naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
There is something that feels samey about the plot and arcs of all the books.
He's the McDonald's of fantasy. Billions served, and you'll get the same assembly-line experience every time. And if you find it's not to your liking, that is simply an indication that your palate has matured. There's a place for McDonald's, and there's a place for Brandon Sanderson. But it has been many years since I particularly enjoyed either.
I've read about a dozen Sanderson novels, and at this point I'm pretty much done with him.
That's some stamina right there. I got through four and a quarter. Real props to the guy, he sure does churn out the words, and he seems like a nice enough bloke that I don't begrudge him the truly obscene wealth that he's milked catching a ride to fame on Jordan's coattails. But that fanbase, ye gods. And not to drag culture war into the Friday Fun thread, but his fictional takes on "diverse" characters are so anti-challenging it's depressing. Sci-fi and fantasy used to raise interesting and challenging questions about stuff like race and sex and gender. The gods of the Cosmere seem to be blue-haired HR ladies, everything is so bland and inoffensive. (And Sanderson's own public "evolution" on gay marriage seems pretty embarrassing, guy had a chance to yeschad.jpg and opted instead to fold and pander.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
16d ago
There's no way to have long form discussion on discord really.
Elsewhere in this thread I mentioned Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death--if you haven't read it, I recommend it. A lot of his concerns about television apply all the more so to the Internet, particularly as people shift to Discord.
I agree with you that LLM spam is well on its way to really wrecking the whole enterprise.
naraburns
nihil supernum
16d ago
Problem is that the US is higher trust than ten years ago.
That seems much more like an epicycle than anything I've suggested--your article shows 29% as a low point in the assertion "most people can be trusted," around 2014, but then suggests a rise to 34% in 2018--and then a flat line to 34% again in 2024. This, against a trend of clear decline since the 1970s, with no sign of a recent upward trend in sight--at best, it's flat (and still historically low) despite slight recovery from a local minimum. Your "upswing for the past ten years" seems like an exaggeration at best--and probably just tendentious. I have a variety of other concerns about this particular measure of social trust, which I suppose you would also call epicycles, but I'm not sure it matters, as it's not entirely clear to me what you're trying to actually say.
it's getting to be a little much at this point
If your point is something like "actually this 'vibecession' stuff is super complicated and certainly not attributable to a single influence" then, I mean, sure? I'm sure most people wouldn't even get through Scott's whole writeup before saying "it's getting to be a little much at this point." Sociological inquiry is often like that. I don't even think it would be wrong to say, as you did, "only high mortgage rates and a frozen housing market remain as plausible explanations of 'wtf happened in 2020.'" But those things still happened against a background of longer-term social developments that hadn't happened before. Mortgage rate and housing market problems aren't particularly novel. The slow but increasingly unmistakable unraveling of the American social fabric definitely is, and we're reaching levels of animosity I don't think we've really seen since the Civil War. I'd be much more persuaded if you tried to boil the whole conversation down to smartphones or social media, than to housing and mortgage rates. Or COVID, for that matter. But I think stuff like COVID and markets are things that shock our social system, at various times; they don't explain what happens in response to that shock. A different society would, presumably, have responded differently. That sort of thing seems, to me, worth thinking about.
I kept wondering when Scott would finally ask, "is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?"
This doesn't explain why there's a step change in consumer sentiment after 2020.
"Gradually, then suddenly." I like the metaphor of, say, super-cooled water suddenly crystalizing into ice on impact. All the ingredients for the trust collapse were there; various people have been sounding the alarm bells for decades, in various guises. Charles Murray's Coming Apart came out 15 years ago. Bowling Alone is a quarter century old. Amusing Ourselves to Death, older still. If you're old enough to remember Pat Buchanan and his crusade against "cultural Marxism," you might also be old enough to remember the John Birch Society. Once people might have suggested that this is a list of racist or conspiracy-theory-driven weirdos; today most people don't even seem to know what I'm referring to. The Postwar Consensus (as it is sometimes called) was firmly globalist; America played the role of Rome, and all along conservatives (usually, fringe conservatives) have been saying "this is going to end badly."
Well, it hasn't ended yet! In various ways things don't seem to be going well. And that itself may be an illusion--but it does seem to be the vibe.
naraburns
nihil supernum
16d ago
Thanks for writing this up, I have been wanting to write something very similar to this all day, but I have not had the chance.
My favorite comment from the SSC sub:
This was less than I wanted to know.
But my favorite substantive comment, from the Substack:
Something that gets hidden in the aggregate is that consumer sentiment among democrats is much higher than among republicans from 2021 until 2025, and then they switch. This seems relevant.
https://en.macromicro.me/charts/110438/us-michigan-consumer-sentiment-index-within-political-party
This feeds into the "media" argument, too, given that news and entertainment media are both aligned with the blue tribe. And this doesn't even just have to be a purely tribalistic thing; if you're an illegal immigrant from Mexico, there are probably very obvious reasons for you to have felt more optimistic about the state of things in 2022 than you do in 2025 (namely, in 2022 you probably weren't too worried about ICE raids, and in 2025 you probably are more worried about ICE raids, even if in absolute terms your risk hasn't actually changed much).
I kept wondering when Scott would finally ask, "is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?" I feel like he probably has a better grasp of the relevant data than I do, but that may also be why he didn't hit this angle? It would surely be outside the Overton window to suggest that the "vibecession" is just the natural result of decades of broadly unchecked immigration from low-trust societies, but to me that seems like the most obvious hypothesis. Economic "Brazilification" (as explained by Faceh and discussed by me) would also, presumably, underwrite "vibe" Brazilification. Whether the gaps between rich and poor actually widen, or are merely seen to widen, is irrelevant to the vibe. Whether politics is genuinely polarized, or only seems polarized: again, the vibe is the same. Whether public infrastructure really is garbage, or only seems to be garbage--and so on. Importing the attitudes of developing nations transforms those attitudes into a self-fulfilling prophecy concerning the state of things.
naraburns
nihil supernum
19d ago
Banned for a week, albeit not strictly for this comment.
This is the comment that got you reported for antagonism. Certainly it is an uncharitable response, left on its own--if you have some good reason to doubt someone has engaged with the proffered material, you can explain that in an effortful way, but on its own there's nothing on offer here but heat.
When I came to check out this particular report, however, I saw that you had, in rapid succession, led with not one, nor two, but three low effort, top level posts. On the surface, all three posts concern different events, but the substance of each post is to cast the Trump administration in the least charitable light available--sometimes, by "just asking questions."
Taken together, you seem to have decided "flood the zone with low effort anti-Trump takes" is a good way to bait other users. Any possible doubts I might have entertained about that were eliminated by this response; the slightest pushback on your low-effort narrative resulted, not in an effortful attempt to expand on the conversation, but with a (completely unjustified) dismissal. This shows you to be here, not to test your ideas in a court of people who don't share your biases, but to simply wage culture war as you see fit.
You are not fooling anyone, but we do try to extend charity even to the likes of you. You have been warned twice before, by two other mods, about low effort top posts, and here I see that you have made three of them, and then antagonized other users, so warnings do not seem adequate anymore. Now we move to bans.
naraburns
nihil supernum
20d ago
It is certainly interesting to see what catches people's fancy!
naraburns
nihil supernum
20d ago
In a hypothetical future age of abundance, how much better can things really be?
I was just this weekend reflecting on the extent to which we already live in this future. Specifically, I was purchasing over-the-counter medicine for a family member's lingering cough, and thinking about the mass produced medicinal miracles of modern chemistry. With the cost of open-market health insurance premiums set to rise next year, there is a lot of public discourse on the state of modern medicine (and how it gets funded). But for the vast, overwhelming majority of health concerns we have today, we live in an age of remarkable abundance and shocking affordability. Furthermore, we live in an age where there is very little difference in the treatments and medicines available to the rich versus the poor.
Now, don't misunderstand--I am absolutely aware of the eye-watering costs of some treatments, particularly experimental or end-of-life treatments, and the relatively better care available to people with money. But the kind of care that costs serious "rich person" cash is also the kind of care very few people would benefit from receiving. The vast majority of medical maladies you will face in your life are treatable by a nurse practitioner with medicine you can buy for less than an hour's wages, and a billionaire in your place would receive the very same prescription at the very same price.
Furthermore, though not everyone benefits in the same way or at the same level, most Americans do have some kind of health insurance that genuinely protects them from bankruptcy while providing them with treatments they could otherwise not possibly afford. Countries with socialized health care are arguably more efficient in how they structure the financing of all this, but either way the risk pooling that modern industrialized nations do with health care costs seems to work pretty well to everyone's absolute benefit, despite the persistence of individual disparities in particular cases.
Your mention of "if everyone went to college" is particularly noteworthy given that anyone who genuinely wants to learn something, today, is far better situated to make that happen than they would have been even twenty years ago. The existence of online college and satellite internet means you never even have to leave your house to get an education, often of a quality much higher than you could get at a top tier university a century ago. We have more knowledge, we disseminate it more smoothly, the costs are minimal and almost always subsidized. I have more books stored in my cell phone than I could physically fit in my house and office--combined. Someone with a loose attitude toward copyright infringement could very easily download several PhD's worth of knowledge for actual pennies (or, at their local library, possibly gratis).
Of course, credentials are a different story, but that's evidence of a society with so much abundance that it actively works to rate limit expertise. America's physician shortage (which is much less than the physician shortage in many other places) is driven in substantial measure by the profession's reluctance to increase the availability of training. This has resulted in a proliferation of paraprofessionals (who often think they are professionals)--but I digress. The point is that we have so much abundance, actually, many of our current sociocultural systems are kind of choking on it.
I sometimes wonder if this is why we are seeing a rise in political movements that, on my view, promise to function by ending abundance. On my view, trade is the lifeblood of prosperity; interfering with trade reduces abundance. On my view, free discourse generates a bounty of ideas; restricting discourse reduces abundance. Asceticism is often a kind of allergic reaction to abundance. Probably someone reading this comment is thinking of Universe 25 and wondering how it relates! Yes: possibly we are poorly evolved to thrive in an environment of abundance.
But I feel like the alternative is strictly worse. Better to wrangle with (and perhaps evolve beyond) our pyschological hangups in an environment of peace and plenty, I think, than to RETVRN to 50% infant mortality rates on grounds that this better reflects the ancestral environment. To answer the question directly, I think things could still get better in a variety of cool ways (I would like to live much, much longer then 100 years, for example!) but I do think we already live in an age of remarkable abundance, for which many, maybe most people are shamefully ungrateful, because they insist on thinking about wealth comparatively rather than in absolute terms.
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
I mean...?
The Groypers, or the Groyper Army, are a far-right group loosely defined as followers, fans, or associates of the American white nationalist political commentator, activist, and live streamer Nick Fuentes. They are named after a variant of Pepe the Frog, an Internet meme.
Basically, (mostly) young (mostly) men who are engaged with (whether seriously or as a LARP or meme) ideas on the identitarian right, in particular taking their cues from Fuentes. It's sometimes hard to tell whether they're being serious or just being incendiary for the lulz. Maybe they would say it is always or often both.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
...the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.
Do you have some example in mind, here? Everything I've seen from this latest release appears to simply confirm what has long been known: that Trump and Epstein were substantially birds of a feather, but Trump kicked Epstein to the curb for stealing his girls. Since that time, Epstein has occasionally ranted about having some kind of dirt on Trump, which for some reason he never actually used and of which there is (still!) apparently no plausible evidence.
I would stop well short of describing Trump as "innocent" of anything and yet the plainly intended implication of all these reports--Trump had sex with underage girls on Epstein island or at least with Epstein's knowledge or assistance--appears to still remain purely in the realm of the undemonstrated, indeed, in most contexts the unstated. Nobody wants to get sued for defamation, and they all know Trump will happily sue them for defamation, so they are just continuing to parrot vague claims while winking and nodding in the direction of Prince Andrew, producing many guns but none smoking, nor even bearing fingerprints.
Trump has spent his adult life a man of wealth and fame, albeit also the butt of many jokes. I would honestly be surprised to learn he hadn't had more than a little bit of illicit sexual contact in his life; I would in that case need to revise my priors on the nature of rich, powerful men. But it seems like there are a lot of people out there who are utterly convinced of the details on this, who keep telling me that some bombshell or other is going to drop (including Pam Bondi!), only for those bombshells to never actually manifest. It was the same with the whole "Russian watersports" thing ten years ago. If Trump were guilty of 1% of the weird, crazy, illegal things he's accused of doing, I would expect at some point for someone to be able to produce hard, non-circumstantial evidence of something. Instead we get lawfare on novel legal theories and this recurrent "this time, we've got him!" nonsense from breathless (and brainless) journalists.
I'm open to evidence! I would not be at all surprised to see it! But again, it seems, no such thing is on offer.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I just fixed some formatting and structure with AI.
Then unfortunately, your "fixes" made your post indistinguishable from AI slop.
That's very unfair.
I'm literally just telling you to write the argument in your own words, same as anyone else. Nothing could be more fair. Nobody comes here to talk to LLMs, and if you post something that has been touched by AI, chances are good others will notice and this will distract from substantial discussion. There's just no reason to use AI here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
On one hand, this seems like a not-uninteresting proposal?
On the other hand, this was almost certainly written by AI (which is in this case quintessentially low effort), and is being posted by a fresh-rolled account so there's no user reputation weighing in your favor.
On balance, I'm not approving this post.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Did it become official at some point?
No, but emojis often fail to meet the standards for effort (particularly when posted without other text) or inflammatoriness, and they are in almost all cases also egregiously obnoxious. I do feel like I've seen at least one of the other mods use emojis on occasion, and I don't think I've dropped a ban on emojis more than a handful of times, though. I think I may even be the only mod who has ever done it. Fortunately, that may be because it has rarely been necessary; people seem to pick up pretty quick that this is not really the venue for that sort of thing.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Since I am participating in this thread as a moderator, I'm not going to get any further into the substance of the argument than I already have.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Banned one hour for use of emojis.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Speak plainly, please, and respond charitably. The article directly addresses what I take to be your sarcastically-expressed criticism. If you do not think it addresses your objection sufficiently, you should explain that clearly and effortfully. Mockery does not raise the level of discourse.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
I am neither being ironic, nor am I aggressively misunderstanding you. Thankfully options exist outside your false dichotomy!
It looks from this post as if "aggressively misunderstanding" is still in fact what you're doing, though--including, here, by skipping the most generous recommendation I could think of. Look--
Your post was a mix of whataboutism, if it's true that there are nazis on the right it's not their (red tribe) fault, and oh, while I hate nazis they'll treat me better than the woke police. Insofar as 'running cover' implies you have some secret agenda to promote Nazi material, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as you're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing (lol Tiki Torch cosplayers) and whatabouting - yes, you're running cover for them.
My point was that magicalkittycat was engaged with a mixture of whataboutism and the Chinese Robber fallacy that is presently circulating in furtherance of running cover for Leftist antisemitism. Insofar as 'running cover' implies the news media has some secret agenda to promote antisemitism, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as they're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing and whatabouting, yes, they're running cover for antisemitism.
Every once in a while it will happen that I am in a conversation with someone here, using the terms and tropes of this place, and it will turn into a kind of "no, you" debate. This seems to be most common with motte-and-bailey arguments--"no, I'm not playing in the bailey, you're playing the bailey!" Sometimes people find ways out by finding a good word to taboo, or through careful charity, or whatever. I'm honestly not great at this (Zorba is genuinely great at it) but I do try. Anyway we seem to be in one of those circles now, where I get accused of whataboutism (maybe simply because I'm not the OP, and so there's a "first mover" advantage or something) for pointing out how OP's sources are engaged in a kind of whataboutism.
But dude, I have to actually invoke that progressive argument here, much as it pains me. You fit the trope of the partisan pretending to be objective and principled to a T to avoid confronting the fact that you are, in fact, also waging the culture war most of the time.
Right, and the circlular firing squad for this argument is the one where I point out that you're playing the role of the leftist who simultaneously speaks as the arbiter and adherent of objectivity and truth while downplaying the possibility (or at least likelihood) of objectivity and truth. Why is it that forums with actual free speech so often begin leaning to the right--almost as though leftism can't stand on its own two feet? Clearly I am not without my priors! And yet exactly one of us in this discussion has frankly admitted the existence of, and offered criticism against, both right-wing and left-wing antisemitism and racism, and it isn't you. I wasn't kidding, here:
My beef is with identitarians.
Your beef is with the vast majority of the modern left. Seriously, replace identitarian with vast majority of the modern left - is your statement significantly different?
Yes! White supremacy is not a new kind of identitarianism, though the term "white supremacy" has gotten woefully overextended and maliciously distorted in furtherance of Leftist aims. And I think a lot of Leftists are not identitarians, though sometimes they have to be reminded of that. The anti-Woke Left is not a group of insignificant size--and relevantly, my sense of this forum is that most users are anti-Woke leftists who have been surprised to find themselves in the center-Right of the Overton window, as radicals have stretched it to reach the territory of identitarian spoils systems.
The main difference between left-wing identitarians and right-wing identitarians so far is that left-wing identitarians mostly control their political coalition (the Democratic Party) while right-wing identitarians remain at the fringes--albeit, less at the fringes than they were before the Great Awokening. With specific reference to antisemitism, the antisemites on the Right are reactionaries who fetishize a failed effort to implement national socialism in a country they often know nothing about. The antisemites on the Left, by contrast, are the vanguard of Islamofacism, a movement with at least tens of millions of supporters around the globe, who are prosecuting a centuries-long grudge against the ideological descendants of Judaism and Christianity. I don't think it's "whataboutism" or "running cover" to suggest that if we're going to talk about political antisemitism, we should talk about all of it, not just those bits of it that are most convenient to our preferred narratives.
I honestly can't tell whether you're being ironic or just aggressively misunderstanding my point. I feel like the most generous thing I can say might be "keep in mind your aims in writing this response to me; now go back and read my post with the idea that I was trying to make the same point to magicalkittycat, for analogous reasons, as you had when writing this response to me."
Less charitably, I did find this line to be unmitigated bullshit:
You and others running cover for antisemitism on the right
I am not running cover for antisemitism on the right, and nothing I wrote can be reasonably construed that way. Hell, I am occasionally accused, here, as a moderator, of running cover for the Jews! But neither do I think that the antisemitic left should be simply allowed to do what it does because everyone is so distracted by the tiki torch cosplayers they fail to notice (or outright excuse) blatant antisemitism from the left and its political allies. (And while the 9/11 hijackers weren't formally "leftists," their presence in the United States was arguably traceable to changes in American immigration law plausibly attributed to the left.)
My beef is with identitarians. To my mind, the main difference between leftist identitarians and right-wing identitarians is that right-wing identitarians are a bunch of reactionaries doing reactionary things. Leftists set the stage, defined the terms, and picked the fight. Reactionaries are doing exactly what (as @Fruck correctly observes) the radicals were told they would do. I don't like it. I don't agree with it. I think that nothing good will ever come of identitarianism, no matter how righteous-minded its practitioners. I don't think any of it is good. But neither do I think it reasonable to apportion blame equally to both sides; this is a mess of progressivism's making.
The only remarkable thing about this post is the political valency; what is this place if not nut-picking to wage the culture war?
Discussing the culture wars is not the same as waging them. Yes, I acknowledge that people do wage them, to various degrees. But we do try to discourage that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
In the 10s - far before 2021, by my observation
It's not without reason that people often peg the "Great Awokening" to ~2014. I don't know how the literal President of the United States can be an underappreciated contributor to social trends, but nevertheless--I think that President Obama's direct impact on the federal bureaucracy was to replace broadly egalitarian neoliberal political machinery with explicitly identitarian political machinery.
This article also has empirical data on the explosion of identitarian propaganda in the news media beginning with Obama's first term in office.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
As others have pointed out, it's difficult to not see this entire post as an artful, nut-picking troll.
But even setting that aside, left wing antisemitism, or perhaps more specifically Islamist antisemitism from left wing political parties, is so frequent that people scarcely bother to report on it (or, perhaps, they actively suppress it because it hurts Democrat narratives). The "free Palestine" shooting of the Israeli embassy couple was much more "Nazi" in character than anything Andrew Torba has ever done. I suspect that highlighting right-wing antisemitism, real or imagined, is a case of "accuse your enemy of what you are doing while you are doing it."
That said, just speaking from personal experience, in my social feeds earlier today I read some surprisingly outright racist remarks in response to Ketanji Brown Jackson's ill-advised suggestion that being a racial minority be considered a kind of disability. As an anti-identitarian liberal this concerns me greatly, but I do think it is (as others have suggested) directly downstream of leftists spending decades crying wolf. If you spend enough time and energy insisting that your political opponents are Nazis, at some point your political opponents are going to decide that they might as well break out the jackboots, then. The story of Liu Bang, Emperor Gaozu of Han comes to mind--
Liu was responsible for escorting a group of penal labourers to the construction site of Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum at Mount Li. During the journey, some prisoners escaped; under Qin law, allowing prisoners to escape was punishable by death. Rather than face punishment, Liu freed the remaining prisoners, some of whom willingly acknowledged him as their leader and joined him on the run from the law.
I don't know any Nazis, and I prefer it that way. But if--and I do not think this is the case now, but if it ever were--I were one day forced to choose an authoritarian regime to live under, and the only choices were some kind of white nationalism and some flavor of socialist wokism, I'm confident that my chances of both survival and prosperity would be much, much greater under the nationalist regime.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Designed to be perfect, but disturbingly generic.
That's the movie's whole shtick. It's the emotional equivalent of ludicrously empty calories. This takes real skill to accomplish, and I'm genuinely impressed with how well the movie and the music really present as the apotheosis of pop. It's the perfect emotional dessert--utterly devoid of nutritive value.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Great writeup, thanks for sharing. As I have asked in the past,
How much of the history of "government" is the history of developing increasingly sophisticated methods for obfuscating the nature and extent of the bondage imposed on the "mass of men," not only for their own ultimate benefit, but for the benefit of all? And--to what extent might we as a people be slowly forgetting that, as we seek to "liberate" those masses, by continuing to give them the resources of life, while withdrawing (or declining to enforce) any guidance?
This is a very old problem. In Plato's Republic, he speaks occasionally of the lower castes in his ideal system, but the great bulk of the work is an obsessively detailed examination of the proper upbringing of the ruling class. Aristotle calls him out on this, suggesting that Plato's vision fails to adequately capture the breadth of human experience. Today, rather than frankly acknowledge the mental incapacity of the masses, we push free compulsory public education (substantially modeled on Plato's prescription!) as a way of supposedly "leveling the playing field," bringing everyone up to some minimum level of functioning (and insisting despite the evidence that everyone has basically the same potential to achieve and succeed).
Occasionally I meet people who are spending their retirement years caring for dependent adult children. Sometimes that responsibility falls to siblings instead, or even more distant relations. The ability and willingness to be a conservator for an adult of diminished capacity is not the stuff of romantic Hollywood aspiration (Love Actually notwithstanding!). Of course we talk about prisons and mental institutions and the government curtailing of important individual rights--because there's nothing any of us can do to fix the damage that liberal individualism has done to the institution of the family. There are all sorts of reasons why strong tribal ties might be undesirable, particularly in a Western liberal democracy, but as Thomas Sowell says--there are no solutions, only trade offs. The same forces that liberate some of us from the oppression of a tyrannical tribal chieftan also liberate the Hassans of the world from the moderating influence of tribal support.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Petty nitpick, curious if there's other reporting that suggests it was targeted for some reason
Not petty at all! I should probably have worded that a little differently--as you say, "motivated" rather than "targeted," despite the language used by the police. The targeted bar seems to have a vaguely patriotic theme to it (red-white-and-blue logos, flying an American flag but no pride flags that I can spot on the Google Maps page). It would be interesting to know whether the shooter regarded the bar as a hotbed of "LGBTQ white supremacy" activity, but it feels like in most of these cases the powers-that-be would prefer to suppress clues along those lines as best they can.
My flair isn't from fanfiction for nothing!
I cannot tell you how many puzzled looks I have gotten from other academics when bringing up stuff like Friendship is Optimal in the middle of conferences on AI. I think a large percentage of them just don't realize that science fiction writers have been constructing thought experiments about this stuff for decades. At most, they might reference some plausibly high-brow (by virtue of being politically en vogue) author like Margaret Atwood. It's understandable; the point of most PhD programs is to get incredibly knowledgeable about something so incredibly specific that the idea of being "well rounded" tends to go out the window completely--there are only so many hours in a day!
But sometimes it pays to be a bit eclectic, too.
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