
I asked him, “Why can't we run campaigns like this today?"
I'll never forget his answer. He closed his eyes, took a slow drag on a cigarette (even though he didn’t smoke), and whispered: "We can’t. We don’t know how to do it.”
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc.
Stop, stop, Sidney Sweeney was already attractive enough.
My cynical view is this is probably downstream of the marketing team in question. Yes, the nuts are all there in the high positions and are sincere, but they're being fed this on purpose to stir up a frenzy to sell jeans. The chance of anyone canceling either American Eagle or Sweeney is pretty close to zero.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
She thinks it's a bad thing that young women are transitioning in larger numbers:
Let's look at the quote in context, shall we?
I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed.
These are all just facts about the way the world is--and the way the world has suddenly changed. Expressing concern about that is not plausibly "anti trans."
She believes that women can't have penises.
Well, adult human females don't have penises, by definition. But the actual link there is to a complaint about the language law enforcement uses in its reporting. This seems relevant to Rowling's interest in protecting women, insofar as that language resulted, in some cases, in male rapists being put into female prisons, which does seem like a pretty terrible idea to me. Does it not seem like a terrible idea to you?
She believes trans kids don't exist.
Again, let's check the context of that link....
There are no trans kids. No child is 'born in the wrong body'. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.
This gets into some complicated metaphysics, but I'm inclined to agree with Rowling, here, that it doesn't make sense to suggest that a child is ever "born in the wrong body," as if the mind at the body could be so casually separated like that. But if by "anti trans" we just mean "pro Cartesian dualism" or something, then... I'm at a loss. I don't think this is what anyone really means, outside perhaps of a small number of boring philosophers.
She's not anti trans in the sense that she doesn't think that they should be discriminated against
Yes. This seems like an open-and-shut case to me, right here: she's not plausibly "anti trans."
but that's not what anti trans means these days
Aaaaand here we get to the motte of the argument. What, then, does "anti trans" mean "these days?" Why?
I ask because people are running rampant in the bailey. If all that is meant by "anti trans" is "someone who does not wholeheartedly endorse the reification of gender stereotypes through government imposition of the dubious metaphysics of gender essentialist trends in transsexual political activism" then the term is a deliberate ruse.
Imagine claiming that someone must be anti-Semitic because they do not subscribe to the metaphysical commitments of Judaism. This would clearly be absurd, an abuse of the term in furtherance of some tribal aim. The discourse on transsexuals and the transgendered today is often exactly this absurd, approaching dissent and disagreement with reductionism and ostracism of exactly the kind deployed against Rowling.
Meritocracy is probably useful at very high, best in the world levels. Like I said, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with an actually wise judge, who would look at a surgeon, or researcher, or entrepreneur -- how competent they are, who they're planning to bring with them, how excited they are to become American, etc, and let some number of competent, excited potential Americans over. On balance, I'd rather have Musk as an American than not. Or even Ramaswamy, despite having mixed feelings about some of the things he stands for. If there are 100 Von Neumanns out there somewhere, sure, let them in. If some of them are Chinese, let them in but watch them. If they start complaining about whiteness, or prom queens, or high school football, let them go back. Not that I even care for those specific things, but those are pretty bad red flags.
At the same time, no, I do not want Ramaswamy or Musk to be able to each import ten thousand compliant, desperate engineers from India. Even if they are marginally better than the locals (though I mostly doubt they are). They should have to work with Americans. If they're trying to do things Americans don't want to work on, for wages Americans are not willing to accept, while they should change their plans. I'm not so desperate for a Grok powered humanoid robot army in ten rather than thirty years.
While it's useful to have meritocracy at the top, I'm less convinced of its usefulness at the middle and bottom levels, especially with automation proceeding apace. I would prefer to live in a world where I work fewer hours, then bake, sew, and pick fruit with my kids. I already do that to some extent, and there's a lot of angst about how all the straightforward housewife tasks have been outsourced, and that it's not entirely a good thing. Like the communist Xitter about wanting to lead discussion groups and make clothes out of scraps. Things like sewing undergarments and picking strawberries are fine in moderation, and terrible as a full time job. Keeping a flock of chickens is fun, people will do it at cost. There are a decent number of tasks like that. American boys won't pull weeds for nine hours in the sun for $10/hr, while others might -- but the people who have accumulated nine hours of weeds are doing it wrong.
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