TheFooder
10d ago
I'd be interested to see those reports. AFAIK, there were very, very few weapons (none?) recovered during the riot. A serious report to the contrary would cause me to update.
TheFooder
10d ago
yeah. I never understand the counter-arguments to this. The entire building could have been taken over by American Jihadi's, every person inside massacred and it wouldn't have made any difference to the election outcome or who the president was going to be. I also find it mostly implausible that the participants had any expectation of success...there were no victory conditions. Obviously there are always lizardmen around but the freakoutery around Jan 6th just never made any sense. It was bad, they shouldn't have done it, but it was never a threat to Our Democracy.
TheFooder
10d ago
I was working up a reply that was basically the same thing: people are being hypocritical and pretending, they were simply wrong about Jan 6th. I was also going to mention the crazy hearings and how they were specifically formulated to make the whole event even more opaque.
I also thought the term 'retcon' didn't make sense. I don't see how people can be 'rewriting' the events or the players. Details may be evolving, but it's not like Republicans are saying Jan 6th was actually about slavery...and it happened in 1776 to George Washington. I dunno...I didn't get it.
TheFooder
10d ago
Anyone else playing Metaculus? I had a terrible 2023, mostly because I did not have any idea how a number of new features worked. I did much better in 2024.
This year in 41st in Peer Accuracy scores and 251st in Baseline accuracy. I have no idea how that stacks against all the other users, but it seems...not bad? Part of what limited my baseline is I only answered 49 questions out of almost 1k+ (though I may have bombed more if I answered more--who knows). TemetNoscoe #1 player answered 570 questions. Sheesh!! I finally figured out Peer Accuracy scores and in a way I prefer them as it's more of a comparison to how you did against other predictors in the questions you actually answered.
This question about refugees was a massive bomb for me :https://www.metaculus.com/questions/20784/ I also blew this one about two lunar landings: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/20919/ I got this terrible Andrea Bocelli question wrong, but outperformed everyone... https://www.metaculus.com/questions/30252/
Overall, I'm kind of grumpy about Metaculus. I hate the spread questions, which I just refuse to do anymore. The resolution criteria is often ridiculous. I don't know how much longer I'm going to play, but I do like feeling like I'm kind of able to do ok at predicting stuff.
How'd everyone (anyone?) else do?
TheFooder
11d ago
Would you count graphic novels? then I'm up there with you :)
At 50, with some perspective, I can see the heaviest reading period of my life was between 10-28 yrs. For instance, I read Atlas Shrugged twice but I was around 16 and 25 when I did so. I read Guns, Germs and Steel around 30--that's 20 years ago! So, maybe, as a Mottizen, the answer is simply that a lot of us already "did the work." We value books and have the knowledge, it's just a bit dated.
Here's another thing that happened: at some point in middle age, I realized I was just zoning out and getting through books but not absorbing much. Now when I read, I (almost literally) go over every page three time to make sure I really 'get it.' Maybe this is my brain crusting over or maybe I've become a better reader, but it definitely slows my pace. 50 pages an hour seems recklessly high to me, though I could surely do a 100 page Dog Man book in under an hour.
Also, my interest in literature has plummeted that has had a pretty big effect on the number of books I read. I read more non-fiction lately, but removing fiction (almost entirely) has put a pretty big hole in my overall time window. I suppose I replaced it with comics, but no one wants to hear that!
I watch almost no TV (5-ish hours a week of Netflix), my doom-scrolling is minimal (though I waste hours writing replies that I often end up deleting), and I spend most of my free-time recording music in my studio. As a family man, start-up, artist guy, reading is a hobby I have limited time for and don't enjoy as much as I once did.
Regardless, 89 books in a year is a lot by any measure, IMO. Go ahead an flex. Regardless of wasted time, most adults just don't have it in them to do that. Joyfully wasting a day with a book is just not a possibility. Still, I know people who haven't read a book since they graduated from college. I don't think that's actually rare and it's a damn shame. If someone told me they read a ~300 page book every month, I'd probably give them a cookie.
TheFooder
12d ago
Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence
I wonder about this...
TheFooder
12d ago
A little from A, a little from B, a little from C and soon we've triangulated something approaching knowledge.
TheFooder
13d ago
I was with this group since before it left /r/ssc's culture war thread (different username) but stepped back at some point in 2018 because I simply refused to ever use Reddit again. I think I had the link but never bothered to look...until recently. And it's all still here, just as you say. A few of my favorite names seem to be missing, but maybe, just like you, something will spark in their minds, a niggling question or event they can't quite parse and The Motte will be here to blow raspberries and hot-takes right into their soup.
I mostly dumped all social media around the same time, thoroughly unconvinced by its various claims of importance. Twitter is mendacity personified and dumbed down. I was pretty quick to follow Scott and others to Substack, but the social side of it didn't metastasize until this year. What I see there reminds me a lot of what I saw here: untamed, edgy, deeply intelligent weirdos who manage to mostly adhere to civil discourse and sometimes provide illumination where none seems apparent or forthcoming. I like to think of it as The Motte seeping beyond its borders and it makes me happy when I see names I recognize still doing their thing. Most online communities seem to evaporate after a few short years, yet here we remain. #FeelsGood
TheFooder
13d ago
I'm not sure you're going to find may vids of Americans eating cow dung...maybe as a rare college prank?
I think the question "is it true for every nationality on Earth," is sort of the point. I'm less certain it is. I think India has special characteristics like, 1.2 billion people with an even larger gap in wealth than anywhere in the West. This opens the door for a broader range of pathological behavior--so in that sense, maybe if we all had a massive underclass we'd be eating poop too?
I think "should I update" is precisely the question. I wouldn't say I've got a high opinion of India, more true to say I think of it very little. But if India isn't "the Worst Country on earth" what is? Kulak sort of defends Africa as equally as poor but not as environmentally degraded or mad.
Anyway, I think there's definitely some bullshit racism going on in this video/review but there also is an important question about what elevates humanity vs. the depths to which we might sink: Eloi vs. Morlocks. For me it raises a longstanding and fundamental concern about the overwhelming power of human depravity, something I've worried about since I was a kid and 2 Live Crew was the hot thing.
TheFooder
14d ago
avoided wading into previous ... discussions of the conflict, which have shocked me with their low quality, contentiousness, and total lack of intellectual charity.
Pretty much every time, not just here. I haven't seen any place anywhere that isn't completely on-sides, as it were. Same for Israel/Palestine. You will never see my opinion printed on the Interwebz. All cost, no profit.
TheFooder
14d ago
No street-shitting for me
God bless you sir!
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! It seems to mostly fit my priors.
TheFooder
14d ago
Like everything Kulak posts, his description of the film and its significance is bombastically overstated, emotionally overwrought, but with a kernel of truth.
agree. I find it over-the-top, but I'm still kind of glad it exists. I've lost the plasticity-of-mind to "go there" anymore.
TheFooder
14d ago
I was hoping to get your feedback @mrvanillasky as I was aware you live in India and have criticisms thereof.
The movie... exists as agit prop Most of the world is completely aware of how bad, dirty, scammy the subcontinent is. The movie is not that deep, kulak just read too much into it since he's aware of India and Jayant Bhandari.
My sense, and I think something Kulak tries to say in his review is that the film is aggressively agit-prop, the AI prompt-maker "Thames" is actively trying to make something racist. Yet another reason I will avoid the film. Still...sometimes there's signal in the noise.
The movie exists to facilitate dunking on Hindu far right users
American far-right dunking on Indian far-right? to what end? "We're the true Aryan race!" kind of stuff? I would agree that this would appeal only to 4-chan-types--I can't imagine anyone I know on the Left watching this, let alone even hearing about it. The problem is that as much as everyone wants to put 4-chan in the garbage, it's got lasting power and some of the stuff on there become common knowledge 10 years later. As a "normie" it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
One thing I'm really interested in is the 'big picture.' It's been pretty clear to me since the 90's that American culture and IQ have been dropping like a stone in the Mariana Trench. At 50 I have the perspective to see how much worse things are at a baseline level. Is India just the destination for any human culture that doesn't have perpetual warfare, slavery, famine, etc.? Is there any solution that doesn't require a "Final Solution", i.e. genocide? Do Indians have any sense that the situation can be repaired? I presume a leftist POV would be that education and female empowerment will reduce birth rates and boost the lower caste. The right..I don't know, they seem fine with dehumanizing the low-caste/class and forcibly sterilizing them. One can have empathy but what's the right amount necessary to fix the problem of human devolution?
TheFooder
14d ago
I just read Kulak's review of "India: The Worst Country on Earth" on his Substack, Anarchonomicon. https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/film-review-india-the-worst-country
I had never heard of this film and haven't seen it, but I have read other stuff from Kulak. While there are definitely points I take from his posts, I do not consider myself a confederate and find his takes to be pretty divergent and extreme from my own. His writing is solid enough I don't get bored so I consider him an example of "what a reasonably intelligent far-right person has to say." He might not be far-right, but I think that's how he identifies. I'm certainly no expert, I've read maybe 4 or 5 articles and I seem to remember him from Reddit...maybe? I would be glad to hear other opinions/warning/lauds.
In his review he claims the film is
- true and accurate (from use of primary source online material)
- a perfect piece of right-wing propaganda
- unwatchable by almost everyone (4-chan trolls are the exception) beyond the 16 minute mark
- An important film that forces Jeffersonian "All men are created equal" types to reformulate their world view
Now that I know the film exists, will I watch it? No, I think it's unlikely. I don't really harbor Pollyanna-ish views on India that need to be rewired, but I also don't get into watching death, rape and destruction in my free time. I find it psychically damaging and can admit I prefer ignorance to knowing the true depth of human depravity. The review reminded me a lot of how people would describe "Faces of Death" back when I was a kid--another film I never had any interest in watching and remain largely ignorant of, aside from knowing it's just watching an endless string of people getting horribly killed.
I would like to know if people here are familiar with the film and what their general impressions are. I would also like to discuss some of the following:
-
Is it true? Can a feature-film length series of horrible phone videos give us an accurate view of what India is really like? I have no experience with the country beyond discussions with people who have been there or come from there and some low-level Youtube vids. Is this really the worst country on Earth? If so, what's the deal with the subcontinet? Is this level of degeneration directly tied to IQ? If not what caused India (I think there's some talk that Pakistan and Bangladesh are in the same boat) to be like this? If this is human degeneracy, what keeps a society from degenerating? Are we degenerating? Is India the future for everyone?
-
Is it perfect RW propaganda? Kulak's point is that it is so disturbing it forces Westerners to adopt an "Ohmygod the West is so much better than this I'll defend it with my life," attitude. I would suspect that hardcore universalists and "brotherhood-of-man-types" would find ways of countering the narrative, but I wouldn't be satisfied with, "it's just nasty fascist racists," if the truth content is high. Bad people can have high signal-to-noise ratio content even if I don't like it.
-
Is it really that bad? The horrible deaths and mutilation parts I might be able to stomach, but the accounts of the varieties of rape and abuse had me squirming just in their retelling. The scenes of ecological devastation and anti-sanitation sound almost as bad. Is India truly this decrepit and insane or is it just a white-power-washing of a place I'm meant to develop a revulsion towards so I have the correct opinon of H-1B visas? would watching the film bring me closer to understanding or just turn me into a gibbering racist? Should I go to India and see for myself? People I know who have gone there tell no happy tales so I'm biased toward believing it's as bad as they say.
-
Is it important? Will this film actually pin itself to history? It's hard to claim that "Faces of Death" was an important series of films from any kind of cinematic or virtue position, but it did make an impact and we remember it. Is it possible that even as pure culture-war propaganda, it's message might actually help people, either by protecting themselves when they're in India or forcing the country/global community to force some changes on the culture? Does something like 'India:TWCoE' need to happen to turn the ship? Does the left need far-right propaganda thrown in their faces from time-to-time? Does the West need to understand how terrible things could become if they don't reverse their own degeneracy? Is this an argument for AI control of humanity or will we necessarily revert to the mean where we use warfare, colonialism and slavery to force the best genes to emerge...like, are we simply doomed?
Anyway, these are just some initial thoughts, but it seems like pure, uncut culture war and I thought y'all might have more perspective on this than me.
TheFooder
17d ago
literally no one said "we'd love to deport them, but it's easier to start with Mexicans.
Well, I don't presume it would be easier to throw out Mexicans--I'm saying it's easier to throw out people you gave H1-B visas to as opposed to people you can't find because you don't know who they are or where they went. they aren't merely here legally, but have been granted the esteemed blessing of the state, which can be revoked at any time.
now that the negative sentiment against it is becoming unmanageable, they're looking for ways to still get it under the guise of legal immigration
The US will have immigration always and forever. It's not a switch, it's a dial. The Biden admin, cranked it so far the knob came off. Whether or not H1-B should be expanded, decreased or eliminated is not a conversation of consequence. We're talking sub 100k numbers not multiple millions. The real immigration issue that voters care about --the millions of voters who crossed party lines or got off their asses to vote for Trump--is the open border. Almost no one cares or even thinks about H1-B visas. It was a foolish topic to even bring up--unless, of course, you're trying to muddy the waters and misdirect people's attention.
I think we can squish this into a prediction space. I don't care about H1-B visas but my prediction is "no change" (+/- 10k total approved visas) with 75% confidence. I think I predicted overall deportations somewhere else, but I expect that number (currently around 270k) to grow by no more than 10% by the midterm elections, 85% confidence. I think both H1-B will not change meaningfully, deportations will not grow meaningfully and the conversation will be about a failed discourse around H1-B to obfuscate the failure in securing the border and deporting the mass of migrants from the Biden era. I suppose we can make a bet if you want, or just see how I did in two years. I wouldn't hate to be wrong...
TheFooder
18d ago
I think if one is under 50, one might be forgiven for not realizing the US had been itching to go to war with the Taliban for years prior to 9-11. The minute the second plane hit I knew we were going into Afghanistan. I wasn't a geo-politics genius, I'd simply been paying attention, maybe more than most because I was also in the military during the Clinton years. The Taliban rule prior to 9-11 was a massive improvement from what had been there before but we hated them for all the things we still hate about them now, plus they were destroying world heritage sites! Nothing has really changed except the US is poorer and totally demoralized. We utterly lost the war on terror.
TheFooder
18d ago
Seems like the story needs to include geographic facts about the difference of what was happening in Japan vs. Afghanistan. Aside from being orders of magnitude smaller, Japan also has a highly centralized population and is much much closer to the US. Afghanistan has to be one of the most difficult places to manage in the entire world. I agree with everything else.
TheFooder
18d ago
People just nod and smile about the whole thing, like "of course we spent $2.3 trillion and got nothing for it...It's kind of weird to me that there isn't more outrage about the whole thing.
I've personally been arguing for decades that 9-11 killed the United States and the $2.3 trillion (pretty sure that's a low-ball number, like we blew past that in 2005) was the price we paid for our own funeral. Every disaster after that -- 2008 collapse, various infrastructure disasters caused by natural events, Covid Authoritarianism, drug and homelessness crises, race and culture wars, political intransigence and overall cultural atomization, are downstream effects of the US obliterating its wealth, military and moral clarity on two unwinnable wars that didn't even relate to the initial injury. My outrage kicked off, in steering-wheel-pounding-earnestness, during Colin Powell's testimony to the UN security Council in 2003. It was the moment I knew we were completely screwed. By (NDAA) 2012 I had completely given up on any hope we'd ever revert to sanity.
As for why isn't there more outrage...well, the same reasons as always: people are mostly level-1 NPCs who can't remember (or don't know) history and are distracted by whatever the latest water-cooler-MSNBC/FOX outrage is. NPCs can't connect dots, they consume slop and regurgitate the opinions they've been handed. "We slit our own throat on the altar of 9-11" is not an opinion I see too much in the wild and not at all in mass media spaces.
TheFooder
18d ago
I think what you're pointing at is a great example of the McLuhan "Medium is the Message." In the days of radio and television the medium determined that the message was necessarily centralized and top-down -- information dribbled out to the public. The Internet's 'medium' is decentralized which disrupts and negates the top-down gatekeeeping so it's 'message' is effectively, "here's what everyone else is saying." The thing is, I think we've already moved through that into the next medium, the Balkanized-firing-rings of social media. We get the decentralization and access to information, but included in that are the muddy waters of propaganda and disinfo, devolution to the lowest-common-denominator-cringe-take, and whales pressing their fishy flippers on the scales of truth. The message now is, "don't believe your lying eyes."
TheFooder
18d ago
the "but they're here legally" argument isn't meant to dismiss concerns. It's meant to highlight that the government is limited in it's ability to throw people out and the legal ones are always the easiest. The debate is a distraction. Republicans need to be able to show at the mid-terms that they "threw the bums out that Biden let in." They will dump numbers on us. Those numbers (people kicked out of the US) are already higher than they've ever been and unlikely to increase without a mass mobilization of the ICE, cops, Border Patrol, every sanctuary city and the military. But you know an easy way to juice the numbers? send back the people you actually have some control over and all you have to do is let their visas expire. Boom!
This is a time honored American tradition, the same game from here-to-eternity. People hate H1-B fine--whatever. I sincerely don't care. Just don't be fooled into thinking this is the real discussion. It's a preliminary distraction set to prime voters for the mid-terms.
TheFooder
18d ago
My main point is it's a distraction from the actual immigration issues. I agree there is no reason to expand the program.
The claim there is a shortfall in skilled STEM talent is difficult because STEM is an overly broad category. Initially I dispute the claim -- there seems to me to be an extreme over-production of STEM graduates globally and in the US. Very roughly, 900k new grads for 110k positions. About 200k of those grads are Master's and Doctorates, the rest are under-grad.
the problem I have with the claim comes more from my experience. I think there may actually be a shortfall at the upper echelons of the various tech industries. The number of really good coders, deep algorithmic thinkers, experienced operators, etc. is kind of high. It's really tough to hire great engineers and no one wants the middling ones who fill out the fat belly of the jobs market. The H1-B program, if expanded, will produce more of these huckleberries, but only in proportions we already understand; you'll get a few more geniuses and a lot more chumps.
What I'm curious about is how we get the huckleberries without the H1-B program. We still require a legal path to hiring them and bringing them over. And maybe 99% chumps to 1% huckleberries is tolerable if that 1% initiates the next tech revolution. These types of games scale in ways that are difficult to predict.
I know two families who lost their houses. One is a composer for Disney and the other is an investment banker. It's still a tragedy, and I think of all those Oscars melted to slag...but as Taibbi noted, it's like the inverse of Hurricane Katrina which washed out the lowest wealth citizens of New Orleans.
What I'm wondering about is the effect this will have on insurance companies. I heard--offhandedly--that Allstate had removed fire coverage for the area. Still...I'd guess most people have some kind of fire protection in their insurance portfolio and these are for multi-million dollar buildings.
It's kind of difficult to imagine how this area gets rebuilt too. Will people even want to go back? Also how much of south LA worked in north-west LA? Will unemployment become a big issue? I haven't heard anything from FEMA...maybe that's appropriate?
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