domain:kvetch.substack.com
hanikrummihundursvin
6d ago
Right back at you.
HereAndGone
6d ago
That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned
To be fair, I don't think Alexander is particularly left or right (I think he's probably somewhere in the spectrum of liberal to centre-right). What he is, is extremely hung up on class and status. He's obsessed with what he deems to be low-class/underclass behaviour (especially around women's sexuality as baby mamas) and hence why he always brings it back to abortion as the social climbing panacea (keep the underclass from breeding more underclass, keep aspirant working class to lower middle class types from falling back down the ladder by not letting them become single teen moms). He wants marriage and family and the rest of it, but on the proper timeline of "get educated, get a job, get married and have the appropriate number of kids, avoid sleeping around as a teen, avoid sleeping around like a ho in general, and if you do get pregnant without planning it, get an abortion so you don't ruin your life and more importantly your social status as nascent middle class". Thus his grudge with the pro-life right, because we want the sluts to keep their bastards who will then leech off the state for life (putting words into his mouth there, but that's the impression I strongly get of how he feels about it). If we were truly responsible right-wingers holding conservative values, we'd be all for discreet abortion to maintain decorum and enforce social conformity around correct behaviour.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
I don't know exactly what you've seen, but my guess is you've seen some of the more nuanced moderate Nazi-like posters who dislike Jews and/or Jewish Supremecists but don't call for their death. And are strawmanning/patern-matching them to the more classical Nazis. I think there's a really important distinction, because first and foremost, the rational Nazi does not want you to die. They might dislike, want you to have less power and influence, might want you to leave, but they don't want you to die and if they saw you on the street they would not attack you. Second, the rational Nazi does not necessarily hate you, personally, if you are not yourself a supremecist. They might not even be a bigot at all, in the same way that an anti-woke person is not necessarily a racist.
Eh... one of my gripes about our most dedicated Joo-posters is that, no, they don't literally say "Death to Jews, Hitler did nothing wrong!" (because that would be uncouth, and also against the rules), but when pushed about what solutions they suggest to the Jewish problem that they describe incessantly, they punt, they waffle, they evade.
"So, do you want to kill Jews?"
"How dare you!"
"Okay, so should they be, like, put in camps...?"
"I never said that!"
"According to you, Jews are bad and destroying our society, so should we disenfranchise them? Forcibly deport them? Just ostracize them? Isolate them in ghettos? What?"
"I'm not answering your stupid questions!"
Now, whether our resident neo-Nazis do in fact secretly wish that they could gas all the Jews, or just have a generalized impersonal antipathy towards Jewishness, I don't know. I'm sure in person they probably are capable of being nice to individual Jews, and wouldn't look our Jewish members in the eye and say "You should die." But clearly they think Jews, as a class, are collectively responsible for evil. It's hard to believe their preferred solution wouldn't eventually result in something bad happening to Jews as a class, including Jewish members here and Jews they know personally. I'm sure a lot of Nazis had Jewish friends and maybe even felt a little sad when their Jewish neighbors got put on a train. And yet.
I suppose they might argue that their preferred solution is that Jews renounce their Jewishness and denounce other Jews and "Jewish supremacy," and the "good Jews" who do this could be allowed to keep (some) rights, but the Joo-posters also tend to favor biodeterminism and argue that being insular, conflict-prone, and parasitical is intrinsic to being Jewish, which suggests that really, Jews Are Just Like That, and that hardly leaves a lot of peaceful solutions on the table.
So that's why I think "Dislike you and want you to have less power, but wouldn't literally attack you on the street" isn't really a compelling argument for believing that anti-Semites do not, in fact, want Jews to die. Maybe they wouldn't get their own hands dirty and would like it to happen out of sight (as most Germans did), but they won't object to it happening.
07mk
6d ago
I very much disagree that college students know that they are sheltered and don’t have life experiences.
You're probably correct on this. But it's still confusing to me why. Everyone knows that everyone is missing something due to having limited experiences. Everyone knows that they fall under the category of "everyone" and therefore they must be missing something. It doesn't take much research to find out that life in the modern West, even as a lower class person, is extremely sheltered and protected compared to the norm of humanity. College students have disproportionately high access to research material and disproportionately high experience doing research. If they truly want to write a good novel or film script about a setting or characters they have little personal experiences with, any mid-level intelligent person in that situation should be able to put 2 and 2 together to realize that they need to step out of their bubble and dive into research to learn about lives and circumstances far different from their own.
Which is why I have to conclude that these people don't have motivations to write good fiction.
aldomilyar
6d ago
I wouldn't consider myself antisemitic perse. I think they have an outsized influence on Western politics/culture and I think it's kinda funny that the whole grievance studies thing has now pivoted to start vigorously ass-biting on the Israel v Palestine solution after they've essentially actively cultivated and allowed a lot of the oppressor framework stuff to take over the culture. On the other hand, I'd much rather live in a one-state Israel than in a one-state Palestine and I think any peaceful, productive resolution is far more likely to come with Zionism than vice-versa. Only one group there is likely capable of producing a viable nation-state that'd actively advance the status of all peoples (provided they were peaceful).
Like on the aggregate I think Semites have an outsized influence on a lot of things, but nonetheless are sufficiently aligned with my own personal interests and incentives that most of those influences have been broadly positive so uh carry on Illuminating albeit with a hope that the genie getting out of the bottle on Zionism might lead to less courting of the colonial grievance studies vibes.
aldomilyar
6d ago
Yeah I'm broadly the same. Jews have outsized success in the modern economy/culture, but I'd also much rather have them than Indians since I think my incentives are better aligned with Jews and Indians are more palpable 'KPI optimizers' who I feel are far more open to downright grift and don't throw up the same level of actual scientific, cultural and technological contributions that I actually benefit from. Also end of the day there's far less Jews than Indians (even if assuming it'll mostly only benefit upper castes) so that also puts a natural cap on how egregious things can get.
HereAndGone
6d ago
Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.
I think it's the arguing! When you have a site that is all "so we do all agree that purple is better than brown" on some topic, then there's not much left to discuss about purple and brown, so there's not much point in hanging around for the fiftieth post on how great purple is. I think TheSchism was a charitable project and even a good idea, but I also think it was mostly Trace's pet project and now that he seems to be busier elsewhere then there's not as much input and not as much drive to get people engaged and recruited.
HereAndGone
6d ago
I think his problem is that he doesn't and won't come out and say explicitly what the hell it is that he really believes, his own 95 Theses if you will. This makes it very difficult to argue with him, since anything he may have posted that you want to dig into, he comes back with "that's not what I think so you're wrong".
I don't mind a bit of the ould sneering contempt, I can dish that out myself, but I do want to know what precisely the sneering is about.
07mk
6d ago
Even many people who are aware, in principle, that echo chambers exist seem to have a remarkably poor time recognising when they've found themselves inside one. Echo chambers, like "biases", are things that happen to other people. I'm actually not persuaded that the average person with an undergraduate degree would be better equipped to recognise that they're in an echo chamber than the average person without an undergraduate degree.
Empirically, I can't disagree. What I find confusing is that, everything you wrote here is also basically common knowledge. Everyone who knows anything about bias knows that the bias of considering oneself above the biases that other people fall for is very common. As such, if you observe other people's biases and think yourself above them, the obvious conclusion would be that you're falling prey to such a bias and should break out of it by challenging yourself with objective research that challenges you.
At least, if you're motivated to write a good work of fiction that can appeal to people outside of your echo chamber. I have to conclude that a high proportion of major fiction writers have no such motivation. The hunger for status within one's echo chamber is often greater than the hunger for money, I suppose.
HereAndGone
6d ago
Nah, Darwin drove me nuts because he explicitly stated that sometimes he just posted something that he didn't believe simply in order to start a row (and as Amadan pointed out, that often got people banned for responding). How do you have any kind of productive discussion if the other party is "ha ha, you honestly thought I was serious about that? man, what a maroon!"
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
6d ago
I'm not anti-HBD. I'm anti third-worldism.
Grant_us_eyes
6d ago
As someone who's taking semaglutide, been on both sides of the fence of loosing alot of weight(in terms of using straight CICO and now using drugs) - yes, it's different. Radically so - it's very much given me a shift in attitude of what's necessary to loose weight nowadays, and the disturbing and sad revelation that people's bodies are infuriatingly different on a multitude of fundamental levels.
You ever hear stories about people whom can literally ignore hunger while focusing until they get near to pass out? Yeah. I can do that, now. Couldn't before. Or about that typical loosing weight advise about drinking water to stifle hunger? That never worked before - it does now. Hell, I was always confused about those strict dieting plans that called for snacks, as I've never had the urge to snack between meals. Guess what? I've begun to get dizzy and lightheaded at certain points during the day, because I lack fuel, and a small snack clears that right up.
But - and this is the part that drives me up the wall and makes me want to chew the scenery - despite eating less, I have so much more goddamn energy now. I'm able to push myself further and harder in training, and I'm alot more active in getting tasks done without even tiring. It's as if I can finally, finally use all the fuel in the tank for the first time in my life.
The frustrating element is that there is no diet, no food plan, nothing that I could feasibly do that could replicate that. I don't know whether it's genetic, developmental, or a side-effect of having your body fried growing up sucking down sugars and carbohydrates - even after pushing myself to eat healthy and exercise for years by this point, I still wouldn't be able to get that amount of energy without taking semaglutide. It's to the point that even if I wasn't loosing weight, I'd still be taking it because I want that level of energy.
Having been on the drug for a few months, now, I've begun to describe it as if I've been issued a new body and now have to re-adjust all my prior expectations. It's that much of a radical change.
From my experience, you can't compare exercise to dieting. It's two different things, two different categories of discipline. Despite training in martial arts for years, no amount of willpower was going to fix and/or change the damage my body has experienced over years of bad dieting - or maybe I'm trying to blame an external source, and maybe the fault was my body itself, a flawed meat-machine that needs drugs to perform at it's optimum. I don't know.
What I do know is, if you want to fix the issue, take drugs. They're fucking awesome, and will cure what ails you.
shoeonfoot
6d ago
As someone who has lurked around for a LONG time, notwithstanding an an account with like 4 comments back on Reddit: please don't leave.
I admit that it's a selfish request as someone who doesn't make the effort to comment, but I'm super grateful to those who take the time to push back on the Holocaust denial and anti-semitism. Please know that you, and all the others who do so, have people like me in the shadows reading your comments, nodding in approval, and (now) upvoting. Thank you.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
That's a better reason than most, and one I share.
To me, a great deal of the attraction of The Motte is the opportunity to lock horns with intellectual peers. If my ideas can't stand up to scrutiny, I owe it to myself to find out.
Yes but the author of the article is specifically positing that there's been a shift in attachment styles (something I previously mostly encountered as a trait you acquire very young, like, baby to toddler years). Perhaps he is using the term differently, but he does specifically refer to "secure attachment", so he's definitely borrowing the entire set of vocabulary while he's at it. And if he isn't using the term differently, it's really strange how the article is framed around "go against your attachment style, you need to not be avoidant" and not "but why are we experiencing an epidemic of avoidant personalities?"
Again the article has singleness as a symptom of the problem, so addressing other possible causes of singleness interests me less than "if it's true people nowadays are more avoidantly attached — why?"
Clementine
6d ago
This analogy doesn't help as much as you (and I) might hope because I often accidentally dehydrate myself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
6d ago
Sometimes I just feel something needs saying, and I guess I just have to live with it whenever I give in.
This is basically the only reason I post. Well, this and alcohol.
Corvos
6d ago
I believe that he wants everyone, eventually, to end up as what we currently regard as the peak of society: high-ranking engineers, accountants, screenwriters, what have you. In short, he wants everybody, or at least as many people as possible, to climb the ladder and become Elite Human Capital (in his eyes). He would like the entirety of America to one day look like Manhattan, and feels that his political enemies want the entirety of America to one day look like Bumfuck, Alabama (or Brazil).
Where he and I differ is probably that I don't think this is possible or desirable - lots of non-EHC jobs need to be done, it's best for them to be done locally, and you cannot convert non-borderline-EHC into EHC, although you can certainly wreck EHC with drugs or bad political systems.
HereAndGone
6d ago
I'd forgotten how entertaining the Smollett thread was. Darwin lecturing de haut en bas about empirical reality in regards to one of the stupidest (but admittedly hilarious) fake hate crimes ever was just perfection.
If Smollett had just stuck to "I got jumped and beaten up by two white guys yelling slurs", he probably would have gotten away with it. Even the MAGA thing would have worked if he said one or both was wearing a MAGA hat. But he had to plan it out like a TV episode with the bleach and noose and on-the-nose dialogue, and it all fell apart.
WhiningCoil
6d ago
Link one: Don't avoid romance says more people are single nowadays and unhappier nowadays because more people have avoidant attachment styles in the past, with some (mostly circumstantial) evidence that the amount of avoidant attachment is increasing. Ends with an exhortation to not be avoidant but doesn't examine the question I would have thought would be of interest, which is why more and more people don't have healthy attachment styles. (Aftereffects of higher divorce rate? Internet usage? Weaker community institutions? Microplastics? I'm just spitballing ideas but wouldn't a marked societal-leve change in people's psychology be something you'd want to investigate the causes of?)
Your achive link isn't the full article. This one seems better?
Once again, it's remarkable all the hoops the article, or the researchers, jump through to avoid the obvious answer. People have avoidant attachment styles because our culture almost universally portrays marriage and family as an existential horror. Women fear being "trapped" in a marriage. Women's media my entire life has bent over backwards feeding women's neuroticism that every marriage is a "bad" marriage.
And on men's side, every single man has witnessed half their friends and family cut in half by divorce. Lost the house, turned into an every other weekend "dad", and a court ordered pay pig. Probably seen friends, family and coworkers spend a weekend in jail on some trumped up charges. I had a coworker arrested because his ex said he broke into her place. On a night he was on security cameras working late in the office.
Marriage has been turned into something horrific unless you literally trust the other person with your life. A gun pointed at your head 24/7, trusting the other person not to pull the trigger, and everyone has seen it. They know someone who's been shot. Probably a lot of people. And one wonders why kids who've watched this happen to their parents (or lost a parent to it) have developed an "avoidant attachment style".
HereAndGone
6d ago
he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
Ah, come on. He was able to finesse the rules within an inch of their lives so that the people responding to him ate bans while he just slid on by with clean hands. Eventually it all caught up to him, but he wasn't the one on the receiving end of the rules enforcement.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
... fwiw I posted my original comment and then went off and curled up in a ball shaking because it was a high stress experience for me posting it, but at least the response hasn't been a bunch of jeering so hey forcing myself to not be conflict avoidant has so far paid off.
Sorry to do something that may register as injecting more fresh conflict into a situation that is already stressful for you from the amount of conflict, but unfortunately by the nature of the thing there is almost no way to bring it up in a situation that is not like this. I think that women making remarks like this is actually a big irritant to mixed spaces (and tends to breed resentment even when people are socialised to be accommodating on the surface). As is often said, men's capacity for physical violence is mirrored by women's capacity for social violence (that is, the threat of exclusion, suspension of reciprocity, coordinated punishment...), and one of the ways in which the latter is exercised are such overt displays of discombobulated emotion (perhaps signalling something like "I feel endangered to the point I can no longer maintain the default façades of social interaction, this is an emergency, someone please help"), which trigger bystanders' defensive instincts and tend to override System-2 social rules about fairness and equality that are otherwise in place.
Once, almost half a lifetime ago now, I had a very long and emotional (but not hostile) argument with my then-SO where at one point out of frustration I punctuated a sentence by slamming my fist into the mattress I was leaning on (the arrangement was such that she was reclining on the bed, and I was sitting on the floor leaning against it with one arm, fairly close to her). I had zero violent intent towards her or the object that received the blow in doing that - it felt really more like a physiological reaction, no different from when you are a little kid and got hurt and can't stop crying - and there was little in the topic of the conversation that should suggest otherwise. Yet, when I did this, she froze and stared at me with the most genuine expression of fear I've ever seen from anyone in the flesh for a few seconds, to then dissolve into a frantic run-on sentence to the effect of "oh my god, I did not know you were like that, this is not okay" which was completely out of line with her usual composed character and in turn left me horrified and impotently trying to explain myself. We talked it out in the end; the relationship did not last anyway; but that day I learned one important lesson about how what an action means to me can be different from the effect it has on others.
It is quite likely that many men have an experience like this at some point in their lifetime, which teaches them to be judicious about even accidentally flaunting their capacity for physical violence, though often it is embarrassing and private and not a thing they will proudly talk about. I wish more women could have similar experiences about their capacity for social violence - as I see it, the casually dropped "and then I curled up in a ball shaking" is really the feminine counterpart to punching the drywall and leaving a hole. The latter can never not send the message that this could have been your face, and likewise the former can never not send the message that the sentence could have been extended with "...because of you, and let's see what the people around you have to say about that" (which often needn't even be said out loud).
George Lucas
I agree that George Lucas had not a wide variety of interesting life experiences, but I think illicit race car driving hobby that ended in nearly-fatal accident is plenty interesting, far more than run-of-the-mill sheltered millennial can boast of. But I agree his personal life experiences provided enough material for only one film (American Graffiti) which isn't bad but not the work Lucas is famous for.
I propose a synthesis: Great films require great directors, scriptwriters, actors, camera work, costumes, special effects, score. Some of those, I imagine, are skills someone can learn if he/she has the requisite talent and aptitude and opportunity to learn (such as in a film school). However, when it comes to the story elements and character portrayal, the film school can be beneficial but it is not the only nor the best source. School education has tendency to teach formulaic standards that please the professors. So it helps when the directors and scriptwriters can draw from real experiences- while it is not necessary if they can draw from imagination and someone else's real experiences. Likewise, it is not necessary but it helps when actors can do the same thing (during the filming of Lord of the Rings, Sir Christopher Lee corrected Peter Jackson on what kind of sound a man makes when he is stabbed in back. I doubt many actors today can claim similar knowledge.)
It is necessary that the scriptwriters are very good at writing, which requires superb talent or relentless practice and usually both.
In Star Wars the original trilogy we have a bit of both: Lucas draws not from personal biographical history but from previous films he saw as a kid that were more connected to reality and they had other writing talent and producers and directors. Star Wars (1977) is a collage of samurai epic, westerns, WW2 airplane action films, and Flash Gordon. When Lucas draws from Dam Busters (1955), he takes inspiration from a film based on a genuine military operation. Kurosawa's samurai films have a more tenuous connection to history, but it is a connection nevertheless, and as inspiration it was new to the US mass audience. Flash Gordon is work of imagination, but contributes the pulp setting and plot elements. Concerning the script-writing skill part, for The Empire Strikes Back, they brought in Leigh Brackett for the first draft, who had written countless amount of pulp space opera and screenplays for noir and John Wayne films, and later Lawrence Kasdan to polish the dialogue. For Indiana Jones, they had Lucas, Spielberg, and old adventure movie serials.
As an aside, Francis Ford Coppola is a great director who did nothing too exciting growing up, but one of his particular skills as director has been in choosing great occasionally high-brow script material. I don't think people today realize how many of his films are either directly based on or inspired best-seller novels. Everyone seems to know that Apocalypse Now is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam (and Joseph Conrad had plenty of varied life experience), but it is not as common knowledge that the Godfather was based on novel by Mario Puzo ("The novel remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 67 weeks and sold over nine million copies in two year") who also wrote the script. The Outsiders and Rumble Fish are novels by S. E. Hinton. Original inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula is, you know, in the title. I think the only film of his I've seen that is based on original script is The Conversation. In comparison, Spielberg appears to be a directorial wonderkid, winning competitions at age 13 and sneaking into Universal Studios as teenager.
The generation of film-makers today have two major endogenous weaknesses: Firstly, they draw from pop culture products that are now twice or thrice-removed from the 'real' source (instead of WW2 aircraft dogfight films, the Star Wars sequels were inspired mostly by previous Star Wars) and the creators have PMC childhoods followed by college and adulthood which are more boring and scripted than 60's kids had. Secondly, both low-brow pulp fiction and high-brow literature are dead. Of pulp era media products, only the withering remains of comics are left. Pulp provided scripts and training ground and filter for aspiring writers whereas high-brow literature provided an aspirational ideal, and occasional script, too. DC and Marvel have been mostly successful at reanimation of decades-old characters and tropes.
Now I believe the weaknesses mentioned above would not be fundamental obstacles alone- the directors and scriptwriters could draw inspiration and verisimilitude from elsewhere if they had to, but then myriad of separate obstacles grind down that possibility: propensity to be blinded by activism; attention deficit among the audiences; economics influenced by streaming services; economics of producing CGI heavy blockbusters to sell toys and-or theme park rides; all sound plausible contributors to decline of the cinema.
It does directly address the issue and has nothing to do with hypocrisy, though. The issue being raised is that LLMs are fundamentally unreliable due to being unfixably prone to hallucinations. The way it's addressed is that humans are also similarly fundamentally unreliable, yet we've built reliable systems based on them, and that proves by example that being fundamentally unreliable isn't an insurmountable hurdle for generating reliable systems.
I don't understand how this doesn't address the issue in the most direct, straightforward way possible while completely avoiding anything to do with accusations of hypocrisy. The only way it could be better is if someone actually provided the specific method of generating reliable systems using modern LLMs.
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