domain:greyenlightenment.com
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3hr ago
I'm not a mod and I don't speak for them, I only speak for myself and my own opinions.
There obviously is an anti-woke consensus here, I don't see what point there is in denying that. That doesn't mean that wokes aren't welcome, it simply means they're not in the majority. The rules about neutrality and consensus building made more sense in the early days when this was all new and the ideological split was closer to even, but now we've gotten to the point where the regulars have been here for 10 years, and they all know each other's positions fairly well. Nitpicking someone about consensus building this late in the game seems a bit silly. As though every post in a 10+ year dialogue has to assume that we're starting from a totally clean blank slate.
I think it's good to still have the rule about consensus building on the books to deal with particularly obnoxious violations (like, saying "obviously we all know that [woke position] is wrong..."), but I don't think it should be enforced that stringently.
Fair point. I do, however, feel reasonably confident that even if we devoted 100% of a country's budget to preventing e.g. premature violent deaths of children in that country, we wouldn't be successful and the side effects unrelated to premature violent deaths of children would be disastrous.
Your smallpox example reminds me of an old post by Scott:
See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”
Eliminating a deadly microorganism is a piece of piss. Eliminating the fact that people will sometimes tell other people things that they know to be untrue, and be believed? I don't even know where you'd begin.
faceh
3hr ago
Even if that take is outdated, liking anime and video games isn't something that women are going to find attractive.
As stated by @MathWizard up there, if you want someone with similar interests to you, you gotta put it out there somehow.
And as per usual, if you're hot, you could straight up say you're into lolicon and hentai and you'd still get likes.
So are you optimizing for hookups, or something resembling a soulmate?
In the grand scheme, its probably not changing your odds much in aggregate, but somewhat increasing the chances of finding someone who likes what you like.
Crowstep
3hr ago
All our modelling showed that doing what people said they wanted, would lose us votes
How ironic that taking this belief to its logical conclusion with the Boriswave will probably be the thing that kills off the party entirely.
Although I'm still pretty skeptical that it was clearheaded pragmatism that made the party govern left and talk right on immigration. David Cameron could have reduced non-EU immigration to literally zero and still have hundreds of thousands of EU workers coming in every year to flood the labour market. Instead he decided that not only did we need Polish plumbers, we also apparently needed inbred Pakistanis and violent Africans. He could have reduced the worst categories of immigration and all that would have happened was a reduced welfare and policing bill. But he didn't, because he found doing so distasteful.
Mike Jones' piece in the Critic is more convincing to me. The (parliamentary) party never wanted or intended to reduce immigration. They are primarily elites who want to impress other elites. They don't actually believe that massive third world immigration is damaging to the country.
FtttG
3hr ago
shoplifting isn't theft, insurance covers it, the big stores expect it and price it in, and besides we're striking back against the big fatcats of capitalism
By definition, shoplifting isn't fraud, and hence isn't relevant to this debate.
FtttG
3hr ago
I think you really aren't understanding the argument I'm making. I'm not saying "we need a certain amount of fraud to happen, otherwise there would be economic stagnation"; I'm saying "a certain amount of fraud is unavoidable, and the price we pay for a functioning economy". Claiming that the latter is equivalent to the former, or that the latter is an encouragement to defraud people, seems to me tantamount to saying "a small number of car accidents every year is an unavoidable byproduct of widespread car ownership" or "carbon emissions are an unavoidable byproduct of an electrified society". No one would say that by acknowledging that you can't create electricity without producing carbon dioxide, you are therefore encouraging the production of additional carbon dioxide - likewise with the argument I'm making.
Rov_Scam
3hr ago
Even if that take is outdated, liking anime and video games isn't something that women are going to find attractive. It's neutral at best, and you don't want to waste your limited real estate conveying information that isn't going to move the needle in your favor. A lot of guys make profiles that seem tailored toward impressing other guys, but girls do the same thing as well. I guess the female equivalent would be mentioning that they like reality TV. What guy is going to find a girl more attractive after learning that she's really into Real Housewives? It isn't something most guys are going to look forward to watching together, it doesn't make her seem more interesting, and it may give the impression that she's kind of stupid.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
Hold up.
For years, on this very forum (well, fine, you have to come buck to the /r/SSC days), whenever someone pointed out the advances of the SJ movement, the response was something to the effect of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses / Tumblr", or alternatively there'd be an attempt to "steelman" the movement to make it look more reasonable than it actually is ("defund the police doesn't really mean defund the police"), something later dubbed "sanewashing" by other elements of the left.
His use of neutral language is not covering up any switch, it's taking what progressives who participated in Culture War commentary at face value, i.e. assuming their good faith. We can dispense with that assumption, but I'm not sure you'd be happy with that either.
Rov_Scam
3hr ago
It ultimately comes down to how wide a net you're willing to case. Yes, if you're looking for someone who shares interests that 99% of women find unattractive (but not so unattractive as to be dealbreakers), and you aren't willing to date someone who doesn't share these interests, then just put it out there as a filter. If, however, like most people, you don't expect the person you're dating to like 100% of everything you like, then it's not worth scaring anyone off. Remember, these women have options, and the last thing you want to do is give them a reason to hit the dump button before making an attempt to get to know you. I've learned from my own habits that it doesn't take much to set this off. Not that it's necessarily anything negative, but that the profile provides so little information that I wouldn't even know where to start. You have to give me something to work with if you want me to start a conversation with you. If 99% of women aren't into anime or video games, and it isn't something that otherwise makes you look attractive, then even if it's ultimately neutral it's not doing much. And beyond the truly negative stereotypes, it signals that you're the kind of guy who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Contrarily, high social trust societies are notorious for calling for scams a lot- Mormons in particular.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Religious leaders pushed back against LGBT in the Catholic and evangelical cases; mainline Protestants no.
Of course not - you'd assume they were a scam artist trying to rip you off. The only place someone would take them up on the offer is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which in turn means the only place a scam artist would attempt it is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy: in other words, fraud is impossible in a low-trust society.
This is completely false. It doesn't surprise me, as westerners don't really grok low-trust societies, even the ones that acknowledge their existence (because hilariously there's quite a few who think doing so is racist).
What you're saying is the equivalent of believing that a predator can only successfully hunt if you transfer him it to Quokka Island. Quokka Island will appear to one as an all-you-can-eat buffet, but It's obvious predators survive and thrive quite well in environments where the prey is adapted to it's existence, it's just that they're subject to "you win some, you lose some" dynamics. In the case of scams, all it means is that they have to put more effort into appearances of legitimacy. To someone from a low-trust society, a high-trust one does not appear as "the only place where fraud is possible", it appears as one where the population hasn't bothered to put up the most basic defenses.
None of this even seems counterintuitive to me, it just seems like basic economics.
The part that's counter-intuitive, and perhaps deceptive, is where you/he claims that tolerating fraud is the price for a high-trust society. No amount of tolerance will turn a low-trust society into a high-trust one. What needs to happen is the purging scammers, once that's done, people lower their guard naturally. They don't "tolerate" fraud, it just happens so rarely, it hardly ever enters their thoughts.
TitaniumButterfly
4hr ago
I don't realistically have the time to get to it in the foreseeable future anyway but thanks.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
I get the strong impression this is not a movie made for black people, it's a movie made for white people who like to think about racism and all the rest of that stuff. Which is fair enough, I think specifically black movies for a black audience would be way different and have much less broad appeal, which means they'd do poorly at the box office (I think Moonlight, for instance, was absolutely a 'black movie made for white liberals').
The vampire element could be fascinating if done well; vampirism as a metaphor for conversion is one of the readings on the topic. Here comes an outside entity totally different to everything you know that takes over your life and changes you completely by force and without your will, and if you are willing that is in fact even worse. Applying that to "white vampires against black descendants of slaves" is going to dig up a lot of interpretation.
But I don't know if they do that, or if the movie can handle that. I haven't seen it, I'm only going by reviews, and it does seem to be a bit too pick'n'mix about the Oppressed Minorities on one side and the - well, the who? The KKK? The vampires? - on the other side. The Chinese couple and Choctaw vampire hunters? That's taking the BIPOC acronym a little too literally.
And why Irish? I don't know enough about this Remmick to know what flavour of Irish he is meant to be (the Scots-Irish of the South, who I presume would be the whites living beside and racist to the black population? Southern Irish as per "the rocky road to Dublin"? Protestant? Catholic? Neither?) Something odd going on there. Why Irish, as against the Anglo-philic culture of the plantation owners? Or is it meant to be a subtle reference to "Gone With the Wind" (the O'Haras and "Tara" being southern Irish by descent) - a sort of 'this is how the glamorous figures in Southern-set movies really are' notion?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4hr ago
Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement.
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement.
They ARE the movement bruh.
This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
People have been asking this for at least a century. "The Nazis listened to Wagner and read Goethe and they still plunged the entire planet into total war, how is that possible?"
Philosophy in the Socratic tradition (and if we can speak of a "western tradition" at all, as distinct from other traditions, then we must start with Socrates) never promised wisdom. It promised a love of wisdom; it promised a critique of those who pretend to wisdom. But wisdom itself is for the gods alone. So it is unsurprising when mortals do things that are unwise.
The main “public critics” of the period have little in common except that they were passionate and somewhat neurotic men.
You have to be something of a weirdo to violate social consensus as publicly and flagrantly as Peterson did.
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make.
Because the experts wanted it to happen, they couldn't perceive it as a threat if it wasn't threatening to them in the first place.
PokerPirate
4hr ago
Flagged as consensus building.
What you call "optimal cultural leadership" is really just "how to make my outgroup not get in power". And your use of neutral language to cover this switch up is bad rhetoric.
A very large percentage of Americans still find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing, including many of the academics/religious leaders/politicians you are critiquing for not being anti-social justice craze from early on. It's fine for you to be anti-social justice craze. But you shouldn't be assuming that everyone else is or that it is the norm around here.
FWIW, I would be very interested in reading an ideologically neutral account of the failures of conservative leadership to account for the rise of wokism, and what lessons can be learned in order to better spread/suppress future ideologies.
fmaa
4hr ago
Otoh it turned out that the optimal level of smallpox was in fact 0. Don't confuse "eliminating this bad thing isn't worth infinite resources" with "eliminating this bad thing requires infinite resources".
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
4hr ago
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
My belief, based on my recollections of the time, is that "leading experts" and "leading academics" were the originators of the social justice memeplex, and therefore wouldn't make arguments against it even if they could conceive of them. In support of this, the common dismissal at the time of "it's just college students spending too much time on tumblr" highlights that this memeplex's breeding ground was immediately downstream of leading academics. Or perhaps more accurately, academia was the superfund site and Tumblr was the groundwater.
Sorry if the metaphor is too dramatic, I'm feeling bitter.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4hr ago
One in a thousand find a gamer girl. But at the cost quite often of having hundreds of women see anime and gaming in the bio and deciding to not engage.
This is the point. It's not that for each random woman who sees your profile you roll a random die and there's a 99% chance you lose her interest. It's that for each woman when she was born and grew up life rolled a random die and there's a 99% chance that she became the kind of person who would lose interest in a man who likes anime and video games. If you want to date a woman who hates anime and videogames then I suppose you might consider scaring her off to be a bad thing, but if you want to find that gamer girl then the normie woman is an obstacle. A waste of your time. Instead of spending hours, days, years of your life sending messages and spending time with women who would have been scared off by videogames and anime but you kept by playing it cool, you could instead scare them all off and then the only people left are the gamer girls.
You don't have time to date 1000 women. If you're some super hot gigachad I suppose you could if you go on a brand new date every day for three years without breaks or repeats. But realistically, that's way too many. But if you scare 99% of them off (and not randomly, you're scaring the worst 99% off) you DO have time to message and date the remaining 10 until you find the perfect one in a thousand.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
which implicitly means that there is some amount of premature violent death of children we are collectively willing to tolerate as the price of doing business
I hope it is with you in your social circle as with the anarchist in "The Man Who Was Thursday" 😁
"I preached blood and murder to those women day and night, and—by God!—they would let me wheel their perambulators.”
Though it would be a unique selling point for a creche or daycare: "Some small number of premature violent death may occur on these premises, kindly remember that, should it happen to your children, you are helping preserve our liberties".
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
Sure, I think of myself as a fairly honest person. But in my life I have shoplifted, perhaps three or four times, by accident or out of pure cussedness. Certainly if the owners of the store maintain a policy to trust people similarly situated to me, they will suffer additional losses over time compared to what they would if they sought a "zero shoplifting" policy. But they will probably lose more business than it's worth.
We aren't arguing that shoplifting isn't bad. We're arguing that some risk of shoplifting is better than no risk of shoplifting, because in order to achieve zero shoplifting, the convenience store must undermine it's own raison d'etre: convenience. Hence the optimal amount of shoplifting for a convenience store isn't zero. More shoplifting isn't better than less shoplifting, but as the amount asymptotically approaches zero there's a point where the security procedures become too much, where the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
We see this all around us. Self checkout leads to massively increased losses, but not enough to balance avoiding paying a cashier. EZ Pass and toll by plate on highways leads to significant lost revenue compared to toll booths, but reduced costs and increased traffic flow make it worth it. If I put on a pink polo shirt and a white baseball cap with a finance logo on it and throw my golf clubs in my truck and drive to a nice country club and walk out and start hitting balls on the range, no one will stop me, because staff can't constantly be harassing members and it's not worth the risk.
The optimal point isn't zero.
Is there evidence that this is not because US-based social media actively suppresses pro-Palestinian content?
Admittedly I don’t think anyone has done that study, but honestly I find it very hard to believe. Certainly if they are they’re doing a pretty terrible job: pro-Palestine content dominates pro-Israel content on all US social media, as far as I know.
Anyway, I was doing some quick searching and I believe this is the original study I was remembering: https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-The-CCPs-Digital-Charm-Offensive.pdf
I think there was at least one other study done as well, but I couldn’t find it in my cursory Google search. I have an admittedly somewhat vague memory of more graphs comparing the different social media sites in terms of non-China-related political content as well that I didn’t see in this particular Rutgers study, which is entirely China-focused. I also recall reading about this topic in both the mainstream news (likely NYT but I don’t remember) and a fairly detailed substack post, possibly by Jonathan Haidt? If you want I can try harder to find it again later (I’m procrastinating at work at the moment by writing this post so my time is limited) or you can look for yourself. In my opinion the study is convincing in its main point that the TikTok algorithm emphasizes pro-Chinese and de-emphasizes anti-Chinese political content. It is not a blunt promotion/suppression, just a light-touch thumb-on-the-scale approach, but I think it shows willingness to interfere in Chinese-owned US-facing media even in the relatively peaceable geopolitical environment of today.
Honestly, though, the concern of whether the CCP is currently manipulating the algorithm is, in my view, very much secondary to the plain fact that they are capable of mandating such manipulation through their leverage over the company. I don’t think that some sort of naive free market principles (which, as far as I can see, are really the only counterargument to the ban/forced sale) justify exposing our media environment to that kind of risk.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
This is the result of the much-discussed "march through the institutions". By the time social justice began to come out in the open, the institutions -- even religious ones -- had largely already been taken over by progressives.
None of that proves "the call is coming from inside the house", unless you're one of the more advanced racists.
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