aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
20hr ago
I don't think there's exactly a word for it but I see this phenomenon everywhere on open internet forum forums and social media sites. It really seems like all it takes is a couple posters with views that someone finds intolerable being tolerated that gives the impression to some subset of people as totally captured. The Social justice lot on reddit genuinely convinced themselves that reddit was a right wing echo chamber held up intentionally by the admins because a handful of harshly moderated communities were, for a time, allowed to remain.
I don't think it's cynical, I think people with this perspective are reporting their experience truthfully. But I always come away from posts like this scratching my head. I have read/listened to greater than 80% of every comment that has been posted to a CW thread since the site spin off and before. It's just not the case that neonazis right wing extremists run rampant, it's just not that case that they outnumber liberals. It's not even clear to me that if we held a motte wide vote that Trump would win. The last couple times I've broached the topic here it felt like, although there was plenty of representation of the opposite side, my generally pro-israel position was at least as well received. The jew posters we do have receive strong pushback on their posts even if I, like many, aren't that interesting in relitigating the subjects as endlessly as they are.
If for your own good you can't maintain good mental health in a place that allows nazis to post if they do so under certain conditions then I hope you do what is right for you. But if this is related to a recent crash out drama then I think you're just misreading the room.
aqouta
2d ago
I think you and @ArjinFerman are both wrong about the point. The optimal amount of fraud is not zero is about how as you eliminate fraud and increase social trust you increase the incentive to fraud and the marginal cost of reducing fraud rises asymptotically such that the last little bit of fraud isn't worth the squeeze. The point isn't that you tolerate fraud as in not police it, it's that you police it but you don't turn panopticon to go from 10 cases of fraud across the whole population to zero. You tolerate it in that you accept cases won't be zero, not that you don't do every reasonably cost effective thing you can do to reduce it.
aqouta
3d ago
I thought it was pretty good until it it was very evident the writers decided they didn't want to write an ending. The exact moment(spoilers obviously) was when the Japanese lady suddenly and randomly invited the vampires in. At the exact moment it just became stupid. Up until that point the character were interesting and they managed to avoid it being overly preachy. But then it just became a series of pretty dumb scenes. I will say that it wasn't stupid in the way I worried about after the early reveal of the klan involvement. I didn't even really mind the gratuitous KKK slaughter at the very end because it had already jumped the shark.
aqouta
3d ago
A random person in real life described Sinners glowingly then talked about how it was about how evil white people are. Im disinterested watching it now, I'd rather see Near Dark again.
It really wasn't tbh.
aqouta
4d ago
'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted.
How is this problem solved through democracy?
aqouta
8d ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
I mean we won huge battles in the fight against affirmative action and knocked the woke racial identarians off their game in a lot of areas. It being discussed less fits squarely in the hypothesis that most of us HBD people weren't actually white nationalists but simply what we've been telling you we are, people who prefer race blindness if they're allowed to have it. Yes, white nationalists continue to exist and they will continue to make white nationalist noises, not really sure why that should matter when discussing HBD.
aqouta
8d ago
The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.
People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.
We must be reading totally different threads. Every time the topic comes up it's people defending what you're calling the motte from blank slatists. Not to consensus build, as I'm sure we have people who cynically want to live in the bailey, but it really seems like the modal motte opinion on the topic is that HBD is obviously real is a large part of various outcome gaps and what should be done about it is to stop trying to overturn every inch of society for a racism of the gaps. It's an end to affirmative action, not establishing a racial caste system.
aqouta
9d ago
I dunno dude, the idea of thinking of a wife as like some kind of utility calculation around chore maxxing or whatever seems like the kind of thing that deranges radical feminists. Our society is structured around you picking one person who is closer to you than anyone else, that swears to you a mutual pact of loyalty and confidence. They aren't like your butler who can quit at any moment and you're expected to congratulate them on getting a better offer. We've added some escape clause but the basic idea is still to death do us part. You pick them and then get to turn off the part of your brain worried about mate selection and the two of your focus on the more important things, the two of you against the world. You can't pay and assistant to have undying loyalty through sickness and in health. Maybe Bezos isn't getting that from his wife, I wouldn't know, but I'm providing that to one person and she's providing it to me.
My wife is a psychiatrist at a public hospital that deals with some of Chicago's sickest and poorest mental cases. I get a pretty good cross section of the stories. It's just not really the case that the kind of politics she's dealing with from her patients are mondain red vs blue tribe stuff. The craziest red tribe anti-vax position you can imagine would not phase her and would sound strange in its groundedness compared to the actual involuntary cases she deals with, which are almost always about refusal to take medication that stops them from like painting the walls with their feces. Psychiatrists are certainly like 400% more lgbt than the general population but they just aren't taking the politics of their patients seriously enough for discrimination to really be a thing, they're fighting tooth and nail just to get the feces smeerers to take their meds.
aqouta
13d ago
This is perhaps analogous in some ways to AGPs and transwomen more generally who are bullied or ostracized for femininity and come to believe that they really are a sissy loser who can't be a man and might as well embrace the only gendered path that seems possible for them.
I don't think this is actually the correct reading of AGPs. Is there actually any reason to think that AGPs are more feminine than baseline?
aqouta
13d ago
I like this model for some things but I actually think bimbofication is a different pathway. The appeal is silencing neuroticism. It's ignorance is bliss and fetishizing not just a lack but a total incapacity for responsibility. Same reason a lot of this stuff is involuntary. Lots of people feel responsibility as an unbearable burden. But maybe you're wrapping all that into the sub role.
aqouta
13d ago
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
There's two sides to this tango, they've not been proven right, but neither have they been proven wrong. The pathway between genes and outcomes is very complicated. It would have been nice if there ended up being some really simple way to map everything out but we can't even do that for height, let alone something as difficult to nail down as intelligence. The question is nurture vs nature and the twin studies convincingly argue that nature is a very large share. Scott convincingly points out that educational attainment may itself have some problems as a proxy for intelligence.
aqouta
20d ago
You can say you dislike territoriality as a national interest but it's not without reason. I think you're confusing arbitrary with contingent. Borders could have been different if circumstances had gone differently but they were reasoned and fought for with blood and statecraft for various very real purposes.
They're neither arbitrary in that they were set up for no reason nor arbitrary in that they make no difference. It's like if you insulted some guy and he punched you in the gut, you wouldn't call his actions arbitrary even if the response could have been a wide variety of actions. He had reason enough and it certainly matters to your gut that he decided on punching rather than harsh words.
aqouta
22d ago
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead, while the majority of voters today (myself included) weren't alive or were far too young to vote for your compromise. Your imagined voter who supported amnesty in the 80s knowing that we'd be in the situation we are today as part of some dastardly bad-faith plan to bring in more illegal immigrants is nonexistent.
If the offer is the same offer that empirically failed to hold 40 years ago offered by the party that has been continuously failing to uphold it this whole time then offering it unamended is bad faith or the people offering it are either stupid or think the people they're offering it to are stupid. I actually do think that an amnesty with safeguards to ensure enforcement is our only real option. But the deal is effectively the amnesty side gets amnesty and the immigration hawks get nothing they weren't already entitled to from the previous agreement. You need to pass like an amendment level of tying future governments to the mast to credibly offer this solution.
aqouta
22d ago
The boomers didn't just shaft the whole next generations coming up, they implemented tons of policies meant to rebalance the racial makeup of the party. Because they weren't going to give up their positions the only way for this to work out is to aggressively discriminate against white up and comers. So they mercilessly culled them and made it clear that they wanted the next generation of the democratic party to be anything but straight white men.
aqouta
23d ago
I think the major difference is people who have monosexual friend groups vs mixed friend groups. If all your friends are nerdy guys you're probably not going to the kinds of parties where there are lots of single ladies to hook up with and you're relegated mostly to cold opens. People have been making less friends now than ever before so it's pretty common to not have one member of the opposite sex that you see regularly and platonically, and if you meet your friends through mostly male hobbies then, lets just say monosexual friend groups aren't rare.
aqouta
24d ago
I'd never fault someone for behaving rationally in the imperfect system. I just found it funny that you cheered on rent control then listed like the most central downsides. I see the cheering was sarcastic.
aqouta
24d ago
We live in a 600sqft 1+1 apartment. It's pretty affordable at this point (thanks rent control)
It's kind of funny how you thank rent control and then describe all the predictable downstream consequences of rent control like high market rate rents and difficulty in relocating. There are grandparents with an empty nest facing the exact reverse scenario an rent control prevents this from being remedied.
aqouta
24d ago
Just asking questions is when someone is pretending to just be interested in a topic asks pointed questions designed to poke holes in some narrative, central example being a holocaust denier trying to make the holocaust seem implausible by "just asking questions" about how many train cars could plausibly carry how many ect ect.
I'd say there are two major distinctions.
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I just don't really think aella is a pedophile. She's not pretending to be interested in how people answer these questions. These are classic examples of "what's worse and why" questions. If someone really wanted to JAQ pedophilia I don't think they'd start with "is one instance of it better or worse than torture murdering grandma?"
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Hypotheticals aren't really the same structure as JAQing off. JAQ offs don't really give you open ended questions. They have a narrative that they want to drive down without variance. They aren't interested in your moral reasoning, they want to use pointed questions to force your to answer one way or the other. They're doing a kind of dishonest persuasion rather than trying to find understanding.
aqouta
24d ago
Do you not understand that this is just like fourth wall breaking and pointless? The person asking you is just going to come back with some added contrivance to make this "actually I start a rebellion" dodge impossible because whether you're clever or heroic enough to overcome the scenario isn't what anyone cares about in this sort of conversation.
They're trying to see how other people think about certain value trade offs, would you do something horrible and disgusting to save a life? Does it matter if it's an elderly life you're saving? If your answer is no then that's a fine answer and you can justify it. Whether you'd then go and try to overthrow the society that put you in that situation is just not very interesting. Yes, very good, everyone agrees it'd be horrible to be put in that situation. Because we all agree with that you elaborating on just how angry you are at this imaginary entity forcing the least bad option is just kind of boring, especially if you're doing it to dodge that actual question.
aqouta
26d ago
I don't really get what the problem here is. The effort required is basically just to actually put together the currently publicly available information and describe why people would be interested in discussing it. It's the kind of thing a college bound high schooler should be expected to be able to do in 20 minutes. And for this effort bar we filter out a lot of fluff. The cost is that we will have to wait 20 minutes for someone to do this before we have a discussion about breaking news, but we're not aiming to be a breaking news platform so this is a very low cost.
It aids discussion a lot to have a rough draft of the facts that can then be directly disputed, it channels discussion in a less free form way.
aqouta
26d ago
If you and someone else believe different things then this is the process of finding out where the underlying disagreement is. Seems pretty reasonable, if you're confident in your beliefs you should be able to object to the part of the hypothetical that is wrong. This is a perfectly fair way to investigate someone's beliefs.
aqouta
27d ago
A lot of words are abused in modern discourse but "arbitrary" is certainly one of the most abused words. Citizenship and borders are not arbitrary. They could be otherwise of course, but that isn't what arbitrary means. The modern world order would fall apart if we did away with borders and citizenships, one can imagine a different world order but we don't live under that world order.
Right, I assumed it was the resent Turok ban that set this off, but it just also isn't the case that rightoid posting like Alex did wouldn't cop a ban. Like we see this from both directions, go to a place where a right winger is banned and you see basically symmetrical complains. There's this soccer dynamic where no matter the cause people from the offending team rush in to argue with the ref while the rest of the field ignores the interaction and every fan goes home assuming the refs were against them. Like are they seriously of the opinion that right wingers don't cop bans on this site?
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