Tanista
1d ago
Privilege discourse always seemed exactly backwards to me. If you have two people with the same exact nature, one white and one black, who is privileged in post-1970s America?
Why would you assume the same exact nature and circumstances for what is clearly a judgment on a group's standing?
Black. Socially, they get the enormous privilege of “having overcome”, of “having been the victim”, of being a kind of token of justice, which are very advantageous social myths.
So you would rather be the retarded kid who gets points for the touchdown because of all he's overcome rather than just being the good football player? A beneficiary of other people's charity so they can feel good about themselves and look down on their fellows?
You don't see how this is humiliating?
It bolsters my sense (confirmed by the excellent post on Reddit manners below) that some "woke" rhetorical norms are just uncomfortably rigid encodings of the types of high-EQ social behavior one needs to live cooperatively with economically diverse groups of people in a dense urban environment.
They're uncomfortably rigid because they're enforced by policy and fear of litigation.
Perhaps related: they're intolerable to many people because they're also not stable (wokes continually add new things) and they're not fair. There's a rigid hierarchy of which groups don't have to show this empathy or this good behavior - in fact their failure to do so mandates that you show more sympathy*. This is where privilege differs from fortune. The gods can favor any of us and we should all be humble as a result, privilege is an unjust social hierarchy which requires fixing and some people in particular are guilty.
I actually think you're right that a lot of this is good for managing diversity in a legalistic diverse society. But the structure it comes in leads to it getting poisoned. It's always a tax on certain people, which allows bad actors to use it as a cudgel.
* A hierarchy that arguably doesn't make sense (are black women lower or higher on the hierarchy than black men? How does male privilege rank next to a massive murder rate and lower educational attainment?) and even some wokes would tell you is a misreading of intersectionality.
People always say this. The manosphere likes to point out that men are the enforcement arm of every government, so this whole feminism thing is parasitical. Women don't really have rights, the logic goes, since those rights depend on male tolerance and enforcement.
Maybe (in that sense fat Mottizens like men don't really have rights either) and yet it lasts for now. Because enough men are willing to fight for the system.
And technological advances mean the bar for "enough" can drop pretty fast. How many people do you really need to run an AI-powered surveillance state?
Canadian post-COVID immigration was primarily Indian and even that caused backlash. And this is a country that's up there in terms of tolerating immigration. 1% per year for a decade with nary a peep.
The more you take the more you weaken selection effects and deal with the things people don't like about India.
Tanista
5d ago
Liberalism has been around for hundreds of years.
It obviously hasn't. Not in this form.
Tanista
5d ago
There is a very simple solution - decrease the extra care elderly people receive. It seems unpalatable now, because who wants to let grandma develop bed sores and die? But the proportion of old people who do not have descendants will increase, and the people who are working and paying taxes will not have strong emotional ties to the childless old people.
These systems don't last because of pity. They last because the old are more numerous because of the baby boom and they can vote. How many do you need to die off before the young (who themselves are delusional about benefiting from these systems) can actually vote them down?
Especially in countries that don't have a large Millennial cohort (iirc America is better off here). They're fucked.
Disagree. The average Twitter user may not notice, because we browse with half of our brain. Our mind is already on the next reel.
In a theater with all distractions gone and a giant screen you're way more likely to catch these things.
It's all moot though, it'll get to fidelity at some point.
In retrospect I think a lot of the discourse and disappointment is just people confusing Nolan's autistic focus on "realism" in the sense of shooting everything he can with practical effects for an Eggers-style autism about capturing the vibe/mentality behind historical stories.
I have to wonder if I just disappointed myself here by assuming Nolan was ever going to do something like The Northman. Where was the evidence for that?
Tanista
6d ago
but a lot of the immigrants being shipped to Europe were/are from active war zones, with a culture and mentality bit that different from the Palestinian one.
Not a problem for an American then?
Tanista
6d ago
Yes but children regress to the mean somewhat even with highly-filtered parents, chain migration is going to be something that gets lobbied for exhaustively and without end and is closer to unfiltered. There's also a certain social effect where the children of people who had top 1% outcomes in life to get out of Bumfuckistan and get to the West, even if intelligent, will fall short of parental accomplishments/expectation and then blame it on Racism instead of recognizing their parental achievement.
They just join the mass of DSA failsons who are disproportionately white who blame the same downward mobility on capitalism.
It stands out because people hate this behavior more from foreigners (or "foreigners"), and the DSA-types know better than to appear as a movement of white failsons looking to loot others. Better to do it in the name of minorities.
Like, the orientation of the state should explicitly privilege people of a particular ethnicity and religion. The very premise of Zionism seems in contradiction with how I understand liberal principles.
Does nationalism thus contradict liberal principles, as many progressives claim? After all, nations privilege citizens. I am just as American as any native-born, in terms of believing the creed! Why should someone else be favored above me, especially if it means I lose the right to freedom from want, fear, etc. ?
If so, there's nothing to do but bite the bullet and say that liberalism was always in a marriage of compromise with nationalism and other particularist ideologies for the vast majority of its history and that sort of liberalism is...fine, actually. It worked for everyone until recently. So what?
Funny thing is that the movie can't commit to being modern. Spoilers, obviously.
Instead of the modern materialistic view of the Bronze Age collapse (i.e. complicated confluence of material factors like drought, loss of tin supply, etc. - people are still debating) it's a straightforwardly moralist tale (humans break gods' law and suffer) except that the morals are themselves very modern. We hear nothing of Troy suffering for Paris' violation of sacred law.
Instead the entire Bronze Age ends because Odysseus didn't apply "do unto others" to his grand ploy in the middle of a war. The rules-based international order sustained by xenia collapses because it cannot bear the betrayal.
There's a sort of divine hiddenness that's also a bit strange given how the movie preserves other supernatural elements.
This leads to the most ironic coda possible for this whole thing: Emily Wilson, who became the scapegoat for this movie's deliberately modern dialogue and themes online, criticized it for being too modern
The movie does posit that the Sea Peoples are returning Greeks for that reason.
But that isn't even the main problem. The movie outright states that the thing that caused the collapse of the entire civilization was the breaking of xenia/Zeus's law because of the Trojan horse gambit and the attendant sack (no mention is made of the much more unambiguous violation of hospitality that kicked off the war).
The movie makes an outcome whose cause so uncertain we debate the causes today into a pretty straightforward monocausal event.
Funnily enough, reviewers whose tastes often align with mine (we all agree Rings of Power is terrible) saw the movie and really liked it, so it must come across way better on the big screen when you watch the entire movie, because the trailers were dogshit.
It's much better than I thought from the trailers. Trailers were awful and bland and I suspect that's part of why the antiwoke stuff was able to dominate. The PR just didn't give you much.
TBF they didn't have to. The story is the story and Nolan is at the peak of his powers in terms of box office draw.
I saw one good review say it was “Bracingly modern”. With that, I agree.
Are all Nolan movies this bad? I know he’s got some detractors out there, but I recall telling people I liked Oppenheimer.
This movie kinda was Oppenheimer. Matt Damon single-handedly caused the
Tanista
11d ago
Anybody trying to claim Epstein was sacrificing 4 year olds to Satan is clearly on some galaxy-brain nonsense and is going to float into the air sharting themselves if a civilized discussion emerges.
It feels like the entire internet has been taken over by the sorts of people who used to make videos on Illuminati conspiracy theories.
Tanista
12d ago
The underclass is gonna underclass.
And that's why the entire planet and every major religion has imposed strict social conditions on our sovereignty everywhere people have lived. Plenty of people ruined their lives via drugs, gambling and so on, but there was enough friction and existing social structures to save the rest. If it was only that you had to go somewhere and do something, that saved a lot of lazy, scared people.
People are actively destroying those speedbumps in the name of an absurd, bankrupt idea that's basically "well, they'd do it anyway"
I have low impulse control. But I watch TV and see the gambling ads and just thank my lucky stars my addictive personality is seemingly too busy gorging on other things to care. It's obscene that someone with a problem is incapable of following major sports without immediately being told how much they could be winning or losing if they just jumped off the wagon.
My cousin told me he saw Jedi gambling for slaves so the whole order was a corrupt organ of the Deep Galactic State.
I mean, it's nothing new: they let slaves fight their war...No peep from the vaunted moral authorities of the Republic as thousands* of beings were made to wage war and die for them
The one point Karen Traviss made in her Jedi rants that couldn't be denied .
* The scale is all fucked up.
Tanista
12d ago
When Arab countries say this, they are not sincere.
This is perfectly compatible with Westerners absorbing their position uncritically.
I find this hard to square with the success of Game of Thrones, whose many departures from real history pretty much always land on the "darker and edgier" side rather than sanitizing. I guess the secret ingredient is tits?
Game of Thrones totally modernizes and makes sympathetic a bunch of viewpoint characters ( Tyrion is a snarky agnostic and his abusive relationship with Shae who he uses as a sex toy due to her low status is erased, rendering her end nonsensical, Varys has a strange, modern conception of how wars should be waged, etc.)
In other cases they take sympathetic characters -e.g. the Sparrows revolting against noble degeneracy through religion - and basically fit them into the mold of the modern Taliban so the audience can cheer as they die. Stannis is portrayed negatively for most of the show, precisely because he buys into his new religion.
The general theme seems to be that Westeros is awful so darker and edgier things have to happen. But the main characters we root for tend to avoid being politically incorrect and are made moreso by the show.
This (or the expectation that it should be this way) seems to have only gotten worse with House of the Dragons for reasons I'm unsure about (probably a generation that grew up entirely online).
Gilley's The Case for Colonialism, which I'm finding tedious. I've spent too much time in spaces like this, there's only so much examination of the culture of free speech, or lackthereof, on campus that I care about compared to the object level question.
Tanista
16d ago
A certain sort of leftist would argue that the "real" (read: Marxist) left was killed by the end of the Cold War.
For the rest of us, nobody would argue the academy has been anti-actually-existing-left in our lifetime. But they could at least claim that the prudes were running the culture when people were going after rap and rock and roll, or that evangelicals and neocons were in charge in the Oughties. In the long run all of those battles were lost decisively by those groups and for a bit only the left-wing position stood as legitimate.
So, let's start with some of the most obvious differences. Climate change is a truly global problem in the sense that it's literally impossible to fix locally. This is the reason why the EU/german-style Energiewende is so insanely myopic and short-sighted; Even if it worked relatively fine on its own merits (i.e. reducing emissions to near-zero with minimal damage to the economy) AND if everyone on the entire globe did the same, it still requires adaptions to the already-changed climate. Instead it not only is sold as an alternative to adaption, the rest of the world isn't doing the same anyway, and of course it isn't working well on its own merits, either.
Speaking of my experience in Canada: it never seems to matter that we can't even get the "other people get along". The argument seems to boil down to "we have to do something!" and the idea that if Canada did do something, it would inspire the Gentiles . After they have been so converted, I suppose you can then direct them towards whatever policy makes sense but you must first lead by example.
The inherent arrogance in the argument is not commented on.
Also, from the article:
And in a similar manner, demographic decline must be approached - if we can’t fundamentally change it, we must diminish its negative impacts where possible. Pension systems must be redesigned to rely less on pay-as-you-go transfers and more on funded, individual savings — raising retirement ages, tying them to life expectancy rather than a fixed retirement age.
What does he think has been happening in developed countries over the last few years? They have all been trying and failing to adapt. Yes, everyone can get together and do this. But it's a collective action problem precisely because everyone will not just vote themselves less right at the moment they're most vulnerable so they can die alone in their hot, AC-free bed in a hellish nursing home. Adapting is subject to the same political constraints as attempting a serious fix of the issue.
Isn't it based on the experience with Feinstein? Her staffers and family didn't cover up her death but did everything but to act as if she was still a functional bit of Senate machinery. This may have been her wish but it was also the last hurrah for the people on her coattails.
Between that and Biden it's not a shock that people don't trust the inner circles of these people to be forthright.
Things aren't equal and they're not going to be equal. The kids who get affirmative action, for example, are not equally skilled as the kids who don't or they wouldn't need it. Nor are their group outcomes the same.
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