domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
I'm sure there are places on the Internet where (say) criticism of Donald Trump will get you banned--but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces. Whereas places you might naturally suspect to be politically neutral--hobby websites, for example!--are routinely very much not.
That's partly a consequence of the people who make up the groups. Board games nowadays are primarily played by younger, indoorsy people. That's generally going to be left-leaning people. If you started a club for gun enthusiasts, I doubt progressives are going to invade the space and push out the people who refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. And your gun club is probably going to have the occasional comment about Democrats that would start a fight should any Democrat be around to hear it.
But there tends to be a certain creeping nature to it. You're making a wargame forum and someone wants to show off their mechs in pride colors. You either ban it or leave it. Then if you ban it you're a political space but according to the left not a political space if you allow it. If you allow it someone is going to give a negative response that probably leads to an argument. The next time someone shows off their mechs and adds "trans rights are human rights" and we repeat.
To my understanding the Battletech forum rejected pride mechs. And one of the novel authors made some gay characters and that got rejected. Eventually Reddit intervened to replace the mods and the left quite literally took over the space.
Having Trump in office hasn't really changed this
No one can without trampling on the First Amendment. And they certainly aren't going to choose to stop being angry that Trump managed to win again.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
3d ago
The thing you need to keep in mind with BPD's is that none of it is real. There are only barely people in there. It's all for effect. They might as well be LLMs, making whatever mouth sounds (even with your dick in it) are required to get what they want from you. Be it attention, money or security.
Tangential, but one of my favorite things to witness is someone with a BPD ex posting something like this on reddit and having a swarm of BPD defenders materialize. Seems to happen without fail. "Um akshually it's a primitive defense mechanism and it's not their fault for behaving that way." I'm sure it's quite comforting to know it's a primitive psychological defense mechanism after being threatened by someone with a knife or had false allegations made against you or whatnot.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3d ago
I'm sorry. I'd like to call myself a pretty genre-savvy individual, and here I was ignoring the screeching violins while entering the bloodstained outhouse. I hope I've learned my lesson, and I hope others have learned from it, but as you can see, the average Mottizen takes "please don't do this" as a personal challenge. I know I did.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
My cynical view is this is probably downstream of the marketing team in question
Still, the fact that ad agents went from "...burgers?" to "let's make some fucking money!" says something about the current vibe.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3d ago
Now there, I do comprehend the horror. It's mostly within my comprehension, though you wouldn't want me to be the one coding a multimodal LLM from scratch.
It's left as an exercise to the reader whether knowing and understanding this makes my self-inflicted wound any better or worse. Overall, I'd say my instinctive technophilia has worked out really well for me. This is a rare exception, and the dents will, I hope, buff out.
She was Indian. As for her caste, I genuinely don't know, I'm both bad at telling and also don't particularly care. As far as I can tell, and I'm being genuine here, it was never a factor in our getting together or breaking up.
I hope it's not too late, but the Barbican is pretty cool.
Ah, I forgot about that place. I was meaning to visit, and do have a few days in hand. Thanks!
(I thought back, and she'd told she wasn't lower caste, because she'd specifically mentioned that her previous ex had been an AA candidate on account of his, which had been a reason for his insecurity)
Gaashk
3d ago
Yes, I think it's something like that.
A couple of years ago, when I was off birth control, I was driving alone and kept puking which is very rare for me, but didn't have anywhere to pull off. Not pleasant at all. Then later that day got an unusually heavy and abrupt period. Probably an early miscarriage.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
The thing that pisses me off the most about these Epstein conspiracy theories is that seemingly none of the people putting them forth have bothered to read the Inspector General's report of the investigation into his death.
I'm actually happy to concede this argument, everything that you said that flows from this.
The rest of your post just wanders back into the fever swamps where we go from Epstein being murdered by two compromised prison employees to there being an entire systemic effort to get rid of him involving practically everyone in the Department of Justice
...but this is insane. There's no going from-to, the theory as far as I'm aware is that Epstein was an intelligence honeypot. No, it would not involve practically everyone in the Justice Depertament.
I kinda wish you answered my Prigozhin analogy, because I think it distills the disagreement between our worldviews. Do you think the idea that Putin ordered his hit is a fever swamp? If not do you think these kind of hits are meticulously documented throughout the Russian bureaucracy?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
I mean, the HP world is pretty quaintly simple in a '50s-cartoon way, and in fact everything non-British (the French (of course), the Bulgarians, ...) in it is presented as the sort of droll stereotype you would expect from old monolingual British people who have never really left the country except perhaps to go and be drunken pests on Tenerife or the like. This does not really register as malicious, as much as it is just ignorant and provincial. I find myself drawn to the charitable(?) explanation that many of the activists themselves are rather ignorant and provincial, and quite self-conscious about it in the modern instagrammable world of jetsetting global citizen cultural trivia mongery, and it's well known that humans are particularly cruel towards displays of identity markers in others that they are desperate to shake off themselves (hence all the older children hating on childish things, Indians hating on "pajeets", people in a hierarchy hating on people one step down in the hierarchy).
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
3d ago
“I don’t know, I just want to make a film of it. I want to kill Jimmy Savile – he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about but aren’t allowed to talk about. I know some rumours,” he added.
07mk
3d ago
It absolutely is. [White privilege] 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.
This, too, is just false, though. White guilt, according to Wikipedia, "is a belief that white people bear a responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other ethnic groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples." This is a different concept from white privilege, which is the notion that modern society (due in large part to the legacy of overt racism) provides privileges to white people that are denied to people of other races, especially black people, in subtle, often unnoticed ways. It's a fancy academic term that builds on already existing feelings like "white guilt," but it's clearly something new that academia developed.
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.
From what I can tell, you appear to have a near dogmatic belief in this. As long as you believe that arguments can't change someone's mind, I don't see why you would want to argue anything ever, such as in this comment thread. I think real-world evidence clearly shows that people tend to manipulate their logic and perception in order to flatter their feelings, and that whatever logic and perception they come up with also cycles back to affect their feelings. That is, even if feelings trump facts always, in the most literal sense of the word, it doesn't change the fact that beliefs about facts change feelings, and academia is and has affected people's beliefs about the facts. Especially for people who were already predisposed, via their feelings, to trust certain facts.
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.
"Feel the same" is sufficiently vague an idea that either this statement is meaningless or wrong. Without the development of concepts like "white privilege," many modern Blue Tribe people would still feel "white guilt" or believe that white people ought to feel "white guilt." They would not feel that each and every interaction between any white person and any black person in any context is tinged with injustice due to the subtle, imperceptible patterns and biases that we practice due to growing up in a "white supremacist" society that causes us to inevitably treat black people worse than white people which thus justifies explicit, overt treatment of black people better than white people. Some might, but there's no reason to believe that everyone would just spontaneously develop these ideas on their own based on their pre-existing feelings, not without some high status institution like academia telling them that there's something Correct about these developments of ideas that build on their pre-existing feelings (in this case white guilt).
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
3d ago
Amazing news. I will pray for your marriage.
ZanarkandAbesFan
3d ago
it's ignored unless you're a US adversary.
Surely it's the other way around? If you're not meaningfully dependent on the US then the opinions of the educated elite there don't matter. Azerbaijan and Armenia would seem to be an example of this, as well as your example of the USSR.
US backed forces ethnically cleansed parts of Iraq and Syria.
I don't know enough about this to comment.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
3d ago
Stop, stop, Sidney Sweeney was already attractive enough.
Yeah, no kidding. "Busty blondes are fascism!" Well, if them's the rules, then I guess I know which side I'm joining.
UBS estimated that in 2022, 96.6% of Lesotho's population had a net worth of less than $10k.
https://rev01ution.red/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/global-wealth-databook-2023-ubs.pdf
In 2017, 89% of Lesotho's population lived on less than $10/day:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-than-10-int--per-day?tab=chart&country=LSO
Edit: Also, top n is less informative than top x%. The poorest person in Tuvalu is in the top 10,000 richest adults in the country. Top 100k in Ethiopia (pop 132 million)? Sure, probably richer than the average American. But Lesotho's economy just isn't productive enough or large enough to support 100k genuinely wealthy people.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
3d ago
Probably 18 or 19 in 20 ‘blonde’ American women have dyed hair, something especially true when you leave the handful of places that still have a lot of Anglos and Nordics (Upper Midwest, Utah).
It's always shocking when I go back home (to one of those places) to visit after being in my heavily Hispanic area and I'm once again surrounded by blondes.
Turkey is an ally and military/economic partner to Israel and has always been, regardless of what politicians on both sides like to say in public.
You know better than me, but that's... not the impression I've gotten. Hosting members of Hamas doesn't look like what a military partner to Israel would do. I've also seen reports suggesting Turkey is involved in financing Hamas activities (they're Israeli sources, though I don't know what they'd stand to gain by lying about it).
Also I live and pay taxes in a country that does send the direct/indirect aid.
You live in the US? I'm not aware of any other country that sends aid to Israel.
TowardsPanna
3d ago
Stormveil:
Totalitarianit
3d ago
Well put. The bias in "neutral" spaces is something I've unsuccessfully argued with the common redditor and open leftists about for years at this point. Trying to focus in on this issue by having your average left-of-center person acknowledge it in these discussions is virtually impossible. The most condensed and easily deliverable version of this argument that I've come across is to present to people the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. If they're the average dug-in redditor, they'll either claim the site itself is biased and unreliable or they'll pivot and say something like, "Left leaning views are just more inline with reality," and the discussion/argument is essentially over at that point. It's the same tactics over and over. They'll either grasp at something to discredit the source or demand you endlessly provide additional sources to corroborate it, or they'll implicitly admit to the bias and justify why it is this way, all while never actually admitting that it is.
It's like the scale of it is so large and ubiquitous that it's nearly impossible to recognize for some people, and for others it's The Celebration Parallax: That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
The thing that pisses me off the most about these Epstein conspiracy theories is that seemingly none of the people putting them forth have bothered to read the Inspector General's report of the investigation into his death. Hence, these people, yourself included, cite the "official explanation" without knowing what the official explanation even is, and go off half-cocked on theories of how Epstein could have been murdered that contradict the most basic facts of the case. To wit:
come on how hard is it to strange someone and wrap some cloth around him afterwards. Are you going to say that it would leave evidence of murder? The evidence was literally already examined by a pathologist claiming it's more indicative of murder, and summarily ignored.
The pathologist you're referring to is Dr. Michael Baden, who said specifically that Epstein suffered a hyoid bone fracture which is more indicative of manual strangulation, and that he'd never seen such a fracture occur in a case of suicide by hanging. Dr. Baden's personal experience aside, it is well-documented in the medical literature that such a fracture indeed does occur in a minority of hangings, particularly among older people. In any event, Dr. Baden didn't bother to address any of the other findings from the autopsy that indicate a hanging: The fractures in the other neck bones, the ligature pattern, the petechial hemorrhage, the plethora, the lack of lung muscle hemorrhage, and the lack of defensive wounds. None of these were consistent with manual strangulation.
Faking a hanging so that it fools a medical examiner isn't simply a matter of strangling the guy and wrapping a cloth around his neck afterwards. You have cause a number of specific injuries while not causing a number of other specific injuries, some of which won't manifest until time of autopsy. And, as far as Epstein is concerned, the murder would have had to accomplish this without Epstein fighting back at all.
The rest of your post just wanders back into the fever swamps where we go from Epstein being murdered by two compromised prison employees to there being an entire systemic effort to get rid of him involving practically everyone in the Department of Justice, plus various state and local officials as well, at which point I don't know what to tell you. Actually, I do know what to tell you: If you want to go on with this, read the report. The whole 120 pages. Tell me what you think is accurate and what information you had that the IG's office didn't bother considering. Then we at least have a basis for conversation.
The goblins are allegedly Jewish caricatures. A lot of the bits of evidence that are brought up - like a Star of David on the floor of Gringotts - are either coincidences or issues caused by the adaptation (the location they were filming in had them already).
On the other hand, they do run the banks, hounded at least one person in canon over debts and do have a different understanding of property (anything wrought by goblins is seen as only leased for the lifetime of the wizard who bought it which...you can see how that could lead to misunderstandings) that leads to at least one goblin betraying the team for treasure.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3d ago
Indeed. I've been a proud Luddite since GPS. I look up directions, draw a map by hand if I have to, and commit it to memory. Although to my shame, I will use GPS for places I'm unlikely to ever return to on long road trips. LLMs inspire an innate disgust in me it's difficult to describe. Perhaps reading Dune as a child, and it's proscriptions against making a machine in the likeness of a human mind hit harder than it was meant to.
Honestly I've never been a fan of ones too large to look believable --- there's a reasonable range that adjusts with frame size.
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