Sam_I_am
3d ago
I follow Cathy on twitter, and generally like her. I also think she's almost entirely right about the substance of her article. She just did the thing in this article, and it stood out so much that it was a perfect example.
Sam_I_am
3mo ago
You don't need to spread fake news in order to get people to be aware of the new Haitian immigrants in that city.
Sam_I_am
3mo ago
It looks like it is backfiring.
right now, the most common claims on the issue are turning out to be false
- The local police have no reports of stolen pets
- The picture of the guy holding the duck is not from Springfield, and we have no idea what his background is
- The women on bodycam footage accused of eating a cat is an American Citizen, registered to vote in 2018
And frankly, it should backfire. When most prominent stories that conservatives are sharing are false, then why should I not be skeptical of the whole thing? You'd think the onus would be on them to come up with the most easily-verifiable, most rock-solid claim.
Sam_I_am
8mo ago
Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder ...
No one?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/
More convincing to me is that the disorder has a very non-psychiatric resolution: if patients are able to amputate the offending limb, they are perfectly happy and never have any further complaints. Compare this to a more psychiatric population like hypochondriacs, who if you treat one of their fake sicknesses just come up with another, because the underlying psychological problem that makes them want to feel sick hasn’t gone away. After hearing this story I decided to count the previous dismissal/marginalization of these people as a huge failure of psychiatry and as exactly the sort of thing I need to watch out for.
Sam_I_am
9mo ago
Gamergate 2
A week or 2 ago, someone made a Steam group called Sweet Baby Inc Detected. This group exists to let people know which games have involved the consultant company Sweet Baby Inc.
Sweet Baby inc is a company that seems to be dedicated to adding more diversity to video games, and many people believe their involvement makes games worse.
This heated up when an employee of Sweet Baby Inc tried to get people to report the group and it's founder in hopes that they get banned
This has been in my youtube and twitter feed quite a bit in the past couple weeks. Mostly it's accounts of employees behaving in similar ways as the above tweet.
I don't really play AAA games very much, so the actual effect of Sweet Baby on those games is not very salient to me, but when reading and hearing about it, I can't help but notice that they usually aren't giving many examples of of aspects of these games that people really think are bad because of Sweet Baby. In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
What people are mostly talking about is how their employees conduct themselves on social media. And even though the way they often conduct themselves is unprofessional and dumb, It's also understandable when there's a hundred thousand people telling you how bad your work is and trying to stop people from doing business with you.
What are your thoughts?
Sam_I_am
11mo ago
Jews would have been my first guess.
Second guess would be something like SJWs.
Sam_I_am
11mo ago
I know that any person can be in a bubble, but are you suggesting that Libs of Tiktok is a better representative of the political landscape sample than anyone's bubble?
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
Vivek might not seem very intelligent to you because you're not in his target audience, but in my opinion, the things he says and tweets are perfect for appealing to a populist American conservative.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
I frequently see people in the West calling for Hamas to release the hostages or complaining that other people aren't calling on Hamas to release the hostages.
I don't see the point behind this. Hamas doesn't care what people in the west are calling for. Secondly, it's hard to imagine what Israel can be expected to give them in exchange for the hostages considering that Hamas already killed 1400, and they can't give those lives back. Furthermore, if Israel does make a ceasefire in exchange for the hostages, it rewards Hamas for taking hostages in the first place, which is not something anyone wants.
Ironically, I think that if people in the west are calling on Israel to make a ceasefire, but not on Hamas to release the hostages, it's a sign that they're more aligned with Israel than with Hamas because they seem to feel like they have agency over Israel's actions. Meanwhile, they feel no agency over Hamas's actions, which is why they don't call on Hamas to do anything. To them, Hamas might as well be an animal that you can't expect it to not attack because attacking is in it's nature.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
I see it now. When I first hopped into this thread, it just said "filtered"
And after reading it, it kinda made me want to reply in a way that may be skirting the rules. I almost think it's a false flag comment. That's how outside the overton window it is.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
I figured it was probably something like that. The 92 was just all I found in the time I spent google searching for it.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
Yep. In order to get permanent weight loss, you need to make a permanent lifestyle change.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
It takes more exercise than most people think to lose weight. I'm currently about 154lbs, and by the numbers, in order for me to exercise enough to lose a whole pound I have to run a literal marathon. That's more than one 5k per day for a week.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
When someone calls a real person an "NPC" it usually means that they don't think for themselves. Their opinions on issues are told to them from outside sources, and they don't know how to adjust them when they are exposed to new information.
They are like an NPC in the sense that they behave as though they don't have any agency over their own beliefs.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
I feel like Vivek is more of a salesman and Yang is more of an engineer.
I haven't seen much from Vivek so far, but what I have seen is mostly him iterating the populist right's position on every issue. He's very articulate about it. He's very direct about it. But I get a strong sense that he's just saying what the populist right wants to hear.
Yang, on the other hand, was out there pushing weird-sounding solutions for real, or future problems. Automation taking jobs? UBI!. Police using their gun too much? They should have a purple belt in BJJ. These don't sound like things you'd say if you want to be popular, but I get a sense that he was genuinely trying to come up with ideas to solve stuff.
That second example is another thing I don't really take seriously. I often get the sense that people are scraping the bottom of the barrel with some of the arguments they use.
I very frequently see people rely on weak arguments like that, I also too frequently see people rely on arguments that are just tangential the core issue at hand. It's almost as though they think that the number of different-sounding arguments is the important part instead of the collective magnitude and quality of the arguments.
You can kinda see this when the Association of National Advertisers talks about "essential deliveries of food, water, or medical products". I get the same feeling when people talk about the "handicapped accessibility" arguments with regards to why Reddit shouldn't increase the price using their APIs.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
I fixed "Iceburg" and I found 2 bad "it's".
If you want to let me know of anything else, feel free.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
Does this site have some sort of new users queue? I made a post yesterday, and I don't see it when I sort by new.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
The value of writing isn't measured by the number of words. It's measured by how much you can get your reader to understand.
Sam_I_am
1yr ago
The point is that TRN is not analogous to Trump because Trump kinda represents the Republican party and TRN represents, like 500 people.
A more accurate analogy to what TRN is would be to take some random bozo on Stormfront and say "Look at this guy! He's not denouncing Right wing terrorism. This means that the Right is pro-terrorism"
You don't need to end up at a neutral position, but you should start at a neutral place in order to accurate find which position is the best one.
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