raakaa
1yr ago
I feel like the attitude of Americans, a few decades after the Civil War, might be summed up in this picture.
To steelman the progressive position here, that picture can be analogized to this meme: sure, those two groups of Whites are able to amicably reconcile, but isn’t there some other group that they forgot to ask? What “Reconciliation” means, in this context, does not include reconciliation between Blacks and the Whites who subjugated them for centuries and then continued to do so for yet another century after the conclusion of the Civil War; rather, it’s just two sets of oppressors shaking hands while their victims remain subjected to their combined racist legacy. The recent wave of statue-toppling and iconoclasm, on the other hand, is true reconciliation: racist Whites being forced to acknowledge the consequences on their actions on Blacks whose considerations were left out of all previous farcical attempts at so-called “reconciliation”.
Do I buy that this noble idea is fully responsible for the recent push for iconoclasm? I wouldn’t say that I do (I wager that a good deal of it is, at least subconsciously, motivated by plain-and-simple outgroup-targeted antipathy in addition to any purer moral concerns). But I believe that it is a very reasonable explanation of the progressive opposition to the “truce” that’s existed for so long.
raakaa
1yr ago
Grammar nitpick: you mean that they’re the same case, not tense. Tense is associated with verbs and tells you what time an action took place. Case is associated with pronouns or nouns and tells you the word’s relation to the action (e.g. was it performing the action? Receiving it? Benefitted by it?).
raakaa
1yr ago
While I am not the biggest fan of arguments about how people need to be bullied more, I take issue with your assumption that
As a result of this bullying they all sympathize with the victims of bullying and will not bully another person.
This doesn’t match my model of how “bullying” and related behavior works. Otherwise, for instance, no frats would have hazing rituals for the pledges, because after the first pledge class joined the frat, they’d all sympathize with the next pledge class and swear never to put them through what they themselves went through. More generally, cf. theories about the “cycle of abuse”.
raakaa
1yr ago
But you can’t even see what it is with your own eyes.
The tricky part here is that the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson, did consciously acknowledge that slavery was a real moral wrong. Not only is it not the case that the Founding Fathers couldn’t see what they were doing wrong in owning slaves, but they actively stated that slavery ought to end. Here’s Jefferson’s take:
A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once concieved and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. […] The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be.
This isn’t even on the same level as, say, veganism, to which analogies are often made. Sure, maybe our descendants living centuries from now would condemn us for our meat-eating, but despite the existence of present-day vegans, it cannot be stated that there is a deep moral divide at the center of America (or any other country to my knowledge) between vegans and carnivores in the same way that there was in early America between slavery-enjoyers and abolitionists.
So it would be inaccurate, in this case, to say that Jefferson couldn’t even see what he was doing wrong by owning slaves.
raakaa
1yr ago
Cancellation (political persecution let’s be honest) relies on the vast majority of people believing they’ll be okay if they just stay quiet. With the invention and deployment of a sufficiently powerful heresy detector, this no longer holds true.
I might just be missing something obvious here, but I’m having trouble seeing why that would be the case. Even in a world with an anti-heresy detector in every smartphone, as long as you don’t do anything too egregious—say, make racial jokes with your buddies, or talk about how you think feminism is harmful, etc—then you have nothing to fear. This would especially be the case if there end up developing clear answers to what would get you cancelled, in contrast to today’s situation where cancellation thrives on ambiguous boundaries.
But if you are using these websites to share your views, then you are engaged in shaping the opinions of others. Maybe you’re not being paid for it, but you’re still doing it—and if your opinions are racist or hateful, then you are thus contributing to a more inequitable society. Beyond this, even if you weren’t participating in public discourse, simply harboring toxic and harmful views cannot help but leak into your everyday interactions with others. That’s how implicit bias works.
This is why your average Joe ought understand that it is not the case that he is safe to spew toxicity and bigotry simply because he doesn’t have a five-figure-follower Twitter account. Hence the cancelling of the OK-sign truck driver, or that of Justine Sacco. I predict that once AI gets powerful enough to scan through petabytes of Amazon Alexa data or conversations surreptitiously recorded by TikTok for bigotry, it is precisely “average normal people” who will face a wave of cancellations. Once the current barriers of inconvenience that prevent general members of the public from being cancelled en masse crumble, all that pent-up energy will be released.
ETA: Actually, a potential counterargument against this vision of the future is that we don’t see people getting cancelled en masse currently based on voting records. Of course, counters against that counterargument include the arguments that many people are listed as unaffiliated, that being a registered Republican is still within the Overton Window, etc….
One high IQ man abstaining from present society due to his disgust with it could come up with a new invention or idea that could create more value for society than 500 million working women. And how many high IQ men from the past who revolutionized society or matters of the intellect otherwise would have their productivity vastly diminished by modern feminized/gynosupremacist society (were they made to live in it instead)?
Addressing this specific part of the post: I think that your model of the motivations of scientific thinkers is off. The way I see it is that this sort of person, throughout history, is motivated by a combination of non-sexual social status (e.g. the desire to just friggin’ win that manifested itself in the mathematical duels surrounding the discovery of the solution to cubic equations) combined with an intrinsic curiosity to know things and solve hard problems. You could say that the former corresponds to the urge to prove people wrong on the Internet or accrue fancy academic titles, and the latter corresponds to a propensity to get nerd-sniped.
Even if scientist-types would appreciate scoring some poon as a side-effect of their labor, I imagine that very few have the willpower to push back against those very strong urges in order to protest any gynocentric society. N=1 here, and I’m no Newton to be sure, but even if I find it unfair that my tax dollars are going to fund a single mother’s hedonistic lifestyle or whatever, I simply cannot fathom pulling myself away from my research in protest. I would bet that high-IQ scientists feel similarly.
Conversely, if a NEET who watches anime adaptations of Kirara CGDCT manga all day were the kind of person who would be making huge scientific advancements if he just had himself a wife, then he’d probably already be making those advancements. (In fact, some of those NEETs are, although Haruhi isn’t CGDCT.)
ETA: Where you might have a point is in the case of NEETs who spend a full-time job’s worth of time writing SNES emulators or making furry VR games or what have you, who would instead, if they had a family to rear and mouths to feed, be forced to engage in more productive endeavors (if helping Google write better spyware is considered productive). But this strikes me as not a situation in which the NEETs consciously decide to opt-out of society to protest gynocentrism. I’m inclined to think that the autistic furry group is largely disjoint from the /r9k/ group (for example, the former group is more likely to be gay or asexual).
raakaa
1yr ago
Additionally, you gloss over the immense social power women have and have always had, and the importance of the female role and how much men (society as a whole) relies on it (relies on it, not unilaterally imposes it). Men are dependent on women as much as women are dependent on men.
Samuel Johnson provides a pithy (as you’d expect from him) expression of this, even in a time far more patriarchical than our own:
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
Additionally, going back even further, into the medieval era, there is the famous story of Aristotle and Phyllis, intended to show that no matter how noble one’s standing or intelligent one’s philosophy, he can still be brought to his knees by a woman.
(And of course, even further back than that, in the Iliad, we see Helen’s face launching a thousand ships.)
Stories like this are useful, because they dispel the pop-feminist myth that men under patriarchy oppressed women simply because they wanted to maximize their own benefits and minimize those of women. Rather, if anything, it was often viewed as lessening the power differential between men and women, a sort of affirmative action, if you will. Of course, the extent to which these stories were merely post-hoc rationalizations for pre-existing social structures can be debated. But they do serve as acknowledgement of what everyone intuitively knows: that women possess immense social power, just as men possess immense physical power. Moreover, they demonstrate that participants in patriarchy were conscious of this.
raakaa
1yr ago
Unfortunately, I’m not able to watch your videos right now, but I’ll give them a look when I can.
In general, while I do appreciate the fact that the beauty found in mathematics and the sciences is becoming more accessible, I still disagree for two reasons. First: as accessible as they might be becoming, I believe that there’s still a large gap between the number of people who can appreciate even a Numberphile video versus the number of people who walk through Grand Central Station and are awestruck.
And that leads me to my second reason: I am inclined to believe that the aesthetic experience that most people get from beautiful architecture is qualitatively different from that which they’d receive from, say, reading about advances in biology. Don’t you think that a medieval peasant is more likely to be floored and filled with the awe of God when they walk into a Gothic cathedral than when they are informed of the finer points of scholastic philosophy? Maybe I’m just typical-minding here, but I wager that for most people monumental and beautiful architecture just hits something primal in a way that more intellectual beauty does not. And if there’s a cross-over point where the latter sort of art does bear greater aesthetic fruit than the former, I would also suppose that it comes at a point inaccessible to the majority of the human population.
I do understand your position. Though I don’t deal in math nearly as advanced as you, there are times when, at the end of a long derivation, some elegant formula will pop out, and I’ll find myself floored. But I fear that it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to find this same joy.
You might be satisfied by a world of physical ugliness as long as there still remains mathematical beauty, but what about the 99.999% of people in America alone (let alone the world) who can’t appreciate the latest advances in higher category theory? What do you say to them? “Shit guys, sorry, but you should’ve gotten a math degree and/or been born with a 2SD higher IQ lol”? If you’re coming from a position of unrepentant elitism (and I write this without any intent to sneer; I know a good number of people who subscribe to this ideology and would describe themselves as such) who doesn’t care one whit about the aesthetic deprivation of the proles, then this is consistent, I guess. But I can’t get behind this view, and I suspect that most who decry the course that modern architecture has taken think similarly to me in this.
raakaa
1yr ago
I think a huge part of the negative reaction to the movie as being "man-hating" is due to people with incredibly poor media literacy who seem to think that the filmmakers' farcical representation of Barbieland is a straight-faced endorsement of their idea of a utopia, which I think it pretty obviously is not.
Unfortunately, if you are making media to be consumed by the public, then you must be considering how the public is likely to interpret your media, regardless of whether they live up to your standards of media literacy. If I take a flight to Germany and wave around a flag emblazoned with a certain symbol auspicious to Buddhists, then I’ll likely be arrested anyway despite any claims of benign intentions on my part.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve heard both the “men bad” interpretation and the “it’s actually a satire” interpretation from others who have watched it. Maybe my friend with the former interpretation, who took offense to the film, is simply lacking in media literacy. But for every one of him, there’s a woman equally lacking in media literacy who also interprets the film as professing “men bad”— and is inclined to agree with this message, and modify their behavior in life accordingly.
I recently read this article, which seems to have awoken some latent bleeding heart in me. As a result, it’s got me thinking about wealth redistribution, whence the following questions:
- What are some of the best “utilitarian” arguments against greater wealth redistribution in America? (When I say “utilitarian”, I don’t actually mean calculating out the utils involved— but I do mean arguments other than moral ones like “people ought be able to retain the results of their labor” (which argument I am particularly sympathetic to around tax season).) What are estimates of the argmax of the Laffer curve? Is there an inverse relationship between “innovation” and income tax rate that might explain why America is far more of a tech hub than Sweden? That sort of argument is what I would be looking for.
- Are there any low-overhead charities out there where you can mostly-directly send money to poorer people? Preferably with options to filter by criteria such as number of kids, marital status, etc.
I understand that this post betrays a real naïveté in both economic knowledge and worldly experience— so I’ll admit that I’m a decent bit embarrassed about making it, but I figure that a Small-Scale Question Sunday thread is the best place to ask this.
raakaa
1yr ago
Apparently, that extension doesn’t support Mandarin or Japanese (among other languages), so I refrained from suggesting it (in case the OP’s primary use case for Twitter translation is, say, understanding what Japanese artists are saying on their feeds).
Regardless, the fact that it works locally for the languages that it does support is still a testament to the pace of NLP research. How does it compare to something like DeepL, in terms of translation quality?
raakaa
1yr ago
It looks like on Firefox, there’s this extension that supports Google Translate and DeepL. Never used it, though, so I can’t vouch for its quality.
raakaa
1yr ago
In the article is a quote from the LARPing group’s own self-description:
"Our LARP explores the mythos of the American Dream - or more so the Broken American Dream. Players experience human stories, portraying characters with unique backgrounds. They face their daily life and the issues that come with it. Some are universal or similar to the ones in Poland (such as struggling to provide for your family or combating addiction), and some are specific to the U.S. (such as reliance on private health care or the prevalence of firearms). We wanted to create an immersive experience about facing those hardships both as an individual and as a community, about making impossible choices, about finding your place in your small homeland.
Emphasis mine. Whether it’s outright mockery or something more sympathetic isn’t so easy to tell from just the article (the quoted description makes it seem the latter, the donut-wielding cop provides evidence for the former), but even if the LARPers talk about the universality of the American redneck struggle, I still don’t read this as an identification with redneck culture itself. And it’s certainly not a celebration.
raakaa
1yr ago
Yep, that’s the big irony. Of course, the most parsimonious way you can analyze it is as an out-group/far-group thing: Middle Easterners are the far-group, Anglophone anti-LGBTers are the out-group.
raakaa
1yr ago
But that’s not the point of painting the bench rainbow-colored in the first place. It’s not just that the activists painting the bench would personally prefer to see a rainbow bench— they’re explicitly doing so in order for other people to see it. “We’re loud, we’re proud” and all that. If such augmented reality goggles emerged with an option to display the bench brown, then that would be tarred as homophobic.
In fact, this hypothetical almost perfectly recalls that actual time when mods for a Spiderman game that removed rainbow flags from the game were scrubbed from all mainstream modding websites.
raakaa
1yr ago
Jews and Muslims won’t accept the idea of compromise or shirk because they have true book and therefore you simply cannot violate the book and be a good believer.
The problem comes when you can find increasingly contorted justifications using the book to (attempt to) excuse whatever behavior you want. For example, this article describes how the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly, a rather large organization of rabbis adhering to the movement/branch of Conservative Judaism, voted on specific rituals to be used in gay Jewish weddings. While the rabbis do pay lip-service to the Book, they ignore its spirit. For example:
“We acknowledge that these partnerships are distinct from those discussed in the Talmud as ‘according to the laws of Moses and Israel,’” said Nevins, referring to the words used in kiddushin, “but we celebrate them with the same sense of holiness and joy as that expressed in heterosexual marriages.”
So yes, there is an acknowledgement that these marriages aren’t quite by the Book— but who really cares, there’s still the holiness and joy, and certainly no reference to Leviticus 18:22. And by the way, sufficient wordcelery will do away with that prohibition directly.
That’s why Kulak, in this article, seems to be emphasizing not the Book so much as the culture. Words can be twisted; culture cannot.
Indeed, the poster two replies up doesn’t seem to be stating this prescriptively, but others explicitly do. For instance, consider this famous speech delivered by Robert Heinlein at the U.S. Naval Academy to soon-to-be officers: he explicitly says that male sacrifice is a moral duty because a tribe deprived of men can survive, while one without women and children is doomed for extinction. (I’d provide an exact quote, but for some reason, pasting isn’t working on iOS. God bless Apple; it really just works.)
raakaa
1yr ago
The thing about lockdowns, at least in the U.S., is that their continued existence after COVID was found to be non-lethal wasn’t merely a costly mistake, but a form of political imprisonment. This may sound dramatic; let me explain.
In May 2020, police were kicking kids out of playgrounds in my blue town while marches and protests in memory of George Floyd were not only allowed, but encouraged. Remember, The Science declared that “racism is a bigger public health issue than COVID”. This unmasked (heh) the true nature of the lockdowns: citizens were imprisoned unless they were to participate in Party-approved political functions. Note that I do not suggest that the lockdowns were concocted from the beginning in order to achieve this aim; no cabal of doctors got together and crafted this plan back in March. But the effect of the lockdowns was equivalent to political imprisonment.
That’s why I have more anger towards the lockdown and its proponents than I would harbor if they were merely another entry in the list of costly mistakes committed by our technocrat rulers. It is precisely because they were wielded as a political weapon that they ought be scorned as one.
raakaa
1yr ago
Being charitable, let's consider this post in the context of (pseudo-?)Impassionata's previous top-level post post-return to TheMotte:
[R]ighteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity [sic] of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.
To me, the argument seems to be as follows. "Only nerds think of humans as rational agents", so they are blind to their own irrational or unjust impulses. Thus, when they follow the proper script for interacting with girls, they think that they ought be rewarded for acting in accordance with this rational system of "rules". As such, when they are justly pushed into a locker instead, they have no clue why. The hero jock, on the other hand, is able to cut through the bullshit, understand the nerd's diabolical motives for what they are (motives that the nerd has successfully wordcel'd himself into not even understanding himself), and intuitively punish him for this, stepping outside the bounds of reason.
Now, Control-F nerds with heterodox high-decouplers, who coolly and rationally debate the viability of ethnostates or the lack of consciousness in women. Any convincing arguments put forth are nothing but mere post-hoc rationalizations of preexisting evil beliefs, just as the nerd's talking-to-women script is merely a means of covering up impure desires. It's similar to the whole "Elephant in the Brain" thesis: any debate is not meant to arrive at the truth, but rather, to persuade others and even oneself that their own cause is the truth. As such, it is the role of the just person to ignore all of this reasoned argumentation and use whatever tools are necessary in order to silence hateful views.
...
I personally am skeptical of this thesis. Is conversation and debate really that futile? If so, then pseudo-Impassionata is wasting his time by engaging in conversation and debate here. Even he must recognize then, assuming that he's not just trolling or motivated by a primal desire to win online arguments, that there is utility in debate. At the very least, it can cut away the cruft that accumulates on top of an issue, revealing the fundamental loci of disagreement beneath. But I won't waste time on this, because more has been better written on this subject.
Instead, I'll indulge in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis: what's with this common theme of bullying nerds? Indeed, a while back, either here or in one of our previous venues, there was a post noticing a tendency for masculine posturing among a certain subset of progressives, a fixation on positioning themselves in apposition to loser dork hateful nerds. I believe that the post was written in the context of reproductively viable worker ants, which makes the fixation ironic: anyone involved in that has to be blind to not see that they're a nerd. So what gives? One hypothesis is that it's an attempt by Theater Kids (I would be grateful to anyone who knows where the comment introducing that framing is) to gain some amount of status by putting down the other group that seems to inhabit the same rung of the social ladder, Math Geeks. This would explain both the odd posturing and the focus on the "Hollywood" (as anti_dan put it above) narrative of jocks versus nerds. Maybe throw in that one "high school is the last time in your life that you can be someone" comment as well? (Again, I'd be grateful to anyone with a link.)
I don't know how much this hypothesis is actually worth anything. But in an effort to avoid merely sneering, I'll flesh it out a bit: I do think that an underrated determinant of which side Very Online people take in the Culture War is the degree to which they enjoy playing social games. Anecdotal evidence:
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In my own experience, one of the factors that repelled me from Team Progress was noticing that the rules offered by progressives for dating as a man do not align with the actions of the most successful men.
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A post (again, I don't have the link) on morlock-holmes.tumblr.com that I remember reading talked about a play, which was to star a white male lead, in which the playwright queried a diverse group of progressives on how to write this straight white male; the answers were all things like "Make him a good listener", "Make sure he stays in his lane", "Make him active in ceding to women's insights". The kicker is that when the play was finished, all the same members of the group hated the lead for his annoying lack of backbone.
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That one comment here on TheMotte saying that when whites move into a neighborhood, it's gentrification; when whites move out, it's white flight; when whites live among PoC, it's colonization; when whites live apart, it's segregation: so where are whites supposed to live?
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The frequent thesis that the constant "firmware updates" for progressive terminology are important from a status signaling perspective.
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The "self-hating" whites from "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" who don't actually hate all whites.
The idea tying together these scattered examples is that progressive orthodoxy rewards people who are able to read between the lines, take things seriously but not literally, navigate complex social environments. If you're the kind of guy who can recite a litany of rules for dating without slipping up, but then know exactly when to break them in practice, then you're rewarded by progressivism: your less-adept competition is filtered out. If you're able to tolerate and write screeds against whites despite being white yourself, then you're rewarded: you draw suspicion towards less-progressive whites, while proving that you are "one of the good ones". If you can orate against the evil of toxic masculinity while still being able to take charge when it counts, then you're rewarded by progressivism.
Hence why Theater Kids are more progressive and why Math Geeks, who axiomatize and theorem-prove, are more likely to fall into heterodoxy. It's no surprise, then, that the progressive is arguing via indirect social shaming ("you all are nerds who deserve to be shoved into lockers by Cool Jocks like me") against rational debate.
Does this idea make sense? Does it accord with your own experiences?
raakaa
1yr ago
Very reasonable analysis. Thinking about the younger second-generation/first-generation-but-moved-at-a-young-age Chinese immigrants that I know, they tend to be rather anti-CCP (and although that doesn’t necessarily mean “pro-America”, it counts for something). And on the flipside, as you said, I’ve met young whites who are very careful to not say anything that might be recorded as being anti-China, lest it impair a future career eastward.
I suppose that in my original post, I was thinking more along the lines of young progressive second-generation immigrants I’ve met (often Latino) who loudly proclaim the evils of America (think “woke”, not “tankie”), put on affected accents, and declare their intent to return to their mother country — eventually. But lots of these progressive values that manifest as anti-Americanism are fundamentally American, and in the anecdotal cases I was remembering, it doesn’t look like the fabled return to the motherland is coming any time soon. I guess that I was conflating Blue-Tribe-ism with anti-Americanism.
There was the Ni’ihau Incident, in which the Japanese-Americans on the island immediately went to help the downed pilot — but in the context of, for example, the 442nd Infantry Regiment, this one incident can likely be counted as a rounding error.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder whether changing attitudes towards assimilationism also change the calculus. My cursory intuition: immigrants were far more pushed to assimilate back in the ‘30s and ‘40s than they are in these ‘20s, where metaphors like the “melting pot” are derided, the very notion of a “cricket test” is tarred as racist, and having a non-American (or better yet: non-Western) culture and family living in their Old Country is treated as a sign of moral worth. As such, I’d expect the number of “would-be-treacherous immigrants” to have risen.
(I recognize that this last bit contains a large number of rather unfounded assertions; I would like to provide concrete examples and details, but alas, phoneposting won’t allow me to do so.)
The key distinction here is that FTMs are generally viewed as victims (for instance, in your example) while MTFs are generally viewed as aggressors/perpetrators. This seems to be what DTulpa was getting at by saying that the former “don’t seem to threaten anybody”. As such, at least in my understanding, transphobia or feelings of disgust towards trans people or what have you is primarily directed towards MTFs.
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