FarmReadyElephants
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User ID: 2869
FarmReadyElephants
2d ago
This is complacency. Mass college education and the trend towards more extreme university politicization changes the game. There's a big difference between 0.5% of your population being sympathetic to revolutionary Marxism (still dangerous!) and 20% of your population being sympathetic to revolutionary Marxism. A difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.
FarmReadyElephants
2d ago
That's a good question. There is a similarity, in that they both encourage political violence and eat away at the axioms of a free society.
There is a difference in degree, however, as assassination is far more corrosive and easier for a single person to pull off on their own. We are a nation of soft-targets, and living that way is a luxury.
Remember here that we are talking about social opprobrium and not the hard power of the state. If supporting assassinations and riots both faced a good deal of social opprobrium, that would be a sign of health for our democratic system. In many countries, the hard power of the state is deployed to police both of these things. Most political orders are not suicidal. America's may appear to be just because we have a lot of social capital to burn. But we should beware of momentum.
FarmReadyElephants
3d ago
Yeah, you wouldn't get fired. You'd get arrested.
FarmReadyElephants
3d ago
There's this great asymmetry that few seem to notice. The right gets to cancel in the immediate aftermath of one of theirs eating a bullet. The left gets to cancel all the time for a great many reasons. Personally, I'm happy that general norms of polite society still blanch at literally celebrating our murders in front of our families. For now.
I know these things are uncoordinated. But if you were the left, why the hell would you declare an armistice when this is the state of play? The only rule you have to abide is to not celebrate immediately after a righty is killed. And even then, many are morally too far gone to even follow that one rule.
FarmReadyElephants
3d ago
But conversely--what alternative remains to them? If the left gets to run cancel culture while the right refrains on principle, it's no longer a culture war, it's a one sided culture slaughter.
And it's not just a "culture" slaughter anymore. The argument is that the right should just eat bullets and do nothing more than complain about it. No thanks. I'll pass.
FarmReadyElephants
3d ago
My opinion, already expressed on this thread, is that celebration of assassination is something we should have a bipartisan "cancel culture" about, because it's a load-bearing taboo that allows the rest of freedom of speech to function. This is similar to how Lee Kwan Yew banned the communist party in Singapore at a time when SE Asian countries were falling to communist revolutions. A 99% commitment to liberal norms is more durable than one that commits to 100% with obvious loopholes for bad actors to end the liberal system.
Cancel culture for other things are bad, since it cordons off plausibly true ideas from public discussion. You shouldn't be cancelled for "misgendering", or stating FBI crime statistics, or making the okay sign, or having once made racist jokes, or donating to a conservative cause, or saying riots are bad.
The effect of cancel culture over support for assassination is to preserve liberalism. The effect of cancel culture for slight deviations from the Left platform is to end liberalism. This isn't hard.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/365663?context=8#context
FarmReadyElephants
4d ago
I think the case of celebrating someone’s death of natural or accidental causes is completely different. Assassination is a possibility in a free society with lots of soft targets and we only get to have that society as long as assassination is massively ostracized.
Singing “ding dong the the witch is dead” when Thatcher died of old age, as awful as it was, doesn’t create the same kind of threat to our free society
Some people are confusing my argument. It’s much more practical than me playing the morality police. Celebrating and praising political assassins is a step on the path to ending a liberal democratic society. You gotta have some degree of sanction against it for the same reason LKY banned the communist party in Singapore.
If you want to craft a maximally free society, don’t start with an absolutely free society and look on in a stupor as people find the exploits that will bring it crashing to the ground
I remember when Trump was shot, the right was accused of being hypocrites on cancel culture for trying to get people fired for celebrating it.
I don't think this is hypocrisy or "my-sideism" at all. The taboo against political assassinations is a load-bearing one for a liberal society with broad free speech rights. If cancel culture was limited to firing people who celebrated political assassinations, I don't think "cancel culture" would exist as a meme at all! I'm happy if the left only cancels people for celebrating political assassinations as long as the right gets to do so too. That sounds like a perfectly stable equilibrium and a well-tailored exception to free speech for a functional liberal society.
But that's not how "cancel culture" became a meme, and we all know that and I feel like I'm being gaslighted by people who should know better. People lost their job for misgendering, or arguing that male and female abilities were different, or supporting conservative ballot measures, or donating anonymously to a legal defense fund and getting doxxed, or casually hanging an "ok" sign out of a car window, or arguing that riots empirically hurt the political cause they were in support of.
The effect of all of these cancellations is to make social discourse dumber, to fence off a chunk of plausibly true beliefs as things you can't say. The effect of cancelling people for celebrating assassinations is to keep assassination taboo'ed beyond the doors of polite society.
Maybe there should be amnesty for entry level service workers. But even there, it shouldn't be too hard to get another entry level service job, and a slap on the wrist from polite society serves as notice to the social taboo.
I'll bite that bullet gladly. I'm happy if you cancel me for celebrating the intentional murder of a political figure. If the price of that was removing all other threat of cancellation, well I would be giddy with a sense of freedom that I haven't felt in 13 years.
In the bay area, there was one particular trans woman who passed well, was sociable, and all around pleasant to be around. She wasn't very forward with the fact that she was trans, so it took me a bit by surprise when I eventually found out. I used her name and preferred pronouns. There were several other awkward non-passing males who haunted the outside of gatherings. I never interacted with them much, and part of my reluctance to do so would have been feeling like I was betraying my own perception and being coerced into using names/pronouns that I did not believe in.
I don't use preferred pronouns for murderers and sociopaths, and I try to use birth name where available. Mr. Wax-my-balls is Jonathan Yaniv, not his preferred porn name Jessica. Ziz is Jack LaSota, and etc.
I think the net effect of having lots of "women raped two kids" headlines is to muddy the waters about the truth of the difference between male and female danger and capability. Sure, it may mention that woman was trans in the article, or you may be able to infer it. But it's pissing in the epistemic commons, and ultimately the point is to make it harder to object when someone pushes for policies which genuinely impinge on women in your life. I don't think bay area people have many children in general, so they don't have to worry about their daughters being forced to room with a weird male, or etc.
FarmReadyElephants
6d ago
Reddit is a lot bigger than bluesky, and it is also full of this stuff. Reddit is a problem
FarmReadyElephants
7d ago
It's not mere contempt though. It's specifically using trans norms as camouflage for bad actors that I'm concerned about. Women are considered less dangerous and awarded more sympathy than men. Trans identified men who are bad actors specifically take advantage of that.
When I heard "Ziz" referred to as "she", I specifically was not on alert for a psychotic man to be active in my social circles and I underweighted the danger from Ziz as my priors were set to "female" and not "male". If I knew there was a murderous psychopath named Jack LaSota going around, that primes my behavior differently.
Trans language pollutes the information commons, to the benefit of evildoers
"misgendering" is a propaganda term.
Personally I do use trans pronouns as an honorific for well-socialized trans people who are well-integrated into the social fabric. And I do remove them if a person acts in antisocial manner. Otherwise, the pronouns serve to cloak the identity of the person (usually as an antisocial man, who is actively hacking people's threat assessment with female identification), which is exactly the harmful case that TERFs are worried about
FarmReadyElephants
13d ago
Consciousness and intentionality sound like potentially two different things (that our correlated in our experience). Perhaps they necessarily entail each other, perhaps they do not. But it sounds like a thorny philosophical question that will be around for a few thousand years
FarmReadyElephants
14d ago
To me the more productive comparisons to Trump are more like a Latin American strongman
The USA is becoming a Latin American country, so I'd expect lots of electoral choices to be between socialists or strongmen. I have a very clear preference between the two.
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
Also, you are misunderstanding 13 52. 13 52 means 13% of the population does 52% of the murders. That is higher both on a per capita basis and on an absolute basis than any other group, by the necessity of percentage math.
According to the CDC website, 67% of new HIV cases are to gay men and 55% of total existing cases. So it's more of a 1.5/55 scenario than a 13/52.
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
Exactly. There is no alternative. China and Russia are the only other independent players in the world besides the USA, and China is the only one with a comparable size economy.
If a President decides to squeeze the imperial provinces, they will get squeezed.
Now, the genius move would be to build momentum with these trade deals to try to squeeze China in the near future. China also can't afford to walk away from the table. Let's see how it plays out.
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
Obviously I think the culture here is much higher quality than .win would be
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
What makes discord and reddit similar is that there is a discussion of enthusiasts available on any topic you are interested in. If I want to learn Ableton or discuss the Byzantine empire, I know I can find that on reddit. It just comes with BLM and LGBT propaganda and ban-happy leftist mods.
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
I think Reddit is more important than people realize. It’s long been one of the most valuable datasets on the internet, even before LLMs. I would google a question about health, products, or general interest with a “site:Reddit.com” at the end to get thoughtful commentary from real people. And now that it is LLM fuel, it’s influence will only grow
And it is entirely captured by the left fringe of the Overton window. It is one of the more progressive San Francisco companies. I’ve eaten more bans there than anywhere else on the internet. I’m not a particularly inflammatory poster! But their Overton window doesn’t extend very far to the right.
I’m troubled by this and I am a computer programmer. How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect? I’ve thought that the Motte would be a good place to build from. We have a high quality audience. Could we start subforums dedicated to special interests and build slowly? It would give mottizens a place to have high quality conversations on issues other than the culture war without having to venture into reddit. But that probably deserves a top-level post of its own
In some respect all circumstances are unique. But gaining access to seaports on the Baltic and Black Sea were foundational to Russia’s concept of itself as a modern state. Losing its Black Sea territory would be a humiliation for them that would be setting them back to before the 1700s.
I understand that is probably the goal of US foreign policy - dismantling Russia into a pre-modern medieval rump state around Moscow. But Russia also understands that is the goal and they have 100 million people and the world’s largest nuke supply to prevent it. Personally, I think we should just trade with each other and get along. I doubt ending the modern Russian state as such will make the world a better place
Ukraine had been Russian for a very long time. Longer than the USA has existed. Much longer than Florida has been a state. These things matter. We are blessed with the world’s largest moat so we have little sympathy for other countries who are faced with the prospect of losing territory.
For us, I imagine our first realistic national humiliation will be when Hawaii is taken by China. I imagine we will fight very hard against that
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
The US didn't really put all that much effort into taking out Assad. Turkey did.
Nah, the US oil sanctions were pretty decisive. You can see GDP per capita dive as they go into effect. US support for various jihadists also didn't help. But it was the sanctions that were the killer. I was hopeful that Russian aid could Assad hold on, but it wasn't enough.
IMO the post-Cold War USA record in the Middle East is a giant humanitarian tragedy, and it has wiped out most of the remnants of a Christian culture going back 1900 years. Many other people have made the case, so I'll spare both of us repeating it.
FarmReadyElephants
1mo ago
Calling it a partition is a little odd, since there never was a Ukrainian state until the 20th century. It’s not like the partition of Poland, where something that exists was split into pieces. And the area currently encompassed by Ukraine isn’t a coherent nation, but an agglomeration of several peoples with distinct heritages
Imagine that kind of attention span from a zoomer
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