domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Testing123
7hr ago
You’re actually underselling the wokeness of the Pitt. Some mildly SPOILERY events:
-
A black woman comes into the hospital with extreme pain. A white doctor thinks she is faking the pain to get painkillers, but a non-white doctor comes in and declares that she has sickle cell anemia and really is in pain. -
Later on, a white main comes into the hospital with extreme pain. The white doctors believe him, but a non-white doctor correctly infers that he’s a drug addict. -
A white family has a kid with measles because they didn’t get him vaccinated. They then delay treatment almost to the point of the kid dying because the mother “does her own research” with blogs. -
A white man in the waiting room is repeatedly rude and causes escalating problems because he has to keep waiting to be seen by the doctors while more injured people get treatment before him. At one point, the white man complains about other people getting treatment with his tax dollars. Later, the white man punches a female administrator in the face and says something MAGA-y. -
A white woman in the waiting room initiates a fight with someone because the latter person is wearing a hospital mask. IIRC, the white woman even screams something about Fauci lying. -
An obese woman comes in with a vague problem. A doctor tells her to lose weight and the obese woman gets upset. Another doctor comes in, finds the real problem (which isn’t related to obesity) and scolds the first doctor for being fixated on the obesity. -
A very old black guy comes into the hospital and prompts a speech by the main white doctor about how a group of black doctors made some important medical discovery 50 years ago that is underappreciated today.
This is just off the top of my head, I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of these.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist.
You can take medical images in various different modalities, you can even mask off either the high-frequency or low-frequency spatial data, and use a machine learning classifier to reliably determine self-described race. Race is real, and it is pervasive.
TIRM
22hr ago
I'm here and I'm not a racist. I'll keep chugging along.
Can we please not be reddit fixated on vote tallies?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
19hr ago
Buddy. Pal. Lemme level with you here. I gotta be brutally honest, because you did ask for an explanation of why you get downvoted so much.
You have, from what I've observed in your posts, a staggering inability to ever acknowledge when the person you're talking to has ever made a valid point.
Now obviously no one in an internet debate ever actually admits they were straight up wrong. But there's a difference between "yeah ok, that's true but your position is still bullshit because of XYZ" and "ah, no, erm, you see, you've simply misunderstood the situation as it were, it's actually not like that at all, I don't know what you're talking about..."
You seem to be particularly fond of the latter. And it's one of the fastest ways to really turn people off from listening to anything you have to say.
I told you that the way you phrased your post will read as insulting to many people here. I'm quite confident that this is a fact. There are many ways you could respond to this. You could say "well fuck 'em I don't care", you could say "it shouldn't be an insult if it's true", there are lots of things you could say in your defense that aren't just total capitulation and admission of guilt. But instead you chose "nope, that never happened, don't know what you're talking about". Which is essentially the most obnoxious type of response possible.
Again, the lion's share of your downvotes come from the simple fact that your views are anti-consensus, but your particular style of argument certainly doesn't help things.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
6hr ago
I'm pretty sure there's a fascinating generational divide at play in things like this.
Here's my folk theory on that. Because of the particular circumstances Boomers were born into, many of the more artistic ones were raised in a much more conservative environment, then had a massive crisis of faith / trust / belief in the late 60s through the 70s, and then had to figure out a way to reintegrate themselves into society and make art about it. And because of that, whatever their other flaws, they were often VERY good at making entertainment that could talk to actual moderates and conservatives, because in many cases, they were the black sheep who had charted an overt path away from where they had started. They were the prodigal sons, but when they returned, they intended to remake culture with what they had found.
If you were a conservative, trying to maintain a traditional culture, these people were like the pied piper of Hamelin. They were really good at targeting younger members of your home communities, seductively you might say. They were legitimately good at representing things you recognized while also undermining it with a certain kind of criticism or nuance, at their best. Or even when they were provoking, they were good at signaling that they were provoking from within a shared tribe, so to speak.
Gen X didn't have the formative experience of the draft, and they grew up in the shadow of both this artistic explosion as well as the backlash, the stagflation of the 70s, and the rise of the religious right, and the cold war of the 80s. They saw the huge excesses of the divorce revolution and the drug culture and AIDS as-it-was-experienced and various miserable, alienating radical activist movements. They were, perhaps, particularly attuned towards cynicism about politics and messy ambiguity in art as a result. The best Gen X (at least when they were young) was often provocative, knowing exactly how to needle a conservative majority, but rarely preachy... (although if I go back and listen to, say, Eddie Vedder now, I can recognize the west coast SJW inclinations there the whole time). And also, the left of center counter culture got stomped down so incredibly hard in the 80s that they legitimately recognized themselves as outsiders, a kind of marginalized dissent. And Gen X got irony.
I think (when it comes to art and communication), everything kind of went to hell with the combination of the collapse of conservatism in the George W Bush years, the rhetorical success of, especially, Jon Stewart, and the messianic rise of Obama. Because it ushered in a kind of generational change, and that meant that a lot of the Millennials, especially, developed their early political identities during the Bush years and then experienced a conversion experience with Obama, all while internalizing the worst elements of Jon Stewart's frequent stance of "we, the smart ones, don't even need to refute the arguments of these moral monsters and intellectual imbeciles, and so we will use a condescending sneer at them instead". And I mean, I liked that tone during the Bush years too - it was very fun and self-satisfying. But it mixes with thoughtful art really, really poorly, it doesn't do nuance or ambiguity, and it really only works when you're preaching to the choir. And once Obama swept it, it turned out that being against something legitimately lousy was easy mode, and when you're for things (like high speed rail in California, or a really aggressive trans agenda), and you leave a giant trail of wreckage in your wake, sneering at your opponents simply isn't enough. That doesn't persuade. It doesn't take reality seriously, or your own failures. Everything that made those messy dissident Boomers so effective had dried up. And I really do think radically different life experiences played a major role here. I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts, the aristocratic power that stands in perpetual judgement due to intellectual merit and thus moral merit. And... that just really sucks for sophisticated art. And then the radicalization that happened in the lead up to Trump has just made everything vastly worse, of course. I've noted it before, but the run up to the 2016 election was the first time in my life that I had EVER seen artistically cooler, non-cringe media from Republicans than Democrats. It felt, at the time, like that was an important bellwether of something.
I've seen Freddie de Boer bemoan what he calls the "We are already decided" stance (or something like that). I think if you're in communities that have already adopted that stance, it becomes very difficult to make sophisticate, nuanced art that can reach out to people with other life experiences.
I remember early on in cancel culture Chris Rock (I think) talking about how he couldn't play colleges anymore. And he had some statement that was like, "You can't be wrong anymore on your way to being" - suggesting, I think, that even if you were going to tell a joke that ended up with an approved morality, you weren't allowed to even play around rhetorically with the unapproved morality, or give it is due, or take it serious, as a rhetorical technique before ending up where you were supposed to. I think I'm paraphrasing that roughly right. And I think (if I am) that that captured some of the specific tension I find so interesting here.
Tacherus
9hr ago
The Pitt as a lagging culture war indicator
So I’ve been watching The Pitt with my wife lately.
The premise of the show is to follow doctors and nurses in an ER over a single 15-hour shift, much like the old show 24.
The show has been praised for its accuracy and I certainly find it intense at times.
That being said, I’m halfway through the Emmy-nominated season and while the medical drama part is solid, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the culture war aspects of the show.
According to Wikipedia, development began late 2023 after the writers strike and into 2024. The show premiered in early 2025 and has already been renewed.
It’s good and I’ve enjoyed watching it.
That being said….
There’s a bit of a culture war time capsule effect that shows up from time to time. It’s intermittent but fairly heavy-handed I think:
- a medical student is lectured on intent vs impact after offering the aid of a social work to a homeless mom
- a trans woman is treated for a cut and a med student draws attention to the “misgendering” of insurance records. We’re told it’s cool to have fixed this
- we’re shown the “correct” way to interact with an autistic patient. A sr resident has apparently never done this before and is in awe of a second year “neuro-divergent” resident who helps the patient
- a 17 year old girl is brought in for an abortion. The doctors commit fraud to make it happen and even talk the kids mom into it
It’s hard to convey from the descriptions but there are two themes I want to comment on.
The first is what is treated as something to joke about vs a Very Special Message. We get jokes about drug addicts with nicknames, jokes about frat boys in car wrecks, jokes about whether a medical student killed someone or just got unlucky. No joking around though when it comes to using terms like “unhoused.”
The other major theme that to me comes out strongly is a vibe of knowing the answers to all these political issues. There’s never any exploration or even acknowledgment of a controversy beyond as an obstacle to be dealt with.
For instance (mild spoilers) the girl coming in for an abortion evidently missed the 11 week deadline. No problem! Doctors will just lie. The mother of the patient isn’t on board but that’s ok the doctors will browbeat her into it and suggest the daughter will never speak to her again if it happens.
Sometimes even the doctors don’t know what to do like in the case of an incel with some violent journaling or a patient who’s been poisoned by his wife—she claims without evidence or corroboration that he’s molesting their daughter and we’re horrified to learn that she might be the one in trouble!
Overall though, the attitude is one of “we know the answers but sometimes society isn’t quite caught up yet.”
Will be curious to see how the tone of shows like this changes having now entered an era of “reckoning” and “post-mortems” of democratic hubris.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
20hr ago
No actually we've managed to avoid fixating on quote tallies 'til now despite having votes viewable after 24 hours since back on reddit iirc. We just don't fixate on vote tallies.
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
There are lots of views posted to the motte which are offensive to various sorts. I don't understand why your offense at racism should be privileged?
Actually, let's take a broader view- society tolerates, and even encourages, lots of views which are very offensive to me. Why is your offense at racism worse?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19hr ago
"don't adopt a black kid, they're all bad, and they're ruining everything".
No, the actual claim is, “The specific black kids who are up for adoption/fostering in America are, to an extremely large extent, likely to be a huge problem.” They are not a randomly-selected cross-section of the overall black population. There is a reason why they are up for adoption, and it is nearly always a terrible reflection on the parents.
If you accept any sort of hereditarian explanation of human behavior, then it should matter to you that the kid you’re considering for adoption is very very very likely to be the child of A) a drug addict), B) an incarcerated person, or C) a teenage unwed mother. (Or the very common D) all of the above.) The same traits that led such a person to such a lowly state are likely to manifest at least to some extent in the child as well. Even if you don’t accept any hereditarian claims, you still have to worry about things like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, childhood malnutrition, and even neglect/abuse leading to stunted cognitive/physical development, etc. Again, these things are not guaranteed to make the child a ticking time bomb, but the likelihood is far from zero.
These things are at least partially true of non-black children up for adoption or in the foster system as well, but to a markedly lesser extent. The likelihood of these problems just is higher when it comes to adopting a black child. That could change at some point down the road, and certainly there are numerous exceptions and success stories even today, but that doesn’t mean it’s immoral or misguided to take these things into account.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
Or you can just like, not let it bother you?
My whole last page of comments got ratio’d and I’m still alive.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
I just want to register my annoyance that I'm being argued with on a point that's not germane to the topic I was trying to refute.
Probably a bad idea to start off with a very confident declarative statement that's not even germane to the topic you wanted to discuss, then.
Total model "accuracy" hits unacceptably low numbers, in my opinion, because of how many blurred borderline cases there are, resulting in miscategorizations of various types.
What's the acceptable level of accuracy? Would it change your mind if it turned out "race" is no worse in that regard than most other categories in biology, or would it mean we have to throw the entire science out?
You realize that black people didn't hop on their ships, cross the Atlantic and invade America, right? Forcibly enslaving people, displacing them from their homes and bringing them to America is vastly different from an invasive species...invading and ruining an ecosystem?
That's literally how invasive species work. If rabbits had been able to swim to Australia unaided, they wouldn't be invasive, they would be part of the natural ecosystem. Like the French and Spanish in the Americas. Do people even bother calling rats invasive? I suppose the British are the rats in this analogy.
Listening
20hr ago
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
21hr ago
I find it impossible to believe that if there were some hint of damning evidence about Trump in Epstein's files that it wouldn't have gotten leaked during either of the last two elections. There is just no conceivable value that the Dem establishment would have held high enough to cause them to refrain.
Much more believable that the juicy parts of the relevant hard drives and data were "accidentally" thrown into an incinerator in 2019.
enormous danger of misinformation and disinformation.
I regret to inform you that you share a planet with people who believe in penis-stealing witches, and many of them don't even have Internet access.
The whole "misinformation" thing has always seemed strange to me. The original default was that everyone was always wrong about everything, 100% of the time. Recently, in large part thanks to the Internet, some people are occasionally less than 100% wrong. You might even say that the Internet made people less wrong (bah-dum tiss).
People being wrong is not a new problem and the Internet didn't make it worse.
During the life of Marie Antoinette, there was a scandal involving a diamond necklace that severely damaged her reputation. Except she had literally nothing to do with it, and she could prove that she had nothing to do with it. The French press vilified her anyway.
And who could forget about Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer who was accused of selling secrets to the Germans? You know, the guy who was proven innocent and then dragged through the mud by the French press because the army was too embarrassed to admit they made it all up? The guy who was vilified because of a bunch of lying journalists and government officials? That guy?
/images/17528682967017636.webp
Hey, I'm starting to notice a pattern here. It seems like journalists and government officials have been spreading disinformation since before the invention of the telegraph. Maybe instead of giving journalists and government officials unlimited power to censor anyone who disagrees with them, we should consider that maybe the call is coming from inside the house.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8hr ago
Will be curious to see how the tone of shows like this changes having now entered an era of “reckoning” and “post-mortems” of democratic hubris.
This appears not to be happening at all, so far as I can tell. After a brief but abortive period of maybe a couple of weeks immediately following the election, in which it seemed like there might be some small but sincere effort toward this, progressives appear overwhelmingly to have hunkered down into a stance that they were right all along and that the voters really are just too irredeemable to ever be trusted again. Go on Bluesky and see how people who are perceived to be advocating “popularism” are treated. (You’re accused of throwing trans people are minorities to the wolves, betraying them for short-term mercenary political gain.)
A handful of smart-but-cynical elite figures like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein might be trying to conduct a proper course-correction, but they appear to have little or no influence on the tier of progressives thought leaders and activists just below them. Presumably television scriptwriters are on the tier even below that one, totally insulated from the imprecations of politically-savvy wonks.
2rafa
10hr ago
It’s funny to me that in real life, many a man will cop to being friends with various kinds of scumbags with the “yeah, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he never did anything to me” reasoning, but somehow when it comes to celebrity I’m expected to be scandalized that people stayed friends with Epstein even though he had a thing for 16 year old girls (whom they may well have believed were 18 anyway).
Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal where 12 year olds were being sexually tortured and pimped to hundreds or thousands of strangers, sometimes dozens a day. Yes, what Epstein did (paying 16 year olds for sex and having them recruit their school friends for the same purpose) was cruel and wrong - and he deserved jail for it - but in the grand scheme of all sexual crimes it was far, far from the worst.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
21hr ago
But groupings mix and blend like crazy
So do colors, clouds, emotions, religions, languages, etc... but there's been no mass political movement to try and convince the public that these things "don't really exist".
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
This is because when democrats can articulate positive visions they're hyper-unpopular('defund the police' 'protect trans kids'). Trump, for all his faults, is very good at articulating ideas that are popular, even if they're bad('no tax on overtime').
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
Your first example is one of the few places where MAGA and Trump actually strongly disagree (Epstein stuff)
I thought you said MAGA is supposed to be a personality cult, blindly following everything Trump says.
clo
20hr ago
Not again, let's not have the HBD discussion for the billionth time again, here's the cliffs notes:
HBD is trivially true, what decisions, policies, actions are taken as a result of that are up to you, but you need to be aware that they exist because sooner or later you will run into physical reality. You can continue to run from it, you can plan around it, you can even make giant state sponsored psyops to make sure that the hoi polloi don't notice and to prevent them from slaughtering each other. Value judgements about what heritable traits are preferable are again, up to you. Maybe evolution will decide intelligence is the Great Filter and the morons will inherit the earth, what the fuck ever.
Racism depends on how you define it, I don't like Swedish food and I dislike the French but I'd struggle with anyone calling it racism, especially since the definition of what racism is has expanded vastly over the last decade to include the default state of literally every Southeast Asian who has to live around other ethnicities
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
20hr ago
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
21hr ago
The metaphor is wrong because in the typical understanding, the actions we should take against "invasive species" should be extreme, up to and including eradicating them from the "invaded" area.
The metaphor is specifically telling you not to put yourself in a position where you would have to take extreme measures to remove the invasive species. Have you ever read an account of an adoption gone wrong? In the worst cases, it sounds like the stuff that makes family annihilations seem understandable. And just to get ahead of the obvious criticism, the worst such story I've ever come across involved adopting a pair of Eastern European girls, who proved to be violently uncontrollable wrecking balls on the lives of their adoptive parents.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
21hr ago
“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
That's deep. Feels like we're getting a rare look at the man behind the mask.
Never wrote a picture in his life. Does he regret that? Is there an artist in there, struggling to get out?
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Better writing than most of what's on AO3.
A few things.
First, nobody likes a flouncer. You would not be the first to decide this hive of scum and villainy is too much for you and crash out. And that's entirely fair. This place is not for everyone. But if you think loudly declaring you will take your marbles and go home will effect a change in the status quo... no, it probably won't. We allow people with unpleasant views to say their piece if they can stay just this side of attacking individuals or groups. That's by design, it's because we want to have a place where you can actually be exposed to someone able to make an argument for a point of view you might find reprehensible. I do not like racists, blackpillers, incels, white nationalists, accelerationists, Holocaust deniers, and our various other deplorables, but where else can I go (except a forum specifically dedicated to those views, which would be nothing but unfiltered bile and rageposting) to hear what they actually believe and engage with them?
"But I don't want to engage with racists!" you say. And again: fair enough. Maybe this place is not for you. But what is it you want, exactly? For us to be less racist, collectively? Then be one of those who pushes back. For us to not allow people to be racist? Might as well just demand we ban all the deplorables, right?
Second: @WhiningCoil earned a number of reports on that post. He gets reported a lot as he descends further into his bitter nihilistic hole. He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit, so it's not like his seething rants about how much he hates (an ever-expanding range of people) have gone without consequences. That post (and several others of his) are in fact still sitting in the mod queue because I decided I was not going to be the one to make a decision about them.
Borderline posts about how much you hate your enemies are, well, borderline, and whether we decide they cross the line depends a lot on how a particular mod reads the particular wording. Outright saying "Black people are a violent invasive species" would be unambiguously cause for a ban. Saying plainly "I hate black people" would get a lot of reports but would actually be allowed. You are allowed to hate people here! Making a nasty innuendo is, well, borderline. Same goes for a lot of the various posts we get about Jews Jews Jews.
As for the upvotes, would it surprise you to know that many of our most heated, reported, and ban-baiting posts also get heavily upvoted? The more spicy your screed about how much you hate Those People, the more likely that a lot of other people who also hate Those People will upvote you. Yes, that means we have a lot of haters here. You'll notice quite a few people also downvote those posts, though, so it's not one-sided.
So yes, this site is "tainted by racism." We have racists here, and they aren't banned just for being racist. That is intentional. The intent is not to be a haven for racists (though we've certainly been accused of being just that), but to be a place where people can say the things they can't say elsewhere, and then have to defend it. I only wish more people like you would muster the wherewithal to argue back instead of just getting indignant and leaving.
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