I mean we literally just had a discussion with someone arguing that inveterate lying was perfectly valid, after a campaign season full of the most shameless lying I've ever seen.
There are limits. I think people would appreciate an apology for the lies before extending any more charity. At least for the whole "our internal polls agreed with the prediction markets that trump was winning but we still called them insane cryptobro conspiracy theorists who did their own research (gross! Ick!)". Or "Biden's not senile you're just a rabid maga partisan for noticing." Or "the economy is amazing and Biden solved Trump's crime wave, illegal immigration isn't happening and you're imagining the price of eggs and why do you care anyway, you're weird!" All lies that were used here with no consequences for the liars other than going on some people's mental lists of sociopathic manipulators.
There's a point where you can't just get done with another round of lying and go "hey bro no hard feelings bro I was just using rhetoric to destroy your ability to understand reality and gaslight you into thinking you were insane for questioning our lies, leaving you helplessly adrift in a sea of mass propaganda to serve my own interests. Come on bro we've all done that, I do it to you all the time you can't stay mad at me! What about charity bro?! What about niceness and understanding?!"
It's time to coordinate some meanness against this tactic, because it's antithetical to everything this place tries to do, and it incinerates what little trust anyone has left. I want to come here to read people who will help me understand things I'm unaware of or confused about, not to get force fed this week's edition of "Blob Propaganda Magazine"
SteveKirk
2d ago
Imagining a social media intern barging into the HRW editor's office.
"Someone linked your report, sir!"
"Excellent, what conclusion did he draw from it?"
"Um..."
Well played. (I was curious because Twitter has never shown me irl hardcore porn. Don't know if there's a setting or the algorithm knows not to show it to me)
As far as I know river and coastal shopping in the US has been in decline for a long time. Particularly the great lakes: we don't move iron ore and coal (and limestone) like we used to. River shipping in the Mississippi is mostly barge these days I think.
We just don't do all the river and coastal hauling of manufactured goods like the Europeans do, not sure whether it's because we have better rail shipping or some other reason.
I do know that the US coast guard has gotten absolutely retarded about crewing requirements, at the same time as crew recruiting and training is going to pieces in the same way it is for air traffic control.
Europe on the other hand has a lot of cheap hulls and crew from eastern Europe.
SteveKirk
3d ago
That's the trick for space platforms. Asteroid chunks are awful and should either be on a totally separate system or limited somehow. An inserter that throws them overboard if there's more than X on the entire belt loop is handy (nice new feature).
SteveKirk
3d ago
That's not lying to the IRS though. They're legally your heirs, they're your children, and iirc at least in the US you can still give them $50k for their trouble and do whatever you want with the rest. Unlike France, say, where they could sue for an equal share.
SteveKirk
3d ago
Wouldn't rich people just adopt an adult, Japanese style, in order to avoid the penalty. They could pay the adoptee a small amount for their trouble and leave the rest to the Richburger Fund For Getting Skinsuited By Activists like they all do now.
Yes, and repeatedly doing so will make anyone who has more than a goldfish memory despise you as an amoral sociopathic gaslighting liar who can be trusted only to manipulate everyone around him to serve the current party line.
Credentialism + nepotism is also a major factor on the creative side. A lot of the industry jobs are going to people because "I met they/them at calarts and followed their Tumblr askblog about obese superheroines with vitiligo, that's definitely the sort of person we need for Concord's character design team." I'm not kidding, that's literally the life story of all but two people I know doing art for games and cartoons, and those two are old guys.
Same with translation/"localization." It's a tiny industry with cliques of professional bullies getting away with hiring all their discord buddies and circulating blacklists, because there's literally no oversight.
It works without pushback because there's still no counter to the superweapons they developed. HR having a "Cluster hiring" policy literally gives them a party cadre within a few hiring cycles, and then you're fucked. And what do the old guard do except shake their heads and say "well I'd never hire or reject a candidate for political reasons."
Yeah, we used to hear that a lot from Google guys in 2012 who are no longer Google guys.
TL;DR: as nybbler likes to say, you can't pick up $20 off the sidewalk when there's a troll with a club making sure nobody touches it.
On the plus side, bugs actually get noticed and fixed now. We don't usually get deus ex style "hey we broke a bunch of maps, all the plasma weapons, and some random character interactions, have fun dealing with that for the next 25 years. Buy the sequel. Devs out"
SteveKirk
7d ago
There are a lot of weird errors and inexplicable decisions on Twitter, but I can't tell if it's gotten worse. The timeline spazzes out constantly, showing the same stuff over and over. The other day my account was limited, then suspended out of the blue, then reinstated without comment after I sent an email asking why.
Granted, the only part of that different from 2020 was actually getting unbanned, but still.
Does this place get indexed super fast by Google? The other day I searched for "Kamelanomicon" to see how many people had already made that joke, and we were the top result an hour after posting.
Are their scrapers just that regular these days? I've seen it in several cases where I've tried to look up old phrases or topics mentioned in a recent motte conversation, and that specific convo was in the top results.
SteveKirk
7d ago
Yes, that's the party line I'm talking about, thank you. It's an effective consensus enforcer, I'll give it that.
This is just the "what does it matter to you that we support Basic Human Decency, seems like you're the problem" gaslighting trick everyone's seen a billion times. It's manipulative and vile, and weird to keep using on someone who's immune to it.
SteveKirk
7d ago
If he was paying her for sex he wasn't breaking any promises. The skeevy guys are the ones going "yeah baby I'm totally gonna leave my wife for you but now's not the right time so please you've gotta get another abortion come on baby just one more time then we'll be together forever"
A guy who is either dating with the expectation of marriage or paying her pocket money with no strings attached is morally in the clear by my standards.
What will it take for you to acknowledge you are wrong about this? People just like you were saying that political correctness had peaked in the 90s, and that it was totally fine to stop noticing it (with the implicit threat that bad things would happen to you if you kept noticing anyway)
Can I quote stats on university hires? The percent of federal "science" grants going to DEI programs? The massive lawsuits against companies and agencies for having basic literacy standards? Is there anything I can say to get you to acknowledge that the giant elephant standing right in front of us isn't getting any smaller?
Ymeskhout called it a crazy conspiracy theory to think progressive prosecutors were using procedural manipulation to favor BLM rioters. It is absolutely a weaponised term.
I used imgur the other day (because someone couldn't see a catbox link), and it's literally worse than reddit. Then you go to funnyjunk or iFunny and it's all zoomer holocaust jokes. Same with the old forums, resetera vs rpgcodex(?) etc.
Social media is totally pillarized at this point, but it seems obvious to me that the leftist ones reach far more people. It's just that the leftist extremism has gone way too overboard to actually help the Democrats; they're trying to run a "we're normal, they're weird" campaign, but their entire youth wing is posting "glory to the martyrs for stomping magat colonizer babies to protect trans kids" memes.
I'm honestly surprised he's still around considering everything, still more that he's getting that kind of work. Read the first two nights dawn books in elementary school, and the Commonwealth trilogy when it first came out.
Probably should get around to rereading and finishing the former, but it's harder to justify burning through a pile of doorstops in a weekend the way you could as a kid.
One house on my street had a single sign that just said "Kamela". Every single one of the others had multiple signs, banners, and flags. One at the intersection had a big banner of trump snarling with some slogan about the face of stupidity, racism, and fascism. Most others also got updated What This House Believes signs with the new firmware.
They all popped up within a week of the Kamelanomicon being opened.
Suspect I'm on a list for not having one. With the neighborhood going 80D-15R it's pretty easy to spot the dissidents.
Oh the press has been doing it since before JournoList, that's baked in. What's new is spreading it to places like this through sophisticated distributed propaganda campaigns: delivering talking points to partisans and using them to manipulate people who trust them.
Take the surge in shoplifting for example. It wasn't just MSNBC or Vox lying about it, they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.
What do you even do against a fully distributed and inescapable reality distortion machine like that? Obviously this election showed the limits of convincing people to ignore their lying eyes, but it took an amazing set of circumstances to wake people up.
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