daguerrean
3d ago
Weirdly I essentially never encounter even the most mildly political comments at work. I work in tech, mostly with asians, and for the most part they seem apolitical. Occasionally there will be a tentative “topical” Trump joke, but I don’t sense any seething anger behind it. Generally asians seem to value seeming composed and professional. I encounter political comments most from white boomers I know through my hobby. The typical tech companies I’ve worked at seem to be good at upholding an unspoken “no politics” norm, even based in SF with a 90% anti-Trump workforce. I haven’t socialized with a person under 40 outside of work in many years though
daguerrean
3d ago
The issue here is that they know they should bet based on the 2/3 odds, they just think that the concept of "probability" they have in their heads is some ineffable philosophical concept that goes beyond measuring odds.
I'm surely outing myself as a mathlet here, but perhaps you have the energy to explain where I err. I fully accept that if you are forced to put 10 dollars on a bet as to whether the coin was heads or tails every time you are awakened, then betting tails every time is the best strategy, in that it will pay out the most in the long-run.
Where I draw issue is equating this with "belief". If this experiment was going to be run on me right now, I would precommit to the tails-every-time betting strategy, but I would know the coin has 50-50 odds, and waking would not change that. To me, it seems the optimal betting strategy is separate from belief. Because in deciding it is the correct move to bet tails every time, I don't sincerely believe the coin will come up tails every time, I've merely decided this is the best betting strategy. I see no real connection between betting strategy and genuine belief.
Now where it is odd to me is that if you repeated the experiment on me 100 times, where 50 runs would be heads and 50 runs would be tails, then asked me while I was awoken what the odds I truly believe are, I would have no problem saying I think there is a 2/3 chance that I am in a tails experiment vs in a heads experiment. Why should one single experiment feel different and change that? I'm not entirely sure.
daguerrean
4d ago
I tested it on the one subject I know best and it is worthless. Sentences are occasionally completely randomly inserted nonsequiturs and there is outright fabricated information that is known to AI to be false (I’m not talking about obscure facts, like if I asked ChatGpt now “Is X true” it would know the correct answer). This may improve in the future, but right now this is awful and completely useless.
daguerrean
4d ago
Can you explain what youtube comments should look like? As you yourself noted, your comment was basically just a giant “me too man” parallel venting, following the OP, but what’s wrong with that? You commiserated with him and expanded upon it with your own thoughts. To me it seemed a fine comment, and if you and @somethingsomething had this exchange in person it would seem to me you two were having a good conversation. Perhaps I’m outing myself as an NPC or socially inept but this all seems fine and normal
daguerrean
6d ago
I don’t understand the complaint here. Unranking him for ethical violations is a normal thing sports have done for a long time. Pete Rose was one of the greatest baseball players ever and permanently* banned from the Hall of Fame in the 80s for betting on games. Whether you agree or disagree, I think the idea of having ethical standards in competitions that aren’t directly related to cheating is nothing new.
The bit in the article about the Twitch streamer is ridiculous to me. She is a form of prostitute and was kissed by one of her simps. This in turn did nothing but boost her career. I promise she is overjoyed by this and maybe even arranged it herself, she isn’t some vestal virgin.
daguerrean
8d ago
I tend to think that this is more or less inevitable, and Ezra Klein and feminists have essentially no responsibility for this. Even if there were no feminists and we were living in a tradwife paradise, the problem is that what a real relationship offers is pretty-well static. The woman available to the average man is a 5/10 and while gyms, plastic surgery and cosmetics have perhaps improved the sex-appeal of a 5/10 somewhat over the past hundred years, there is only so much you can do. Meanwhile technology is pushing the pleasure of porn to ever-greater heights. At some point in the future (if we aren't there already) AI VR porn, fleshlights and sex bots will so-surpass the thrill of real sex so dramatically it will be hard to deny. Even the most attractive woman on earth doesn't come with a literal motor in her pussy.
Everyone surely has some tipping point where the appeal of tech-assisted masturbation outweighs the appeal of real-life sex and any attendant social status. For men that are more anxious, have access solely to less attractive women or are more socially isolated and less affected by shaming their intersection point will come earlier. In a sense these men are just the canaries in the coal-mine, but as long as the technology continues to improve, it will come for all of us one day.
I think this is a real social problem beyond just porn and sex, tech-assisted super-stimuli generally. As I said, the offerings of real life relationships and activities are mostly static while the offerings of virtual ones are growing daily. Real life friendships vs AI chatbots/twitch streamers, video game achievements vs career achievements, pets (both virtual and real) vs children.
daguerrean
9d ago
I am a centrist and while Jan 6 didn’t bother me, this would. I interpret Jan 6 as mere bluster that nobody (including his supporters) took seriously. If he actually became president for a third term this would cause me to admit that the left was actually correct about the seriousness of Trump’s antidemocratic tendencies.
daguerrean
9d ago
Trump is too old for this to be serious. I don’t understand what sort of play Bannon is making, maybe just trying to get himself back in the news if nothing else.
daguerrean
9d ago
I used to watch Live PD religiously until they canceled it (my mother cried on hearing the news). I was always a bit afraid to watch the reboot, I assume they had to have made it more palatable to the BLM crowd (more black women commentators? Less showing the dregs of society at their worst? More police helping old ladies cross the street?). Is it noticeably worse than it used to be or pretty much the same?
daguerrean
9d ago
Knowing nothing about chess and nothing about the characters involved, I'm going to say that if this guy killed himself because of cheating accusations then he was probably cheating. Of course, reading this post I'm not actually sure if the cheating accusations had anything to do with his death.
daguerrean
11d ago
Nigga, this is just going through the exact motions Amadan outlined. I get it, libtards started it by employing legions of late night comedians and entertainers to metaphorically pour shit on Republicans for years except (duplicitous as always) they his behind a veneer of civility while their Hollywood Jews did the dirty work for them. Trump isn’t doing anything fundamentally different, he’s just more crass and if anything the crassness and directness of it is a virtue, there’s an honesty to the directness of it.
My point as always is that there is value to norms. Even if the norms seem paper thin or hypocritical I believe they are better than nothing. There are just proper ways a president should behave. I believe there is serious value in having a degree of ritual and civic religion. It is always possible to construct a plausible sounding reason why your enemies really started it, your enemies are actually so much worse than this, blah blah blah. It has to stop somewhere else escalation begets escalation. I know everyone will tell me this isn’t an escalation because libtards have already done a million worse things, but that’s exactly how escalation works and can always be justified
daguerrean
11d ago
any discussion that veers in the direction of "What happens when the other side does this?" will get a hundred stories about how the other side is worse anyway, the other side has been defecting forever
Yep, this basically sums up discussion of this on TheMotte. It saddens me but this is just one of those things where people are just so solidified in their opinion there is really no new argument or event that could change it.
daguerrean
11d ago
As I said during the whole Charlie Kirk thing. Trump revels in deliberately antagonizing liberals. This is bad. This erodes norms which leads to things like Reddit openly celebrating murder. And it will get worse before it gets better. We still haven’t seen a Democrat President really use this same style even though a large portion of their base has come to embrace it. This is really the worst aspect of Trump imo
a requirement that CCW permitees get explicit and specific permission from any private property owner before carrying on their property
Obviously, I'm not a gun guy but this seems eminently reasonable to me, is this particularly onerous? Does it allow for a business to put up a sign saying "guns welcome" that serves as a blanket permission? Just speaking for myself, I would be outraged if someone carried a gun into my house without notifying me, like if I saw that my plumber was carrying a gun I would be angered by this and would definitely favor a law of this sort.
Edit: I'm not speaking to the constitutional legality of any of this, just my own preferences
daguerrean
14d ago
This is really an analogous ‘gotcha’ to saying “woke people think society is white supremacist and has too many white people in positions of power, therefore any woke person that doesn’t resign their job so a POC can have it is a hypocrite.” Even among the anti-woke crowd this argument has always been considered poor because even granting its truth, so what? So you have established their inconsistent behavior, you haven’t disproven the claim that society is white supremacist. This is essentially a version of the classic meme “yet you participate in society”
daguerrean
15d ago
If rule of law is so masculine, why do men keep breaking it while women follow the rules all around the world?
It’s like that line from True Detective, the world needs bad men to keep the other bad men away from the door.
You know I don't think people are being fair to you. I can only address this by speaking to my own experiences.
I remember being there in 2007 or so, forming swastikas in Club Penguin with the other anons. Obviously at the time this was pure shock value and didn't indicate any serious ideological commitment. Now we may argue about exactly how serious /pol/ is today, but it's hard to deny that it is a lot more serious about Nazism than we were as teenagers in 2007 harassing kids in Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin.
But what about me? Am I meaningfully more Nazi now than I was in 2007? Did those formative years on 4chan have any lasting influence on my politics? It's hard to say, of course from my own perspective our jokes in 2007 had nothing to do with it. My beliefs seem to me to be merely a logical progression based on what I've learned and experienced over the past 18 years. But either way I've somehow ended up reading SecureSignals posts thinking to myself "Hey this guy may have a point" and to some degree embracing beliefs that would be described by some as white nationalist.
Perhaps this is just another manifestation of the fully generalizable Toaster Fucker Problem. 30 years ago I may have done my fair share of "noticing" but dismissed it without a community of noted race scientists like the Motte to further radicalize me. It seems obvious to me that while "haha just joking" extremism doesn't literally mean the jokers hold those specific beliefs in earnest, it does meaningfully shift the Overton Window and creates a space where serious discussion of previously taboo beliefs can blend with the jokes. If you believe that White Nationalism and Antisemitism are very evil then it is reasonable IMO to be concerned about these jokes and want to stamp them out.
Basically I don't think most of the people engaging in these jokes are seriously Nazis but I do think it creates a space for those ideas to spread and does probably contribute to the popularity of taboo far right beliefs if not outright Nazism. To be clear I think the Left has their own version of this same problem, in fact, to a much more advanced and concerning degree.
daguerrean
17d ago
This is libertarian nonsense. Words have meaning, and declaring Penguin Day is not violence. This is akin to redefining White Supremacy to include punctuality. Just because anyone with sufficient intellect can play 7 degrees of [violence/White supremacy/Kevin Bacon] doesn’t make it so.
This is very similar in form to the “everything is political” crowd. Often on reddit, if someone complains about politics in X, some oh-so-smart objector will point out that everything is political, even a painting of a flower is political (perhaps it is conservative because it upholds traditional notions of beauty or the status quo or is silent on leftist social issues, perhaps it is environmentalist because it presents nature as beautiful). And in some abstract sense I accept that a clever person can extract a political meaning from any text/object/artwork by sufficient mental gymnastics. But all this really does is deprive us of a word. If we are to say that everything is political, then what word do we have to distinguish between a straight up campaign ad for Trump and a painting of a flower. Even if sufficient efforts can divine a political meaning in both there is surely some real meaningful difference in the strength, obviousness, legibility or centrality of that political message, and we could use a word to express that.
Similarly here there is surely a useful difference in violence between punching a guy in the face and Penguin Day that is useful to talk about, and twisting the word violence into contortions just replaces a useful definition of the word with a useless definition of the word. This is only popular with Libertarians because they are the only people for whom the new definition is useful. They want to import the bad scary evilconnotation of violence to new territory by a bit of trickery. They think if they can redefine scary bad feeling word to encompass any government action no matter how benign it will trick people into applying this old emotional association (scary, bad, evil) onto the new definition (any govt action). Woke people redefining White Supremacy are trying the exact same trick
In general a good rule of thumb is this: if someone appears to be using a very nonstandard definition of a word they are almost certainly trying to manipulate you dishonestly.
I reflected a bit on this. Generally among conservatives and here on The Motte there are two types of responses, both I dislike.
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“The left started this with Charlie Kirk/Jay Jones so this is fine.” All I can say is that this way lies ruin. Where does endless escalation lead and tit for tat reprisals? Are we expecting some kind of come-to-Jesus mutual disarmament moment or just escalation until Civil War? If we are hoping for mutual disarmament, how does that happen? Why can’t this be that? Doesn’t someone have to move first?
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“This is different from Charlie Kirk/Jay Jones, that was not okay but this is because reasons.” Here my reaction is to say that you never step in the same river twice. Even though I share the intuition that this is a nothingburger while Kirk was a big deal I have to recognize it is always possible to conjure self-serving reasons why “this time it’s different.” I think peace requires you to put aside the different river instinct and recognize it is similar enough
Amelia Earhart is a very good suggestion. I think my criteria would be pre-1950, not a DEI exaggeration of her accomplishments, non-political, not the wife of a more famous man as that’s a bit demeaning. Earhart has a nice feminist aspect, with bravery and technical competence. I would nominate these:
Laura Ingalls Wilder as kind of a stand-in for the bravery and hard work of women on the frontier, as well as their literary contributions.
Lilian Gish representing women in entertainment/Hollywood. Though maybe her involvement in Birth of a Nation disqualifies her. However, importantly Gish was gorgeous, and would make for beautiful money.
Emily Dickinson representing women’s contribution to literature, especially poetry.
Maybe Grandma Moses?
My issue is all of these feel sort of DEI. Why Earhart and not Lindbergh? Why Dickinson and not Whitman? Why Gish and not Chaplin? I guess Wilder would be my top choice followed by Gish, but more as emblematic of women on the frontier than her specifically.
daguerrean
18d ago
Yea, anyone that has been on 4chan or Discord knows that young conservatives are most likely full Deus Vult if they are engaged enough to care about politics, and this stuff is truthfully pretty run of the mill.
That said, this is bad, I have no problem saying this is bad. However, I think it is a sort of LARPing for 99.9% of these people, the same way Eat the Rich/Punch a Nazi is LARPing for the majority. But in the Kirk discussions we already hashed out the reasons this is bad. I think there is a crisis of earnestness, people are absolutely allergic to being serious which creates this sort of “Haha just joking….unless?” aspect which rightly scares people. In part I blame Trump for the degradation of seriousness as a virtue in American politics, but perhaps he was more a effect than a cause.
Now a bit regarding Nazism specifically. The left has so abused the term Nazi/fascist, similar to abuse of Antisemite or Communist/Socialist, that at some point you can’t be surprised when people start to think Nazism isn’t so bad, and start to wear the badge in defiance. In a weird way it becomes analogous to blacks reclaiming the word “nigger”
daguerrean
18d ago
Just as a sanity check let’s run the same test cases against wokeness. By my count these apply.
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Rejection of modernism. Obviously wokeness favors alternative “ways of knowing” and rejects objectivity, rationality and the scientific method as white supremacy.
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Cult of action. The motto “Punch a nazi” is certainly proudly anti-intellectual, elevating the propaganda of the deed/direct action above any intellectual debate.
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Disagreement is treason. This is too easy, wokeness considers silence as violence and obviously disagreement is violence.
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Obsession with a plot. White supremacy is behind everything. Bad test scores? White supremacy. Crime statistics? White supremacy. Every institution is full to the brim with hidden, covert racists.
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Enemies simultaneously too strong and too weak. Trump is simultaneously a fascist dictator but also a bumbling, senile buffoon.
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Newspeak. Control and redefinition of language is one of wokeness’ defining traits.
The selective populism and appeal to the middle class are basically free squares that can be applied to any ideology
daguerrean
19d ago
Not to be rude, but this feels like an unusually weak post for Scott. Those celebrating Kirk’s murder would obviously disagree with his third premise, “Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time).” In fact I’m having trouble imagining someone that would agree with his first premise, that most Americans are fascists, without believing political violence was acceptable. This post seems aimed at a constituency that I’m not sure exists, those that believe fascists are everywhere but are opposed to any political violence.
daguerrean
20d ago
I think most the responses here are taking “Current Thing” to mean something like “biggest issue”, but I disagree. To me the Current Thing is what normie women put in their instagram bio. Palestine, Ukraine, BLM, those were current things. The AI bubble deflating will simply never be the current thing no matter how earthshattering it is
3/10. Hideous is strong but unattractive is appropriate.
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