KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
1d ago
Not directly, but someone with actual academic ability could have held that professorship, and several classes of students were given substandard education so that activists within the institutions could feel good about themselves. If you mapped it all out, you could probably argue for a fair amount of diffuse damage, and a lot of diffused responsibility. But since our systems aren't very good at reckoning that sort of thing (and are currently uninterested in even trying), the scrutiny fell mostly on Arday. I would not want to find myself in a position like that, watching my entire world crumble because I'd been promoted far beyond my competence and had been found out.
KingOfTheBailey
1d ago
Tragic, and @faceh's sign needs a lot more tapping. The demand for diversity exceeds its supply, with awful consequence.
I'm reminded of the casting of Domino in Deadpool 2 (2018). In the comics, an image search shows her on covers in a variety of pale tones ranging from Caucasian-white to body-paint-white. The movie cast a woman with mixed German/African-American ancestry and gave her a big Afro. Then, they had to find a stunt double and tried to match the actress's sex and ethnicity. They went with Joi Harris, a motorcycle racer with no previous stunt experience. Domino's Afro meant Joi was performing stunts without a helmet, and during a take she lost control of the bike, was thrown through a plate glass window, and died.
KingOfTheBailey
2d ago
There can be no reconciliation without truth. This is a phrase that comes up in indigenous affairs, and advocates for indigenous peoples use it to mean that there cannot be a reconciliation between indigenous populations and the states that oppressed them without there first being a truth-telling and a serious reckoning with what was actually done. I believe that it applies here. "Woke 1 was crazy"; OK, which parts were crazy? Who said them? Who believed them? Will there be a reckoning? Will the people who pushed crazy ideas be kept away from any levers of power, institutional or otherwise? Or, instead, is the Democrat machinery trying to put out a message of "whoopsie daisy, we went a bit far there sowwy" until the next time they can go for the big prize? Based on how little has come back on the architects of the COVID response, I think the answer will be just "whoopsie daisy, sorry, vote for us again please".
Given that there's still an active fight over men playing in the WNBA, the DSA seems to have a lot of influence within the Democrats, and I'd estimate not even 10% of the downstream cultural impacts of "Woke 1" have receded from the high-water mark of ~2022, I don't think anyone has won. To look at some concrete policy examples: Canada and several US states still allow abortions with no gestational limit (i.e. "full-term abortions") and the UK has decriminalized full-term abortions; trans self-id remains the law of the land in e.g. large parts of North and South America, Ireland, Western Europe, Australia, and Scandinavia; land acknowledgements are common enough that Wikipedia documents them as present in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and parts of the US; and the concept that a nation should enforce its borders and deport people who violate them still remains controversial. Software has eaten and now runs the world, and the world of software is still as hard-line progressive as it was in 2022, both in the open-source world and in the halls of the major tech companies. Wikipedia, the world's reference to large parts of reality, remains staunchly progressive; and the cultural bias in the software world will absolutely tilt AI developers' sense of whether a model is "biased", and so when LLMs replace Wikipedia as the default person's answer to questions, it will also put a progressive tilt through the world's understanding of itself.
There's no "won" to assign to any "we", not yet. The vibes are shifting, and most of that shift has been through (and because of) Trump's second term, but IMHO he's got a good chance to flub the midterms after making a mess of Iran, and any shift in electoral performance will be read as a bellweather. Even if he performs well in the midterms and is succeeded by a Republican, I wouldn't say there's any "win" to call until there's evidence of a sustained and durable cultural shift. What became "Woke 1.0" was latent in the culture for some time before it erupted, reactivating people who were sympathetic to the "politically correct" era of culture but mixing their memes with the Tumblr generation, as the latter graduated from being "just kids on college campuses". That generation built on groundwork laid in the 60s, where the left was able to push a lot, make a lot of counter-cultural headway, and when the high water rolled back they somehow landed college professorships and dodged pretty much any serious consequence.
KingOfTheBailey
4d ago
Yes, but if it's been documented as happening since the 1970s even on Wikipedia, ideology over raw capitalism has been a thing for quite some time.
KingOfTheBailey
4d ago
I think you can call Floyd's death the trigger but not the cause, because TV programming has been willing to purge things that red tribe likes at least since the 1970s.
KingOfTheBailey
4d ago
Doyle was fond of that word, too, and I still snigger at the thought of Watson being unable to contain himself while conversing with Holmes.
KingOfTheBailey
4d ago
It could be that you grew up in a much more literate culture than the current generation, whose parents are more phone-captured, whereas younger generations got hooked on/left with games much sooner, or just had a thinner reading culture in general and didn't pass the SF/F around their friend groups?
KingOfTheBailey
4d ago
I suppose you could consider The FAA's DEI Hiring Scandal as Bayesian evidence to get a sense of how the aviation industry might be thinking about DEI. That might make someone much less keen to start logging hours and spending dollars with a flight school.
KingOfTheBailey
4d ago
That is likely a true characterization of ATC's motives on the radio, but if anything I think it makes Richard's response more damning. If the path to pilothood is as stacked as the path to ATC was, I could see why he'd say "nah I'm a white guy" and be correct to do so.
KingOfTheBailey
5d ago
The reason it became a talking point (more among memers I think, more than the online right generally and certainly not the white/ethnats) was that he did a barrel roll, and when ATC suggested he might be able to get a piloting job after landing the plane, Richard replied "Nah, I'm a white guy". The fact that he was interested in seeing whales and crashing the plane away from people to hurt also meant his actions didn't get tainted by public safety or terrorism discussions like GP's hypothetical Tyrone example would have. Instead, he came across more like a sad guy with a screw loose rather than a resentful loser, a normal-ish guy ground down by life (and to at least some extent DEI), and a member of the lost generation Compact Magazine wrote about in its description of a different industry.
KingOfTheBailey
5d ago
I am beginning to think that retrospectively de-canonizing the Star Wars EU was actually one of the best things Disney ever did for that universe. Because it's now non-canon, they don't have the incentive to go back and inject this sort of nonsense into it all.
KingOfTheBailey
6d ago
I think you have to inculcate a sense of duty and noblesse oblige in whomever you enfranchise. Doing this for a smaller number of people is obviously easier, and then the system can gain legitimacy if the fruits of good governance are visible to the people. A benevolent and enlightened ruler is then simplest, so why expand that power at all? Expanding the franchise is defense in depth against an one idiot or tyrant wielding power irresponsibly or ineffectively. But at some point the expected value of the marginal additional voter becomes negative; I think this is least controversially demonstrated by proposals to lower the voting age.
KingOfTheBailey
7d ago
Sounds like the world of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I would like to know more. The problem I have with it is that it is vulnerable to gerrymandering in a way that universal suffrage is not. Example: If you want right-wing governments forever you increase the difficulty of the community service or exam options.
KingOfTheBailey
7d ago
Old-school LoL? Don't tell me such dangerous things!
KingOfTheBailey
7d ago
KingOfTheBailey
7d ago
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general
Some interesting commentary on this point, from the GPT-2 era.
Robin Hanson’s post Better Babblers is very relevant here. He claims, and I don’t think he’s exaggerating, that a lot of human speech is simply generated by “low order correlations”, that is, generating sentences or paragraphs that are statistically likely to come after previous sentences or paragraphs:
After eighteen years of being a professor, I’ve graded many student essays. And while I usually try to teach a deep structure of concepts, what the median student actually learns seems to mostly be a set of low order correlations. They know what words to use, which words tend to go together, which combinations tend to have positive associations, and so on. But if you ask an exam question where the deep structure answer differs from answer you’d guess looking at low order correlations, most students usually give the wrong answer.
KingOfTheBailey
12d ago
No Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?
KingOfTheBailey
14d ago
https://bash-org-archive.com/?43
I would've thought someone would've done something with the "Tupac Shakuras" pun by now.
KingOfTheBailey
14d ago
Also, in the locally-hosted ~1-2 graphics card space, their Gemma 4 local models have been quite good for general-purpose use, even if its tool use was a bit broken. (Qwen3.6, or the really big Qwen 3.5 is still the practical frontier for coding AFAICT.)
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
Also if you tranq someone out, they're often considered "dead" with a different label.
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
I don't think I ever levelled up pistol in many of my playthroughs. One reason is that too many useful weapons use the rifle skill, including the shotguns, and the other is that if you unspend the points on pistol at character creation, the game gives you the skill anyway.
I think both your weapons: low-tech skill and your level of combat strength affect how easily you can break things.
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
You are making many of the same choices I do.
Not sure if you want advice on cheesing the skill system, but
KingOfTheBailey
19d ago
It depends. Singular "they" is a motte-and-bailey among lefty groups that support custom pronouns, where the motte is "singular they has been around since the 14th century, you chud" and the bailey is "people should be able to identify themselves with 'they' as a nonbinary gendered pronoun".
I think I'm fairly close to this also. There's the Hunter Biden Laptop Story, where the NY Post's reporting was suppressed before the election, and it's even documented on Wikipedia. There's also the suspicious timing of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial results, which in a pre-mandate world would have handed a massive win to Trump just before the election, via Operation Warp Speed; I've seen it argued that it was political, that there was "no evidence" it was political, and that changes to the assessment schedule could plausibly have been done for scientifically justified reasons. I can't find a smoking gun document either way; interested people can probably argue forever about that one without ever making progress. TIME Magazine also came out in Feb 2021 and laid out how they "fortified" the election result to make it all-but-impossible to contest, revealing significant command-and-control capabilities among those who wanted to see a Biden presidency.
Do I believe they did anything so crude as to manipulate the count or the voting machines themselves? Not really; I think isolated manipulation is almost certain and uncoordinated widespread manipulation plausible, but I don't think anyone will be able to meet the standard of proof to convince anyone who has already chosen a side. I do think the environment in 2020 was stacked to favor D as much as possible as the country went to the polls. On top of that, vote-by-mail is always less secure than in-person-only elections, and there's a fair amount of means/motive/opportunity to harvest and submit ballots.
It is disappointing that the result of the contested 2020 election was not a bipartisan effort to secure the elections to the satisfaction of both parties, and that Voter ID seems to be impossible to pass even now.
Yeah she did a good job in the film, I agree. Unfortunately, the casting choice or the desire to diversify limited the pool of qualified stunt performers, with fatal results.
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