07mk
1mo ago
But what Walsh is actually revealing is two not-very-surprising realities of human nature: First, that every group has an awful fringe, and it’s easy to make that group look bad if only the fringe’s worst moments survive the cutting-room floor.
Not having watched this film yet (I intend to at some point due to the generally positive reviews from across the political spectrum - I'm not particularly familiar with Walsh and have no interest in What is a Woman, though I've seen his name and face* on social media second hand), this sentence went a wildly different direction than I thought it would go based on what I'd heard of the film. What I would have written would have been something more like:
First, that every group has an awful fringe, and therefore it's incumbent on every group not to subvert their ability to discriminate against and excise this awful fringe, lest they empower that fringe and cause awfulness to happen.
Because one thing that's clear about the movements behind the types of activists that are being mocked in this film is that they subvert this ability in many ways, e.g. by valuing an argument based on the race of the arguer rather than the quality of the arguments, which have enabled both cynical grifters and naive true believers to form an awful fringe that gets glossed over at least and institutional backing at worst. It seems like the original sentence was meant to call out Walsh as acting badly by shining a light at this awful result of this incompetent-at-best/malicious-at-worst behavior by these movements rather than calling out the very things that caused the awful result in the first place.
The second part also has a somewhat similar phenomenon going on; exploiting the human instinct for avoiding confrontation was a major means by which these awful fringes became as popular and influential as they did, which is what even allowed Walsh to have content upon which to base this film in the first place.
* I gotta say, if I hadn't heard of Walsh before I saw his face, I would have guessed that his ideology was the exact opposite of what it actually seems to be. Which, I guess, probably made it a lot easier for him to blend in while filming this.
07mk
1mo ago
This is why I've found the Democratic response to Trump's/Republican claims of 2020 election fraud so frustrating. As someone who believes that there's no good reason to believe that any meaningful election fraud took place in 2020, if I were in charge of the Democratic party, I would have responded to such accusations by investigating with so much fervor that even the most die-hard Trumpist would think we should be scaling it back. If fraud were not found, then this would embarrass and discredit Trump and his ilk, and if it were found, then it will help us to run more valid elections in the future, as well as possibly correct errors in the 2020 election. This seems like a win-win. Mocking the fraud accusations seems like a pure power move - "I won, therefore I get my way instead of yours," instead of "I won, therefore my belief that the contest was fair has no credibility, and thus I'll defer to your judgment for the sake of keeping our democratic republic credibly such."
07mk
1mo ago
I know, my position is basically "let's try it again and maybe it will work this time".
I don't think "maybe" needs to be the extent of the plan, though. The transformation from the colorblind 90s to the ever-present race conflict of today didn't happen spontaneously. It was done due to people openly and explicitly pushing for this to happen. We can try again, but excise those elements this time.
Now, that's easier said than done, as it would likely require a great reformation of academia such that they all - not just the "hard" fields - actually take concepts like empiricism and logic seriously. And the forces that pushed this in the first place will continue to innovate, to come up with new, creative techniques to subvert our ability to see individuals as individuals. But having been burned once, we're at least somewhat better equipped to notice and stop these guys before it's too late.
Unfortunately, getting anything like this seems a pipe dream at this point. It'd also be working uphill, since it seems that race consciousness and racism is the human default. Which is one reason why academia had such an easy time turning their ostensibly antiracist efforts into scaffolding to support overt racism.
07mk
1mo ago
I don't think there are any good stats on this, but most estimates of trans people in the population put it at around 0.5% or less. If anime increased the likelihood of identifying as trans to just 0.75%, that would represent a gigantic increase in likelihood while still making it vanishingly unlikely that any given anime fan is trans or even seems trans.
I do buy into the theory that whatever correlation exists is due to them being both downstream of autism, though.
07mk
2mo ago
I find myself wondering: do they really believe this? Do they literally think Matt Walsh is going to rise from his folding chair and physically assault them? I have to think they know they are full of shit and this is just rhetoric to justify kicking someone out whose real crime is being an ass.
I would wager that they do genuinely believe that Walsh presents a danger to them in the moment that can be lessened by him being kicked out. However, that's about the extent of their thinking; there's no actual consideration for logic or physics or logistics of the situation. Rather, the logic is that someone presenting danger is a good reason to kick them out, and therefore if you want to kick someone out, claiming that they're dangerous is a good tactic. But if you claim that someone is a danger despite not believing that they're a danger, then that makes you a liar, which is bad, and you aren't bad. So you come to genuinely believing that this person presents a danger to you.
07mk
2mo ago
This thread invites people to discuss things they were wrong about, but most people are using it to grind their usual axes.
I don't think the "but" belongs there. If you believe you used to be wrong about something, then of course it's natural that you'd have an axe to grind with whatever forces led you to believing that wrong thing in the past. And grinding that axe is how you discuss things you were wrong about in the past.
07mk
2mo ago
How much overall empirical evidence is there in education in general? It seems to me that there isn't a whole lot of credible research on exactly what works and what doesn't, as well as to whom and how much, and I'm reminded of the line about marketing, that you know only 10% of it works, but you don't know which 10%. And with the replication crisis in social sciences that has shown no signs of getting any better recently, it seems unlikely that there's much credible research on this out there. This problem is compounded by the fact that researchers of this sort are overwhelmingly professional academics, which would bias them towards overweighting the value of the education system that they themselves have invested so much time and effort into, as well as the well known partisan bias, which, in the case of sex ed, would lead to the vast majority of researchers being biased in favor of discovering that the type of sex ed being implemented right now is really useful and valuable.
07mk
2mo ago
The point is that "millions of our fellow citizens are complicit in the industrialized slaughter of innocent people, buuut we need to win the next election so let's just roll with it" isn't really a stable worldview. That doesn't fly without some major cognitive dissonance. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, then it seems to me that the natural course of action in that case is uncompromising activism, as opposed to even a qualified capitulation.
(Full disclaimer, I am weakly pro-abortion, but I do get frustrated at how the anti-abortion position is systematically mischaracterized and misunderstood.)
I'm in the same boat, but I'm not sure how you land at the conclusion that uncompromising activism is the natural course of action. It's certainly one plausible course of action, but so is trying to dishonestly and cynically win elections in order to gain power to enforce one's intentionally hidden agenda, but neither strikes me as more natural than the other, and more importantly, it strikes me as even less likely to work than trying to win elections. If winning just one election isn't enough, then surely that calls for winning even more elections, rather than pivoting to uncompromising activism, which has a rather questionable track record. I think this primarily points to politicians, activists, campaign managers, etc. are really just not all that rational or competent and tend to follow what makes them feel good in the moment rather than what increases the odds of bringing about a future that they prefer.
07mk
2mo ago
men are more valued on the job market and would accordingly have an easier time returning to supporting themselves if the deal doesn't work out
This is the kind of thing that seems to be repeated often but for which there's basically no actual evidence.
In any case, one thing that's clear to me, at least about the men I'm familiar with, is that you could negate all such advantages, real or imagined, and even tack on a few extra disadvantages (of which there already are plenty which also haven't been mentioned here, but IMHO trying to go through some laundry list of stuff and weigh them properly is a fool's game whose conclusions depend entirely on the biases of the writer and none on the actual reality of the situation), and it would still look like a far better deal than what they're getting right now.
07mk
2mo ago
Would you, personally, prefer to take the status of the woman in this arrangement? Would you marry a woman if, under no uncertain terms, she told you she wanted to have a lot of kids but you would have to give up your career to stay home with them?
I find this mindset fascinating, of asking a question like this in an apparent expectation that the answer would be obviously no. It would be pretty difficult for me to find a man in my life who would say no to such a deal; in fact, it would be the rare man who wouldn't consider this the relationship equivalent of winning the lottery, in terms of how good a deal they would see it as.
07mk
2mo ago
I just told my wife (2 kids and counting) about this article and her reaction was (roughly translated): "weird how many women have multiple".
This seems like a good avenue of research if we take the notion of revealed preferences seriously. Among the population of mothers with 1 child and with the opportunity for a 2nd, how many of them go on to get a 2nd? Defining what that "opportunity for a 2nd" in an objective way would be basically impossible, since where to draw the line in terms of financial and other logistical constraints is highly subjective. But it'd still be interesting to see what the results would be depending on different places the line is drawn. If it turns out that some significant proportion of such mothers go on to have (or at least attempt) a 2nd child, then that would provide at least some support for the notion that, as a non-mother without first-hand experience, the author of the essay has an inaccurately severe view of the pain and suffering that childbirth involves for the mother.
There would be other explanations as well, of course, such as childbirth causing amnesia in the mother, or that the benefits of being a mother of 2 is so much greater than being a mother of 1 that the calculation is very different than from going from 0 to 1. Or that the women who give birth to 1 child are already filtered for women with lots of courage to go through with giving birth. But I think the explanation that someone who hasn't experienced giving birth is catastrophizing it in a way that isn't reflective of the actual experience of the women who have experienced it is a pretty simple one that ought to be given a lot of weight.
07mk
2mo ago
As people age, they often gain the wisdom and self-determination to step back and recognize these internal conflicts. They realize that their earlier choices—made when their short-term drives held more sway—were myopic and not aligned with what they genuinely value in the long term.
Yes, and that's the rub, isn't it? In such cases, do we say that someone's myopic short-term drives are their "true" preferences that ought to override whatever they genuinely value in the long term, or do we say that what they genuinely value in the long term are their "true" preferences that ought to override their myopic short-term drives?
If it turns out that some significant proportion of women who choose not to have children when they can end up regretting it when they age up to when they no longer can - a big if, IMHO - then should the next generation of young women celebrate them and follow in their footsteps, since those older women got to live out their short-term drives in their youth, short-term drives that they would have had considerable difficulty living out even just 100 years ago due to the lower freedoms and opportunities offered to women back then? Or should the next generation of young women see these older women as warnings for how they could end up suffering in the long run due to following their own short-term drives? I could see different people having different answers to these depending on their values.
07mk
2mo ago
This seems analogous to the obesity epidemic that's also been called a "crisis" in many Western nations. The revealed preference of many people is that they would prefer to indulge in high calorie foods and lack of exercise, and then they suffer health issues including possibly early death later on. This is an eminently reasonable preference, especially in modern Western nations, where the deliciousness and diversity of food is at incredibly high levels and the importance of physical fitness and downsides of bad health issues are at incredibly low levels. It seems that at least some of these obese people regret their eating/exercise decisions that caused their health issues, but then all that means is that their revealed preference is to indulge in their youth, then later on suffer the negative consequences including regretting those indulgences, rather than to not indulge and to not suffer health consequences of obesity by not being obese.
I suppose this points to the difficulty of figuring out how exactly to weight revealed preferences when that preference includes both a decision and regretting that decision. In those cases, do we just say that everything is hunky dory, since they're meeting their preference of regretting their present decision in the future? Or do we say that something has gone wrong, because preferring to regret something is a concept that's in tension with itself?
07mk
2mo ago
I don't watch Tucker - even clips of his other than, say, as part of a montage of right wingers saying ridiculous things, very rarely shows up in the media I consume - so I don't know if he's ever had a good faith interview with a far left "woke" person before. As best as I can tell, he hasn't, and I'd be happy to presume that he hasn't. Given what far left "woke" people have said about their ideology, this seems to be primarily a consequence of there being a dearth of far left "woke" people who are also willing to even consider being in the same room as Tucker, much less being seen having a conversation with him in public. It's the same phenomenon I've seen with interviewers that I have paid attention to, such as Sam Harris, who was practically begging far left "woke" people to converse with him on his platform as of around 5 years ago, with someone like Ezra Klein being the farthest left/farthest "woke" person he managed to land, IIRC. And Harris, even today, isn't considered nearly as much a right-winger as Tucker is.
But, more to the point, singular examples involving a pundit who likely interviews dozens of people a year, hundreds of people in just a few, isn't meaningful, and even more to the point, when the person never claims to be trying to put together an in-aggregate fairly balanced lineup of interviewees in his show (as best as I can tell, Tucker hasn't claimed this). Maybe he has a heavily right-wing bend in his interviewees, and it's done out of intentional bias rather than out of limited options or even unintentional bias. So? Perhaps Tucker wants to provide a platform on which to have good faith discussions about right-wing ideas, especially those that don't tend to get platforms? After all, if Tucker had a good faith conversation with a far left "woke" person, well, an argument between a far left "woke" person and a rightist like Tucker is about a dime a dozen; the views of someone who's far left "woke" are essentially hegemonic in modern media, and there's precious little to be gained from listening to yet another conversation analyzing and critiquing it. There's some gain, potentially, but, I'll just say that I doubt that Tucker is the kind of brilliant mind who'd be able to extract some extra insight that others had missed when discussing the ideas of this far left "woke" person for the umpteenth time. On the other hand, good faith conversations about far right ideas - certainly of the sort that would be espoused by a Nazi - are difficult to come by outside of niche subcultures like this one. Even someone of Tucker's wit and intelligence would be able to offer a lot of valuable new insights into the world merely by asking basic questions, because almost no one is asking or answering those basic questions in good faith.
If we refuse to do this, then we capitulate to grifters who eternally claim they're "just asking questions". It's bad to give JAQing off a pass.
So don't give them a pass. Who the heck cares if you do or don't give them a pass? What does not giving them a pass even mean in this context? JAQing off is bad only inasmuch as it overwhelms a limited bandwidth, such as taking up the time of a researcher or expert with questions that offer no insight, which prevents the person from spending that time answering actually meaningful questions. There is no limited bandwidth here; Tucker's interviews aren't being forced to be beamed onto everyone's phones at the cost of people being able to download an interview with a far left "woke" person or whatever. People who don't like the questions that are being asked by Tucker and his ilk can just... not download his interviews and leave their bandwidth open for the types of content they do like. Just because they're asking questions doesn't obligate anyone to answer them or to listen to someone answering them. So don't answer them, and don't listen to them. Go ahead and don't give them a pass; just don't go around claiming that someone else answering them or listening to the answers is somehow indicative of their friendliness to whatever questions and answers are the topic here.
07mk
2mo ago
Sure, but you have no credibility with which to make the judgment whether they're seriously committed to exploring viewpoints on their own merits or using it as a shield to broadcast highly controversial views that they want to pull into the Overton window. In general, very few people have that level of credibility when talking about other people's behaviors, and specifically, if those other people are people one disagrees with or dislikes, then they definitely have no credibility in determining such things. If I disagree with them, then regardless of the underlying reality, of course I'll convince myself that these bad people with bad ideas are dishonest cynics who are cynically being dishonest in order to sneak in their bad ideas to the mainstream, and as such, my conclusion that that's what they're doing carries no weight.
This is why, again, interviewing a Nazi or promoting such an interview tells us nothing about how anti- or pro-Nazi they are; it's some dimension other than the actual ground-level ideological/political beliefs that determines if someone believes that publicizing an interview with [ideological/political beliefs they disagree with] is bad. It's either ideological hubris or ideological authoritarianism or some combination of both that are the determinants.
07mk
2mo ago
And we just had Tucker, who informs almost the entire Republican right, interviewing a Nazi with Elon Musk promoting it. Would you take that as evidence that anti-Nazi efforts in the US have failed and that we must now quintuple down on them?
Considering that interviewing a Nazi and promoting the interview aren't indicative of any sort of positive opinion on Nazism - in fact, both behaviors are pretty much orthogonal to one's support of or opposition to the ideology, or any ideology - I'm not sure how this could be claimed to be evidence of such a thing.
07mk
2mo ago
That's a hilarious premise. It'd be as if a bunch of men decided to strike from sex (or marriage, perhaps) until the women stopped using makeup, working out, and dieting. Since the actions they're trying to prevent are the very same things that make striking more costly, you could expect the defections from the strike to happen immediately and overwhelmingly.
07mk
2mo ago
No, the OP is talking about which cultural paradigm is better. Hence why it is Eastern vs Western media while trying to characterize the products as culturally eastern even when only their production or publishing is, and not Eastern-made Western media versus Western-made Western media
I don't think your interpretation is correct. The fact that the OP also responded to your comment with essentially the exact same point I made, that the fact that Elden Ring is Western through and through despite the Japanese developers only reinforces his point, indicates that his point indeed was one of the devs, not about cultural paradigms.
What does this category 'Stature' mean beyond 'I respect it, and I think a lot of other people do too' versus 'I don't respect it, and so it doesn't matter how many others do'?
Yes, obviously any talk about influence of fictional media is subjective. It's not infinitely subjective, but there's no avoiding subjectivity, and certainly objective numbers can't override it, though it can contribute to it.
It's not like there's lack of established western franchises that meet your broad categories. Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Red Dead, and Grand Theft Auto are all open world action games of note, some with far more RPG credentials that Elden Ring which is JRPG in the mechanical build sense rather than story-changes-according-to-actions RPG. Depending on what you mean by 'stylish' action games, Helldivers, God of War, Fortnight, Gears of War, or even Doom. Call of Duty has been a spectacle shooter for over a decade at this point- is that not stylish because it relies on gunplay and grenades and setpieces rather than melee combos and stylized cutscenes?
I find this paragraph pretty ridiculous. That these games aren't in the same genre as Elden Ring or DMC isn't some result of gerrymandering, it's the result of people categorizing these games based on how gamers perceive them based on their interests and styles and such. Assassin's Creed and GTA could be said to fit into the same genre as Elden Ring, but the former has been shit on for over a decade already for being formulaic, while the latter's core combat and movement based around guns and cars places it ina different category. This isn't gerrymandered, this is the consequence of people noticing that these games differ in critical, important ways that directly affect the structure of the game and the way the players interact with them. Same goes for first person versus third person, which is a pretty major and meaningful differentiator, which is why DMC and Doom don't fit in the same genre (though I'd argue that Doom brought a lot of the feel of DMC from the third person format to third person), even before getting into the difference between shooter and melee combat.
I do think that the default presumption should be that any observation of differences here between East and West is an artifact of different countries being better at different genres. However, the fact that so many of the Eastern successes rely so heavily on Western culture - even the anime-style Genshin Impact is heavily influenced by Western medieval fantasy - only strengthens the point that the original comment was making.
07mk
2mo ago
There could be something to that. I recall being told by some Bloodborne lore hound that the blood communion religion of Yharnam in that game had all the imagery of Christianity, but the structure of the religion was based on Shintoism or some other East Asian religion, which is an extra twist on the "what if it turned out that the church was evil?" cliche.
I actually don't know the Castlevania game stories well, but that's certainly another Western-culture inspired game made by East Asians which has seemed to capture Western audiences. I did watch the Netflix cartoon, which was made by a Western studio, but in a style meant to emulate anime (itself a style meant to emulate Disney), adapting an Eastern dev-made video game that itself was an adaptation of a Western-made story. Which could have turned out interesting, for seeing all the twists and turns such layers of adaptation and copying styles introduced, but it ended up turning everything into slop designed for Modern Audiences, which is why I stopped watching it.
07mk
2mo ago
And if the foreign team defeats the home team by adopting home team signature tactics, strategies, compositions, and paradigms, that indicates that the foreign team may be doing home-team tactics better, but it does not indicate that away-team tactics are a disproof of home-team tactics or premise, or that their approach is fundamentally different. The Japanese baseball team may out-play the American team, but the sheer fact that the teams are playing baseball and not shogi is indicting whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself.
Sure, but we're not talking about whose cultural paradigm is exerting itself. We're talking about which baseball team is better.
Sure there are. What constitutes quality is subjective (most players don't, in fact, enjoy fromsoft difficulty curves), but stature is not, and there are plenty of series that absolutely crush the likes of Elden Ring, let alone DMC. There's a reason that the Elden Ring peak concurrent steam players was a bit over 950,000, and Minecraft was over ten times that- the qualities may not be what you value, but stature doesn't care about what you value, it cares about what other people care about.
Sure stature is subjective. Popularity isn't, but stature isn't just popularity, it's reputation. In any case, the games you're talking about aren't the same genre, and one doesn't need to gerrymander a soulslike genre to do so. I was actually thinking of 3rd person action open world RPG for Elden Ring, and 3rd person crazy stylish action game for DMC. Again, for either, I can't think of any Western made games of the same genre that come even close.
07mk
2mo ago
I don't have any opinions on cultural superiority, and as best as I can tell, the original comment didn't express any, either. Just that Eastern devs seem to be appealing to Western audiences better than Western devs. Again, I believe examples of Eastern devs using Western culture in their games even better than Western devs do only supports this notion more strongly, similarly to how an away team defeating the home team in a sport that has home field advantage is a stronger signal that the away team is better than if played on a neutral field.
Now, as you point out, there are plenty of Western made games that do Western culture well. I just think it's correct that Eastern devs have done it better, especially when considering within-genre - there's no Western-made game similar to Elden Ring or Devil May Cry that come anywhere close to those games in quality or stature.
07mk
3mo ago
The fact that Japanese devs are able to create a Western culture inspired game more successfully than Western devs themselves seems to support the original comment's point. I suppose there's Skyrim and other games with similar inspirations made by Western devs, but there's plenty of examples of Japanese devs outdoing Western devs with Western culture inspired games. Obvious examples that come to mind include From Soft's Dark Souls games & Bloodborne, Capcom's Dragon's Dogma and even Devil May Cry games, and Square Enix with Final Fantasy games (notably, when they took a modern Western storytelling approach with a Western-culture inspired fantasy game in Forspoken, in bombed both in the West and East).
07mk
3mo ago
Is that because of the legal framework or because most modern people are very unfamiliar with violence and hesitant to engage in it? I heavily suspect the victim there was not worrying about the law.
I'd default to believing that these things reinforce one another. If a legal framework demands constant checks when physically defending oneself, then a culture of just shying away from violence is a reasonable response. And if there's a culture of just shying away from violence, then structuring the law to punish the few outliers who choose not to disengage, since engaging causes more direct, immediate harm is a reasonable act. Perhaps one was the chicken and the other the egg, or perhaps both were birthed by some 3rd common factor, but ultimately, those don't matter; if there's a self-reinforcing cycle, then every part of the cycle is caused by every other part.
07mk
3mo ago
in the work-tangential world like at the kind of upscale-ish or trendy bars where people tend to go after work.
Zoom calls and in the workforce, perhaps, but this seems like a leap. The group of guys with such small social presence being talked about would be the ones to disproportionately not go to these work-tangential events and/or spend minimal time in those. And even in those settings, the ones you actually are able to talk to enough to say that you actually "know" these people would likely be disproportionately not from that group. Same would go for other social spaces and clubs and such.
Well, just because I'm a Democrat doesn't mean I can't appoint a Republican to run the investigation. Heck, even give Trump himself the right to hand-pick the one top investigator in charge. Ideally, the investigation should be bipartisan, but it's hard to be credibly so, just make it partisan against my favor.
And if top Democrats do have good reason to believe that meaningful fraud took place, then as a Democratic voter, I would want this to be revealed and publicized, so as to excise the Democratic party of fraudsters and their enablers, which would increase the credibility of the Democratic party's dedication to keeping our democratic republic democratic. Unlike a Democrat calling out a Republican, a Democrat calling out a Democrat for fraud (that helped Democrats) is a costly signal to the electorate that Democrats really do care about democracy. Let democracy be done, though the Democratic party fall.
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