domain:alakasa.substack.com
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a full pardon for U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry.
Perry was convicted last year of murder in the shooting death of Garrett Foster, a USAF veteran and BLM protestor. Foster had attended a downtown Austin protest armed with an AK-pattern rifle, and joined his fellow protestors in illegally barricading the street. Perry's car was halted by the barricade, Foster approached the driver's side door, rifle in hand, and Perry shot him four times from a range of roughly 18 inches, fatally wounding him. Police reported that Foster's rifle was recovered with an empty chamber and the safety on.
Perry claimed that the shooting was self defense, that the protestors swarmed his vehicle, and that Foster advanced on him and pointed his rifle at him, presenting an immediate lethal threat. Foster's fellow protestors claimed that Foster did not point his rifle at Perry, and that the shooting was unprovoked. They pointed to posts made by Perry on social media, expressing hostility toward BLM protestors and discussing armed self-defense against them, and claimed that Perry intentionally crashed into the crowd of protestors to provoke an incident. For his part, Foster was interviewed just prior to the shooting, and likewise expressed hostility toward those opposed to the BLM cause and at least some desire to "use" his rifle.
This incident was one of a number of claimed self-defense shootings that occurred during the BLM riots, and we've previously discussed the clear tribal split in how that worked out for them, despite, in most cases, clear-cut video evidence for or against their claims. The case against Perry was actually better than most of the Reds, in that the video available was far less clear about what actually happened. As with the other Red cases, the state came down like a ton of bricks. An Austin jury found Perry guilty of murder, and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
Unlike the other cases, this one happened in Texas, and before the trial had completed, support for Perry was strong and growing. That support resulted in Governor Abbott referring Perry's case to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. A year later, the board returned a unanimous recommendation for a pardon to be granted. Abbott has now granted that pardon, and Perry is a free man, with his full civil rights restored to him. He has spent a little more than a year in prison, and his military career has been destroyed, but he is no longer in jail and no longer a felon.
So, now what?
It seems to me that there's a lot of fruitful avenues of discussion here. Was the shooting legitimate self-defense? To what degree did the protestors' tactics of illegally barricading streets, widespread throughout the Floyd riots and a recurring prelude to tragedy, bear responsibility for the outcome? How should we interpret Perry's comments prior to the shooting, or Foster's for that matter?
Two points seem most salient to me.
First, this case is a good demonstration of how the Culture War only rewards escalation, and degrades all pretensions to impartiality. I do not believe that anyone, on either side, is actually looking at this case in isolation and attempting to apply the rules as written as straightforwardly as possible. For both Blues and Reds, narrative trumps any set of particular facts. No significant portion of Blues are ever going to accept Reds killing Blues as legitimate, no matter what the facts are. Whatever portion of Reds might be willing to agree that Reds killing Blues in self-defense might have been illegitimate appears to be trending downward.
Second, this does not seem to be an example of the process working as intended. If the goal of our justice system is to settle such issues, it seems to have failed here. Red Tribe did not accept Perry's conviction as legitimate, and Blue Tribe has not accepted his pardon as legitimate. From a rules-based perspective, the pardon and the conviction are equally valid, but the results in terms of perceived legitimacy are indistinguishable from "who, whom". As I've pointed out many times before, rules-based systems require trust that the rules are fair to operate. That trust is evidently gone.
This is what we refer to in the business as a "bad sign".
In a more formulaic and low stakes corner of the culture War Ubisoft has announced "assassin's creed Shadow". The series is known for offering open world exploration set in various historical locations and times from the Nordic to ancient Egypt. This installment is appearantly a popular fan request in being set in fuedal Japan.
The culture War angle is that the game has two main characters, a female assassin and a disputed historical black warrior named yasuke. Now I haven't played one of these games in over a decade and am not particularly invested in this title but the response has been a fairly clean case study in marketing by controversy and I think it might be worth dissecting.
In my corner of the web I first learned of the game's existence from the preemptive "man, racists right wingers are going to hate this" posts. And indeed if one looked it was not hard to soon after find right winger racists filling their niche in this tired dance. One can always find bad takes that isn't what is interesting about how this kind of thing develops.
A trap seemed to be set, I don't know which end first broached the topic of "historical accuracy" but because it took the form of what legitimate criticism might look like the culture War quickly fell into a groove of progressives defending the historical existence of yasuke being a real samurai and pointing to other popular media depictions of him as well as pointing out that the assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple. The anti-progressive backlash is in a hard place because I think there is something legitimate there but the shape of the discussion is not condusive to making the argument.
I think most of the anti-progressive front probably doesn't have an issue with a black sumurai in a game made by people they trust to have making awesome games as their first master. There's something itching in the back of the head of the backlash crowd that the reason we have yasuke isn't because a black guy in Japan makes for interesting segments of blending into crowds but because the people making the game have an anti-majoritarian view. The same thing that gave us yasuke is what motivates someone to put on a "fuck white people" shirt.
This is a feature of the culture War I'm seeing more and more. Proxy battles that few people care deeply about but have features that make them better or worse to do battle on. This game seems like favorable terrain from the woke angle and it's tempting to just give them it but I understand the impulse to fight on the terrain anyways.
Just saw this geographic fertility map of Turkey on reddit. The statistics were released yesterday:
Population map for comparison (urban rate is a whopping 75%):
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Visualizing-Population-Density-in-Turkey-Full-Size.html
In 7 short years FTR crashed from 2.11 in 2016 to 1.5 in 2023.
Women get children later (average is now 29 years; which is older than in the US (27 years in 2021)) and there is an increase in one-person households (14.4% -> 19.7%)
And despite President Erdoğan being more powerful and way more conservative (out of touch?) than other leaders:
The alarming decline in Turkey’s birth rate comes against the backdrop of frequent calls from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who advises families to have at least three children to boost the country’s population, drawing the ire of feminist groups and women’s rights associations. He also advises “Muslim families” not to use birth control or family planning and opposes C-sections as well, angering the same organizations.
Armin
5d ago
Because my nitpick topic is the intersection between politics and gender/sex, in the last months since 7 October I began a very unscientific analysis of the social media content, especially on Instagram, of my friends, acquaintances and other people I follow. (Context as always, European middle-upper class, intra-national environment, very EU-based)
I cannot emphatise enough how much the driven behind pro-Palestinian content is driven exclusively by women. Between the thousands of people I follow, there is a core of around 50 people, all women apart one anarchist guy, who are hard Palestinian-posters (And remember, there is a lot of interests in politics in my environment, it is normal to see all these people interested in stuff like this). And I am not talking about random posting, I am talking of months and months of posting, all inserted in a moral framework of "do not touch the children" or "Israelis are racists". Having followed the process since the beginning, it was fun to see how it took at least one month until the start of the pro-Palestinian posting, as if they were checking where it was the consensus in their group before beginning to post.
The question I ask the community here, why a topic that is so far from our location and interests (again, we are no Columbia University or Middle East, we are far away both ideologically and physically) is so interesting for women, that makes them post about id dozens of times every week, for months straight? And I am talking about a very intense interest, is not rare to see online meltdown of suffering, death menaces or simply histrionics directed towards obscure metaphysical forces.
Again, my observation are reinforced from what I saw in the US and Europe about the universities and campus protests; the protestors are overwhelmingly women, and the most desperate are women.
For me the question rotates around two different forces;
- The maternal ethics of women, that makes them take always the side of the one that looks weaker or more oppressed.
- The ideological force behind social networks, that make them taking the side of the part with more social consensus in their social circles.
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
6d ago
The solution is simple. If the state wants women to give up their careers, their education, their financial independence so that they will have and raise children then the state needs to adequately compensate those women for what it is asking them to give up. No state on earth is prepared, or could afford, to do this, which is why functionally all efforts to increase fertility fail.
We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.
Why could this work historically? Partially because much more of women's labor was needed inside the home (and so unavailable for work outside the home) and partially because there were actual legal restrictions on the work women (especially married women) could do outside the home.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
5d ago
Jewish billionaires conspire to change the narrative on the protests. From WaPo. (Archive link)
A group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, according to communications obtained by The Washington Post.
Business executives including Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt held a Zoom video call on April 26 with Mayor Eric Adams (D), about a week after the mayor first sent New York police to Columbia’s campus, a log of chat messages shows. During the call, some attendees discussed making political donations to Adams, as well as how the chat group’s members could pressure Columbia’s president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus to handle protesters, according to chat messages summarizing the conversation.
Some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests, the chat log shows — an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted
The messages describing the call with Adams were among thousands logged in a WhatsApp chat among some of the nation’s most prominent business leaders and financiers, including former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital [..] The chat was initiated by a staffer for billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht[…] In an Oct. 12 message, one of the first sent in the group, the staffer posting on behalf of Sternlicht told the others the goal of the group was to “change the narrative”
The chat group formed shortly after the Oct. 7 attack, and its activism has stretched beyond New York, touching the highest levels of the Israeli government, the U.S. business world and elite universities. Titled “Israel Current Events,” the chat eventually expanded to about 100 members, the chat log shows. More than a dozen members of the group appear on Forbes’s annual list of billionaires; others work in real estate, finance and communications
“He’s open to any ideas we have,” chat member Sitt, founder of retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams. “As you saw he’s ok if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”
The mayor’s office did not address it directly, instead sharing a statement from deputy mayor Fabien Levy noting that […] “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print.”
One member asked if the group could do anything to pressure Columbia trustees to cooperate with the mayor. In reply, former congressman Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), CEO of the American Jewish Committee, shared a PDF of a letter his organization had sent that day to Columbia President Minouche Shafik calling on her to “shut these protests down.”
Usually I wouldn’t post so much from the body of an article, but there’s a lot of information to unpack here. It appears that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations, as well as the highest levels of media and academia. This comes after Mitt Romney admitted the tik tok ban was influenced by the extent of pro-Palestine content. IMO this is going to be used in American discourse about Jewish power for many years to come. You have Jewish billionaires across industries banding together to manipulate the narrative, influence politicians, and “shut it down” — literally a trope of Jewish power. The influence here is, frankly, incredible: a dozen billionaires alone, conspiring with journalists and academics and advocacy group leaders, talking about using black celebrities to push their narrative and applying “leverage” to university presidents. As Cenk Uygur tweeted (no friend of the alt right), “You can't complain about the trope, if you do the trope”.
I kind of wonder if some of this is even illegal. Not that I am naive enough to believe a charge would occur if it were. They are sitting down in briefings with the Israeli government and discussing how to best push their influence machine. Isn’t this lobbying on behalf of a foreign power?
sliders1234
5d ago
I think it’s fairly popular to think about evolutionary biology in these parts. Here’s a few things about food that come to my mind.
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The most fulfilling meals (to me but I think it’s common) are some combination of carb and meat. Hamburger, tacos, pasta, rice with various dishes. Why do humans have such a preference for mixed foods? Basically why do we cook instead of being equally satisfied with having a piece of meat and then some carbs later. All of human taste seems to be far more complex than what is necessary for encouraging me to eat the foods I need to be healthy.
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Why does my body have such a desire to store fat but when we look at potential mates we want the thin one. It seems like those preferences should be the same. Fatter mates would have more survivability in a famine. What’s good for my health should be good for the health of the person I want to have sex with. (Obviously being fat isn’t health maximizing in modern days but it was health maximizing in other environments).
Tomato
2d ago
The premise that “24 year old female virgin” is a rare specimen is in itself pretty interesting.
SSCReader
1d ago
It's interesting because the guy with the rifle was in some sense doing a right wing coded thing. Open carrying a rifle, which in Texas is legal. It's been a left wing talking point that this in and of itself should be considered a threatening act (see Rittenhouse, K). Which means in other circumstances it could quite well have been the case that the right was outraged by the shooting, as open carrying a rifle in and of itself should not be grounds to be seen as threat of violence, that justifies self-defence. In fact if Foster had shot and killed Perry as he was driving a car towards a protest he would have been in the Rittenhouse position! Arguing he brought a rifle to the protest to defend against just such an attack.
Which is why (as with Rittenhouse) the case hinged on whether the rifle was pointed at someone and if this itself constitutes a threat. Only without clear video in this case to show one way or another.
There is a narrative here where Rittenhouse was found not guilty (correctly) because he did not point his gun at someone and therefore was not threatening, and Foster also did not point his gun at someone so was not threatening and was thus murdered by Perry. In that case the left would have a case to argue that they did indeed play by the rules more than the right. Rittenhouse was acquitted. The jury set aside all the political stuff and acquitted him. Perry was found guilty then a political intervention happened. That's how I would contrast the two stories if I were still going to bat for the left in a political sense at least. The left left (hah) it up to the judicial system to decide the right (hah!) outcome, the right refused to do that and blatantly freed a convicted murderer. Might have some bad optics for squishy moderates. But of course plays well with those already convinced. Unlikely to make a difference in Texas, but might have some play if pushed nationally, perhaps.
I suppose to turn the discussion back to you, if you had clear video that Foster did not point his gun at Perry, and was just walking around, would you accept that he like Rittenhouse did not actually threaten someone and thus Perry shooting him was murder?
jeroboam
2d ago
Sam Altman just loves to be a sociopath and then brag about it. His latest?
https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666
"Her".
In case you've been living under a rock, this is in reference to the 2013 movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays the voice of an AI girlfriend. And it's also a reference to Open AI's new product, Chat GPT 4o, whose voice sounds just like... you guessed it, Scarlett Johansson.
This is no mistake. Open AI actually approached Ms. Johansson and asked her permission to use her voice. When she said no, they said fuck it and did it anyway.
https://x.com/BobbyAllyn/status/1792679435701014908
If Elon Musk is chaotic neutral, Sam Altman is increasingly proving himself to be lawful evil. It's not a good look.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Trump announces Ken Paxton as possible AG pick: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/20/donald-trump-ken-paxton-attorney-general/
“I would, actually,” Trump said Saturday when asked by a KDFW-TV reporter if he would consider Paxton for the national post. “He’s very, very talented. I mean, we have a lot of people that want that one and will be very good at it. But he’s a very talented guy.”
This is interesting because 1) Paxton is an aggressive partisan willing to engage in skullduggery, exactly the sort of person project 2025 would want and 2) he’s one of the few people trump has shown loyalty to. Also unlike Greg Abbott, who turned down the VP job, he seems to want the job. Also, last time he was out of office Abbott appointed his own chief of staff as attorney general, so it’s not like that would strip mine the Texas state government of conservative talent.
It’s worth noting that a lot of trump’s policy success from the last admin came through bill Barr, and an aggressive consiglieri in the AG seat is probably what trump needs to be effective.
Culture War nexuses
This isn't exactly some thought-out post, more just a culture war observation. Every now and then there happens an event that feels like a CW "nexus" where it is the intersection of like five different hot topics in one moment. I had this thought while walking yesterday and wondered if someone else had any other examples. Here's two of mine:
A couple of weeks ago in Toronto a group of Indian immigrants, presumably in a gang of some sort, robbed a government-owned liquor store. They pulled a knife on an off-duty cop there. When they left, they were pursued by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and regional cops. In a rented van the thieves went the wrong way down the 401, the busiest highway in the world; the OPP stopped pursuit and told the regional cops to do the same, but they continued to follow. The getaway van hit a car going the opposite way. The other car's inhabitants was also a family of Indian immigrants: new parents, a baby, and their newly-arrived grandparents (via family reunification presumably). The getaway driver, the grandparents, and the baby were killed. The getaway driver was out on bail on weapon's charges, had a suspended license, and was under court order not to drive.
If you've been paying attention to any political issues in Canada you can see how this neatly ties together a bunch of hot topics into one incident. I have another:
In late 2022 a cement mixer in Berlin hit a female cyclist. The driver got out of his truck to check on the cyclist and was stabbed by a mentally ill homeless refugee. An ambulance arrived to transport the critically injured woman to the hospital, but on the way was stopped by climate protestors who had glued themselves to the road. The cyclist died but the truck driver survived.
Forgotpassword
2d ago
I think that's understated. I recently went on an anthropological expedition by way of mass online dating. I had about 80 first dates over the course of 2022. I was mostly looking for upper-middle, educated, career-having women and I'd say about a quarter were palpably inexperienced to the point that I don't think they had any meaningful romantic experience by their mid-late twenties.
Like this wasn't coy 'oh teehee I'm a virgin, bats eyelids', this was like... obvious unfamiliarity with how dating even 'worked'. The common theme generally being some form of coming from a fairly repressive sub culture, focusing hard on education/career until finally getting to 26-27 and their parents' reproach shifted from 'When are you becoming a doctor' to 'When am I becoming a grandparent'. Then they'd sally out onto Hinge with a vague dream of meeting somebody nice, and no real experience beyond consuming KDramas.
SomethingMusic
6d ago
The breaking of social covenant and the rise of selfish societies
Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.
In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone. The cost of thefts cause a cyclical cycle, it forces stores to raise prices to cover the loss of the theft, which in turn prices people out of purchasing goods, which again raises theft. So far, the plans the governor has been trying to put into place seems to have done little to curtail any theft.
A 2024 jobs report shows a massive shortage of manufacturing labor, with 770,000 manufacturing jobs open. Labor participation has not recovered from the COVID crisis, with participation at 63.3% just before corvid and around 62.5% from the most recent report. Labor participation was highest before the 2008 housing crisis during the Bush admin around 67%. 7.5 million men have dropped out of America's workforce, meaning that they are not job seeking and therefore wouldn't be tracked as part of unemployment in FRED data.
There's a lot of words spilled on the internet on 'high trust societies'. Places like Japan where a lost item will be much more likely returned to its owner than, say, Detroit. Or rural America, where people will pay money at an unattended farm stand for fresh fruits and/or vegetables. However, trust doesn't fully cover what's going on in the west. /u/johnfabian's post is not about trust, but rather the breaking down of the covenant between constituents and their governments that keep a society basically functions. These social functions are much more simple than trust. It's about not running a red light, not driving the wrong way down a highway, or waiting in line for a train rather than trying to crowd on regardless of capacity.
Western society flourishing was largely predicated on this tacit understood social covenant: on an individual level, each person does their best to contribute through labor - be it stocking shelves to software development to entrepreneurship. In turn, the government upholds the status quo and optimizes legislation for stability and prosperity for the working class.
However in recent times this has changed. I'm not sure if the western governments decided they can have it's cake and eat it, too, or that the only way to perpetuate power is finding a new voter base, but the recent focus on marginalized groups has significantly eroded the trust away from indigenous constituents. It doesn't take a genius to tell that demographic groups are being treated, litigated, and policed based off of completely different rule books, and this type of treatment always creates division and resentment. The covenant between government and the constituencies broke, which changed the payoff matrix. As governments pick and choose which demographics to control, people become more selfish, as the ability to create value from freer markets diminish.
This is why 'selfish societies' is a better term than 'low trust' societies. As much as people love to yell at corporations for perusing short term gains, individuals pursue selfish gains at the cost of others even more as shown from my examples alone. Trust does not fully explain how people behave in the aforementioned examples, but selfishness does. Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold. Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint. Even the declining birthrate is a result of selfishness; people would prefer to have the increased income and enjoyment of consequence-free fornication instead of laying an effective and positive groundwork for future generations.
The question, then, is it possible for a government to regain the respect of its constituents, and can the people understand that there needs to be some amount of selflessness to create an environment to nurture the next generation?
hydroacetylene
6d ago
Whither the way of the Boomer; or, Where Hydro rants about the Gosh-durned millenials
The dominant trend of the new generations is to replace the boomer's functioning social technology with actual technology that doesn't work and then justify it with orgiastic doomerist neuroticism.
Downstream in the thread- literally the first topic this week- there's discussions of modern dating and the social technology around it. The point I made was that the loss of meeting people in real life didn't happen because of the sexual revolution, because for 40-50 years after the sexual revolution people met in real life. The loss of meeting people in real life happened because of the apps. And of course the apps displaced meeting people in person, and it kinda seems like everyone who actually wants to have a relationship and not just a hookup would rather meet people in person. But the justification for nobody meeting in person anymore was #metoo when people defended the apps, and 'well it would be kind of awkward' sometimes. Usually the latter explanation is male, and when you drill into it with 'the worst she can say is no, why don't you give it a whirl' the explanation is 'because then I won't be able to speak to anyone she knows ever again'. Sorry, rejections just aren't that awkward. And of course #metoo is in its usual formulation also delusionally neurotic.
But I want to talk about jobs. It's time for a nice change of pace. Back in the day, to get a blue collar job you walked in, physically, to a blue collar workplace and asked for one. It's true; ask the old men and they will tell you. And you can in fact still do this; I reckon any one of you can find a job within biking distance of your house if not walking distance by asking around enough, in maybe an afternoon's effort- granted, probably a job as, like, a dishwasher, but the boomers don't regale you with stories of walking into a job as CEO of the company. No, they found jobs as janitors and cashiers and, yes, dishwashers and they got their positions as lawyers and accountants through classified ads. The point is, the zoomers have the same opportunities as boomers to go find employment, at least if you use a big enough scale(Detroit has fewer opportunities than in 1955). No, not as computer programmers, but well-remunerated white collar work has never worked like that. My grandfather(RIP) used to tell the story of how when he first started college he could find a job in an afternoon for his spending money, and can anyone do that anymore? I did it in the 2010's. And it seems to be that the now-hiring signs adorning many stores and restaurants are there with this expectation, elsewise why would they exist? It's just that zoomers won't apply, as any restaurant manager will tell you. Instead there's online applications of the sort that are notoriously shitty when as anyone who's gotten that sort of low-level job recently can tell you, HR just filters it out for not having ten years experience and a masters degree in washing dishes when the store manager would've happily hired you after a handshake. I listen to restaurant managers complain about it all the time, usually in rather different language. It's not hard to draw the connection to millennial dating woes above; if you're too scared to ask a girl out due to paranoid imaginings you're probably also too scared to just go talk to the manager and ask for a job.
Downthread also, there's discussion of 'why do women give up the tradlife when it delivers the things they say are important to them' to the answer of 'because they believe most men will horrifically abuse them as soon as they can get away with it, even though that belief isn't true'. Likewise, this is the same quality of orgiastic doomerist neuroticism. In the fifties, when a large majority of women were totally dependent on their husbands, my great-grandmother was considered singularly unlucky because her second husband beat on her and was an alcoholic. Obviously, these two sets of implied numbers don't match up.
In the breeding of hunting dogs, there is this quality of just going for it which is referred to as grit. It seems our society is sorely lacking in grit. Safetyism is a dominant component of our culture, and this gets used to justify throwing out social technology that just makes things work.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
God.
Paxton represents everything I dislike about this state. Setting aside his little scandal, he’s a shameless partisan who grandstands whenever he gets the chance. Every AG statement just drips with condescension and/or righteous anger at the opposition. I suppose, given our political climate, that makes him a savvy political operator.
While we have various stupid and offensive laws, I can’t really blame him for enforcing them. But I do not look forward to seeing how he operates with a more deadlocked legislature. Especially if Trump is looking for opportunities to get even.
No_one
5d ago
but when we look at potential mates we want the thin one
Not the thin one. The curvy one..
Link goes to one of the most stunning examples of 'autism' out there, and it's making everyone from arch-hater 0hp Lovecraft to bog standard SJWs and boomers mad.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
5d ago
In the spirit of bringing life into the thread, I thought I’d share something a little different.
Dozens of stars show signs of hosting advanced alien civilizations
Two surveys of millions of stars in our galaxy have revealed mysterious spikes in infrared heat coming from dozens of them.
A summary won’t do it justice, and I encourage anyone interested to read the linked article; it’s not long. In short, though, researchers checked out approximately 5 million stars (in our galaxy—close enough to look well at and potentially one day visit) for anomalous ratios of infrared heat to light. The idea here is that if a star is giving off a lot of light that is being captured, it will heat whatever is doing the capturing up significantly. This is suggested to be possibly due to either unusual debris fields around these stars, which would be unexpected due to their age (most planetary collisions happening early on in a solar system’s lifetime, and these stars being older)… Or due to large amounts of sun-orbiting satellites soaking up solar power, a Dyson swarm. Our exoplanet imaging is still very much in its infancy, and we have already discovered planets that seem to bear biosignatures. The latter explanation is plausible, at least.
This is pretty far from standard culture-war fare, but I suspect that there are enough rationalists and futurists here to find it interesting. There are also a few potential links:
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- What does the future of our society look in a universe where life is entropically favorable? That is to say, what if life is not rare, and instead happens consistently whenever the right conditions are present for long enough?
This implies that there is either a way through the theorized AI apocalypse, or perhaps that silicon-based life continues growing after taking over from carbon-based life (the “biological boot loader” thesis). While I’m rather attached to my carbon-based existence, it’s at least heartening that in this scenario something is still happening after AI takes over; the spark of life hasn’t left the universe. Unless all that power is going to making paperclips, I suppose.
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- What sort of societal organization is optimal for a galaxy in which we can expect to interact with numerous alien civilizations? We have (thankfully) yet to encounter grabby aliens, but the game theory seems logical; in an environment where there are limited resources and an ever-expanding population, conflict is inevitable (by historical earth standards).
Does it make sense to enforce population control on a cosmic scale, discouraging humans from expanding to other stars to avoid conflict? Could the “dark forest” hypothesis make sense, where offense is favored over defense and civilizations hide as much as possible?
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- If we were to travel to other stars in the distant future, would the expected travel times result in human speciation, or such a long remove that cultural exchange and even biological exchange is kept to a minimum? Or is there an “optimal human”, which genetic engineering and biotech could potentially bring us towards as a local maximum?
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- Is this all bullshit, and are we alone in the universe, forevermore?
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- Does anyone have any thoughts on the spate of propellantless propulsion efforts currently being made? Somewhat like perpetual motion machines, or room temperature superconductors, or fusion… This is a topic that has very high expected returns, and thus a high expected gain in fame or financing from lying about experimental results. But I do note that fusion seems to be moving forward; while LK-99 didn’t pan out, there are still groups working on things inspired by it, and it seems like lessons learned are leading to next generation superconductors. My point here is that if the laws of physics allow it, we seem likely to eventually create it… And we are yet to discover a Theory of Everything, so who’s to say whether something like propellantless propulsion is possible?
Mods, I apologize in advance if this is insufficiently culture-war adjacent to deserve posting here. I didn’t think it worthy of its own thread, and feel like it’s perhaps healthy for the Motte to have some fresh topics as well. I’m a devoted lurker and thought I should do my part.
Edit- My list got butchered. Trying to fix it, but it seems the method I chose of writing multiple paragraphs after a question is disfavored.
Tangentially related...
How much should Trump get even, if he is elected? Either choice he makes seems pretty fraught.
Option 1) Play the bigger man. Pardon himself, obviously, and a few limited other people. Beyond that do nothing. This will prevent a wider conflagration in the culture war. Downside: without a tit-for-tat, the left will be emboldened for much greater tats in the future.
Option 2) Do unto him as he hath done unto me. Pursue corruption investigations against his pursuers (many of whom quite deserve them). Go after voter fraud and ballot harvesting. Turn the executive branch against the left in the same ways it has been turned against the right thus far. Upside: When both sides are armed, the chance for peace is higher than when only one side is armed. Downside: The system will probably resist him, and it could provoke a bigger backlash.
If I were Trump, I'd go with option 1. In reality, I expect him to just do whatever he wakes up feeling like he should do that day with little follow through.
No_one
4d ago
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/15/congress-is-preparing-to-restore-quotas-in-college-admissions/
Apparently, there's a new privacy bill in congress, with a maximally bad attachment to it, and quite likely to pass. (what kind of monster would be against privacy? )
Almost all kinds of decision making (anything that involves computers seems like) are classed as an algorithm.
If your 'algorithm' causes disparate impact, it's bad and you must change it or you're open to lawsuits. Yearly review of the 'algorithm' is mandatory, first review in 2 years after bill is passed..
Covers: every bigger business (iirc 750 employees+), all social networks and...??all nonprofits using computers to process 'personal data' to submit yearly evaluations if they're not causing 'disparate impact'. Excepted: the entire finance industry, government contractors.
It also explicitly allows discrimination on the basis of a protected characteristics (race, sex etc) for the purpose of
27 (ii) diversifying an applicant, participant, or customer pool;
Here's a bigger excerpt:
Here's how it works. APRA's quota provision, section 13 of APRA, says that any entity that "knowingly develops" an algorithm for its business must evaluate that algorithm "to reduce the risk of" harm. And it defines algorithmic "harm" to include causing a "disparate impact" on the basis of "race, color, religion, national origin, sex, or disability" (plus, weirdly, "political party registration status"). APRA Sec. 13(c)(1)(B)(vi)(IV)&(V).
At bottom, it's as simple as that. If you use an algorithm for any important decision about people—to hire, promote, advertise, or otherwise allocate goods and services—you must ensure that you've reduced the risk of disparate impact.
The closer one looks, however, the worse it gets. At every turn, APRA expands the sweep of quotas. For example, APRA does not confine itself to hiring and promotion. It provides that, within two years of the bill's enactment, institutions must reduce any disparate impact the algorithm causes in access to housing, education, employment, healthcare, insurance, or credit.
No one escapes. The quota mandate covers practically every business and nonprofit in the country, other than financial institutions. APRA sec. 2(10). And its regulatory sweep is not limited, as you might think, to sophisticated and mysterious artificial intelligence algorithms. A "covered algorithm" is broadly defined as any computational process that helps humans make a decision about providing goods or services or information. APRA, Section 2 (8). It covers everything from a ground-breaking AI model to an aging Chromebook running a spreadsheet. In order to call this a privacy provision, APRA says that a covered algorithm must process personal data, but that means pretty much every form of personal data that isn't deidentified, with the exception of employee data. APRA, Section 2 (9).
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Haven't you noticed by now?
Anything done by anyone Jewish, or any cause that might be interpreted as positive for Israel, is inherently sinister and evil.
It really is quite tiresome.
This tweet from an economists caught my eye.
“One of the biggest gaps in economics is explaining why outcomes differ across countries.
Why is homeownership lower in Germany? Why do the rich live the center of the city in Argentina, but in the suburbs in America?
We don't have great frameworks to answer these Qs.“
https://twitter.com/arpitrage/status/1786042798275277144?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Is this a question we really don’t know the answer to or a question that good people have learned to not consider the frameworks that are explanatory? I feel like the white nationalist and the woke can easily answer this question. One side will say racism and the other side will say diversity is not our strength and people fled from crime.
Wikipedia has the Great Migration occurring 1910-1970. And White Flight as occurring 1950’s-1960’s. Cities largely built before then have dense urban cores . Those cities built after are endless suburbs. Of course cars took off as a middle class thing around this time period too. Argentina might be a higher percent European ancestry than any country in the world.
How many other question have solutions to them that aren’t analyzed because the researcher starts with the wrong frame.
The ukraine war and godawful sources a problem
Samo Burja (sadly can't find the tweet) once said that we rely on defense ministries of the individual nations for information but at the same time lying about the state of affairs is considered respectable propaganda in a time of war.
Onto the sources
The Bad
Ukranian ministry of defense: These guy's obviously can't be trusted, they would totally lie about things if it means more american aid, lying about success in offensive operations, lying about goals and motives, or lying about defensive strategy, especially due to operational security concerns.
Russian ministry of defense: Exactly as untrustworhy as the UKR MoD but we hear less from them. What the UKR MoD and RU MoD agree on is likely "true".
Basically propaganda
The new york times: Something I wasn't expecting was how god awful the NYT's actual coverage of the ukraine war actually has been. reading their reports has been surprisingly low value. very little description of what is happening at any reasonable level. Maybe this shouldn't surprise me, the actual events of the war don't really improve how something looks narratively so you end up with little information about the facts on the ground
(this applies to most of the western print press and I won't mention any further, though Matthew chance of CNN was pretty good)
Better than most
Wikipedia: Wikipedia continues to keep winning. While it both does a good job explaining the history (talking about the invasion and conflict really starting in 2014) it also has some great parts that go unnoticed. Casualties? Reports vary widely what a great line to just throw out. Wikipedia's reporting is way above average and has better timelines than any reporting I've seen in the mainstream western press. They still have issues but sadly little actually can beat them. (I definitely find their UKR coverage worse because it's less contentious on english language groups than say their isreal gaza coverage but thankfully i'm not forecasting isreal gaza so i don't have to worry about it)
The institute for the study of war This is probably the most accurate source that you can call "respectable". Unlike other sources they do a good job of citing their sources and their citations stem from far more credible sources than the UKR MoD. The main problem with them is Bias, General David Petreus is a pretty solid general overall and while I tend to like the reports, I find the reports are slightly more anti-russian than the facts on the ground typically indicate. But unlike other reporters they actually accurately report the facts on the ground to a degree that nobody else except 1 group does. I may dislike sentences like "We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting." because they really should have just deleted the word Russian in that sentence. overall I like these guys and think they are the best reporting I can get regularly
The best (but so infrequent)
The AUSTRIAN ARMY Youtube channel The austrian army's reporting on the battlefield situation is top notch, I think that since they only post updates every 6 months or so their reporting tends to be a lot better at not missing the larger scale operations. Of course it's harder to cite the austrian army youtube channel and call it "respectable" but many probably would accept it.
Analysis and speculation
William spaniel While mostly a channel about strategic implications he actually does a pretty good job talking about how leaders can actually think. The Naval war college regularly cites him so I consider him much more credible than average. (though the naval war college also plays Polis to discuss the Peloponnesian war so they're definitely more willing to be a little less hinged than you'd expect)
Perun IDK how this guy got so big but /r/credibledefense loves him and I like his powerpoints.
So onto the actual conflict.
Right now the big story is that the russian army is making a move from the north while Ukraine is slowly losing territory on the southeast, not much to be sure, if this were mar 2022 you'd call the approach a massive slowdown. However the long slow push of russia into ukr territory is happening after a failed UKR 2023 counteroffensive. The war continues with what I would call world war 1 tactics with 2024 weapons. Trenches, Artillery, and spotters dominate the war, while in WW1 it was biplanes, in the Ukraine russian war it's the drone. The drone is creating this weird war where visibility is at an all time high, if you look at the survivability onion you'll notice that stealth comprimises most of the survival tactics Evasive manuvers are almost a last resort. This means it's much harder to conduct certain operations without getting troops killed. I wonder how much the conflict will change in the coming months, the 1 prediction which tends to hold true is that almost nothing happens because this is the second coming of world war 1
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
I enjoyed the article. I think I'm one contributing factor here is what Scott identified over a decade ago in should you reverse any advice you hear. People in either sex positive or purity cultures are probably in thick information bubbles that take those positions to pathological extremes. This is probably even worse today than when Scott's article was written.
I suspect a lot of people operating in an enthusiastic consent framework would agree with the author that the circumstances she describes some of her friends having sex under were problematic. There's a reason those articles have the disclaimers they do. I suspect they would do so using a language of consent, that various kinds of pressure had rendered the sex in question not really consensual. The problem with this angle is that it turns what is supposed to be a simple and intuitive concept into one that hides a lot of complexity and nuance.
From my perspective it seems like there are two key issues. Firstly, women feel a social and interpersonal pressure to have sex they don't want. Like they need a good reason not to have sex with someone. This is totally backwards to how it ought to work. You do not need any reason to refrain from sex with someone beyond "I don't want to." "No" is a complete sentence, as they say. Related to the first, many men apparently feel no compulsion to respect that "no." Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds. So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.
Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict. I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better; in particular, I wonder if there are arguments for the Israeli position in the current war that don't mostly rest on one of the following:
An arbitrary cutoff of historical reckoning either shortly before the most recent Hamas attack, or else somewhere in the early '90s following the general Western mode of thinking about other geopolitical conflicts. Unilaterally declaring all scores settled is not a persuasive or universalizable moral principle.
Invocation of inherent superior qualities of Israeli Jews relative to Palestinians, be it intelligence, education or general "civilizedness". You would almost certainly either need to cut out a very contrived set of conditions to make the principle only apply to this case, or accept some hypothetical corollary you probably don't want that involves similar abuse being heaped on morally/intellectually/civilizationally inferior people that you care about or feel kinship to.
The way I see it, the moral case for Palestine is pretty clear, and unlike some seem to assume does not require you to subscribe to a lot of oppressed-are-always-right slave morality (though you do need to stop short of maximally might-makes-right master morality). The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves. I do not think that Palestinians' stupidity or backwardness or whatever are so great that they can't be afforded what we otherwise consider basic human rights to property and safety, even if the people who want to take those from them for themselves were all literal Von Neumanns.
I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians, and the argument that some Palestinians submitted and got to live better lives under the Israelis than they would have had in an independent Palestine does not morally convince me either. If Bill Gates steals the plots some rednecks built their houses on, builds a mansion in its place and then offers them lavish jobs as domestic servants, do the ones who don't accept forfeit their right to complain about the theft? Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal. It seems pretty clear to me that there is no recourse left to the Palestinians who do not want to to take this deal that preserves their human dignity - their conquerors certainly won't hear them out themselves, and they are backed by the US machine which not only could produce a personal cruise missile for every Palestinian if it put its mind to it but also has enough intellectual and propaganda firepower that they could make even the Palestinians doubt that they are themselves humans with rights.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed. (If you have been driven out of your house and into a corner at gunpoint by the mafia, the mafia boss's kid stands by watching the show and mocking you, and, seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder even though the kid is technically innocent of the misfortunes that befell you and this did absolutely nothing to help your situation. As a bonus, the corrupt police (my country) is then called in to arrest you, after sharing a smoke with the mafiosi.)
Though I said that the moral case for Palestine is clear, this is emphatically not to say that I rule out the possibility of a clear moral case for Israel existing at the same time. "They're both justified to continue murdering each other" is a sad reality of a lot of tribal conflict. However, in this particular case, I actually do not even see that case, or at least what I have seen seems much weaker to me, given that Israelis still have the option to leave Israel at any time as a large part of the world would welcome them with open arms (while the anti-Palestinians like reiterating that not even other Muslim countries want to take in the Palestinians, as if that helps their case), and even though in some sense they would also then be "driven from their homes" it's not like they are usually unaware of those homes' provenance.
edit: Thanks for everyone's responses, there were certainly a lot of interesting points to think about there. I'm too overwhelmed with the volume to respond to everyone, though to the extent there were some overlaps between the points I would be grateful if you could check my answers to sibling posts.
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