JulianRota
8mo ago
I've seen a little bit of a few things like this. Not really enough to have much to add to this thread. But I do think that one of the major issues in the way our larger culture discusses political issues is that a large segment of the "activist class" doesn't have the slightest idea of how these people are, how they really think, and how they actually respond to the "helpful" programs that they constantly dream up. They just listen to a few of these fake sob story tales or videos and go off entirely on believing that, never even pausing to consider that it might not be an accurate description of the situation.
JulianRota
8mo ago
Ah, I see. Thinking about it a bit more, I'm not sure whether it's a culture thing or a raw intelligence thing, but I think you could say that some people aren't capable of understanding the idea that some things are physical systems that are not governed by the whims of individuals but instead by their own sets of rules. So in their minds, the outcome of any interaction with such a system is actually solely determined by the feelings and inclinations of whatever expert they are interacting with.
We could say things like, the outcome of your legal case doesn't really depend all that strongly on what your lawyer or the prosecutor thinks of you. Your medical outcome doesn't really change much based on how much the doctors and nurses like you. Your car or other such thing getting fixed doesn't depend on the mechanic liking you. And so on. But I think this class of people doesn't consider these ideas and then reject them, they seriously aren't capable of thinking them at all. So maybe it makes sense to them to lie to look better to them, even though, to us, it's stupidly obvious and will clearly have no impact on the outcome besides making it slightly harder for us to do our jobs.
Which in turn makes it sound more callous and cruel to use sarcasm and mockery to try to show such people the error of their ways. Might as well knock a guy with no legs for not being able to walk. But then on the other hand, if somebody is fundamentally incapable of dealing with the real world and can't be fixed, doesn't that suggest they should be locked up in a mental institution somewhere, or at least not allowed outside the house without "adult supervision". Maybe this is all a little exaggerated and most people do figure this out eventually, it's just that the worst cases of this tend to be much more likely to commit and be caught for serious crimes and end up talking to a public defender.
JulianRota
8mo ago
Speaking of other professions, I'm not a lawyer, but I've worked at a mechanics shop, and the perspective is similar.
The more truth you tell us about how your car got broke, the faster and easier it is to fix. If you tried to use JB Weld to fix a leak, and you just cop to it - "It started leaking something, so I tried putting JB Weld on it here, but it didn't work. Can you fix it right?", we've got better things to do that judge you. The honesty is appreciated, and it lets us fix the problem faster. If you tell a stupid and obvious lie, like you have no idea what happened but the car isn't working right, it just takes longer to find, and when you later claim you have no clue why there is JB Weld all over the crankcase where it's leaking, then you only make yourself look even dumber than you would if you just copped to it. You've cost yourself time and money and done nothing at all to help anything.
Yeah, not every mechanic or shop is honest, and that can be a headache to deal with. But whether they are or are not honest, you're still not helping anything by lying about what happened.
If you want to make your mechanic happy with you, tell them exactly what is happening and what if anything you did in as much detail as possible, but don't bother speculating on what you think might be wrong. It's okay to ask for explanations or to see what's broken etc, but there's not really any point in accusing them of ripping you off.
JulianRota
8mo ago
I think this is a significant enough point that we ought to consider why this doesn't seem to be happening. Notably, pretty much everybody who manages to make it into the PMC Elite one way or another seems to abandon whatever community they had previously been a part of and show loyalty only towards that PMC Elite. They only respect the support and advancement of other more junior members of that community and seem to act only to maintain and increase the power of that community.
The stereotypical MAGA Appalachian coal miner, if they manage to make it into the elite, will pretty much always adopt their values and consider their former neighbors to be unredeemable racist hicks to be sneered at and driven into the dirt.
The black person, whether or not they actually grew up in "the projects" will also adopt elite values and won't ever do anything to actually improve the life and culture of those communities. They'll spout the usual platitudes about "institutional racism", but won't do anything about it except more entitlement programs that only create dependency and more affirmative action style reforms that prioritize racism supremacy and entitlement over actually improving yourself.
Every other "community" that I can think of repeats the same points. I think the Amish are one of the few types of communities that retain strong loyalty to their own community, but they don't seek positions in the PMC Elite. There are also some super-religious Jewish and Christian communities that I think do similarly, but people of those religions who make it into the Elite also show no loyalty to any such tight-knit communities of the same or similar religion.
JulianRota
8mo ago
That would be You Are Still Crying Wolf, section 17 near the end. Which, curiously for this thread, is exactly about refuting the crazy theory that Trump is racist.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I actually think every forum, or at least every forum I actually visit, has things it's good and bad at.
HN is quite good at deep technical stuff. It's mid I guess at where tech intersects the real world. At purely real-world stuff involving geopolitics and macroeconomics, it's purely Reddit-tier. It does seem to have a noticeable sub-population of extraordinarily weird people, the type who do stuff like attempt to browse the web without Javascript, run their own email servers and use text-based email clients, continue to use IRC, etc, who seem completely unaware that they are far, far outside of the mainstream and get mad that the world doesn't cater to them. I've actually gotten to where I get severely annoyed by the crypto people who insist that all communication must be over E2E-encrypted provably-secure systems and discount all other features, concerns, failures, and attack types.
Reddit is okay for entertaining stories. Some of the smaller or more tightly moderated subs are okay for some types of information or discussion. For anything adjacent to the culture war, it's mostly trash.
But then it's not like the Motte is perfect either. We're mostly okay at reasonable discussion on tough culture war issues. The QCs showcase some of the really gold material that we manage to produce, and I'm proud to have earned a few. Sometimes it can be a bit quokka-ish though. Not a lot of room for stuff I consider fun. There's still a little sense of super weird and sheltered people sometimes, though not nearly as bad as HN.
I sometimes say only half-jokingly that it would be good to somehow require posters in a forum to prove that they can go to a bar in their local area by themselves, hang out and drink for a few hours, have a few decent conversations, and not weird out or piss off everyone around them or get kicked out or something.
JulianRota
9mo ago
So I don't really dispute any of that, but it feels like this conversation is getting a little shifted or circular, I suppose as a consequence of it being with so many people. What I'm really arguing against is ulyssessword's point that "the 'opioid epidemic' is an appropriate reaction to the chronic pain epidemic". I find it pretty hard to buy into, humans have been doing manual labor for millennia, opium has been around for millennia at varying levels of availability, but only now somehow is blue-collar manual labor so strenuous that using opiates to dull the pain is an appropriate response.
It seems more likely to me to be something like the point that sarker and TheDag are making, that the pain is actually a symptom of broader cultural disease, not a natural consequence of manual labor.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I guess I'm somewhat lucky in not having many issues with serious or chronic pain. I did get my wisdom teeth removed, and I don't think I was prescribed or took anything particularly strong for that, but I don't recall very clearly. I had to get a root canal a few years ago, and I do remember that hurting pretty badly the next day. I had been prescribed Tylenol with Codeine, which I took and worked pretty well at dulling the pain, but left me pretty zonked out. Definitely not something I had any interest in taking if I wasn't in serious pain. I think I only took that for 1 or 2 days, and the pain was mild enough after that that I didn't bother.
JulianRota
9mo ago
Looks like an interesting article, thanks! I will read later. But that, and TheDag's point would imply that any "chronic pain epidemic" is just a broader symptom of, I guess I don't really know what to call it, the broad cultural sickness we have in the West and America right now, and treating with opiates is clumsy duct-tape over the real problem that mostly won't help much.
JulianRota
9mo ago
Well, he said that at one point, but he also threatened to bomb Moscow if they attacked Ukraine. Whatever any of us might believe, it's pretty clear that Putin started planning his invasion of Ukraine right around when Biden was sworn in. Not exactly a sign that they thought Biden and the Democrats would be much more effectively tough on him. Seems more like American chaos is what they really want.
JulianRota
9mo ago
Eh maybe. But then still, why an opioid epidemic now? Opium and derivatives have also been around for a very long time. Is it just that much more appealing in pill form and prescribed by your doctor than in smokeable or snortable form?
JulianRota
9mo ago
I've heard from people in the medical industry that the effect of prescription opioids is roughly split in thirds - about a third get basically no effect at all or strictly bad effects, another third get effective pain relief but no desire to do more once the pain is gone, and the final third feel dangerous addictive desires in addition to pain relief and are prone to addiction and all the resulting issues if other factors in their life line up right/wrong.
Meanwhile, it seems really weird that there is suddenly a "chronic pain epidemic". Why should there be such a thing now? Humans have been doing lots of strenuous manual labor for all of recorded history - especially before the industrial revolution. Have we all suddenly got worse somehow? Is it maybe related to signs that the modern diet is mostly terrible?
JulianRota
9mo ago
I think we'd have to be concerned with the likely motives of such actors.
I think Russia and China etc don't have much reason to care whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge - the outcomes on things they actually care about are probably within a standard deviation of outcomes regardless of which party is in charge of what. What they are likely to care about more is the overall levels of tribal division and conflict.
Low internal conflict means that anything we do or intervene in overseas is likely to be broadly supported, consistent over the long term, decently well-planned and robust against setbacks. High internal conflict means that anything either party does will be opposed by the other for tribalistic reasons if nothing else. Interventions will tend to be the opposite - inconsistent, weak, poorly-supported, poorly-planned, likely to be canceled at minor setbacks.
As such, they probably don't really care about actually hacking voting machines, except in as much as half-assed and ineffective attempts to do so reduce everyone's confidence that whoever gets elected won legitimately. They are probably much more interested in backing extreme activist groups on both sides to amp up the overall level of division. Which IIRC is pretty much all they've been credibly accused of doing.
JulianRota
9mo ago
A few notes, but mostly marking to think and read more and maybe write more about later:
I have a feeling that like 70% of the privacy ultra-activist stuff is counter-productive in that it mostly serves to draw more attention onto you than would be paid if you acted more like a "perfectly ordinary sheep" type. Like the guy trying to be covert with the obvious trench coat just making sure everyone in the diner is staring at him versus nobody giving him a second glance if he was wearing business casual.
Google gets beat up a lot for non-responsiveness to user inquiries and supposed privacy violations. I actually agree with your point in that I continue to use Google for most things because I trust their security better than just about anyone else. Their Advanced Protection stuff is probably best of breed, and at least I can be sure that no hacker or activist will ever be able to socially engineer their way into my accounts. I accept that they might delete it someday because some wrongthink I posted somewhere gets caught in the wrong filter. And they might give everything they have to the Government some day, but meh, I doubt it's much safer anywhere else.
I do still use Google's location tracking, partly because it is sometimes convenient. I also have a feeling, or at least would not be surprised if it is some day revealed, that the phone UI checkboxes to turn it off actually only turn off the visibility to you, not the collection and storage. If they're gonna collect and store it either way, I might as well get some use from it too. If I ever need to really be covert, I guess I'll have to leave it at home. Though even that might not help much, since it's such an unusual and rare thing to do, if anybody was actually watching that closely, they'd probably have reason to think that, whatever I was actually doing then, I was up to no good.
And yeah, running your own servers and storage has its own risks as well. I doubt I'm a particularly great sysadmin, but as far as I know, I haven't lost any servers yet, so maybe it's not quite that hard, or maybe nobody cares that much about my stuff.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I'm pretty sure it's 100% outgroup-hatred along standard culture war lines. Executing convicted murderers is a red tribe value, therefore to all blue tribe civilized society, it's savage, uncivilized, and wrong no matter how it's done, and every weapon in the culture war will be brought to bear to oppose it. That explains why a genuine attempt to do it in a more "humane" way has absolutely no effect on the media position. It was never about that, it was about crushing red tribe.
Meanwhile, if somebody wanted to execute Jan 6 convicts, even in the most pointlessly brutal way you could possibly imagine, the same sources would likely cheer on how they were getting exactly what they deserved and lament that the punishment wasn't harsh enough.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I'm skeptical, but curious. I wonder exactly what "common" means here. Exactly how many are we talking about, who had them, how much money was invested in slaves in England overall, what kind of work were they doing, etc. The details could easily confirm or refute my presumption that it was relatively low friction to abolish in the places it was abolished early.
The elite class now sure doesn't seem to like farmers and ranchers, even though that's where their food comes from. It seems pretty plausible that a bunch of trend-following elites were willing to ban something that only hurt people they didn't care much about anyway.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I think it works okay if you view things in a more fuzzy way. The idea of abolitionism didn't just magically appear at the time of the Industrial Revolution, just like the IR itself wasn't a single thing at a single time but a gradual progression over hundreds of years. Going from an idea written about by a few privileged elites to a movement endorsed by nation-sized populations and that nation-states are prepared to wage full-scale wars over is not an instant or automatic process. It seems very plausible to me that the IR powered the growth of abolitionism from something that they were willing to pass in places that didn't really have any slaves anyways to something that they were prepared to enact and enforce by force of arms in places where the entire economy was built on slave labor and the controlling imperial power was getting a fat chunk of the profits.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Why wouldn't there be a second chance? Everyone I know who preferred Trump liked DeSantis too, just thought it wasn't his time to be President yet.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Do you have a source for this? There's video of him still breathing after he was released. I'm not aware of any witnesses or video that reliably puts the chokehold time at 6-15 minutes. Exactly who made that "estimate" and based on what?
Considering the normal timing of NYC subways, usually 1 to 2 minutes between stops, it would be extremely strange for someone to be in a chokehold for "6-15 minutes".
JulianRota
10mo ago
A question that sounds snarky and rhetorical, but is actually serious: Why don't you guys just argue with each other privately?
Why indeed? If you move to DMs over any of a hundred systems, you can sling as much crap as you want at each other, and nobody will judge you or mod you or ban you for doing so. So why not? The only reason that makes sense IMO is that the audience matters. Everybody here has to see it, or at least be able to see it.
But what of the effect that has on the place? I see that you don't feel offended or put off by the argument. What of the audience though? They're important - they must be, or you wouldn't be interested in posting it publicly. I've come to think that, to use another Wire quote, all the pieces matter.
Regardless of whether you or BC are super offended by the debate, when everybody sees it, and sees it not being modded, it changes the tone of the whole place. It becomes just that little bit more acceptable to trash your debate partner rather than discuss civilly. People who love that are more likely to come and stay, and people who don't will disengage and drift away. Even more importantly, it changes peoples behavior just a bit. Nobody is perfectly combative or perfectly civilized. It's a signal to turn off the civilized part and dial up the combat part. And that does in fact matter, even if we'd rather it didn't or it isn't immediately obvious.
The same points can be made perfectly well without the personal attacks. Perhaps even better. Even if I think User X is a great big jerk, it's not conducive to a reasonable conversation to just call them a jerk. It's perfectly possible for me to be the calm and reasonable one and make my points without the insults. If I do it right, and I'm right that they're a jerk, then they will show themselves to be one to the audience in short order. The audience is a lot more likely to believe it when they see it for themselves over just me telling them.
JulianRota
10mo ago
You probably noticed after that unfortunate subway incident that left-wing reddit was quick to say "We failed Jordan Neely", and if you understand that statement, you understand the Blue Tribe. To the Blue Tribe, Jordan Neely acted the way he did because the group failed to include and empathize with him. Penny is a murderer not because he killed Neely, but because he acted without the consent and validation of the group. Tutto nello feelz, niente al di fuori dello feelz, nulla contro lo feelz
I understand that they think this way, but I think that it represents a hole in the Blue Tribe thinking. They, or rather this segment of them, believe with a religious fervor that they have the solution to all societal ills. They believe that their ideology covers all cases of everything, so nobody will ever feel compelled to do anything bad once everything they want is implemented.
I call it the Theory Of Nice. It's the belief that Niceness Fixes Everything. The root cause of all hostility and meanness is that somebody else at some other time was not sufficiently Nice to that person. If anyone is being mean, we can cure them by being exclusively nice to them for a sufficiently long time. We can construct a world where nobody is ever mean to anybody, therefore there's no source for meanness to start from, and everybody will just be nice to everybody else all the time. Any time somebody of the Ingroup is mean to other people in a manner severe enough to require some form of suppression, the real meaning is that we failed that person by not being sufficiently nice to them earlier, because if we had done so, obviously they would never have done that. They're our Ingroup after all, so it's not possible that they're just inherently bad.
Meanwhile, everyone in our Outgroup, i.e. Red Team, or people who don't just accept our assertions that our ideology will fix everything, is just incorrigibly evil. They're brainwashed monsters, all hatred against them is justified, any measure against them, no matter how harsh or mean, is acceptable. Obviously doing any of those things doesn't make us mean or corrupt us in any way. Don't you understand, they're the Outgroup? It's different for them! It's just different, that's all!
I think any ideology that purports to fix the world and be the one solution to everything must account for everything and everyone everywhere, and do so provably. You can't just hand-wave away that this person wouldn't act bad if we did things my way. You'd have to demonstrate in practice that it actually does handle every single case in the promised way, no exceptions. And you can't dismiss some other group that is clearly your Outgroup as unfixably evil. If you do those things, you don't actually have a glorious new ideology that fixes the world, you just have plain old Ingroup-bias, the exact same stuff that's been in our hindbrains for millennia and powered countless atrocities around the world.
JulianRota
10mo ago
getting killed seems a bit of a reach
Shortening the description of what happened like this IMO really does a disservice to understanding the incident. At no point did anybody, Penny included, set out to kill Neely. No weapons that were not appropriate to the situation were deployed. No physical techniques that were not reasonable considering what was happening were used. He was merely physically restrained for a brief period to make him stop doing whatever it exactly was that he was doing. This was highly likely to have been reasonable and appropriate. That he died from it is an unintended consequence, most likely due to him being in comprehensively terrible health.
The class of people that Neely represents has wildly different health than anything most regular people can conceive of. Which touches back to the giant hole concept that HlynkaCG was talking about. These people start out severely mentally ill, the type that would likely be institutionalized for life in another era. They do lots of illegal drugs, not checked at all for purity or cleanliness. Possibly including injected with dirty needles. They probably sleep on the streets somewhere most of the time. Constantly in and out of jail and hospitals. You can bet they never follow up on any health or legal suggestions offered in those places. Eating whatever comes to hand, no thought to it being clean or healthy.
I know there are legal doctrines covering this sort of thing, which I'm not meaning to debate right now. But morally speaking, exactly what responsibility do we have to this sort of person? If you're both so crazy that you're antagonizing and scaring people on a train, and also so unhealthy and fragile that a brief period of mild restraint is at risk of killing you, then what exactly do we do with you? I have a hard time feeling like society has any responsibility towards such a person.
JulianRota
10mo ago
One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society.
Agreed. I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, and in doing so have met and worked with a lot of people who think very differently from the norms expected in "liberal society". It seems to me that there's something of a cult, of people who have only ever been in "liberal society" places and can't begin to even conceive that there are people out there who really do think very differently. They speak of "multicultralism", but all they really know is that those other people sure dress in some cool costumes and have fancy dances and tasty exotic food. The idea that these people also have very different values from them is unthinkable.
The type of person I have described is of course not every single "blue team" person. They're probably a minority in most places. But they definitely do exist, and I've met a number of people like that. I get the impression that their numbers are growing, spreading into more places, and becoming even more strident in their beliefs. I don't know how this ends, but I can't help but think something ugly is going to happen eventually. And along those lines,
Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so.
It seems rather funny in current year. Especially back in the 70s or so, there was such a culture of "revolution" and "overthrowing the system" and other such things being cool. They're still in love with the idea of protests and riots. Look how they cheered on the BLM protests of 2020! But then, Jan 6 happens, and oh, it's the most terrible horrible thing ever! Well, when you were talking about protests and riots and revolutions and overthrowing things being totally super cool, exactly what did you think it meant? It's hard for me to see it as anything but, oh all that stuff is great only when we do it, but if they do it, then it's terrible and unacceptable.
JulianRota
10mo ago
The details in the story are even wilder
admitted to failing to make a $3.75 million quarterly licensing payment
Is it just me, or is that kind of not that much money? If you have over 100 full-time employees and the infrastructure to print a news magazine and distribute it nationwide, that ought to be a pretty small part of your budget. You've got to be hurting pretty bad to have to miss something like that.
Oh, and they had already cut back to monthly publication in 2020.
The linked article on publishing AI-generated content under the bylines of fake reporters is really something else.
I think the question hinges a lot on who happens to be more aggressive and determined that day, which isn't really answerable. But if I had to make a bet, I think I'd bet on knife.
IME most amateur fighters tend to go for overpowered knockout blows first. Bat fighter will probably start with something like a full baseball swing, which is slow, easy to dodge, slow to recover from, leaving an opening for a rush. Knife fighter will be inclined to go right in for core hits, which is probably the right move here. Knife going for glancing hits and slashes against extremities is not likely to be very effective against an opponent with a bat anyways. Knife should keep distance, feint a few times to draw a powerful bat swing, then rush in during the recovery from that, grab on with one hand and keep stabbing with the other. That seems reasonably likely to be something an amateur would do, and it'll probably take too long for bat fighter to drop the ineffective bat and at least try to fight by hand.
Bat can win, but I think bat's winning strategies are much harder for an amateur to pull off. Bat has to choke up on the bat to swing faster and lighter, aggressively give up distance and jab with the bat to keep the knife at distance, accumulate minor injuries on knife guy, and only go in for a full swing when they're partially disabled and open.
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