culture war roundup
There's a certain degree of wokeness to all modern media of which must be tolerated
It must? Why?
Not only do you have all of old media to consume, not only do you have anime and k-drama providing modern alternatives, but you always have the option to drop out and walk away, as the Amish do.
YE_GUILTY
1yr ago
What you say about storytelling is true: to optimize for drama and thrills and edge-of-your-seat uncertainty, you're going to want to write an underdog story. Ooh, how's our hero going to get out of this one? You've only got the faintest clue, and you're watching with breath absolutely bated to see if you've guessed correctly or not.
The problem is that the Underdog Story may not be the best lens through which to view the world. Or at the very least, it shouldn't be the only lens through which to view the world.
The Underdog Story has its upsides in terms of life lessons, like self-reliance in the face of tough challenges, proactivity about doing the right thing, and so forth.
But it also has its downsides, and one of the most important is the plot-driven necessity that anybody powerful be somewhere between evil and useless, so never good. A heroic overdog would be boring, after all: no uncertainty about how he'll get out of this one.
But what happens when we marinate our minds in this narrative structure, over and over and over again, in a relentlessly-optimized fiction market? Maybe find ourselves inexorably associating "power" with "evil" and "weakness" with "good?" "The status quo" with "the evil empire" and "anything right and decent" with "us chosen-one rebels?"
Perhaps we'd end up thinking that way: living out a perpetual rebellion, as the only stories that matter are about the conquest, about supplanting the powerful. What happens after - the actual ruling, the use of that hard-won power? Well, feh, that's always just skipped over in the epilogue. "And they lived happily ever after." Once we win, there'll be utopia! Who cares about the details? They never need to in the stories.
So somebody with power who is not presiding over a utopia needs to be torn down. Every generation sends up its heroes to tear down the last generation's and be torn down by the next generation's in turn. Nice and dramatic: how's it going to go this time? And maybe there really is improvement ratcheting upward each cycle - either way, every generation can always imagine it's the chosen one that will really fix everything this time, and can always explain away their failures once they're apparently on top by appealing to some unseen ever-more-powerful foe that must be holding them back.
Not good for stability, though. No telling what hard-won good will end up as collateral damage in any given revolution. Our Heroes' victories don't tend to last long if there are sequels.
The tagline to 1978's "Superman" was "you'll believe a man can fly." With special effects these days, that's trivial; much more impressive would be to show us how someone can be both that strong and that good. Such a character's Hero's Journey may be over, but that just means that the really important part has begun.
Tougher to sell tickets to that, though, so maybe we're stuck this way.
(Hello, all! I've lurked since before there was a Culture War Roundup thread but never posted at all. Thought I would try to help get the new site running, but I don't expect my courage to last.)
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
At least for now, we're stickin' with the same behavior we had before; Culture War posts go in the roundup thread, non-culture-war posts can go elsewhere.
I think there's actually good reasons to keep this format and ugh ask me some other time I have been doing way too much typing today. But seriously, ask me if you're interested.
aqouta
1yr ago
Hello, all! I've lurked since before there was a Culture War Roundup thread but never posted at all. Thought I would try to help get the new site running, but I don't expect my courage to last.
You've made a very good comment and I encourage you to not let courage be the barrier to your further posting. Those of us making smaller, more mundane, comments can often be the magic catalyst that sparks off truly great comments and discussions. You will at the very worst be forgotten.
Okay. I had a really good username that exceeds 25 characters. But this will do.
Also thanks setting this up, coming from a long time pre-Motte culture war roundup poster.
Edit: 2 posts in an someone's downvoting everything. Both of us are at zero. Please consider abandoning reddit voting. Having an option to downvote at all is too much for most.
Edit 2: Someone sent me the reddit suicide report message. From 'System', so they are abusing baked in features. Really off to a dramatic start.
gattsuru
1yr ago
For Anti-Evil Operations specifically, this should link to the most recent post removed by AEO that they've heavily references as a WTF moment, as at best a violation of the use-mention distinction and at worst actively counterproductive. bsbbtnh's post here is not the sort of thing I'd want to turn the forum into a long-lasting debate on, but in addition to the post's removal claims to have received a week-long suspensions.
Unfortunately, most older AEO activities look like the underlying post have fallen off the API that camas uses for indexing, or the full account was hit in ways that make the posts show up as deleted for camas purposes. The first four AEO actions were in response to a thread about a mass-shooter (I think the Dayton Ohio mass shooter?), which were significantly less controversial at the time, and seem to be in the first category. The oft-reference straight-of-wikipedia 'age of consent' list seems to be in the latter category.
Then there's the incredibly bad blocking implementation, that two years in Reddit still hadn't actually formalized those new 'advocacy of violence' rules that were supposed to be out in two weeks, that the mods were getting admin mails asking if they had any questions and then never responding, so on.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
@ZorbaTHut explained it (which is to say, there really isn't much more explanation than what we've said before).
My personal opinion is that we probably weren't in as much imminent danger of being banned as many people (including Zorba) believe, but it was inevitable that we would be banned someday. I always watched /r/CultureWarRoundup as a kind of canary, because despite their much smaller footprint, I honestly thought they'd get banned before we would. Their witches are pretty open, and SneerClub definitely knows about them, which means presumably they must get reported fairly frequently.
But I do have two things to contribute which I never would have posted on reddit. First of all, I will confirm that it was indeed Chtorrr who visited us and dropped the "friendly notice" in our mod channel.
And that being said, a few months back there was a "Mod Summit" (via Zoom) to which all subreddit mods were invited. I was the only motte mod who I guess was bored enough to zoom in (I even sent them questions! None of which made it to the queue that got answered, naturally). As you might expect, almost all the talks were about things like "How to build safe communities" and "How to self-care and preserve your mental health while having to deal with all these terrible people," etc.
The most valuable thing I got out of it were screenshots.
Without further comment: https://imgur.com/a/4oIS59D
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
You showed up here saying that you got banned from the old site, and I think it's becoming clear why.
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Also known as the "hot take" rule.
If you're saying something that's deeply out of the ordinary or difficult-to-defend, the next person is going to ask you to explain what you mean. You can head this off by explaining what you mean before hitting submit. The alternative is that the first half-dozen responses will all be "can you explain in more detail", which increases clutter and makes it much harder to follow the conversation.
I have an entire mod queue full of partisan flaming from you, and that's after I already handed you a warning. (Which isn't visible unless you hit "more comments", we clearly need to do a better job of permalinks.)
I'm giving you a one-day ban; you either need to behave a lot differently or find another site.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Not removed! My general target was 3000, though a lot of recent ones dropped down due to various topic-specific megathreads. Manifold Markets doesn't seem to be working right now so I can't point to the market, but 1500 was the target I set for The Changeover Is Successful.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Rather lazily copy-pasted content from an old /r/CultureWarRoundup post as well.
Kiwifarms, again
From the telegram, kiwifarms is back up at kiwifarms.top - in addition to the onion address. Their new IP seems to be from orcatech/vanwatech, who host 8kun - 8kun had trouble during the jan 6th hearings.
In a featured post, Josh is locking the threads of keffals and associates, and asking people to leave them alone for the moment. User responses range from "well, that sucks" to "yes, sir" to "probably the best move at the moment". Probably partially cope, but none of them want the farms to go down every two days.
Yesterday a discussion about this pitted "blocking some keffals posts strategically" vs "that's giving into the leviathan, never flinch, it's what they want". Ignoring the political violence detour, josh's probably making the right choice - and probably should've done something like it days ago. I'd still prefer lighter (very strict wordfilter? banning doxxing/anything implying violence or doxxing but allowing any other posts?) restrictions a week ago to banning the thread outright a week ago ... but if that wouldn't have worked, temporarily lock the thread outright might've saved the rest of the site.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
According to your fellow drama appreciator, there's a guy over there with an axe to grind, who's pastime it is to convince people, that everyone here is a nazi.... I might need a bit more than "trust me, bro".
Could also be sneerclub, but I don't see what they'd get out of it now that we're off redit.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
1yr ago
My observations from lurking around Art Twitter indicate that most artists, who are often but not always left-aligned, hate hate hate AI art. This may feel like I'm stating the obvious, since it's going to unfortunately invalidate many of their jobs overnight, but it shouldn't be understated.
There are a few strains of this. Some are denying the power of these new programs. Some in the replies indicate this guy is cherrypicking bad results, but even if StableDiffusion can't copy him 100% yet, the time until it's reproducing his art perfectly in seconds is here in less than five years, conservatively. This one is more in the acceptance stage of grief. This is from an art YouTuber that I quite enjoy and to summarize the tweet he essentially says it's here, it's good, it's probably over soon unless you're established.
From my limited perspective, AI Art is/is going to be maligned in online spaces and among journalists in the same way as Crypto and NFTs are. Big companies will adopt it, but they will be dragged for it by the online commentary class. I've seen the term "AI Art Bro" thrown around the same why as NFT Bro, which makes me a bit sad. The tech will be supremely disruptive in a way Crypto and especially NFTs can only gesture at being, but there are a lot of upsides to it, and I get the feeling that many people are dismissing it without giving the implications much thought because of the class of people they perceive as being most excited about it.
Personally, I think it sucks for the artists who get displaced, and they will be displaced, but it's good overall for everyone else who isn't an artist. Others have discussed how many doors it opens to have cheap, instant, bespoke art that you can dictate into a text document… Still, there's something deeply psychologically troubling about some code making something you base your identity on obsolete, so I do genuinely feel for them.
I think voice acting is one that's going to be hit soon as well. I look forward to this for similar reasons - how many games and productions are bottlenecked in quality/money by the high cost of voice acting? The outpouring of art we'll see from people who didn't have the resources beforehand is something that excites me.
To answer your prompt on tribe distinctions, this one might fall more on the growth/retreat split that was brought up by Ilforte. Retreat mindset focuses on artists losing their jobs and deepfakes allowing for misinformation. Growth mindset focuses on democratizing access to art and all the new doors opened by AI content.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
Am I going crazy? Is there bug in the shadowbanning feature? Or are some posts being randomly disappeared, but are still visible from the firehose feed? Examples:
Darrell Owens in The Discourse Lounge, "YIMBYs Triumph In California". (Part of a migratory series on housing, mostly in California, also at theschism.)
This wasn't supposed to be a big year in the Legislature. It's an election year, which means excuses and cowardice and small-c conservatism. It's why there was no SB 827 or SB 50, no mass-upzoning bill. But it was a surprisingly successful year in the Legislature for the YIMBYs, maybe even more so than last year. The governor has yet to sign these, but he's expected to. California has no pocket veto, so if he takes no action, they become law at the end of September.
First, the bills that didn't make it.
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AB 2053 (California Social Housing Act) would have established a state agency to "produce and preserve mixed-income homes that are union built, sustainable, collectively owned, affordable for all income levels, and are financially self-sustaining". It would also have provided a mechanism for the state to engage in counter-cyclical construction when it's cheap and jobs are scarce. It made it through the Assembly, but failed to advance from Senate Governance and Finance by one vote. More here from Alex Lee, the author.
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AB 2656, which isn't exactly major, but would have outlawed CEQA shenanigans as seen in the 469 Stevenson case in San Francisco by interpreting them as a denial under the Housing Accountability Act. It passed its committees and the Assembly, but disappeared in the Senate Appropriations black hole. This indicates just how much of a third-rail any sort of CEQA reform is.
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SB 917 (Seamless Transit Transformation Act) passed its votes with near unanimity, but Assembly Appropriations spiked it for unclear reasons. It would have placed a timeline on the harmonization of the more than twenty transit agencies in the Bay Area, covering wayfinding and real-time transit data, establishing free transfers, multi-agency passes, and planning a unified regional network. Streetsblog opines that it will still have a significant impact.
And the major bills that did.
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AB 2011 (Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act) allows residential development on commercial sites; as a compromise, it doesn't require union labor, but it does require preference be given to apprenticeship programs. This got the Carpenters' Union on board, though not the broader Trades Union. It requires a certain proportion of subsidized units, and comes with minsterial approval, which means its projects are exempt from CEQA. It could make 1.6-2.4 million more units feasible statewide.
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SB 6 (Middle Class Housing Act), similar to AB 2011, also allows housing in commercial zones without specific subsidized percentages, but requires union labor and does not provide ministerial approval. Here's a comparison of the two bills.
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AB 2097 (Parking reform), a reboot of last year's AB 1401, which was lost in Appropriations. There have been some amendments; cities can argue (using a "preponderance of evidence") that they really need parking, unless twenty percent of the housing is set aside for low-income, elderly, or disabled people, or students, or the project is twenty units or smaller.
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SB 886 (CEQA exemption for student housing) is a CEQA reform that actually did pass; it exempts (certain) student housing projects. This doesn't directly address the UC Berkeley enrollment mess, but it does address one of the underlying causes, which was the city of Berkeley's blocking of student housing.
Matt Yglesias is very excited:
I think it’s possible that California is going to substantially improve its housing situation over the next decade / The key isn’t any one of the bills that’s passed or any specific action taken by the governor or the AG, it’s that they now seem to have a durable political coalition in place that wants to see more homes built and keeps taking new swings at it.
This is something that Owens covers as well. Until now, the Trades have blocked any housing reform which didn't require union labor. But AB 2011 passed without the Trades' approval; the Carpenters' unions (along with public employee unions, teacher unions, and the SEIU) showed up and advocated for the bill. There is now a path to major reform that doesn't require the Trades. Much is possible that previously wasn't.
Links to a couple of relevant comments of mine on the topic of feminism from the last Reddit CW thread that got buried.
I think what is lacking in this comment thread is an acknowledgement of male outgroup bias and female ingroup bias (there are quite a large number of studies that measure the core phenomenon, it's highly reproducible). Men are very strange in being perhaps the only (innate/biologically defined) social group to not have a ingroup bias. Men have a more favourable perception of women than they do of other men. While it's possible this is simply a consequence of modern gender ideology, this finding largely holds in cross-cultural studies, including in illiberal, "patriarchal" cultures. There's also circumstantial evidence from history, e.g. chivalric codes and courtly love. Men have an innate psychological need to want to protect, provide and care for women. To put it, men have a predisposition towards "simping" for women. This can manifest in different ways, such as extreme paternalism towards women, or liberalism towards women, depending on the circumstances.
The counterbalance to this effect was essentially nature. The world was a very dangerous place (and still is in many parts of the world), and the danger and the risks present in the world would naturally limit the roles and activity of women, from childbirth to hunting to political leadership. Security is preferred over liberty for women, by both men and women. As my linked comments and other commenters have already mentioned, modern technology, medicine, industrialisation and modernity generally changed this balance and there was no longer a natural counterbalance to men's innate desire to provide for women, and they began to do so in a maladaptive way. After modernity also destroyed the female role, women began feeling empty and resentful, blaming men of course, who were have always to provide for them, tend to their emotional needs and fix issues. If something is wrong, it's men's fault one way or another! Men lacking an ingroup bias means that most men were pretty content to go along with the demonisation of men too. Thus you have all the ingredients for feminism.
What kind of feminism are we talking about here? Because there are a lot of very different movements and schools of thoughts this term applies to.
This is a sentiment that is often expressed, including by both by feminists themselves who want to engage no-true-scotsmanning, and by some non-feminists who want to lay the blame squarely on 'third wave feminism' (and occasionally second wave as well). I strongly disagree with this sentiment.
There's really only two movements that can be described as distinct movements or schools of thought of feminism - liberal feminism and radical feminism. They are also mutually exclusive - belief in one necessarily precludes belief in the other.
Liberal feminism is essentially just liberalism or liberal thought applied to women. For this reason, I'm hesitant to even call it 'liberal feminism', as this implies a level of philosophical kinship with radical feminism that doesn't exist. 'Liberal feminism' doesn't have a distinct philosophical tradition or prominent philosophers either, instead relying heavily on liberal philosophers from Locke to Mills to Rawls generally, with lesser scholars basically just transposing their ideas onto women and gender, with the possible exception of Wollstonecraft. However, I must point out that even Mills assumed that women were subjugated by men Liberal feminism is what the average person is thinking of when they think positively about feminism, but this is actually just reflection of a positive view of liberalism generally.
Radical feminism is the other feminism and is arguably just 'feminism'. What makes radical feminism distinct is its core focus on patriarchy or patriarchy theory. This is a Marxian theory which defines men and women in terms of oppressive power dynamics, man as oppressor and women as oppressed, and that radical reform (revolution of some kind) is needed to end this 'patriarchy' and oppression. Virtually every prominent feminist scholar has been a radical feminist, from Millet and McKinnon to bell hooks. Even supposedly liberal feminists like Gloria Steinem were actually radical feminists, and I believe were more so labelled liberal feminists for their presentability. Ideologically they still subscribed to patriarchy theory and a radical deconstruction of society ('patriarchy'). Radical feminism is arguably just as old or even older than liberal feminism, with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention's Declaration of Sentiments essentially laying out a form of proto-radical feminism/patriarchy theory (though there are some elements of liberal feminism there too).
Liberal feminism was a flash in the pan. Women gained legal equality extremely quickly, with the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, before feminism had even really began in full swing. What are now regarded as seminal or foundational (radical) feminist texts, such as Kate Millet's Sexual Politics in 1970, were yet to be published. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, often called the book that started the so called 'second wave' of feminism, was published in 1963, only a year before the Civil Rights Act. Of course, the underlying feminist sentiment existed before that, but my point is that liberal feminism or 'women's rights' were mainstreamed incredibly quickly and pretty painlessly too. With the primary goals of liberal feminism achieved so quickly, much of the liberal activist energy behind it dissipated, leaving behind mostly (though not exclusively) radical feminist activists, who still had a bone to pick. Many liberal feminists who stayed would eventually be excluded and pushed out, such as Warren Farrell and Karen DeCrow. It would be these radical feminist activists who would go on to fulfil the majority of feminist leadership roles, professorships in 'gender studies' and social sciences generally, and advocacy/lobby groups. Radical feminism has become orthodoxy, and the only active form of feminism.
The distinction between liberal feminism and radical feminism strongly mirrors the split in the black civil rights movement, between Martin Luther King Jr's liberal approach vs the black liberationist (i.e. Marxian) approach represented by Malcolm X or the Black Panthers and similar groups. However, while most people can distinguish between movements represented by MLK Jr and Malcolm X, the same does not seems to be true for liberal feminism and radical feminism, which are often conflated with each other or seen as part of the same tradition. I'm not completely sure why this is the case, it may just be because women's rights were relatively less of a contentious issue and people, including men as per a comment of mine above, were happy to go along and not question it much. It could have also been a deliberate tactic of obfuscation on the part of the radical feminists, deliberately linking themselves to and hiding behind the positive connotations of liberal feminism for gain. They have been pretty successful if this is the case, as radical feminism has completely supplanted any liberal notions of the relationship between the sexes. Patriarchy theory has become the default position in the public cultural continuousness, even those who would (mis)label themselves as liberal feminists. The idea that maybe women weren't essentially slaves to men in the past - and instead that liberalism towards women is a natural moral development due to changing social conditions/modernity - is verboten now.
There are some different groups within radical feminism, perhaps the most obvious being the contemporary conflict between intersectional feminism and the TERFs. But I wouldn't call these movements wholly different schools of thought, they are both radical feminist ideologies at their core. A comparison I would make is to Marxism. There are a whole range of different sub-movements within Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism etc. that all do get into conflict with each other for one reason or another. But at the core they are still all Marxist and adopted the same core ideological thought and framing. The same is true for radical feminism. You can make legitimate blanket criticisms of (radical) feminism the same way you can of Marxism and its derivatives.
PmMeClassicMemes
1yr ago
In January 2021, and a few times after, meme stocks experienced profound price increases based on little related to fundamentals. The reasons are varied - in some instances, there were many large players who were short the stock (GME, AMC) and waves of buying pressure from retail investors, as well as other hedge funds, caused the prices to cascade upwards in a truly hilarious manner (GME going from $18 in December to $480 at the peak). In other instances (TSLA in summer 2020 for example), it was the case that too many call options (a derivative that allows one the right, but not the obligation, to purchase a specificed security at a specified price, on or before a specific date) were sold, and those who sold options were forced to buy more stock to hedge, in a cascade upwards.
Due to various acts of incompetence by Robin Hood and other brokers, having insufficient liquidity to deposit with the clearing houses which settle stock trades (as exposed in the SEC Report, Robin Hood's head of compliance was unaware of the existence of margin requirements with the clearing houses), various things which appear sketchy occurred in January 2021, and at other times. For example, in January 2021, Robin Hood moved the stocks to "Position Close Only", meaning that one could hold or sell, but not buy any more of the specified securities.
For those who were new to markets, this became a crusade. It has long since ceased to involve any fundamental cause, or even revolve around any sort of evidence, but instead is a venue for a mish-mash of totally wild conspiracies that are reminiscent of QAnon.
Let's look at AMC. AMC is the movie theatre company of which you have likely visited in past. It has a market capitalization today of 4.20B (lol), In September 2019, AMC had a market capitalization of $1.1B. This is a 4x.
When one compares the company's books [1], the discrepancy becomes even more stark. At the end of 2019, AMC had a tangible book value of -3.7 billion. Today, it has a tangible book value of -4.8 billion. In Fiscal Year 2019, it lost 149 million dollars. This quarter, it lost 121 million dollars.
So uh, how is it alive? How does it stick around?
Well, there's a cult backing it, and they have essentially agreed to use the stock market as a Go Fund Me, with the belief that when the End Times/"Mother of All Short Squeezes" comes, AMC's share price will rise as high as $100,000 per share[2]. With 516 million outstanding shares, this would value the company at approximately 51.6 trillion dollars. They believe in earnest that they will be able to cash out from this level, and earn trillions of dollars that their counterparties obviously would not have available to pay them. They believe this is the case because they believe that short sellers have sold billions of "synthetic" or "fake" shares of the stock [3], despite no obvious mechanism for such a thing occurring, and positing a conspiracy that would require likely >10,000 people, all of whom could instantly betray that conspiracy in exchange for vast riches beyond belief, to all keep quiet for over a year and a half at this point. The CEO, Adam Aron, has somewhat played into the meme stock aspects in a way that makes me feel sorry for the cult believers. However, he has also attempted to dispel some of the mythos [4], to little effect. In link 4, the tweet thread, he states this, but says that part of the reason they have done their recent corporate action (issuance of a preferred share to all shareholders - effectively a stock split), is to show that there are no synthetic, or naked shorts.
And so, the preferred share was issued to each shareholder who owned AMC. The AMC "Apes" beforehand stated that this [5] would be [6] the nail [7] in the coffin [8] and The MOASS WOULD HAPPEN as SYNTHETIC SHARES WERE REVEALED.
Predictably, no such MOASS occurred, and the price of AMC and the split-off preferred equity ($APE) have bled since. Predictably, cults do not take kindly to evidence that The Date Was Wrong, and instead, Outside Forces Have Conspired To Ruin Us. [9] [10] [11]. 11 is a good example of the totally false information that runs rampant in these stock cults - the stock $HKD was halted 94 times during its run up and run down. The halts, by the way, are automated and processed by computers on the basis of price swings in short periods - there is no centralized authority who chooses what to halt and when, other than if the company has imminent news and requests the exchange halt the stock.
The reason that I make this post is somewhat of a follow up to [12], and to indicate that the reasons I believe social media is a pretty awful technology, and the reason I support greater censorship isn't solely a matter of politics. It's a matter of homeless people [13] [14] investing in a bankrupt movie theatre stock, because influencers who run Onlyfans accounts and monetize their Youtbe channels make money by being "leaders" of a "movement". Because people are convinced that this bankrupt movie theatre stock is their ticket [15] out of the middle class. Because [16] this is how to get back at the man - how to get revenge for 2008.
This Friday, there are approximately [17] 36,000 call options on AMC that will expire worthless. Given the option prices on AMC, it is safe to assume that these were all purchased for around $100 each. Every week, "The Man" makes $360,000 by selling options to retail traders who are convinced that The MOASS is coming. Prior to the pandemic, The company has sold to date, 200m or so shares after the retail crowd started buying the stock, at an average price of $20. The executives of the company sell all of their shares, as soon as they vest, and have no ownership interest. The CFO unloaded everything he had at $30. When the CEO unloaded at $50, the cult said that it was OK because he was doing "Retirement Planning". His retirement plan is likely "Be Rich".
People are going to lose all their money. People will develop crippling drug addictions. People will kill themselves. People will spend the rest of their lives convinced that the entire world conspired against them to prevent them from becoming millionaires, bitter and poor. Some of them will go postal and harm innocent theatre employees or random bankers, eventually.
And what great benefit do we derive from this? The nature of social media platforms is not a neutral venue in which all speech can be heard - you do not have an email box of "Thought Of The Day from Everyone In Your Town" - you have an intentionally cultivated set of messages sent to you, because they're maximally addicting. Any perceived increase in the "freedom" of your speech is a side effect and an afterthought to maximizing the stock price of BigTech.
It's possible that this is simply the same set of suckers that would have been taken in by any other scam at any other time in history, but the group feels larger and more committed with the passing of time, rather than losing faith, continuing to dump more good money after bad. I doubt the scale of the problem has ever been this large - I've not even mentioned the Gamestop, Bed Bath, BBIG, etc. cults.
I think when people conceive of social media censorship, they react viscerally because they do not want themselves to be silenced. This is the great error - it is never small communities that cause the problem, it is the influencers.. Analogizing to the past, I think that if little people generally want to argue for the virtues of Cannabilism, then free speech should allow them to do so in 1980 or in 2022. However in 1980, Ted Koppel would not appear on Television every evening extolling the virtues of Cannabalism, followed by a 60 Minutes piece on how THEY are keeping you from finding out how good flesh tastes.
Any society that renders it easy for its constituents to be quickly and easily brainwashed, in a fashion so pleasurable they do it to themselves to get the next dopamine hit when they refresh their feed, into anti-social and self-destructive behaviors is doomed.
BigTech does not facilitate this because it acts for Free Speech. It facilitates this because maximizing the quantity of speech makes more money.
Those who confuse the quantity of speech with freedom of speech make the same error as one who would see owning 50 guns as more free than 10, or 10 abortions as more free than 2. A freedom's true import is clear when it is utilized to effect, not when it is worshipped in effigy.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMC/balance-sheet?p=AMC
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/amcstock/comments/mv9tnf/amc_100k_dont_be_fooled/
[3] https://twitter.com/stephmase22/status/1566969527128162304?s=20&t=3K1ye3x0XGHSEKh-Hqyh8Q
[4] https://twitter.com/CEOAdam/status/1555303048989364227
[5] https://twitter.com/userofintellect/status/1556792984821063683?s=20&t=3CaLcH6xyJqf4b-inkSmhA
[6] https://twitter.com/AntonioTheMexi/status/1555395134182785024?s=20&t=3CaLcH6xyJqf4b-inkSmhA
[7] https://twitter.com/AMCcheerleader/status/1559655570776330241?s=20&t=3CaLcH6xyJqf4b-inkSmhA
[8] https://twitter.com/StacksMoney247/status/1557103509866258432?s=20&t=3CaLcH6xyJqf4b-inkSmhA
[9] https://twitter.com/CeccottiFrank/status/1566927882668355584?s=20&t=dviPpKxJTItHcSsFiSgaPw
[10] https://twitter.com/beachbumscali/status/1565014681160257536?s=20&t=dviPpKxJTItHcSsFiSgaPw
[11] https://i.redd.it/9axs30kdvaj91.jpg
[13] https://twitter.com/Michelle801Ape/status/1502217924462927872?s=20&t=zKPElFtnPP5-5qaXq0E0Gg
[14] https://twitter.com/DrJoRoJo/status/1396529297565921280?s=20&t=zKPElFtnPP5-5qaXq0E0Gg
[15] https://twitter.com/trini_amc_ape/status/1567350662026903553?s=20&t=zKPElFtnPP5-5qaXq0E0Gg
[16] https://twitter.com/LTwittington/status/1566509811444875266?s=20&t=zKPElFtnPP5-5qaXq0E0Gg
[17] htt
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1yr ago
See also, previous discussion about more/better police. (This was mid-2020, when the issue was particularly salient.) Another thing that came up was Jill Leovy's Ghettoside (review/summary here), which argues that black Americans are particularly subject to simultaneous over- and under-policing, where the cops hassle and intimidate them for minor infractions but allow murders to go unsolved.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1yr ago
I think it's worth trying to empathize with these people. Consider this previous discussion on some comments by Matthew Cortland, where he vociferously argues against the concept of QALYs, because as a disabled person, QALYs value his life less than that of someone who isn't disabled.
On the one hand, it is devastating to be told that you're not an entire person, even in an accounting sense.
On the other, when you're doing a utilitarianism, either you're going to count disabled people less than non-disabled ones, or you're going to see nothing wrong with deafening someone, or blinding them, and so on.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The "more teenage pregnancies" has an archive here; that itself was just controversial, but the author also started linking hundred+ page PDF links with hardcore NSFW content that made the moderators have to deal with it and just generally making clear that they were either trolling at best, and... well, "turning teens into baby factories shortly after menarche" was the only reasonable read of their post, but it was way closer than I'd like to be anywhere near.
For the more general problem, I think there's definitely too much emphasis on later child-rearing in ways that are counterproductive both for those who can't or don't conceive at 30+, and even not great for those who do (both in health outcomes for the child, available energy, age-related issues for both parents). I think clearing up a lot of (charitably) miscommunication about those matters is probably going to be more effective.
(or, uh, institutional support for surrogacy on massive and probably also incredibly controversial scales.)
That said it's probably worth noting what a lot of the post-1960 curve is responding to. While a lot of US state laws date back to the Civil War era, enforcement and social norms largely treated those as tools for very limited sets of circumstances, rather than general rules. There was a lot more treatment of 16-year-olds as 'adults' for these purposes, and they stopped (and changed a variety of federal laws!), for a reason through the early 1970s. There's a few different causes, but one of the biggest was that most of the male half of such cases were not themselves teenagers, and that quite a lot of this turned out to be incredibly predatory. Anything that even risks bringing that sort of problem forward is going to (rightfully!) be a major landmine.
It'd be useful, and it's definitely part of the debate (and not one specific to trans- or LGBT-stuff!).
But I think there's also a few other concepts included and that are in many ways more primary parts of the discussion:
-
"Exist" as in being possible to recognize or know about, even under assumptions that they don't need to replicate themselves into the future. This is more overt for transmen, which were probably vastly undercounted in every statistical analysis for a decade, but the flip side of 'LGBT culture is trying to glom onto every crossdresser' is that Eddie Izzard has come out as genderfluid -- a lot of people who were part of the 'not-labeled' set demonstrably do want to go with these deeper categorizations when they become aware of them, some of which were not previously things that even had names.
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"Exist" as in be able to go through society in a viable manner. The classical example here is the older WPATH SoC that required six months of lived experience before hormone therapy or hair removal: this wasn't physically impossible, but at best involved a bunch of really bad decisions and never being able to use a public restroom.
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"Exist" as in being visible to other people. This is the other side to the 'you can be trans as long as you pass and I never have to hear about it anywhere'; not only are some people just never going to pass well enough to meet every critic's standards, but there's going to be at least some people who don't want to pass in every metric, either because their desired presentation isn't going to 'fit' (eg, transwoman who wants pants with pockets), or because they've grown to like things like Pride parades or obnoxious amounts of lipstick.
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"Exist" as in be discussed in specific places where (they believe) other matters of similar level of complexity are discussed. This is the other side of the conversation about whether gender nonconformity is appropriate for middle-school age groups.
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"Exist" as in live. This is somewhat based around overestimates of not-transitioned suicide rates and of transitioning and post-transition reductions in suicide rates (and sometimes overestimates of bias crimes), but you can still end up getting a giant pile of bodies with even more skeptical estimates.
gattsuru
1yr ago
but not very far to replace 80% of all fan art and furry commisions.
I'm not sure it's quite that high or that close. StableDiffusion is very good at making portraits or fullbodies of a single character with few accoutrements, for some species, but it struggles a lot with complex prompts or contextual clues and some other species, and while there's some ways that this will improve with additional training and data, there's others where it may reflect a technical limit in its underlying approach.
That doesn't mean it won't happen eventually. It doesn't even mean StableDiffusion can't be disruptive as-is -- I expect we'll find more and more Photoshop/SAI/so on plugins that use it as a texture- or brush-like tool to add detail and form to individual components of an image. It does some things even great artists struggle with: interpolating a character from different perspectives or in different media using textual_inversion is really magic!
It's not that it can't make a character sheet. It's not even that it might not have the token width to input a prompt for a character sheet. It's that it's not clear the current approach can allow it to have the necessary contextual framework necessary.
Of course, that might just mean one decade rather than a year.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1yr ago
Fair enough, you're right that actual fat-activists are not the consequentialists I described in my first post!
I still wouldn't support this hypothetical, steelmanned movement because I find fatness disgusting, but the thought-experiment was novel to me. Maybe I'm just behind.
This might be a topic better suited for the culture war roundup thread, but here goes:
The red tribe largely considers AR-15's a status symbol. In part this is because building/customizing AR-15's is a popular hobby for high IQ red tribers with a bit of disposable income, and no doubt this plays a role in the way both side talk about assault weapon bans.
So, what's the blue tribe equivalent of that phenomena? I'd say it's travel, except travel doesn't seem to be any kind of culture war flashpoint. I'd also say pet ownership, except that high IQ hobbies associated with pet ownership(dog training, for example) are probably associated with the red tribe more than the blue tribe. The closest thing I can think of is what I'd call fruity literature- novels or short stories with lots of superfluous gay stuff shoved in or outright centered around homosexual themes.
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