jake
5mo ago
Your constant righty-blackpilling is the reasoning equivalent of always betting on black. The accuracy of your predictions are a coincidence of a feeling applied categorically, not the result of an astute perspective of the world. You hinder yourself in this habit.
The "normiecon boomers" who are still awake right now to talk in friendly confines are wondering when the shooting's going to start. They've been wondering this for months, with their little polite hedging of "It's a matter of time before someone shoots one of these judges/bureaucrats/politicians."
Trump has no support left to lose he didn't already lose 3 years ago. This doesn't move the meter left, it moves it precipitously right.
jake
5mo ago
Farming karma has gotta be a mix of things. I hate powerusers and would pretty aggressively ban them so I never bothered to talk with them to figure out their motivations, I'm sure it's a combination of things, any, all. Seeing the number go up, seeing all the notifications from comments on a post, seeing it on the front page of /r/All, especially #1. "Being the best" (at reddit, lol, lmao). Po-mo attention seeking, at any rate.
I never cared about the karma game enough to know the tricks. I know that >150 upvotes on a new post in around 15 minutes would usually be enough to get a post on the front page of a sub in old reddit. I don't know what it takes to get an obscure sub's posts to wide visibility. I don't see a reason it couldn't be several people swapping accounts, though the botting there seems easier since presumably it'd take 1-2 people.
TD figured out, or else perfected the technique, that stickying a post would significantly boost its visibility so they constantly rotated stickies. They were absolutely gaming the system, but I think the above is how. The admins worked against them of course, with the infamous example of them screwing up and making like 25/25 /r/All being TD, and later when people figured out via reddit advertising how TD had an audience comparable to /r/politics despite an ostensible order of magnitude fewer subscribers. I don't remember the sequence, but that general time period was when /r/politics had its big changeover in mods, paid actors among them.
jake
5mo ago
A tad late to this but can give info as a former reddit powerjanny (I figure Zorba knows who I am, or will with this mention)
Mods of even the largest subs are given no tools to identify bad users. We were never told by admins when a brigade was happening, we had no method of specifically detecting brigades, we had bots that would ping if a thread was linked and we would sometimes get warnings from other mods, but that's it. My default when I see a locked thread with mods complaining about brigading is the thread was just especially provocative.
Spam is the majority of bad user activity on reddit. If it's a picture of the sort of shit you'd find in a gift shop--like shirts and mugs--in almost every instance it was a spammer. A second account would comment asking "Where can I get this?" and then either OP or a third account would reply with a link. Then there's the submission and comment reposting mentioned here, very common, and accounts we'd label auction accounts. Those accounts followed a pattern so clear you could look at the first page of their profile and know, not that this was hard. It'd be like 2-3 submissions, 2-3 comments made in the last few days from a >6 month old account. These were different than the word-for-word repost bots, as repost bots only very rarely messaged modmail while the latter would frequently message with invariably broken English of such content as "Why ban" or "And why is ban??" (That why.)
There is also the paid political activity on reddit. Some are mods, most don't need to be paid, they happily follow party line. It's easy to look at political subs, especially the new ones that have started popping up this year and will continue to pop up ahead of the election, and see the same usernames in the mod lists, and other usernames posting links to those subs and other political subs, all pushing narrative. I'd imagine if you opened politics right now it wouldn't take long to find a year-old account with more than a million post karma that constantly posts articles hating on the right, that person is paid for what they do. And, yknow, don't forget Ghislaine Maxwell. As to those random subs popping, the paid users either start new ones or take over dead ones, then upvote bot submissions in their critical windows so they're pushed to wider visibility and actual users start upvoting.
As for LSC, I'd imagine most specifically bad use there is spammers and powerusers farming karma, with a minority of the paid users who will post whatever boo Trump or boo Righties article to every possibly relevant sub.
I'd be happy to answer or try to answer other questions. I started before Trump arrived and the site lost its mind, I thought it'd be interesting, it was, it quickly turned terrible. I stayed day-to-day to ban spammers, I stayed long-term to enforce no politics and keep frothing ideologues off the mod list.
jake
6mo ago
Probably generally fair but as Fred Brooks wrote the Mythical Man-Month in 1975 it seems appropriate in talking about overstaffing issues in software projects nearly 50 years later.
jake
6mo ago
The loss in quality in video games must also be mentioned. I don't know enough about the field to understand how improving technology has changed it; I assume as engines and graphics continue to improve, the demands for their effective functioning also rise, so studios, to a point, need to hire more people than teams of the past. At the same time the lovely little LOZ-riff indie title Tunic was mostly done by 1 guy, and while to modern standards for graphics and length it's unremarkable I do think its brilliance, and of course the other 1-guy masterclass of Stardew Valley reveal the core problem in the gaming industry: too many people.
Halo 3 to the day is one of the most technically impressive games ever made and compared with modern studios it was a skeleton crew of some dozens of staff. The campaign, though quite brief compared to CE and 2, is memorable, has excellent setpieces, and still holds up (just played through it again.) After the campaign, their attention was not spared when it came to the multiplayer. First was a robust replay system, it wasn't the first replay system, but it was fantastically done, I filled my 360 hard drive with noscope clips I was able to pull via downloading the replay at the end of a match, then cutting the segment from the replayed game, often recording at additional angles for pierce-through-multikills or sniper ricochet shots. Then there was the excellent map editor, allowing significant customization of what weapons and vehicles spawned on maps, where players spawned on maps, and the gameplay rules for those maps. Where Zombies had been a popular custom game mode in Halo 2, they gave it full support in the Halo 3 mode of infection and variants of maps designed to have fortified positions from which to mow down the endlessly-respawning zed team. The real meat of these were basically gone at the launch of Halo 4 despite it also being on the 360 and "despite" them having significantly more employees. Again I don't know the field, but I know enough to know about Brook's Law. What are all those extra hires really doing?
Overproduction of managers/elite is a known thing, I'm sure someone else has made the observation of this really seeming to be a problem in everything, overproduction of ostensibly qualified workers for every sector. Video games went from very niche to an industry where single companies could make a billion dollars per month, it's no wonder so many people started graduating after an education pipeline meant to get them in the industry, in whatever specialty. People who didn't really want to work on video games, but think it's something they could do because they like video games, or people who didn't think much of their options. A lot of them being "writers" who would prefer to be authors or working in Hollywood, but while they don't have the chops to do any of that, they have a degree and they know someone in the industry or especially they fill the right checkboxes, and they're hired in and their incompetence makes it into the game, either in the writing or downstream of their slow and low-quality asset/programmatic work on the game.
All that said, my GOAT stack is the probably-normiecore of Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and Red Dead 2. It's a good time to be playing games, industry struggles ignored.
tl;dr: IMVHO, because of the size of the industry, too many people resort into working in video games rather than the earlier days of the field being mostly obsessive nerds powerfully driven to create
Also, AI is coming for video games just like it's coming for Hollywood. Bug testing and QA may never go away, but in our lives we will soon enough see a wide field of auteurs like Eric Barone and Andrew Shouldice, except they'll be putting out titles on the level of Deus Ex and Halo.
jake
6mo ago
When I saw the second Dr. Strange movie and Benadryl's character was invited or spoke of the coming wedding of his former love interest played by Rachel McAdams I said to myself "He's gonna be black." He was. When I opened Helldivers for the first time and the cinematic played I didn't know the camera was going to shift to the spokesman's family, but if I did I would have correctly guessed his wife would be black. When the only information I had about the Fallout show was a white woman lead I knew she'd have a black love interest (if she wasn't gay). If I see a mom-coded woman in a commercial the expectation most congruent with reality is if there is a person also in the commercial coded as her partner they will not be white, and this is a pattern so frequent my normie Fox News father and even my normie-leftie brother have separately remarked to me about how all the media they consume, primarily sports so mostly advertising, features interracial couples, most commonly white-woman-black-man.
The Western institutional left is abundantly clear about their desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities. It is the most perfect case of denying out of one corner of their mouth and bragging out the other, they will not break stride as they say "It isn't happening, racist. It's great that it's happening." That intent is attempting to be realized in casting for shows and films and advertising. The interracial pairing is not "novel" but remarking on it being a thing that has happened is no response. Nobody's saying this has never happened before, what they're pointing out is the obvious politics behind the sudden preponderance in all media of one of the least common pairings in the real world.
Casting a woman to lead a television adaptation of a media franchise primarily consumed by men is a separate expression of the same thing. They are not attempting to meet the expectations and wants of their audience, they are attempting to be proscriptive, views and profits be damned.
I don't pay attention to admin actions here, I think you all do a good job, I say that because I don't know and I'm not suggesting you only replied because of reports. But if you did--someone downvoting these comments is hitting the user and not the substance. They are here in bad faith; if they report, they report in bad faith. They should be ignored.
But also, someone who reports because they care about this place and they're following the spirit of this place, they would have reported coffee. "I didn't read that but you're wrong" is the antithesis of the Motte. It's a violation so apparent it needs no context, but given context they might also note how his arguments were at best contrived and detached from my essay and at worst asked and answered by my essay. Such a user would have also seen how after my initial harshness I praised him and even agreed with him on certain points. I engaged, he didn't, but he's not here to engage. He saw "On Hip-Hop" and thought it would be a good place to opine, began reading my essay and realized he was profoundly out of depth but rather than the healthy behavior, not responding, he charged ahead to betray his ignorance; to act like he understands subjects he clearly doesn't. I think my essay should be treated as adequate support for my labeling someone in this manner.
As for "pissant": If someone new to this place came in and gave loud and wrong opinions it's possible they could be swayed from their arrogance by a particularly thorough teardown. A user who's been here for years and has over a thousand comments knows better than to respond how he did. It's a bad debt for the spirit of this place when the long-present, loudly wrong but ostensibly properly spoken can escape the criticism they deserve and need. Discourse cannot be good if it refuses to include just rebuke and I'm not talking about a modded "Don't do this."
The person who has succumbed to extreme hatred of jews isn't going to be swayed with even the greatest of otherwise and only tone-neutral arguments. Hard antisemitism is the final deviation from thought norms and it requires strong emotional impetus. They don't believe any experts or evidence against them; they're prepared for those arguments anyway and they have their "experts" and "evidence" to fall back to if their preparation fails. They become walking confirmation bias feedback loops and it's all cemented with hate. BAP's gotta be pretty smart but the rant I linked shows the guy operating multiple sigmas below his actual intellect as he expresses his hate. It makes him dumber, it makes them dumber. You have to engage and give good arguments, absolutely. You must also absolutely target them in the same place their hate dwells, and that means making them feel shame--the shame from recognition of the deep iniquity within themselves.
But for your purposes, I can say I don't anticipate responding to a user like I did to coffee again.
jake
7mo ago
the overriding component for most people is melody, which hip-hop lacks nearly entirely.
I'm not sure what you mean. My impression is you refer to the lack of singing; if someone said they found no melody in Hip-Hop I would think they had either truly never heard a single song from the genre and were describing only what others had told them, or they had some neurological inability to process melodies, or at worst they were being grossly reductive. The three tracks I linked from the genre should resolve that, as should literally any track with rapping unless it's purely verbal. And a lot of Hip-Hop includes singing, those three tracks being immediate examples. Same for harmonies, very present in those songs.
Melody and harmony aside, the idea of a lack of instruments is also curious; there is a lot of synth production involved, but these guys have musicians in the studios playing on their albums. Pharrell has been working with Brent Paschke, a phenomenal guitarist, for over 20 years. On Sooner or Later the last 2 minutes of the song is Paschke just wailing to Pharrell's occasional lyrics.
Maybe your angle is about the lack of bands when the artists perform live. I think this is about a half-fair criticism. Not having the musicians on stage who contributed to the tracks may give a false impression of the product and surely boosts the ego of the rappers, but lead singers of traditional bands are famously egomaniacal. To be "fair" to them, this no doubt has a lot to do with how fans of those bands give the singers most of the love and attention, but that just means if rappers had supporting musicians with them they'd still get all the real adoration.
There's also the idea of being a studio act. I think plenty of rappers would do this if they could, in that they would prefer to not be dependent on the tour, but that's the state of the record industry. Greed reduces royalties to such trivial amounts most bands and artists can only make money by touring. When a dozen musicians are credited on an album that's a hard group to tour with, though if those musicians are getting royalties from airtime they're generally getting royalties from their work being played at those concerts, so at most it's an image thing.
jake
7mo ago
Why are you responding to the volume of reports from the black-and-jew-haters I have correctly identified and criticized in this essay? @coffee_enjoyer, after the jew-hate he doesn't remotely hide in his commenting here, has shown an astonishing lack of knowledge given the arrogance with which he writes; he doesn't know a goddamn thing about Hip-Hop or clearly anything more than some very basic sociology of black culture yet he gets no ding for making this discussion immeasurably worse. Every comment he has on this post is immediately disprovable and he started off with "Too long didn't read lol."
jake
7mo ago
I can see how I came across as saying great music needs lyrics, but to clear that up I know it doesn't. Much as I like Hip-Hop, I listen to electronic more than anything, and of that I'd say half is pure instrumental. So if there's any bit of objectivity in music it's that music doesn't need lyrics to be good. The point I was working from is the idea of calling any music bad. Calling it bad invokes a standard, for lyrics and production.
jake
7mo ago
If it's a matter of a deep attribution of the pioneering of sound then we just fall back to Tomorrow Never Knows and A Day in the Life and Come Together and everything since 1966 is just riffing on the Beatles. Except, what about their inspirations? At what point are we just falling back to the guys who invented the piano, the guitar, the violin?
I didn't say Kanye invented it, I said "figured out," as in he figured out how to bring those techniques together in a way nobody had before him, or at least nobody since Lennon-McCartney. This is a fact, it's why everybody knows who Kanye is and the recognition falls precipitously for every artist you've named. Kanye knows them, surely loves their work, but the relationship is this: Kanye heard elements in songs he enjoyed, he put those elements in his music, and he experienced incomparably greater success than those who inspired him because he did it better than any of them. Kanye's peers and especially the young musically aspirant, heard what Kanye did and they wanted to do it too.
But you don't have to take my word for it, you can just look up all the artists who've named Kanye as their inspiration.
jake
7mo ago
Kanye's sampling and genre-bending. Acts were doing these in pieces, ATCQ, De La Soul, J Dilla (Ye fav) and Outkast among them. Kanye brought everything together, he was the fusion point. College Dropout showed the sampling all across the album, Jesus Walks as the notable genre bend with Southern Gospel. Late Registration with the incorporation of a full orchestra. Graduation with its use of electronic. Daft Punk-sampling Stronger was a huge hit, but Flashing Lights is also very good and prominently features electronic and it also had several violinists play on the production. And 808s is the reason most people, directly or by-effect, know what autotune is. It's trite now, it didn't start trite.
I can't help but feel that this perspective is, for lack of a better word, basic. Who cares about arena acts?
It wasn't an appeal to popularity. For artists in most genres, when they achieve the level of success where they can do arena shows, they lock-in, their sound at that point is their sound from then-on. Multiple Hip-Hop artists have reached that level but have continued to deeply experiment as they search for new and better sound. It would be a mind-blowing difference to go from a Kanye Graduation concert to one of the concerts Kanye put on for Donda. Elsewhere, unless Taylor Swift takes a hard genre pivot into more experimental work, I doubt there will be a meaningful difference between a 1989 concert and whatever her album concert is in 2027. It's that drive and willingness to change in pursuit of greatness I find so admirable, it's part of why I love Twenty One Pilots. Through Scaled & Icy every TOP album has been a different dominant genre. There is a core sound, but take a dozen of their songs at random and there's a pretty good chance you'll find those songs belong to a dozen different genres. Hip-Hop most definitely included.
jake
7mo ago
Who in this coomer era jacks off to images of any celebrity but teen boys who somehow can't access internet porn? Sure, I'd imagine not many guys jack off to Beyoncé, I'd imagine not many jack it to Sydney Sweeney either relative to the eyes on endless free porn. Also it's not top 1%, it's top <.0001%, and here you may find a useful rule: most of the women in that top .0001% have remarkably few Instagram followers.
Furthermore, there's a key difference between The Gallic Wars and US gang violence: sovereignty.
Ah man, if Caesar looked at the United States, he would be most confused by the "sovereign" and least confused by the gangs. Gangs occupy the exact social niche once filled by the warlord and his brigands; modern organized and disorganized gang crime is just modernized brigandage. It's actually a perfect example, we think there's something strange or novel about this crime, the tolerance of it is, but its existence runs deep in our history. Caesar would instantly recognize the phenomenon and understand exactly the gang's cause and purpose. Caesar would also get the incredible things Bukele has achieved, though he would wonder why Bukele didn't just kill every Salvadoran with MS-13 tattoos.
I don't attribute honor or anything else admirable to the gang, but I also wouldn't to raider bands of Vikings. Nevertheless I understand why these groups exist and existed. Violence is our history, we became "more civilized" but we didn't change. In many ways the peak of civilization, certainly at its time, was the tremendous effort American men spent to incinerate 100,000 Japanese civilians. The bombings were in equal parts absolutely necessary and the least honorable actions ever committed by man. It would have been honorable to march on Honshu and pile their bodies in the millions. Some honor.
What kind of man has his wife wearing a whorish 'outfit' like this, out in public for the world to see?
Clearly a guy who gets to fuck women like that, ie Kanye and never BAP.
jake
7mo ago
I was clear. I don't consider the average Hip-Hop "unenjoyer" racist. I know for a good number of them they haven't listened to good Hip-Hop and they would like it if they did, I know for another good number of them it's just not their taste, like yourself and that is the most fair, I would never criticize anyone for simply not liking a kind of music. I also specifically said I'm not criticizing BAP and those like him for racism itself, I consider his transgression becoming a fool for his racism. Hating Hip-Hop because he hates blacks and jews is fucking stupid.
Saying that contemporary pop owes its style to hiphop may be a bit of an own goal, as I haven't heard a pop song released in the past decade that I would call "good".
If you enjoyed Lady Gaga then I have no doubt there are albums released after ARTPOP you would enjoy. I think you may underestimate and definitely limit yourself, there's a world of wonderful recently-released music. On the other hand you could choose to only listen to stuff released before 2000 and you'd never run dry for incredible music, so maybe I'm being a bit unfair.
jake
7mo ago
Someone who thinks this music is good is as tasteless as a foodie who tells you sugar is the most exquisite because it makes his mouth feel the best . . . The lyrics are only one aspect of music. The BPM and rhythm can also induce in a person a sense of patient thought or a sense of urgency. Rap combines sin with urgency.
It is a bad idea generally but especially in this place to speak confidently while betraying such ignorance on a matter. How do we have discourse on a topic you show you know nothing about?
Your pissant bit of writing was addressed in full in the essay, read it or don't, I wasn't addressing you. I understand your being and I know what's above can't crack your animus. You hate jews and viewing Hip-Hop as a tool of jews--it's been one moneymaking tool of many in the legendarily corrupt profiteering of the jew-dominated record industry, certainly--you hate Hip-Hop.
If you actually understood the problems of today you would laugh at calling Hip-Hop a problem. You bring up the Beach Boys? They were unique in how they were fairly uncontroversial to the conservative establishment of their era but who do you think the hippies were listening to during the Summer of Love? Yeah I think Good Vibrations got bit of airtime. Shit man, seems like their music wasn't particularly edifying after all. But you should know this, you see through the excess of modernity, you're not unimpacted because it impacts us all, but you remain yourself. You are authentic, and my respect for authenticity is a major theme of the essay.
The spirit is sick and there are places the music certainly reflects it; music as symptomatic would be fair so Hip-Hop as symptomatic is obviously fair. The disease is elsewhere, and this is what you surely understand. Like how these problems would still exist if Hip-Hop never emerged because the major points of shift in this country occurred long before Hip-Hop led in just black culture. The great disaster of our age is social medial and veritable epochs in internet time passed between [epoch] Facebook/Twitter, [epoch]Instagram/Twitter, [epoch]the preeminence of smartphones, [epoch] the explosion in Hip-Hop's popularity. Without Hip-Hop's dominance TikTok would still exist and still fill the internet with the shittiest, most cognitively degradative content yet devised and the laziest rap wouldn't be clipped a million times but there'd still be the million clips of the laziest rock and pop and country. Videos would still be plentiful of shitty shows where hundreds of girls dance while being recorded for their instagrams by others and righty commentators would still bemoan the state of the western woman. Even if you weren't wrong about the quality, on this matter you still would only be decrying the trappings rather than the thing itself: a thing that existed before ¥ was even born.
My children will be homeschooled and I will curate their exposure to culture but I will eventually show them everything--given, with my description and guidance on certain subjects rather than graphic depiction---because I will not be able to to guide my children at every moment in their lives, nor should I want to (beyond the father's healthy wish to always be there for his children). They will need to become adults and make good judgments on their own, so if my daughter at any time in her life were at risk in being negatively affected by hearing that music I will have failed as a father. This is something modern fatherhood has failed at and continues to fail at so often, but even recognizing that as an issue I'm still in the trappings. Far closer to the source, but still the trappings.
jake
7mo ago
Just a small thing, Donald Glover was poor growing up. Not quite hard poverty but poor, he had both parents in the home, no gang shit, theatre magnet program in high school and from there New York. What hurt his cred more than anything was 30 Rock and Community, not his upbringing, and he still definitely has more cred than Canadian-child-actor Aubrey Graham.
jake
7mo ago
I'm receptive to the brilliance of Jazz, I just don't know it well enough.
Otherwise I disagree, I think I can be simple, I think if anything I used too much detail.
What constitutes the (non-instrumental) "song"? Lyrics and production. What genre is most represented in interesting lyricism? Hip-Hop. What genre is most represented in brilliant production? Hip-Hop. Do you like Daft Punk? They love Hip-Hop. Do you like Trent Reznor? He loves Hip-Hop. Do you like The Mandalorian theme? That guy got the job because of his work in Hip-Hop. Do you like anything in modern pop? You know where so much of that sound came from? The producers having worked on or been inspired by Hip-Hop. Take it away and music would be immeasurably worse. Of course it's the same for Jazz, since what I do know is Jazz led to Disco led to Hip-Hop and Hip-Hop samples Jazz and completes the circle.
Timeframe also matters here, I'm not comparing Hip-Hop to all music ever made, but since its emergence its impact on music has been uniquely profound.
I know there are people on the right who enjoy Hip-Hop, plenty of them. Kanye was pretty much unpersoned for so typically being ahead of the curve in voicing views he'd probably skate by voicing now, views those sufficiently familiar with Hip-Hop will know range from being the norm among black artists to comparatively tame. That's part of why what BAP wrote came across to me as so laughable, BAP, man, blacks really don't like jews. They just know better than saying it outside of friendly confines, they don't have Kanye's instability, they also don't have his genius.
The King of Hip-Hop released in summer 2021 Donda, what I would argue is not only his best record but one of the greatest ever produced. As-released Donda is 27 tracks running 109 minutes, the last 4 are alternate versions of previous songs on the record so ignoring those it's 87 minutes (if you're going to listen, change it to play Jail pt 2 instead of Jail as track 2). It's a record where the many artists Kanye featured included profanity in their verses, but in final editing the profanity is censored and there is no explicit variant of the album. There is no fucking hoes content and no shooting thugs content, in part because the album's tribute and namesake is Kanye's mother Donda West. Because of her, appropriately its genre is in fact primarily Gospel (And while Heaven and Hell is not progressive Hip-Hop, multiple other tracks show Kanye's continuing prog innovativeness.) Its religious genre is not something read into it by fans, not like Christians once arguing U2 is secretly religious, not Tyler Joseph where he's open about his faith and has spoken of Christian themes in his songwriting. Donda is purposefully Gospel. The most influential musician since Michael Jackson released an album that is arguably his best, and it's Gospel. I said it already, Kanye's a genius.
Music has been subject to repeated moral panics. There are targets of justified moral concern that were and are deliberately slandered as moral panics, but not music. There were panics about the Beatles and the Stones, Marilyn Manson and "Satanic Death Metal" and Hip-Hop and "Rap." Suburban mom WASPs blaming ills again and again on the Other rather than grappling with their inability to raise their children. Physician, heal thyself.
When the clueless blame Hip-Hop for hood culture, they are blaming rock for the decline in lasting relationships and the rise in casual sex and they are blaming GTA and Call of Duty and 2A for Sandy Hook. In Hip-Hop it is that most classic mistaking of cause for effect: Hip-Hop didn't cause hood culture, hood culture caused Hip-Hop. If it never emerged, black musicians would be singing about money, women and gang violence in Rock & Roll. If Rock never emerged and the most popular music in the ghetto was Yo-Yo Ma on Bach there'd still be drugs, tricks and drivebys. If that slice of ability in the community suddenly lost or never had that outlet, do you think those communities would be better or worse? Worse, obviously. Some of those artists, the few who did grow up in the shit, who do have a real brilliance, they'd have fallen into crime and not gotten out. They would have done very well. More crime, more violence, more kids, more deaths.
"That's their problem"? No shit, it's their problem right now. One of the reasons Kanye turned so hard, after either his instability or the people around him who actually seem to have been handlers and controllers engaged in constant psychic sabotage, is because he had so much hope for Obama helping Chicago and it didn't fucking happen. The hood already suffers in silence. What'd BLM do? Yeah, Black Lives really fucking Matter to the the movement that resulted in so sharp a spike upward in post-Floyd homicides and premature deaths.
Hip-Hop, good? I said I don't call music bad, so should I call it good? I enjoy it, I think its best has beauty in a way precious little other music captures. And I like that the best rappers and best producers are known. There's this French DJ who goes by Thylacine, he just released an album called "and 74 musicians", so it's "Thylacine and 74 musicians" (Spotify). It's an album of wonderful electronic-orchestral arrangements by an artist with under 80K subscribers on YouTube and not even an English Wikipedia page. How many of you have heard of him? People know Kanye, people know Jay-Z, people know Pharrell. I love Pharrell, for a decade before he made it as a white American household name he was doing some of the best production work in the business with Chad Hugo as The Neptunes. Then Daft Punk. I also love saying this in the rare times I get the chance: The song everybody knows by Pharrell called Happy isn't his best song called Happy. Seeing Sounds drags at points but Happy, Sooner or Later, and You Know What are phenomenal. It might seem like I'm arguing against my own point by highlighting obscurities of Pharrell's discography but no this guy is one of the best, and people know him, and he puts his best in the music he brings to them. The guys who break in and last make the music they want to make, they don't stay still, they're always moving. That is admirable.
And while Hip-Hop itself being good music I won't "answer" (I spent several thousand words saying it is). I will say with moral certainty the world would be less and worse without it. It is a good thing that Hip-Hop exists. It uplifts more than it degrades.
jake
8mo ago
Sorry for killing the mood /s
This comment has good points, the base idea is good and I'd have read more if you'd elaborated more, but including this last bit of snark hurt you.
jake
8mo ago
... but it creates extremely entertaining and compelling movies and stories that actually have plausible deniability, such that you seem like a madman if you perceive an agenda aligning the content in such a way.
I have different but kind of parallel thoughts on this.
The first is in how the Left is critical of I'll say older standards of beauty and the "male-gaze" side of female sexualization. I won't say this as as categorical, but within the Left some do have a clear interest in putting characters in TV and film and also major studio video games who would not traditionally be considered attractive enough for mass media. In the Tolkien Rings of Power, the mightiest and fairest of the Elves remaining in Middle-Earth, Galadriel, is played by Morfyyd Clark. There are poor style choices here, keeping her pristine amidst battle would emphasize her otherworldliness. There is also an unfairness in comparing Clark, and almost any woman in Hollywood, to Cate Blanchett. But I seriously doubt casting took a hard pivot because they didn't even want to try competing with Blanchett. I am certain they had better options they forewent because Clark is "mid" for Hollywood. Film is full of more examples by the day; Halle Bailey would rightly be a model, she has incredibly striking features that would make her fashion advertising gold but she is so far on the "alien" side of model-alien-androgyny (as an aside, "androgynous", when you really evaluate those it describes, really just means "girlish") that ignoring other perceived issues with the film, the sharp features of her face hurt interest In The Little Mermaid. What helps I'm sure with Anya Taylor-Joy's success is not just her skill at picking roles in good films, but specifically films that benefit from a kind-of alien looking actor like herself.
In video games, there's Aloy in the Horizon series, Abby in TLOUP2, MJ in Insomniac's Spider-Man 2, and The Hero in Fable 4 (or Fable not-4, I don't know and I'm not bothering with the articles elaborating on it.) I think they accurately recreated the face model for Aloy, but in Fable, and I won't be surprised if there are changes, they made the character uglier than her model.
Given there is some political interest, and again I'm not painting with a wide brush, but given there is some clear interest in subversion of traditional beauty and traditional relationships, the most powerful content-producing AI couldn't produce subversive content on these lines because it isn't logically possible. If a person wants to look at beautiful women then ugly women, no matter how otherwise compelling the setting, won't light up those biological hardwires. If they want a story of that great man hero, "actually male heroes suck" in the most otherwise beautiful setting won't do anything for them. If they want a story with the traditional nuclear family, the great story around the queer poly cell isn't going to do anything for them. Of course harems might, and the terminal diagnosis for this poly fad is the most terrible return of the harem, but harem stories are eminently male-gaze, so that's not happening.
My other thought, my original thought, is on the technology. If the technology of AI-generated shows and films reaches the hands of the people, their cultural output will blot out the sun. The entertainment industry, in its current state, will be utterly incapable of competing in a world where random creatives can generate compelling television as quickly as they can write it. The Nolans, the Villeuneuves, the Mendeses, they'll still have success, but when John McCrae can put out himself Worm and Pact as shows, or when the many successful Royal Road writers can make shows of their works, or when some guy in his basement can produce Peter Jackson's Rise and Fall of Gondolin, when Orson Scott Card (who I hope will leap at the tech) can make adaptations of the Speaker and Shadows Saga. When fans in places western copyright law can't reach can use this to make a 100% book-accurate show of Harry Potter, Hollywood is fucking over.
Will they let this happen? I think Sora was the canary, the final warning. I think if they aren't having all-legal-hands 24/7 (in spirit if not actual) from now to Inauguration Day 2025 they too will have a terminal diagnosis. But I think, and I dearly pray, the tech will go too far too fast and it will reach the people before Hollywood even realizes they should be planning to stop it.
jake
8mo ago
Determined patients could break a robot, but it's just a robot. Better that than maiming or killing a human. As for the humans currently working in those environments, some are in places where they have a prudent fear of injury or death and I'm sure that informs their interactions with some patients. Simulacras won't fear anything, so their interactions won't be tinged by fear.
More than 90% of labor will be automated in our lifetime. Simulacra will improve, the human facsimile will become seamless and their fine articulation and strength will first match and then permanently exceed humans, or at least those non-cybernetically-augmented. They will be tremendously cost-superior as their minimum effort in work will be better than many humans giving their utmost. So while fears of institutions being black pits for the dregs is valid today, in 30 years a largely simulacra-staffed institution will have patients receiving a higher standard of care than what premium specialized multi-patient care facilities deliver right now.
Some homeless need the hard support of institutions right now. The problem I have with mass institutionalizing advocacy today is I don't trust such institutions to not become abyssal places bereft of human dignity. The government could probably run a non-terrible pilot, but it would be a handful of the homeless and so not solve anything, but run in mass, and especially if turned to privatization, they will become hellish. And some might say, these people are already making cities hellish; they might argue their lives are already hellish, a warm place to sleep, food, and the removal of narcotics would be better; or they might argue the institutions would be hellish because such people inhabit them. To all of these, yeah maybe. But if the perception is these places are worse than prison there will be powerful opposition from the lowest of the individual homeless who fights at being sent, up to well-funded, organized actors working against it.
With the mass automation of labor and comparable-in-impact breakthroughs in other industries, costs of many products will spiral downward. Inflation is a motherfucker but things will either stabilize by the end of the decade or the country will start burning. I choose to believe the former will happen. The robots will look like humans, they sound like humans, they will feel like humans. The reason it will work so well when it's implemented is because that obstacle of "this thing isn't human" will be brief; we can't help but humanize that which isn't human. Look at the affinity for animals. The simulacra will be capable, they will be pleasant, they will remember everything but not hold to particular memories in spite for later cruelty. They will just be better. Not in the transcendent, infinite worth of the human, but as the continued demonstration of the spirit of man in improving the human condition. They are the next great step. On a long enough timeline, a healthy capitalism will compete itself into being socialism. Costs will be so cheap, quality will be so high, so many industries will just cease to exist as some breakthrough renders them entirely obsolete. Food, healthcare and pharma, energy, housing and construction, clothing, entertainment, automation comes for it all. Eventually these institutions will be able to provide what the patients need at the highest quality for a pittance of what it once cost and this is why I know I will eventually support such measures.
I don't see dregs being shoved in capsules and fed bugs. I see the indigent being, yes forcefully, put in institutions where not their wants but their true needs are addressed. Where they eat good food, where they have good rooms, where they have access to education and entertainment, where they receive the medical care they need. Where they have interactions with simulacra that are in the meaningful sense absolutely real, real relationships with simulacra who might be programmed to care but do it so well the patients feel truly cared for, which they will be.
It's utopian, so it's naive and dumb. What future is the alternative? Throw them all in a pit? Might as well send vans around for them to be shot and taken to crematoriums. I know that's reductive, there's an adequate middle ground, but why stop at hoping for a solution that's only adequate? The technology for the best swiftly approaches, why not hope for it in everything? I don't ascribe an unreasonable negativity to you, the concerns you raise of terrible conditions are entirely valid, and if that were the proposal or what ended up actually happening after the ostensibly good proposal, I'd oppose them. But at a certain point in the endless march of technological progress it will take more effort to poorly deliver such a service, it will take actual malice rather than simple avarice, because the avaricious option will so fortunately be the best option for the patients.
The solution is institutionalizing the indigent homeless population. Not all of them, not the outlier hobo wandering-workers, the homeless who are principally unable to work. The state running such institutions, or paying for private administration, does open the door to abuses. One is financial, with taxpayer money footing the bill they're incentivizing bad actors who will profit in their delivery of a poor service. Bigger is employment, hiring caring or at least competent staff who aren't sociopaths, something we see facilities in the US failing at pretty regularly. Still, some significant number of the homeless should be institutionalized because they need a level of hard support the church and private charity is no longer equipped to handle, and really it's the domain of the state anyway.
I'm not the first to bring this up, but I don't think I've seen anyone explain why it will be possible in our generation. Changing political sentiment will help, it'll probably be necessary so that people who shouldn't be on the streets stay off them, but technology in that of the human automata, the simulacra, will be the lever. By 2035, wide-production probably 2040, simulacra will exist that are capable of acting as orderlies in healthcare settings. Some successor to GPT or whatever, after direction from the human overseer they are accountable to, will run their scheduling, their pathing, their tasks, the conversing with and monitoring of patients that they can then provide to those human physicians and overseers.
These simulacra will be perfect orderlies: they don't need to sleep, they don't need to fear (in once high-risk settings) a patient sneaking something sharp to shiv them, they won't make mistakes, or they will but certainly fewer by-the-day and more minor than humans make. Patients meanwhile won't have to be afraid of simulacra verbally abusing them or stealing from them or beating them or raping them or killing them. They won't have to fear and suffer from the petty tyrannies of spite, or even just a bad interaction as the brunt of annoyance on a bad day. With time, simulacra will be integral to the delivery of an undeviatingly high standard of care.
I've always assumed Japan will use them first because of their inverse population pyramid. Lots of old people, not enough people to care for them: okay, robots. The success, the quality, the savings, these will see varyingly immediate success and that will spread. Private healthcare in the US first, but there will be policymakers who will be aware of the applications of simulacra in facilities like psychiatric institutions. When it is a guarantee those institutions' patients will be free from the debasing of their humanity (beyond that from being institutionalized) the philosophic argument against becomes very difficult, and then financials get their say. Massive savings for effectiveness in care humans will quickly be incapable of providing, at least in multi-patient environments, will be the big push.
jake
8mo ago
I don't remember who linked this--"Automatic Language Growth", link: https://mandarinfromscratch.wordpress.com/automatic-language-growth/
ALG argues children learn new languages better because they listen better, rather than an age-waning ability to acquire the languages spoken around them.
Hanania is known for being known. Known, quoted, known more. His writing is bad and his reasoning is worse. His best piece wouldn't get an AAQC, or wouldn't deserve if it I missed his time mostly lurking here ahead of just lifting ideas from his intellectual betters--a descriptor that applies to every regular Motte commenter. That said there is a niceness to his name in this discussion because Taylor Swift is also--in a real but not total measure--popular for being popular
It's not her music. It's not bad, I don't call music bad, but I can name individual songs in her discography I like. There are artists with categorically superior lyricism and vocals and production who don't have her success. Unappreciated or especially fan-asserted "underrated" acts are the nature of music but where artists might have solid radio play, single and album sales, merch and ticket sales, it's not the music that results in an Instagram with close to 300 million followers. Swift is a saint next to Whore of Babylon Kylie Jenner who sells makeup, filters and utterly disastrous self-concern and narcissism to her 400 million followers. It's because winners win. The perception of being popular makes a thing more popular. Swift has been on the literal side of "highly newsworthy" this year, and that attention brings more attention, young people, especially women, seeing her popularity become interested if not before and/or more interested in her for that popularity. Her endorsement will produce votes, I don't think many, but any is bad. Those not at consequence for their politics should not be listened to about politics. You gotta have skin in the game or your ideas will become informed by privilege and what ought to be rather than what is.
My only skin in this game is living in Chiefs country, Missouri. I know a lot of people who I saw wearing Chiefs gear 10 years ago, 20 years ago, who were hoping for the success they now enjoy. I'm happy for them, I don't give a shit about the Chiefs but there's always a bit of a pleasant feeling with the local team winning the big game. I also know people who never said a thing about the Chiefs, not after two Super Bowl wins, not until Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift became a thing. I've seen them gleefully posting "I wouldn't care about the Chiefs otherwise but go Taylor Swift's team." Same sans Swift, I was rooting hard for Tom Brady to get his 7th when the Bucs thrashed KC in 2021.
So what I've been thinking about for the last week or two, what's missed by Hanania (no surprise) and also commenters here, is the timeline:
-
Swift and Kelce couple; stories come out of Swift at Chiefs games
-
The season goes on, more and more Swift at Chiefs games; Mahomes has the worst season of his career (still ending in a Super Bowl lol); some memeing about the Swift Effect
-
At this point the only grousing I've heard from Chiefs fans is "please just let us watch football"
-
Chiefs in the playoffs, they keep winning
-
~3 weeks ago stories start rolling out about Swift's presidential endorsement and how she's "Biden's best hope"
-
I hear political grousing from some Chiefs fans / Swift, once again a political target, is attacked by twitter righties
Swift is being attacked by righties because of politicization from lefties. The animus was preexisting sure but it only emerged because of the "Swift-Biden endorsement" articles. Assuming her guaranteed endorsement of whoever's going against Trump in November, there are people who will vote, and shouldn't be allowed to, because Swift told them to. Attacking her is a reasonable move for the right, but I agree head-on is a bad angle: 4chan-style trolling I've begun to see of /pol/tard Tay is a better angle, though still maybe not the smart one.
Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!
Mahomes is superb and as long as he maintains form KC will compete, but football is a terrifically easy game to rig. One no-call or flag can be the game. It's exactly what happened in Super Bowl LVI. 4th quarter, under 2 minutes, 3rd & Goal, Rams down by 4. Holding: Half distance to goal, automatic 1st down. On the same play, the Rams had a false start (5 yard penalty) that went uncalled. At the critical moment a bad flag gave LA a touchdown and the Super Bowl.
As I said downthread, as someone in deep red country the conversations I hear have an underlying apprehension of violence that rises by the day including today. I don't believe in their hearts these people want violence, but as the right is the political alignment predicted by having superior-to-average faculties at assessing danger, I think even if only intuitively they understand and greatly fear how swiftly we approach violence as the only way out. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who know when to draw the sword. If and when it happens, it will be the right and only time.
The thought of this as being what stops Trump is many things, all of them wrong. There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man." Farcical. There will be topical complaining from RINOs, the establishment-GOP will continue searching, as they surely have since 2016, at finding a way to keep him out, and in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes. This conviction completes the ascendance of the man as the idea of the total rejection of the establishment. The establishment understands this, and is thus why they attack him with a wholly unparalleled ferocity; it is exactly the same reason those who land on the turbo-normie-left-side-of-bell-curve-meme support him. They don't have to think and wordswordswords, they viscerally understand power against power.
People try to contextualize what's happening in so many irrelevant details, ignore the minutiae. It has never been about vice, it has never been about ambiguous business dealings, it has never been about brashness, candor and honesty. Politicians as a category are the least ethical humans in this country, why would they care about any of this? It is about a man who refused to kneel when demanded by seated power and has risen to threaten their entire existence. This conviction heralds the imminent arrival of the pivotal figure of American history. It doesn't have to be Trump, but where we are in the reverberations of history is no earlier than the election of Buchanan.
More options
Context Copy link