domain:parrhesia.co
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Your opinion is just as valid as his. “I hate spending time with racists” is fine. So is “I think racists are shooting themselves in the foot.” Neither of those is booing the outgroup, and neither is building consensus. No one can take your preferences from you.
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
I know a boomer or two who has empty houses that he doesn't even rent out because he doesn't want to bother.
Pretty much everyone I know personally who has rented out in the past would never rent out again. They'd much rather pay taxes on an empty house than deal with the potential for another tenant from Hell, and they've all dealt with at least one. And these were not people renting out cheap shacks, either.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2d ago
I got sniped by your edit, RIP.
Sorry.
To respond, you seem to think of the “weak but strong” mindset as recognizing the enemy’s strength but thinking oneself still capable of taking them on.
I think it is most essentially revealed in that Tyson quote. It is unsurprising to me that uneducated Iron Mike, via practical training and competition at the highest levels, stumbled across the idea’s purest distillation. Throughout training, he is deeply concerned that his opponent is too strong for him. This leads him to train harder. He does retain a certain degree of confidence in his own strength, though, or else he wouldn’t be willing to face this guy’s challenge. At the moment of decision, he then switches over to the idea that his opponent is too weak, that he knows he has him. But he still has to respect his opponent’s strength, because Tyson demonstrably fought hard and tactically. He is just utterly confident that he is the strong one now.
It’s important to note he wasn’t always right! He was one of the greatest, but I think it’s fair to say that when he lost this “too weak and too strong” mentality, he also lost bouts he could have won.
As I see it, and as how most applications of the term I’ve seen look like, it’s a cognitive trap that does improve morale, but usually does so at the cost of epistemic clarity(e.g. “Republikkkans are literal fascists, we can surely defeat them with protests and slogans!)
I think this is just a side effect of, what I would Chudishly call “ivory tower thinking.” A sort of over-academicizing of thought. Despite this, the concept is extremely practically useful in real life.
The way it is tossed around by overeducated people who do not have any actual experience with low-information, high-friction contests is what leads to the cognitive trap version that I think you do correctly identify.
I think this is why colleges and universities used to be so big on amateur sports for as much of the student body as possible. I’m sure the logic would have been “It’s just good for the young men’s development,” but I think this is kind of practical learned knowledge is an element of what they meant by “good.”
daguerrean
2d ago
I think it makes sense to say it is invasive in the context of a white suburban middle-class family. Are white people an invasive species from the perspective of indians? Absolutely, but I don't have to care about that.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
While there are obvious political-correctness-related reasons for this, you do have to consider the 'Dog Bites Man' angle. I wouldn't want detective shows to reflect real crime statistics, because most of the homicides making up those statistics are boring and obvious. 'Who shot this low-rent ghetto drug dealer? Well flip my dickens, it was this other low-rent ghetto drug dealer.' Right. Not exactly gripping drama. When it's an intelligent, wealthy man hiding a dark secret using an intricate fake alibi - then you have good drama, precisely because it's unusual relative to the real world.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Anecdotal, but expressing anything anti-Trump is one of the easiest ways to get a bunch of downvotes, in my experience. The only real competition is showing sympathy for trans issues.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
It depends who they're being racist against.
Antisemites, you are normally free to call them Jewposters or accuse them of obsession with "da Joos."
If anyone tries anti white racism the tradition is to accuse them of trolling and bad faith, because surely they don't actually believe it.
East Asians are normally where we see a real fight, posters will land half and half on whether it's justified or not.
But blacks, south Asians, any Muslims, the expectation is that you calmly engage with the meat of their argument, such as it is.
Babies at 2 years old, if exposed only to people of one race, will respond to people from another race differently.
The fact that even a single mixed-race child doesn't fit in either category is revealing.
They have their own category. Words like "mulatto", "quadroon", "octoroon" exist.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
2d ago
I got sniped by your edit, RIP. To respond, you seem to think of the “weak but strong” mindset as recognizing the enemy’s strength but thinking oneself still capable of taking them on. This is, indeed, a healthy mindset to have towards one’s adversaries. As I tend to see it in practice though, it’s a cognitive trap that does improve morale, but usually does so at the cost of epistemic clarity(e.g. “Republikkkans are literal fascists, we can surely defeat them with protests and slogans!)
NullHypothesis
2d ago
That's actually a good point and yea you're right that anecdotes are pretty weak in the grand scheme of things.
I dont' think there's any disagreement that the percentage of people with college or higher tend to vote democrat especially in the last 20 years, but Turok's point was specifically that conservatism is increasingly becoming the party of the uneducated, yet if we look at the data for the last 3 election cycles the lead democrats had amongst people that voted with college or higher has actually been decreasing:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patterns-in-the-2024-election/
Percentage of people that voted for republican in 2016, 2020, and 2024 Post grads 29 > 32 > 33 Grads 41 > 42 > 46 Some college 49 > 50 > 54
It's increased for each group.
Granted, just because you voted for Trump doesn't mean you are conservative. Possibly other factors such as people not voting that could impact the numbers. I guess Turok is technically correct since High school or less also increased from 51 to 59.
Maybe you're right and mods are unfairly applying mod posts to Turok. Personally I don't think Turok should have been modded for that statement specifically but looking at Amadan's post it seems to come off as a mod post about his behavior across multiple posts and not specifically the post he made that got the modded comment.
Anyways it looks like the virulent post that modded and I see some mod comments as well so hey seems like you are making an impact.
Chess has limited transfer effects. It won't "develop the brain" very much except for getting better at chess/recognizing its patterns. I do like one thing about it though: It teaches the value of looking more than one step ahead when evaluating anything.
There's no career option in it, unless you're a very rare talent. Pretty much a dead end, as you say.
Chess players are usually kinda weird/nerdy. It takes a somewhat special person to spend hours every day on plugging away at it. Chicken or egg problem. Not sure how good the socializing aspect would be, I suspect not that good. I usually try to chat when I play online chess with mediocre results. But as deluxev2 says, it is pretty much respectable. Moreso than playing MMOs every day or something. Chess is "cleaner".
I guess I would encourage soccer just as much as chess? Decent hobby to spend a limited amount of time on though.
Paul Morphy said: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
deluxev2
2d ago
As far as hobbies go, I think chess is pretty well respected. Socially being known to be good at chess won't typecast her as the wrong type of person. Practically unlikely to go anywhere big as you note (but the same is true of soccer, reading, etc). It might be a good place for practicing how to learn e.g. how to find good sources of information, when to rely on mental shortcuts, how to intentionally memorize things.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2d ago
people can and do come to definitive conclusions about the world all the time
But this is different from truth. A definitive conclusion is just a definitive conclusion. People conclude wrongly all the time. The truth will be discovered in the contest.
Are the #resist libs correct in assuming themselves the underdogs?
We’ll find out, won’t we? But at every moment, it is best for me, Joe Chud Reactionary, to treat them as both strong (they control many commanding heights of information warfare and have copious quantities of the sinews of war, among other advantages), and weak (I must believe that they can in fact be defeated, implying that my side is stronger than them due to some combination of factors.)
They would benefit from doing the same thing, so I hope they don’t.
hanikrummihundursvin
2d ago
It's not just the presence of these events, it's the absence of others.
I remember being shocked as a kid when a bad guy in CSI: Miami turned out to be black. In almost every other case it was some sort of white person. And oh boy was it righteous and great when a white man tried to frame an innocent black man and got caught because of it. Gave an immense justice infused confirmation bias high to my progressive young self.
I expect a society that has a number of educators who endorse pedagogy that prioritizes niceties over competence will generate less competent individuals. Although, I'm not sure that Americans at large ever did value competence much.
As for the government, the USG didn't seem that smart during the Cold War either. There was the government that allowed an intelligence agency to believe a 1000 strong militia could successfully execute regime change in Cuba with an amphibious landing. Sure, the CIA was a silly place filled with wacky ideas and incompetence. The very serious people -- the ones who didn't think the Bay of Pigs would work -- decided it was all well and good. They could just as easily deny involvement with a carrier task force offshore.
The USG has been exposed as inept in counter-espionage for century. Does this plane look familiar, or maybe I meant this one? US intelligence agencies and Federal law enforcement were repeatedly compromised at high levels right up to the end of the Cold War. Despite the fact Soviet espionage efforts were proven beyond a doubt from get go the USG allowed, decided, or forgot to correct the public's perception. Instead, they were led to to believe Soviet-friendly memes like McCarthyism instead of the reality that the nation's adversaries posed serious threats. Then there was that time where the USG unwittingly decided America and the rest of the world should go hungry and foot the bill for Soviet breadlines. Woops! Didn't think about that one.
The USG belatedly rounds up spies from time to time, but its counter-espionage appears dismal as it ever was. It could be that general government incompetence can no longer be propped up by blessings, luck, or being too big to fail. Alternatively, China could be a far more capable adversary than the Soviets ever were. China is also not without its own incompetent fuck ups despite our general interest and the Iron Curtain Great Firewall. COVID, ahem.
Grant_us_eyes
2d ago
I would think the answer is fairly simple - someone who could pull such a solo operation off would need almost polymath-levels of knowledge and skill - be capable of writing and directing and sound management and storyboarding AND managing CGI and and and-
That isn't to say it doesn't happen - Astartes comes to mind as the Ur example of the crazy stuff a single person can pull off nowadays - but even then it takes places in a well-established sandbox of a creative universe.
funzodonzo
2d ago
A good roundup of rumours about Xi
Is there suppose to be a link here?
aardvark2
2d ago
We interbreed without real issue,
The modal point for this is about Europeans and West Africans who aren't very far apart. I'd be curious to know about how good most genetically distant populations, Mbuti pygmies and Australoids fare in that respect.
Btw we don't know really that there was reproductive barrier with Nearderthals, after all, we have some of their genes. Maybe it were cultural values against mixing.
and we don't really inhabit different ecological niches
neither did Neaderthals.
etc. but these are pretty minor overall.
They were significant enough that Europeans didn't go in Africa interior before they invented treatment from malaria and Austronesians could not establish structure where they kept Africans as slaves. Africans, on their own hand, could not just take technology they gained from others and use it to expand (like Europeans took gunpowder and compass invented by Chinese and used against them).
Something else, or are more specifics needed? The problems go on.
You can argue whether Missouri is a tributary of Mississippi or vice-versa or what is the actual border between Europe and Asia but it does not disprove geography.
How close are they?
If you have geniune interest in this question, you can look in literature estimates of genetic differences between some populations. There are algorithms like ADMIXTURE which take genetic information as input and do cluster analysis, and produce results pretty much like that a 19th century racist would have made.
hadn't even figured out evolution yet, and wouldn't for over a century, so they hardly were working from scientific principles to begin with!
This is irrelevant. Gunpowder, sails and compass were used without any scientific basis for them in centuries. People drew maps assuming flat Earth. etc etc. These pre-evolution racists might just assume that God or gods made differences between races.
the underlying categories will increasingly be revealed as fundamentally flawed.
This experiment has been already run in Brazil. No. On reverse, Brazilians are much less happy to brag about how they do not believe in races, than Americans.
daguerrean
2d ago
I thought we were forced to split from SSC so Scott's name was not sullied by association with us due to our most popular topic of discussion at the time, HBD. When TheMotte was formed HBD was kind of our meat and potatoes.
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
It's also an old pre-battle rallying speech technique. "Yes, they're strong, and it's okay to be afraid, but if you do your part and hang in there, we'll beat them because we're stronger".
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
> it’s a common narrative and, one step further, it’s a good and healthy narrative.
As for truth, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a fascinating concept, but people can and do come to definitive conclusions about the world all the time. Are the #resist libs correct in assuming themselves the underdogs?
I_Smell_Mendacious
2d ago
the government has other reasons to not reveal the files that are known to the higher-ups on both sides of the aisle
I kind of assume that if there is evidence of crimes by wealthy, powerful individuals at the presumed level of Epstein clientele, it won't see a DAs office. Instead, a 3 letter agency will have presented it to said individual with a "welcome to being our bitch" speech.
Righteous is irrelevant, though?
True is also irrelevant because your enemy is always a mystery. Lacking 100% knowledge of your enemy (because how could you ever have it?), it is impossible to know the truth of your enemy. So it’s best to plan with humility and act with confidence.
And I say good in the context of healthy, as in, likely to lead to a better and more predictively successful life
So, adaptive wins, as it always does.
Edit: Probably worth saying that I think this is also a good and righteous state of mind. When God told the Israelites he was giving them Canaan, they didn’t just waltz in and wait for God to vaporize their enemies. They sent in spies, scoped out the land, enjoyed a few odds-evening miracles, engaged in effective battle strategies, suffered and died to defeat (partially) enemies that were simultaneously too strong (to be defeated solely by the Israelites) and too weak (to resist God’s will).
And this is a fair way to say it.
If I am a Martian Elm on Neptune, I’m not concerned much about the plight of the Neptunian Elm. But I also don’t want the Venusian Elm to move in on my nice spot by the river, either, and start competing for water. Even if I am supremely confident I’ll win, there’s nothing I really gain out of the situation.
Besides not speciating into a Quokka Elm, I guess.
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