Testing123
1mo ago
Can we see the answers without being a subscriber?
Testing123
1mo ago
Maybe this is a better fit for the Friday Fun Thread but IMO it’s culture war-y enough for here.
Here’s a thought experiment based on a thread that has popped up in /r/whowouldwin:
Imagine that every single person in Liberia gained a 180 IQ overnight. Also, they were imbued with an extraordinarily strong sense of patriotism such that they never wanted to move away from Liberia for more than a few years for school or special training. Could Liberia reach a GDP of $1 trillion by 2040?
Relevant stats: Liberia has a population of 5.3 million, a GDP of $4 billion, and a GDP per capita of $750.
Testing123
1mo ago
I absolutely loved it. IMO, the main culture war angle was that left-leaning critics desperately wanted it to be anti-Trump but the narrative is stubbornly a-political (or rather, the narrative and the characters treat politics as a meaningless game they indulge in for the sake of adrenaline rushes).
Testing123
3mo ago
Thanks for this, one of the best Motte posts I've read in awhile, and not just because I read Who's Your Caddy a million years ago and always wanted to go back to it during the Trump era. IIRC, Trump is the first chapter.
Testing123
4mo ago
https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election
Wow... Gavin Newsom is up 12 cents TO BECOME PRESIDENT.
Testing123
5mo ago
I think one of the strangest instances of a woke injection into a film/story just occurred and it seems to be flying under the radar. FULL SPOILERS AHEAD for Under the Bridge, a Hulu murder mystery show that’s based on a non-fiction book of the same name. For what it’s worth, I thought the show was pretty good despite what I’m writing here.
In real life, Rebecca Godfrey wrote the Under the Bridge non-fiction book. In the Hulu show, Rebecca Godfrey is a character portrayed by Riley Keough. Godfrey (speaking about her character henceforth) was born in Vancouver Island in Canada, moved to New York to start a writing career, and then at the start of the show, she moved back to Vancouver Island temporarily in the late 1990s to write a new book on her hometown.
But soon after moving back, 14 year old Reena Virk is murdered seemingly by a group of her friends. The story is so shocking and intriguing that Godfrey begins investigating the crime independently to write about it. In addition to talking to a bunch of the kids involved, Godfrey reconnects with Cam Bentland, a local police officer investigating the murder. Cam is a Native American who was adopted by white parents, and Cam is also implied to be Godfrey’s ex girlfriend. They soon rekindle their romantic relationship and begin using each other to get different informational angles on the case.
Most of the show consists of uncovering what happened with the murders, and for the sake of this post, I don’t need to go into it. Basically, a group of very troubled girls (aged 14-16) got pissed off at one of their own and decided to beat the shit out of her. Then one girl and another guy took it way too far and murdered her.
Godfrey becomes a key media player in the very high-profile case. She works both with and against the police to push the kids in different ways, and at one point, she passionately argues for the innocence of one of the main accused kids. Meanwhile, Cam eventually discovers that she was adopted by her white parents through the Adopt Indian Métis, in which the government encouraged white parents to adopt Native American orphans. Cam feels disgusted by the revelation, disgusted with her parents for being involved and never telling her, and disgusted with herself for being a cop, so she leaves the police force and decides to try to connect with her real family.
To reiterate, this is based on a true story. Reena Virk really was brutally murdered by her friends, and Rebecca Godfrey really did write a book about the murder. So it might surprise you to learn that in real life:
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Rebecca Godfrey had no direct involvement in the murder investigations. She wrote her book after everything occurred.
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Cam Bentland, the Native America cop, was entirely invented by the show.
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By extension, Godfrey’s lesbian romance with Cam was entirely invented.
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I have no in depth knowledge of Godfrey, but she was married to a man, and I haven’t seen any evidence that she was a lesbian or bisexual.
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While there really were some heinous laws regarding Natives in Canada, none of that stuff had anything to do with the murder of Reena Virk or the Under the Bridge book.
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Godfrey presumably approved of televised adaptation of the show, but she died at the beginning of its production, so it’s unclear if she approved of any of these additions to the real story
Discussion points:
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If Godfrey wasn’t aware of these changes, then Hulu’s writers portrayed a presumable straight woman as a lesbian/bi woman in a fictionalized account of her. Is that a step too far in wokeness for the average media consumer?
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Can someone clue me in on what actually happened with the Adopt Indian Métis program and programs like it? In the show, it’s implied (I think) to be literal kidnapping of Native American children by the Canadian government, but I have a hard time believing that’s true.
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Maybe this is too broad or vague, but is it disrespectful in some sense to take a real tragic story in which most of the participants are still alive and use it to prop up unrelated woke narratives? I’m not meaning this in an obviously baity or culture war-y way. I mean, does calling that “disrespectful” make any sense? Is the concept of respecting true stories in this sense valid?
Testing123
5mo ago
I don't know about "most" serial killers, but IIRC, a lot of the most high-profile ones were big in the 1970s and early 80s, and then serial killing went into decline. Like school shootings, it seemed to be partially driven by social contagion.
Testing123
5mo ago
My understanding as an outsider aligns with yours. The vast majority of murders are either really easy to solve ("he was probably shot by that guy who stole his girl who he's been beefing with for the last three months") or almost impossible to solve ("he could have been shot be any one of 100 gang bangers in the neighborhood"). The genuine who-dun-its are more fun and interesting, but far rarer, and there's probably no systematic way to solve them. At best, you can throw some smart people at these cases and maybe they'll be lucky enough to identify and pursue the right thread. But ultimately, these cases have a terrible cost-to-success ratio for police forces and probably shouldn't be prioritized as a high-level objective. Maybe there's room for private investigators here?
EDIT - Thinking more about it, it makes sense for the FBI to have a system in place for dealing with complex, especially dangerous criminals, like serial killers or Ted Kaczynski types. From a law-and-order perspective, it's probably worth it to spend a lot of money and resources to take these guys out because they set bad precedents and spread social contagions.
Testing123
5mo ago
Related - I think someone posted on the SSC subreddit that the the vast majority of the most popular celebrities (as measured by social media followers) were musicians, as opposed to actors, athletes, or any other entertainers. People generally seem to like music more than any other entertainment.
Testing123
7mo ago
I'm not sure how to get a group of specialists, but as a backup, go on Reddit or Twitter some other forum and post a bounty for whomever gives you the best advice.
Testing123
7mo ago
I think that (monogamous) couples have an obligation to maintain their attractiveness, within reason***. When you entered the relationship, you gave up the ability to have sex with anyone else on the pretense that that you will get your sexual satisfaction from your partner, and part of that satisfaction comes from their physical attractiveness. If they choose to erode their attractiveness, they are hurting you and violating their relationship obligations. IMO, like sexual fidelity, this should be made explicit at the start of relationships, but should otherwise be considered implicit unless the obligation is explicitly waved,
***"Within reason" = within the ordinary bounds of aging, illness, and unexpected events. Obviously people are not going to be as hot at 50 as at 25, and obviously we can't completely control the course of our aging.
Which is to say that I think you should consider yourself in the moral right here. You have a moral right to be dismayed by your wife's fading attractiveness. This doesn't make your wife a horrible person or anything, but you shouldn't feel bad for wanting to nudge her back in your preferred direction.
Testing123
7mo ago
I recently watched the Paraguay episode of Parts Unknown, and he said that he was (IIRC) 57, and that he was already the longest living male member of his family in many generations.
Testing123
8mo ago
IMO, Javier Bardem "passes," but now that he mentions it, it is weird that there are no obviously Middle Eastern cast members. The Fremen are all either black, Mediterranean, or mixed race (like Zendaya).
Inspired by a few Reddit threads: why is there less sex and nudity in movies and television today than in the past?
I don’t have any raw data to back up the claim that there is less sex and nudity these days, but that’s my sentiment and it’s shared by many others. The best concrete example I can think of is Game of Thrones. The early seasons were (in)famous for the amount of gratuitous nudity; Saturday Night Live did a sketch mocking the “guy has sex while another guy getting a blow job watches him through a peephole while another guy watches him through a peephole” scene. Yet, the final two seasons, when it became this massive international phenomenon that everyone on earth watched, had (IIRC) no nudity at all and very little sex.
The second best concrete example I can think of is Marvel movies. There have been 30ish of them and (IIRC) there are no sex scenes at all, and maybe even no make out scenes (I think there’s one in the first Captain America). Sure, they’re PG-13, but so is 007, and they still have sex scenes.
Compare this to the 80s and 90s when every action-oriented movie ever had sex scenes, if not also completely gratuitous nudity. For instance, in Commando, Arnold Schwarzenegger throws a bad guy through a motel wall, and just happens to reveal a naked lady with giant boobs having sex. Or if there was any romance, it would inevitably result in a sex scene, even a clothes-on PG-13 sex scene. These seem to be nearly dead in the modern day.
So why do modern movies have so little sex and nudity? My guesses:
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Internet porn has lowered the value of movie sex and nudity. In the 1980s, getting porn was expensive and annoying, so getting to see boobs in an action movie was a legitimate draw. These days, everyone has infinite internet porn, so who cares? (Counterpoint – celebrity nudity still has a special appeal over porn nudity, ie. the Fappening, or people going to see No Hard Feelings to see Jennifer Lawrence naked)
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MeToo, combined with the backdrop of Jonathan Haidt’s thesis in Coddling of the American Mind, have made (young) people very squeamish about sex. We are in a new low-tier puritan age where men are terrified of being accused of sexual assault and women are terrified of being sexually assaulted, so sex is now a much heavier subject and gratuitous nudity has lost its appeal
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here seems to be a new stratification in culture where everything is either hardcore sexual or has no sex at all. Everything is porn or innocent. People are either kinky a f or extremely shy around sex. Tv shows either show no nudity or they’re Euphoria with tons of sex and nudity. Movies are either porn or puritan.
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lockbusters are now designed to appeal to overseas audiences more than ever, particularly to China. Non-Western audiences (particularly China) are more sexually conservative than Western audiences, so film studios are reducing sex and nudity. In some cases (like China), literal censors might intervene against a movie if there is too much sexuality. Any other ideas?
Testing123
8mo ago
The game works best in unexpected moments of chaos. Like, you and the squad will be running to the next objective when suddenly an enemy horde side swipes you out of nowhere, so you start sprinting away with lazers flying over head, and you dive into cover, and you start fumbling with stratagems to get an eagle cluster out there but the fucking arrows are weird, and then a robot gets around your cover and you have to switch back to your weapons and you start shooting wildly and then your idiot friend died and he's calling for a reinforce but fuck fuck fuck youre barely surviving. Stuff like that.
Testing123
8mo ago
I have to rant about a particular incredibly stupid plot point in the finale. SPOILERS if anyone cares.
It's revealed that the scientists at the lab are studying a life form in the permafrost and that they are better able to access the life form due to pollution created by the local mine which melts the permafrost. So not only does the lab publish fake reports about the pollution levels to protect the mine, but the lab actually asks the mine to pollute more to help its research along. This pollution causes deaths, birth defects, and other problems in the local town. The lab claims that their research will revolutionize the field of health in some unspecified ways, and that their work will eventually be unfathomably valuable.
Ok, so...
- Permafrost is just frozen ground. You can melt it with any heat source. You don't need special pollution to do it. But ok, let's say that for sci-fi reasons, only the pollution melts the ice the right way.
- The pollution that mines give off is stuff like mercury and industrial chemicals. You don't need to get that stuff just from mine pollution. You can get it on its own without polluting a local town. And if the end product of this research is so valuable, I'm sure the lab can afford to import mercury or whatever.
- Also, it appears that all of the lab's research is conducted right near the physical lab building. So... why don't they just get a bunch of pollution and dump it right near their lab? Why do they need to pollute the whole town?
- Or why not just use machinery to cut away permafrost and ship it to a place where you can safely and cleanly expose it to the pollution? Yeah, that's expensive, but the end product is insanely valuable and surely worth it.
- Ok, fine, let's concede that for sci fi reasons, only the pollution can melt the permafrost the right way, and the permafrost can only be melted by polluting the entire town. The pollution conspiracy is still so fucking stupid. They reiterate that the end result of the research is WORLD CHANGING. I'm sure it's worth bajilions of dollars. So if it's that valuable, just tell people what you're working on and what it's worth. Then your corporate overlords can build a giant fracking-style concrete basin to contain the pollution, or even pay off the few thousand local townspeople, or use some other big engineering solution. Surely anything is better than risking jail time, massive lawsuits, and the closure of the entire project by knowingly killing and poisoning thousands of people.
God, I know Hollywood hates corporations, but why does it think they are so stupid?
Testing123
9mo ago
Sometimes I forget that the presidents of other countries (outside America) can't just order troops to go wherever for whatever reason.
Testing123
11mo ago
So I am willing to bet that even today Catholics and protestants know that it was mostly political strife. As were the other major Christian schisms and fights. If you look it is very often some inter elite fight.
I can maybe believe that the elites were primarily motivated by real politik, but masses and mobs really did murder each other on the streets throughout the era. I find it hard to believe that their true motives were stuff like decreasing regional tax-kickups to the Holy Roman Emperor.
Testing123
11mo ago
The Persecution of the Internet Historian
Internet Historian is a popular YouTuber whose best content is retelling interesting, fairly obscure stories with janky animation and luscious voice over. He’s an excellent storyteller and the videos are insanely easy to watch.
Left wing breadtuber Hbomberguy recently released an almost 4 hour video about plagiarism on YouTube. One of the subjects of the video was Internet Historian, and I think Hbomberguy credibly shows that IH was in the wrong. For his most watched video, Man in Hole, IH heavily copied the story and format of a Mental Floss article, as well as directly quoting entire paragraphs. IIRC, IH did cite the Mental Floss article in the original video, but it would be fairer to say that the entire video was an animated telling of the original article, and IH should have described it as such.
Furthermore, after Man in Hole was DMCAed, IH seemingly purposefully concealed what he had done, made excuses, and never fully acknowledged the extent to which he plagiarized, even after reuploading the video with heavy edits.
I think IH did a bad thing by committing plagiarism. Then he did another bad thing by trying to cover it up. I don’t think his life should be destroyed, but I think he deserves some score for this and my opinion of him has been lowered.
But if you ask some very online leftist people what’s wrong with IH, they won’t say plagiarism, they will say he is a literal Nazi - https://old.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/18dotzf/internet_historian_is_a_nazi/
That thread is by far the most popular ever on that subreddit, and lists evidence that IH is a Nazi. I’d summarize the evidence as “IH has a 4-chany sense of humor, has made some edgy jokes, and follows mainstream conservatives on Twitter.”
What I find most interesting about this affair is how difficult to convey to the breadtubey online leftists how vapid and dumb I think this evidence is. I think that’s because there’s actually a lot of cultural complexity here tied into some big gaps in moral intuition.
For instance, many of the evidence points are that IH has made jokes in his videos about Nazis and the KKK. In one video, he put 14/88 in the background, in another he uses a KKK caricature, and he has also sarcastically listed his birthday as 4/20 (Hitler’s birthday, though this might also just be a weed lmao thing). To the OP and most of the commenters, this is strong evidence that IH is a literal Nazi. Even if they acknowledge that these are edgy jokes, they can’t comprehend why someone would make light of something so awful unless they were secretly sympathetic to it. Or they just say that IH is straight up “dogwhistling” to align himself with all the Nazis watching his videos.
These arguments strike me as so divorced from reality that it’s difficult to bridge the gap. These jokes are not actually making light of Hitler, Nazis, and the KKK. They are making light of online lefties being pathologically obsessed with speech. Referencing Hitler isn’t funny; what’s funny is watching online lefties think that referencing Hitler indicates a deep seated hatred of Judaism and a real desire to exterminate non-whites. It’s the overreaction that’s funny. Or another way to put it – edgy Hitler jokes are shibboleths indicating that the speaker doesn’t buy into the predominant lefty internet culture. The speaker signals that he has such little concern for the culture that he considers stifling, censorious, and ridiculous, that he invokes the greatest taboo possible. IMO, this is the essence of edgy 4-chan humor.
Is this an accurate take? Or am I being too nice to IH?
Testing123
11mo ago
Can you elaborate your thoughts on the Internet Historian? I though the Hbomber video convincingly demonstrated that he committed plagiarism, albeit not as badly as the other subjects in the video.
Testing123
11mo ago
Seriously. Go to the Philippines or Thailand or almost anywhere somewhat touristy in Central America, and this guy is guaranteed to get a decent looking girl. He can even try Eastern Europe if he’s willing to deal with a higher rate of rejection.
Testing123
1yr ago
I have used OTC corticosteroids on my hands and have found it very effective. But the reputation of corticosteroids in the face is that they work in the short term at the detriment of the long term. They thin your skin, and thin skin is already the reason why facial skin tends to be so much worse than regular skin.
Have you been prescribed facial corticosteroids by a dermatologist?
Testing123
1yr ago
I told my allergist about my hot shower response and she diagnosed me with cholinergic urticaria, but didn't say much else except recommending Claritin when I shower. On its own, it's annoying, but not a huge deal. Hell, hot water is generally considered bad for facial skin anyway, so it served as a little extra incentive to embrace cooler showers.
However, on the off chance this allergic response is connected to something bigger, I'm going to press my allergist during my next appointment. Maybe it's worth getting one of those mega antihistamine injections just to see what happens to my face. Honestly, HOPE my facial skin problems are related to my allergies, because that's so much easier to solve. Wouldn't it be amazing if the root of my problems was an allergy to some random fucking environmental thing that I can avoid or crush with antihistamines? But that's probably wishful thinking beyond the rosacea.
I had stress related psoriasis once that went away after dealing with the underlying cause. Is there a possibility that the sensitivity is psychosomatic (in other words linked to stress or other mental health issues)?
I won't say a psychosomatic role is impossible, but I tend to be skeptical. Besides, I beat my psoriasis with cortisone (that stuff kicks ass).
Testing123
1yr ago
I checked Amazon and saw glycine is 10 cents per pill, but then I checked my collagen supplement and I see there's already glycine in there. But thank you for the tip.
One of the theories is that seed oils are more calorically dense and cheaper than traditional alternatives, so they encourage more eating.
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