domain:academic.oup.com
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.
07mk
2d ago
We wouldn't normally call that academia though. And my experience right now is that these kids are getting their ideas from their parents and from Tik-Tok. So they come in already having opinions about Palestine for example. They weren't taught that in elementary school.
This is exactly what the flow of ideas from academia to to students would look like; parents and TikTok get these ideas from academia, whether it's indirectly through their peers or other TikTokers, or directly through their own experience in academia.
But again you have it reversed. Critical theory is a creation of the Blue Tribe, it didn't create the Blue Tribe. You're again just saying Blue Tribe places do Blue Tribe things. Well yes, of course they do. If they didn't they wouldn't be Blue Tribe! All the concept of critical theory does is putting an academic skin on things Blue Tribe people already believed. They believed it, then they taught it in an academic way, but the Blue Tribe already HAD those beliefs.
This is simply false, though. 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. They might have a general sense of dissatisfaction at what they perceive as society-wide injustice due to how they believe that white people are treated better than black people in society, and they might go into academia in order to research and develop this dissatisfaction into grand theories about White Supremacy and Colonialism and such. You can describe it as putting an "academic skin" over things they already believed, but that'd only make sense if we took the "skin" metaphor pretty far, with how complex and active an organ the skin is on our bodies (not just a bunch of stickers to put on your car or some textures to swap on a character model, as "skin" means in other contexts).
Academia is downstream not upstream in other words. Academics frequently overestimate their own importance. Don't fall for it.
I mean, it's both downstream and upstream. No academic endeavor happens on an island free of external influences, and the academic endeavors behind "wokeness" has clearly had extreme impact on the culture in America/the West, including the very Blue Tribe culture that had incredible input on that academia itself. That's why the chicken-and-the-egg metaphor is apt here. It's clearly both, and trying to claim that one is the actual upstream source will just lead to fallacy.
I see your point. In my defense, when I use a word like "normie", I am certainly not thinking of board game fans or hardcore Harry Potter enthusiasts. Many moons ago I was part of a friend group with whom I'd meet up and play board and TTRPG games, a group which included (pseudonyms obviously):
- Robert, a trans man
- Robert's boyfriend Jesse, a cis man who seems to exclusively date trans men (after he and Robert broke up, he explored the world of polyamory for awhile, becoming embroiled in multiple concurrent relationships with trans men or non-binary women; eventually he settled down into a monogamous relationship with one of the former, whom he married)
- Oliver, a male person who claimed to be a trans woman (despite going by his birth name, not medically transitioning and making zero effort to pass)
- Celia, a bisexual woman
- Norbert, a bisexual man
Most of whom were, if not Extremely, then certainly Very Online. If such a composition is in any way representative of the broader board game/TTRPG enthusiast community, at a glance we can see they are a highly selected subculture with values and expectations very different from the mainstream - "bisexual trans person who owns a twelve-sided die and knows what Chaotic Neutral means" is not my idea of a "normie". I've no doubt that wokeness is still ascendant therein and that one could face cancellation for neglecting to mouth woke platitudes in the board gaming community (likewise in video game design, YA literature, knitting circles etc.). But there was a period in the 2010s (peaking in summer 2020) where it really looked like the social rules governing those intensely woke subcultures had a good chance of becoming the social rules governing every Anglophone community (explicitly conservative subcultures like churches and gun clubs excepted). And based on the reaction to this ad, I do think that specific cultural moment has decisively passed. Mainstream spaces are no longer obligatorily woke; caveat emptor for subcultures, many of which are just as woke as ever (if not more so, in light of evaporative cooling).
In the Anglophone world, the "racial reckoning" of 2020 was so widespread and omnipresent that even numerous people who had been thitherto wholly ignorant of politics (esp. identity politics) got swept up in it: everyone was expected to post black squares on Instagram. I feel confident that a plurality of Americans would know who George Floyd is and what he's "famous" for; even though I'd say a plurality of Americans would know what Harry Potter is, I don't know if JK Rowling herself would have quite that level of name recognition, and even of those people who do know who she is, I assume she's known as the creator of Harry Potter first and for her political opinions a distant second, if at all. In point of fact, we already sort of knew that the "JK Rowling is a bigoted genocidal TERF, don't offer her any financial support" thing didn't really have teeth, outside of TRA and nerd circles: despite an attempted boycott mentioned prominently in its Wikipedia lede (which also goes out of its way to smear Rowling as an antisemite), Hogwarts Legacy was the best-selling video game of 2023 and has grossed over $1 billion in revenue. I very much doubt that this is a "knowingly buying Hogwarts Legacy to own the libs" situation: I suspect that the overwhelmingly majority of people who bought a copy of the game were wholly unaware that any attempted boycott even existed. If they had been told that there had been an attempted boycotting, I imagine a significant number would have assumed that it had been organised by the religious right, in protest of the Harry Potter franchise promoting witchcraft - they literally aren't aware of the "JK Rowling is a TERF" meme. When I talk about "normies", that's who I'm talking about.
pigeonburger
2d ago
Very rarely do I have to take a pause from reading something because it elicited a visceral reaction. As soon as I realized where you were going with this, I had to take a little break because my brain was just filled with "Oh no, oh hell no. Don't do it bro!"
faceh
2d ago
There was actually a really early portent of this in the Carl's Jr. Super Bowl Ad this year, clearly there's marketing departments exploring the 'sexy' style of advertising again.
pigeonburger
2d ago
With hindsight it looks easy, but to people who survived a highly repressive era, a sudden repudiation of that era would have looked like a trap to catch more dissidents.
At least at my school, the econ majors absolutely would know calculus, and more. My econ friends went well beyond it: analysis, measure theory, stochastic calculus, etc. More mathematically rigorous than the average engineering or science major.
Though I suspect there's really two econ majors, one that's kind of a business for poets version and one that's intended to prepare you for a rigorous econ PhD program.
TeknOShEeP
2d ago
Quick glance at their stock price shows a roughly 15% jump since the ad campaign started in stark contrast to what has otherwise been a crappy year for them, so I'm fairly certain their boardroom is drooling over every hit piece.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2d ago
Rowling is very much not anti-trans. She's totally down with people dressing, speaking, and acting however they want, to a degree that no sex or gender conservative would ever approve.
That's not the point, right? She thinks it's a bad thing that young women are transitioning in larger numbers:
I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition
She believes that women can't have penises. She believes trans kids don't exist. She's not anti trans in the sense that she doesn't think that they should be discriminated against, whatever that means, but that's not what anti trans means these days.
TeknOShEeP
2d ago
Mmm, going to have to disagree. The P320 has a fairly light trigger pull compared to most DA striker fired guns, 1mm of travel is maybe 2 lbs at most? Probably less.
And no, partially engaging the sear then jostling the gun absolutely should not result in a discharge, thats the whole point behind drop and firing pin safeties. Except as newer videos reveal, the P320s firing pin safety does not actually block the firing pin, and the drop safety is easily defeated by any slide canting, which occurs even under normal trigger pulls.
It appears to be a uniquely terrible design, even compared to other Sig pistols with teething issues, and a possible exception to the "guns dont kill people, people kill people" rule.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
2d ago
Exactly. There's one for the Ford Capri I can't forget about.
Post TDS content on say, a hunting forum or a boating forum.
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