Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Also, there's a distinction between bullshit jobs that are de-facto jobs programs, and those that arise as a necessary consequence of poor regulation and incentives.
Do please elaborate how you make this distinction.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
How the internet causes radicalization because there is too much information, causing tribalism as an easy and ineffective method to filter information.
Ironic, I wanted to write an effortpost about how the internet causes radicalization because there is too much information, causing tribalism because you are finally seeing your opposing ideology's true, grassroots, mask-off arguments, not the laundered-for-public-consumption ones you get from their more tactful, tactical, official mouthpieces, and the truth is worse than most suspected. The radicalisation comes from less biased information on the other tribe, not a self-imposed more bias due to sloppy filtration.
What a shame that we can't fight about it because we're both too lazy.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
You're all fucked, some just about to be fucked before the others.
Aren't you Indian?
Don't you have a ridiculous civil service which people kill to get into because once you're there, some quirk of iron rice bowls and pork barrels and constituency building has basically made Indian civil service jobs a sinecure where you never have to do any work but also you can't be fired, and this situation has persisted for 70 years despite the grinding poverty of all other sections of the Indian economy, because it's politically impossible to untangle this snarl?
And you think people are going to lose their jobs... because new labour saving tools become available?
Most jobs don't exist to fulfil tasks. Most jobs exist to fulfil government kayfabe. That an AI can perform a task is therefore completely irrelevant to the question of who has a job.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I don’t think that diminishes Shakespeare’s place in the canon.
...although it should. 35/37? What a hack.
Is there any historical precedence for this? Has there been a time and place where popular culture so heavily converged on recycling products that the flow of new products was stymied.
Well, there's "literally every point in history except between the Enlightenment and now", as a starting point. The culture of the 1420s was not exactly fresh and original compared to the 1410s. Hell, pretty much everyone believed that history writ large was cyclical before then, not just culture.
(Alternatively, maybe most of the cinematic creativity is flowing into television where for a variety of technical and cost reasons, interesting stuff can still be made on a big budget (ie. HBO).
Then again, your main analysis is probably too doomer and I think it's more likely this. Due to some strange pathology in specifically Hollywood blockbuster financing, movie moguls like rehashes this season. You don't see the same trend in TV, or in literature, or in any other center of cinema production (Bollywood? China?), so I don't think it's time to start sounding the horns of the apocalypse.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced.
The definition of a Bullshit Job, as per Graeber's original essay, is exactly as you describe: one in which the product is useless or harmful, not one where there is no work done at all.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
That's fair. I don't dispute that Neely should have been in jail already for his previous crimes against Americans.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
But who says 'slaughter the innocent, treasure and protect the guilty!'
I can actually defend Neely in the context of your analogy from a right-wing perspective. Bombing Afghan aid workers and not giving a shit but handling Neely with kid gloves is right and proper because he's American and the Afghan aid worker isn't. One of our guys is worth a hundred foreigners, that's the whole point of being a nation with national in-group preference.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I did think Rishi reading "We give thanks to Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the son of God and etc. etc." was particularly farcical.
I guess it just feels like an extra notch in the subsumption of British particularism into the soup of globohomo when the Establishment doesn't respect the culture enough to even try to maintain the kayfabe. I mean, sure, I doubt Bojo's a sincere Christian at heart and him reading epistles would be rank hypocrisy, but even purely nominal Christianity is better than official Hinduism. With Rishi, you know it's just his mouth making sounds and the words are not believed. With Bojo, you'd merely strongly suspect it.
Much was made during the Trump years of "Why are you supporting this man who from his actions clearly doesn't give a shit about the white working class", and the answer was often "I can't get positive actions from any of the candidates, so I'll take the one that at least one pretends to care over the others who don't even bother with the pretense". Having a Hindu read homilies during the King's official pledge to protect the Christian spirit of Britain? That has to me the taste of a ceremony that didn't even pretend to care about the ancient mores of the sceptred isle.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
This would represent an extremely small number of edge cases and therefore is not worth calibrating the system around.
I'm more concerned about the "I had an affair because I was bored, now my husband's divorcing me, please toast his votes" demographic.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Russia has to spend blood and treasure to secure the rest of Ukraine. We just have to spend treasure to make their cost go up! And we’ve decided the exchange rate looks pretty good.
Who's "we", and what was the calculus? Because I have a strong suspicion that the "we" is just seething third-generation Russian emigrants still mad that great-grandpa was run off the shetl, lobbying and donating until the US's pay-for-play foreign policy let's them use America like a golem to smash their ancestral enemy.
I'm a citizen of the West and certainly no-one asked me about sending all my money to Kiev.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
just a 1000 km away
This is a very... American diagnosis of the European psyche.
Europe is smaller, and more crowded than America. And psychologically, Europeans are used to implacable hatred of everyone in the next valley. So 1000km away to a European may as well be on the moon. It is as much "not worth worrying about" as 13000km is to an American. So as far as agenda-setting of national policies goes, Russia may as well be as distant and irrelevant to European countries as it is from the USA.
Estonia, maybe, has cause for concern. But the Western European nations who are gun-running to Kiev? They have zero legitimate interest in Ukraine, just like America.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
the near-total absence of, not only anti-war sentiment, but of any consideration of foreign policy at all, from 2023 leftism.
A trillion dollars sent to Ukraine isn't foreign policy to you?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I'm sure that's what they said about Korea and Vietnam, too.
The game of "claiming that my warmongering is defensive" has a long history.
At first blush it may appear simple, that the left opposes war when the enemy is leftist (Red China, USSR, North Vietnam) and the right opposes war when the enemy is rightist (Confederacy, Axis powers, Russia)
Yeah, it's this.
The outliers are post-9-11 Afghanistan and Iraq, and I'm old enough to remember these: the motivating power of the anti-war movement, certainly in my neck of the woods, was "We oppose whatever a Republican president supports".
So both during and after the Cold War, the left isn't anti-war per se. During it was just led by fifth columnists (so it was anti-"War against these specific countries, comrade"), and after that it was standard domestic partisanship (anti-"any war that Dubya leads").
Mexico 1846 is... a case of trying to impose post-WW2 alignments on stuff that happened a century prior. Mores were so different then that I think, as you say, totalizing conclusions are impossible.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
How many discord politics edgelords would actually teleport back in time for this purpose (assuming they couldn't use their 21st century knowledge to gain great wealth/power)?
Probably none. The point I'm trying to make is not that the homogeneous women or the heterogeneous men are either right or wrong, or sincere or insincere. These considerations go deeper than necessary to understand the phenomenon OP identified. We can explain the observation without ever having to consider the truth-value of the answers his colleagues gave. Considering "publicly stated opinions" through the lens of a high school popularity contest has a lot better predictive power than considering the relative merits of whatever that opinion purports to be about ex facie. Requires a lot less domain knowledge, too.
That being said, I'd really want to see the Fourth Crusade, just because I'm a Dandolo fanboi.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
'Women have always been the primary victims of war' was a fair statement because most war discourse draws a difference between 'victim' and 'combatant'.
This is just playing a shell game with words here, no different to redefining racism as "privilege + power, impossible to be racist to whitey". If someone who just got his arms blown off by a mortar while he was eating his campfire beans doesn't count as a victim, then I contend that you have changed the word beyond all plausible recognition.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
well, I’ll just leave this here.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the more modernity I see, the more the Soviet Union's collapse becomes inexplicable (because our society is so rife with Fake And Gay Economics, and yet doesn't collapse, that the official narrative of "The USSR collapsed due to its Fake And Gay Economics" must also be false).
That datum raises only further questions, because I know I wouldn't be protesting the CCCP in Red Square if I had 1.6 Russian women per man to distract me.
For me, it was fascinating to discover how males and females consider history, especially when the topic of "in which historical epoch would you like to live?" and every woman answer "now".
You mention a degree of incredulity at the homogeneity of this attitude, and I think that points to a specific insight. Other commenters have suggested that "2023" is indeed the right answer for everyone, men and women, because... there's more Marvel movies to consoom now, I guess, and only edgelords would disagree. And that may be true, but it misses the point that you always get some male edgelords who get autistic about DEUS VULTing with the Crusades or Smashing The Fash in 1917 Petrograd, and are willing to stick their neck out and say "Yes the spiritual interesting-ness of the times exceeds the appeal of being able to go see Ant Man: Quantumania". Even if it's poorly thought out; even if they're almost certainly, objectively wrong; they'll speak the words, publicly.
What I think you're seeing with women is probably not some deeper or more clear-sighted shared awareness of either the rising tide of technological progress nor the snowballing gynocentrism of society. What I think you're seeing with women is the greater conformism of their gender. They know that "Now" is the answer that all their friends will say, that you might get cancelled if you don't say... so that's what they say. They gain nothing from being an edgelord because (as has been rehashed on these pages and infinitum) women get points/mates/security just for existing. If you want anyone to notice you as a man, you must stand out from the crowd, and this is the biological basis for male edgelord-ism.
That the answer "2023" is plausibly correct in an objective sense is a coincidence. They say it because it's conformist, not because they have deeply considered the pros and cons of ACCELERATE
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Your thesis that ANTI-SEMITISM is a next level offence in the Current Year (current year Britain?) is plausible, but in the specific case of Labour Party politicos there are special inside-baseball considerations to make which might make your thesis less general.
Namely: current Labour Party leader Kier Starmer is a beige centrist who used the cudgel of "I am taking even the faintest whiff of an accusation of antisemitism as a gulag-able offense" to purge the party of the Soviet Red influence of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. In order to avoid accusations of isolated-demand-for-rigour he is therefore required to come down like a tonne of bricks on this, the alternative being that he makes it obvious that when he did it last time it was just a pretext for his internal party coup.
Epistemic status: rampant speculation
To an extent, transgenderism is attention-seeking behaviour. Or at least... validation-seeking behaviour. The insistence that others recognise them as the opposite sex and use their pronouns points to a people whose self-image relies on the affirmation of others. Indeed, it occurs to me that the frequent insistence in trans discourse (which I reject, but it nevertheless points towards their motivations) that "sex and gender are different, gender is a social role" bears me out on this - trans people want the social role of the other sex, to which the attitudes of others are not merely important, but definitional.
Anyway, this overriding concern for the affirmation of others, I imagine, overlaps somewhat with the urge to blog. Here one intentionally opens themselves up to outside scrutiny, curating a window into your field that other people can peer through and read your hot takes.
So it's not that cissies(?) are discriminated against in the blogosphere; it's that the cluster of personality traits associated with trans is somewhat overlapping with the cluster of personality traits that would make someone want to blog.
In conclusion: if anything could possibly be attributed to a selection effect, then it's a selection effect.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Right, but the canard loses some of its power then. It's a put-down against leftists by saying they're jobless leeches
The canard here is being used to support the proposition that "mods are leftists", not that "mods are losers". If your counterargument is "Ah-ha, but mods might have a lot of time on their hands because they're young, not because they're jobless adults", then this is no counterargument at all, because young people are also reliably leftist; probably MORE reliably leftist than the unemployed.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
How many Brazilians do you think are posting on /r/portland?
On the face of it: this is good evidence against my thesis.
More subtly: "Portland is home to one of the largest immigrant and refugee populations in Oregon", hmmmm, what a twist.
I love this comment as a glittering example of "Comes so close to noticing but then the crimestop kicks in"
To wit: don't you think it a little... suspicious... that the """reports from IRL""" that your news media pipes you from Ukraine, map so neatly into the tropes you've been fed for decades from your entertainment?
Does that not strike you as a little, err, improbable to be an organic occurrance?
(So no-one accuses me of not speaking plainly: I am forwarding this as circumstantial evidence that Western reporting from the Ukraine War is very, very contaminated by Western attempts to narrative craft it into the pre-prepared slot in the Western psyche of "Just like my Indiana Jones movies".)
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