2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
9hr ago
His AI opinions have not always been on point lol. That is literally impossible given his AI opinions have oscillated between almost every possible opinion on AI and the AI race over the last 4-5 years.
I don’t begrudge people who leave - someone once suggested Kulak was making like $25,000 a year from his Substack which seems crazy me, but good for him - but I have a fundamental difference of opinion with them in that (a) I’m not going to pay for some random Redditor’s political opinions, even if I agree with them and (b) when you start making money - even if it’s just a side hustle - the incentives change in a way that usually makes your writing worse, your reasoning more motivated, etc. It’s like paid mods, I don’t have an issue with them in principle, but I understand why people in the community see them as a cultural problem.
I also don’t understand who is actually paying all these people. I have money, but the idea of spending $300 a month to read a bunch of Motte-or-worse comments seems…bad? I guess people will say they subscribe to newspapers but the good papers actually do original journalism, reporting, have good sources etc and even the opinion columns are usually people who were actually accomplished in their fields, are still well connected, and so can present some analysis and credibility I can’t find on Reddit (or most of Substack).
2rafa
10hr ago
Yeah, we had the user viewpoint series a few years ago, but this would be slightly different - do it!
2rafa
13hr ago
Most attractive 24 year old women in Miami aren’t dating fifty year old men, or close to it. There is a larger sugar baby / p4p scene in Miami than any other major city in the US adjusted for the population, but it’s still quite limited. I think it’s more likely the circles you’re in. I know a few women with much older parters, but they tend to be average looking women who get out of a long relationship at, say, 32, don’t like the prospects their age, and settle for a much older man with kids already who funds a nice and relaxing rest of their life. A hot 24 year old, in general, knows that a silver fox today is the man whose ass you’re wiping in twenty years, when you’re still in your forties.
2rafa
14hr ago
I agree more than disagree, but it was a process with many stops and starts. It began in earnest in the 1880s and 1890s, reached its zenith in the decade after the first world war in certain subcultures of young urban women, then went stagnant (and partially reversed, depending on the exact place and metric) for a while through the late 1950s, then was reignited by the sexual revolution and its immediate precursors and finally - for the first time - filtered out into pretty much the entirety of western society by the late 1970s, which is when the sexual revolution actually reached most normal people.
This poster (Anglology / @Echetus / “James Lachrymose” [pen name]) is quite interesting.
He had a short lived podcast interviewing other obscure largely British right wing anons for a time, which was occasionally interesting. The strange thing is his accent. Despite portraying himself as English, he had a slight Eastern European twang, clearly resident in England but didn’t grow up there. It wasn’t a wealthy international school accent either, nor was it a BAP style fake in-joke. I’d be curious to know of his background; he writes occasionally for the mid[wit]brow British right wing magazine / failson collective that is The Critic.
2rafa
1d ago
I’ve met countless East Asian women who work in back office or clerical / admin jobs, as paralegals, in other low tier white collar jobs.
2rafa
1d ago
There is no strong Jewish identity outside Zionism other than in actual Haredi Judaism, which is mostly apathetic on this question but which really has nothing to do with the political left and sees the entire secular world, Jewish and gentile, as corrupt and degenerate.
Most liberal American Jews will and are abandoning Zionism. They are doing it perhaps slower than the left would like, but faster than one might have anticipated given half these people literally went on birthright. In the end it’s a relatively small price to pay, because Western Jews never sacrificed or lost anything for supporting Israel. There was never any cost to it, it’s on the other side of the world from America, and America is too racially, religiously and culturally diverse for extreme, violent antisemitism to become likely as state policy.
What, an unholy alliance of hotep black nationalists, 74% indigenous Mexican Catholics, Arabs, trans leftists and racist Irish and Italian Ellis Island people are going to commit some kind of inquisition against Jewish-Americans for supporting Israel? That seems about the least stable political coalition of all time and one that probably wouldn’t agree on anything except that one issue. Antisemitism is rising, and will probably continue to from the nadir of the 1990s (although I don’t think we’re close to mid-century levels yet, let alone something that would imply actual physical risk), but there are a lot of other kinds of medium sized ethnic animosity in America.
My guess is that two thirds of American Jews, already secularizing fast, will abandon any remaining Zionist aspect of their identities and remain generic progressive libs. The remaining third will be split into the fast growing Haredi populations which with the exception of Chabad might swear neutrality in the even of any serious state anti-Israel sentiment, but probably will just stay out of it, and the Modern Orthodox / Religious Zionist / maybe some more right wing conservative Jews, who will remain Zionist, and who will increasingly just come to be seen as the ‘Israeli diaspora’.
2rafa
1d ago
Third worldism was largely invented by merging ideas held by Indian nationalists, later Maoists, Fanon, indigenous rights activists in erstwhile Western European colonies and so on together in opposition, primarily, to both the ‘West’ and Soviet communism which was seen as too imperial and, eventually as the racial angle developed, essentially a white empire ruling over an ethnically diverse working class. The contribution of Jews to third worldism is and was substantially less than their contribution to ur-Marxism, to anarchism, or indeed to Leninism / state communist ideas.
2rafa
5d ago
Yeah and it's probably why the story isn't going to be finished. The polite thing to do would be to share the description with the fans or let somebody else finish the story.
2rafa
5d ago
I don’t think it was my fault. I just said it was racist. English was never that user’s problem, he clearly spoke it fluently and wrote it well (long before AI writing), and that insult was solely prompted by the knowledge that he was Indian. Hlynka couldn’t even insult him to his ‘face’, but had to use that particularly cowardly passive aggressive bait line; and he knew exactly what he was saying. My definition of racism here, which I have always understood to be bannable, is directly insulting another user, without evidence, solely on the basis of their (purported) race, rather than on the basis of their argument.
For what it’s worth, you can go back to the thread and read what I said. Beyond that, I don’t recall having any contact with the mods at all on this (or any other similar) matter, and I wasn’t the only person saying that he crossed the line in that thread.
I criticized Hlynka for that comment and some similar ones about @self_made_human, clearly it was the kind of vulgar racism that was beneath both him and this community in general. I agree with @Amadan that it’s a difficult question. Maybe we should have let him stay but asked that he consider a sincere apology. That doesn’t really make sense on a big subreddit, but in a community of less than a hundred regulars it might. Maybe the line should just have been a bit more firm - like all his posts go in the ‘user review’ queue before being approved and three other users have to check the ‘neutral’ or above box before they’re released without a ‘deserves a ban’. Maybe mods should have more latitude, for some problem users, to just delete rule breaking posts, and record them instead in some kind of log.
I’m not saying any of these is the solution. There are probably better ideas. But what @bro said is also true. The central mod principle is no heat without light. Even as Dase was being rude, he was still responding to the argument and making a case, it wasn’t just an insult or kulaks calling everyone he doesn’t like a racial slur forever.
2rafa
5d ago
I’d let @RandomRanger decide. Obviously it was a direct insult, but it didn’t use slurs and had a certain creative charm to it. Harassment isn’t a single argument or even a number of them that end up in the trading of insults. I don’t know if Dase has been as rude to me but he certainly has been rude, I can’t say I’ve ever been offended (the only thing I really don’t like it when people do is not reply to my long and thoughtful replies to them, but that is also a sin I commit far too often, so I cannot judge).
I would say to me, Dase and the erstwhile Hlynka existed within the ecosystem of the shared community which we (and Ranger) inhabit. There is room for cranks, even rude ones, there, in part because people know and can avoid them if they want to (and the block feature works well for this), and because they have contributed before.
Dase is a fragmented and often very wrong thinker. He flip flops on China every other week from bullish to bearish and back again, he was wrong about the Ukraine war, about much around Trump, about a bunch of other stuff. (I am not claiming my own predictions are better). He gets very mad when you criticize his ideas. Ban him for a week, if he’s rude ban him again. If he starts posting stuff like the above under random RandomRanger comments, then permaban him, but that is quite different from a heated argument. Few of us, I think, and certainly not me, can say they’ve never resorted to personal insults here before.
I really hate the way The Diplomat is written. I don’t really know how to describe it, but if I did I’d have to call it something like ‘midwit core’. It feels like Scandal, which imagined itself as a political thriller but which was actually about the super hot protagonist secretly being the most powerful person in the world and hypercompetent and hot and every gorgeous guy wanted her for her brains AND beauty. Okay, yeah I remember Wattpad too. Scandal would also randomly drop in obscure references to domestic or international politics in one liners to make the show seem smarter than it was.
There is just the sense in The Diplomat, too, that the writer is so smug for occasionally throwing in a line of obscure Wikipedia or Whitehall or Foreign Policy or intelligence circle / tradecraft stuff or Britishisms she doesn’t really understand and thinking that this has lent this ridiculous thriller a certain realism. For example, the writer’s grasp of the British class system, Westminster intrigue, the makeup of the Conservative and Labour parties, what the right and the left want, is so warped, it’s like the foreign correspondent for the New York Times in London spent six hours editing the script. It’s not about ‘realism’ - the average American political thriller that features the UK is entirely unobjectionable even in its ridiculousness because it doesn’t pretend to understand domestic politics. The Diplomat will throw in references to niche recent historical events (not like Brexit), specific newspapers or conferences, an Oxford college, a minor public school, a members club, a medium sized financial institution, later US politics too, but in a way that like an LLM would when it’s being overly niche in an unrealistic way, with no background, with no deep cultural understanding of anything (“give me a random deep cut reference that only someone in the New England upper middle class would understand. Make no mistakes”). I note that the creator and writer worked on later seasons of the West Wing, when it got much worse for this, because even when Sorkin is at his worst (which is often) his dialogue, while unrealistic and ultra-liberal, has a certain weight on background that The Diplomat just lacks.
I also find the show’s politics particularly grating. It’s not that it’s like a final vestige of Hillary Clinton era ‘neoliberalism’ or whatever we’re calling it now. I literally liked The Newsroom, I’m clearly not politically picky with my television. I think it’s that this is a prestige drama that sees itself very firmly as imparting a Very Specific Message That is Very Important, when actually it’s a poorly plotted (loosely) “political” thriller where the villains are perennially either venal Biden staffer types who just want power or some loose constellation of bumbling evil ‘far right’. The irony is that I think the main villain is actually an attempt by the writers to cast a Hillary Clinton type as bad, her paranoia damning the world if our heroic and very similar Powerful Woman doesn’t stop her, retroactively excusing 2016 in an “it wasn’t the ideas or the type of person, just the wrong person” kind of a way.
Keri Russell is good. She was always good and the problems with this show are 99% a bad script. Her husband’s character is probably the best in the show.
2rafa
6d ago
Fleabag is a very good example. I find that many men seem to kind of hate Fleabag (the character, if not the show) though. Which is not to say that the character is meant to be particularly likeable, obviously she mistreats people around her all the time, but she is fundamentally sympathetic in the sense that she is acting out and has a terrible relationship with women because of the early death of her mother, she is earnest in her own way, she isn’t a caricature of a horrible person. I wonder if it’s because Fleabag is kind of the story of one of those evil BPD cheating whores some men online like to complain about, except told from her perspective instead of just his.
I agree, but at the same time different kinds of people exist and I think a small community interested in the discussion of controversial things is going to have to draw the line somewhere. I have no disagreement with the rules or moderation broadly. I think the moderators do an excellent job and I pretty much agree with them on everything.
However, I think that temp bans solve issues with some problematic regulars in a way that is repeatable without resorting to permanent banning. For example, we are all here to participate in a conversation. If a topic is very busy because it is interesting or because something big is happening, a three day ban is essentially a permanent exclusion from that conversation. You cannot reply to your interlocutors, cannot defend your arguments, cannot make that interesting point you just thought of. It’s also embarrassing although I agree that some people have no shame.
It is unclear to me what a permanent ban of someone who has been a valued and interesting (in the sense that they have started and participated in lengthy conversations that have involved most or all of us, have added valuable information to those, have shared interesting or underrepresented views, have challenged some arguments in a smart way that might have gone unchallenged - and Dase and Hlynka both did all of these at times) member of this community accomplishes. If they are actively harassing another regular of greater, similar or at least comparable quality, then it is a simple choice - at some point the community will need to pick one or the other and it is only fair that it be the guilty party. But if they’re just being rude or getting very angry about something and have started to be nasty with the insults in the replies, banning them for a few days or a week seems better.
By the way, I don’t remember but I think I was actually in favor of banning Hlynka at the time. If I was, my mind has changed.
It would be a mistake to ban Dase just as it was a mistake to ban Hlynka. Every community can afford a few regular cranks and they can be banned for a few days to let them cool off if they’re being annoying.
I would say that the line for permabanning a regular and frequent contributor (of more than 3+ years) should be direct harassment of another valuable regular. Everything else can be handled with judicious temporary bans.
2rafa
7d ago
Yeah, and I’d say while she isn’t ’judged unfairly’ she’s both not really the protagonist and ends the show in a very unfavorable position.
It seems to me that for many writers the fun is kind of in making up the story as you go along. JK Rowling who has had a pretty consistent regular output for 30+ years now, along with those thriller writers like Coben who churn out books on the regular, seem to do this - you can tell because they all suffer from the kind of plot holes that would be easily avoided if the whole story was very tightly plotted before the bulk of the writing began. They will usually have an idea of the vague events and ending, but most of what happens in terms of scene to scene or location to location stuff is probably decided at the time of writing.
By contrast, I think Martin probably suffers from the opposite problem. My suspicion is that he has known exactly how this story plays out in relatively minute detail (whether or not he shared all that detail with the show creators) for a long time because his great joy is world building, to the point that the actual writing is no longer a creative exercise in the same way. All that is left is hanging the prose of dialogue, description and second-to-second mechanical stage direction on the frame that he’s had in his head for many years, which is distinctly unsatisfying when one’s passion is imagining the setting and the grand sweep of events therein.
Classic pulp fiction and YA and mystery and adventure writers who churned out hundreds of books almost never cared about worldbuilding. Agatha Christie, Clive Cussler, these types had supporting characters come and go, backstories shift, large background elements were taken up and discarded, continuity was often broken with regularity to the point that even the ages of the protagonists often didn’t seem to make sense.
2rafa
7d ago
Part of it is that audiences consider female characters with major flaws to be unsympathetic. For example, there are many widely liked male main characters who cheat on their loving wives (Don Draper etc). This isn’t necessarily portrayed positively, but it doesn’t detract from their masculine appeal really.
How many female protagonists regularly cheat on their loving husbands? It’s almost unheard of. When it happens, they’re universally decried by men and women as a total bitch unless EXTREME extenuating factors apply (like the husband is very abusive or disappears for 20 years).
2rafa
8d ago
What I’m really excited for is the actual Holodeck / Tron / what people thought future virtual worlds would be like in the 80s / type stuff where it just generates fully immersive, coherent, endless, well-written virtual worlds on the fly. I don’t even need VR, just an endless Red Dead II tier world
2rafa
8d ago
Yeah, but that goes back to the original argument where the woman was suggesting that men writing these woman characters will have them be hypercompetent in some ways and then be, say, a terrible mother or give them crippling neuroses. That doesn’t seem too different to Holmes being a hypercompetent detective but also an addict or Poirot being a hypercompetent detective but also a neurotic asshole
Hypercompetence is generally uninteresting and - even when it’s interesting - it’s mainly interesting to men. Not because men are more competent, but I think because men like examining very complex and well functioning machines; men will watch hours-long YouTube videos on steam engines and industrial machinery and pore over complex diagrams and cross sections and so on. The ‘hypercompetent man’ is essentially just another one of these machines, the man who reads about these famous generals or whatever is seeing them less as characters or even as human beings and more as versions of those videos where the railroad track connector perfectly switches between the different rails so that trains can go in different directions or something.
If I imagine a hypercompetent woman, like my mother, who held down a very demanding job, had three children, cooked dinner most nights, would pick us up from school on the way back from meetings and then often go back to work, was always working on like 17 different side projects on the weekend, baked sourdough bread, taught yoga for fun twice a week and still attended absolutely everything, her life isn’t actually very interesting. Impressive? Certainly, but these kinds rarely have the tragedy or the strife to be compelling protagonists.
10 Year Anniversary Celebration (it was actually earlier this year, but we can still call it the ten year I guess) would be fun.
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