Well, the site got dumped. I have a bad habit of hoarding tabs, and I've got two pages worth of posts still open, so I'm going to copy-paste them here in raw text so people can salvage what they can. Anyone else who still has pages open, feel free to join in.
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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 OracleOutlook U Fiat justitia ruat caelum 4m ago The CounterGalloper should ask something like, "What do you think is your strongest claim?" and then target that.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 coffee_enjoyer U ☕️ 4m ago “He Gets Us” doesn’t get it
The Christian advertising campaign “He Gets Us” aired two ads during the Super Bowl. The first ad asks “who is my neighbor?” interspersed with shots of mostly unsavory characters. The one you don’t value and welcome, the ad answers, to the drums of glitch-y hip hop. The second ad is titled “Foot Washing” and proved quite controversial. Among the scenes of foot washing depicted in the ad, the following have generated the most discussion: a Mexican police officer washing the feet of a black man wearing gold chains in an alley; a “preppy” normie-coded girl washing the feet of an alt girl; a cowboy washing the feet of aNative American; a woman washing the feet of a girl seeking an abortion (with pro-life activists sidelined, their signs upside down); an oil worker washing the feet of an environmental activist; a woman washing the feet of an illegal migrant; a Christian woman washing the feet of a Muslim; and a priest washing the feet of a sassy gay man. This last ad has tenfold the views on YouTube, in large part due to the negative response by Christians and conservatives, for example Matt Walsh and Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry. Joel writes,
There’s a reason the “He Gets Us” commercial didn’t show a liberal washing the feet of someone in a MAGA hat, or a BLM protestor washing an officer’s feet. That would’ve been actually subversive. Because they were strictly following oppressed v oppressor intersectionality guidelines.
I mostly agree with Joel. I think that this ad campaign is a failure.
The campaign fails to understand what brings people to a religion, or any social movement for that matter, or even any product, and as such it will not lead viewers to join their evangelical church or behave in the intended Christian manner. The audience of the Super Bowl is jointly comprised of people who care about what’s popular and cool, and people who care about remarkable feats of strength and dominance. These people are not going to be compelled to “love” their crack addict neighbor because you tell them to, because why would they listen to you? — there is no deeper motivation substantiated as for why they should do this.
In the Gospel, Jesus doesn’t say “love your neighbor because it’s nice to do that and I am guilting you”, he says “love your neighbor so as to be a son of God whom created you, and obtain His reward, or else risk judgment from the eternal judge.” This is reward-driven and status-seeking behavior, the reward being administered by God and the status being administered by the church body. In its context, it requires a belief that the person saying it is the ultimate judge of both life and afterlife. (To behave Christlike, the required motivation is the totalizing significance of Christ... hence the name of the religion.) The starting point of the faith is the most dominant and powerful person telling you to care for the poor, not some cheeky “you should care about the poor because you should.”
Again, the Super Bowl viewer cares about what is popular and what is dominant. That’s normal, I’m not criticizing it. So could you not pull anything out of the religious tradition to depict the popularity and dominance of God? What, you feel bad playing off of FOMO to get people to your church? Jesus did just that on many occasions. 1, 2, 3, 4. Do you somehow feel guilty describing Jesus as glorious and powerful? What about the 72,000 angels he commands? You don’t want to tell the viewer that their prayers will be answered, when every 10 minutes there’s an ad for betting and gambling? Viva Las Vegas, non Vita Christi. So it has to be asked, what exactly is the purpose of the campaign? How is this getting people to your church, or even just getting people to behave better? “Jesus gets me” because… biker smoker and crack addict?
If the object of the ad is to instill a sense of pity to compel the viewer to behave morally, then there’s clearly better ads to be made. Why not the focal point of the religion, the “innocent beautiful sacrificial lamb slain for our freedom” motif? The religion already comes with a built-in way to empower pity. You could say, “he gets us because he dealt with all our pain and temptation”, and that would make much more sense, while incentivizing the intended result of the ad. As is, I get the idea that the ad campaigners are afraid of any depiction of the life of Christ. I don’t get the sense that these people believe he is an essential ingredient in the moral life. And it’s fine if they don’t, that’s their business, but then dont make multimillion dollars ads about it. If Christ is indeed essential, then your multimillion dollar ad campaign ought to be directed toward producing an image of Christ that is alluring, whether this be through scenes of pity or scenes of power. In an attempt to make Christianity subversive you should not be subverting Christianity.
Back to Joel’s critique of the ad: yes, the foot washing ad is problematic. Beside the fact that it is misinterpreted (explained below), it only works to further demean the image of Christianity to an irreligious America. “If I become a Christian, I’ll have to wash an old man’s feet?” The only viewers that will be compelled here are the foot fetish enthusiasts piqued by the alt girl. You are not going to convince anyone to join your social movement by promising them the opportunity to wash a man’s feet in an alley.
The foot washing ad elevates the status of people whose lifestyle do not conjure images of Christianity, and whose status is already elevated. During a Super Bowl, it’s not subversive to elevate the status of a vaguely athletic black man wearing gold chains. The half time show was Usher! Neither is it subversive to show an oil rig worker subservient to an environmental activist. In whose world is an environmental activist not more privileged than a dust-coated oil worker? And a wholesome girl washing an alt girl’s feet is not subversive in an event inaugurated by Post Malone’s national anthem. No, no; show me a wealthy and attractive CEO washing the feet of his fat ugly employee, if you must. But don’t just reinstitute the high/low status dynamic already in place by the world.
My last criticism I’ll try to keep short: the theological ground of these ads is spurious. There is indeed a scene where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, but the writer goes out of his way to clarify the meaning behind it. It begins by mentioning that Jesus “loved his own who were in the world”, namely his followers present and future. The students are shocked when their superior attempts to perform this subservient act, until it is explained to be necessary. “If your Lord washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do just as I have done to you. I am not speaking of all of you [not Judas]; I know whom I have chosen.” So, rather than being an act that a Christian is compelled to do to anyone, we have an act that Christians do to one another, to cultivate humility and esteem for their brethren. They are told not to do it to merely self-labeled Christians, like Judas, let alone those of other faiths, as the ad suggests they do.
Foot washing was a culture-specific action that reflected the status hierarchy in a way that has no direct American parallel. An approximate American parallel would be for a boss to allow his employer to use his office, or for a boss to cook his employee’s family a dinner, or to clean his employee’s keyboard. The difficulty in understanding the event without careful study is the reason why it’s a mistake to depict it as a means of propagating your worldview. Nothing is accomplished. File this under “Christianity continues to die, but not before demeaning itself.”
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 Glassnoser U 5m ago · Edited 2m ago Your email link doesn't work.
This is interesting information. I was confused about why it sometimes sounded like you were picking up from a previous discussion about the topic. Now, I know it's because of the shared references.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 ymeskhout U 6m ago I don't want to give the wrong impression, almost every source we rely upon tends to be be mentioned in the show notes and you can see that it's usually a dozen at most. Most of the time it's background reading material that gets everyone up to speed. Advance notice of citations are generally only useful if someone is about to make a contentious factual claim.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 ymeskhout U 10m ago Your podcast is tiny and low budget (no offense), yet you manage to take all of these precautions.
Oh no offense at all taken, that was kind of my point. I wouldn't try to hold JRE to any standard if he didn't put up a thin veneer of verification with Jamie-pull-it-up. If I had to guess why more rigorous fact-checking isn't more prevalent overall, I'm guessing one under-appreciated component is that many within the media ecosystem are fixated on not jeopardizing the networking relationships they rely on. If you earn a reputation as a hardball interviewer, you'll end up with fewer people willing to do interviews with you (I don't know how Isaac Chotiner manages to convince people to talk to him). There used to be more of a division between 'paid' and 'earned' media coverage in the form of marketing vs PR, but it's near impossible to tell it apart nowadays. Journalism has long had to wrangle with the problems of "access journalism" where critical coverage can get you frozen out.
I believe a good way to accomplish this is to do what you are doing with preregistering evidence but demanding that the participant choose for himself which evidence of his is the most compelling.
Yes I agree with you completely, so the guidance I described is incomplete. It's just not practical to go over 100 different sources in any reasonable amount of time. I have suggested exactly this for an episode on 2020 election fraud allegations that never got recorded where I ask the other person to pick whatever they think are their three strongest claims, and then we can focus on just that instead of go on a neverending safari.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 2rafa U 11m ago They can’t be that low historically given how many Chinese there are, surely.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 faceh U 29m ago That phrase has been turning over in my head a lot. Would it really be SO BAD if we lived in a social order where personal ownership was a rare exception? Imagine if you could visit any given city on earth and rent a comfortable place to reside in for the duration of your stay. Where you can borrow a car on demand and not have to worry about icky maintenance expenses and fixing it if it breaks. Where you don't have to worry about upgrading your phone every year or so because you just turn it in at the end of your lease period and they issue you a new, state-of-the art upgrade. Where you don't have to move a huge collection of physical media with you because you can access your shows and movies where-ever you are using your streaming accounts. Where swapping jobs is as easy as selecting a geographic area and uploading your resume to find a suitable gig.
Being functionally rootless with no personal possessions or dedicated 'home' to return to means you have absolute freedom to move around to where-ever the market takes you. Not so bad a thought?
Bad. The entire concept is bad (to me).
But if you accept the underlying premise/logic, a world where AR makes you feel like you own things and gives you the psychological assurances that come with personal ownership whilst also having the convenience of having no real possessions other than a bank account associated with your name seems like a no-brainer.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 ZeroPipeline U 38m ago This is handled in a legal context by barring the introduction of cumulative evidence so perhaps a similar solution can be applied here.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 Fruck U Lacks all conviction 39m ago Actually the most important element is the bus. For some reason we have been engineering buses over the decades to make them nigh perfect mobile bo incubators. The first buses didn't stink at all actually - they were like covered wagons with rows of pews in the bed, open to the air and everything. But the bus travellers didn't smell enough, so we remade them with windows on the sides to trap in the odours. Then we perfected our technique - rearrange the seating so we can cram as many people in as possible. Take out the long skinny windows near the roof that let in air and replace them with giant full body windows that can't be opened, just let in the sun to cook everyone up and get them sweating. Put in air conditioning and then have it break down at least half the time. I assume the final step will involve sealing the bus and adding heated stones and jugs of water.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 gattsuru U 50m ago With the small exception of wanting it with attractive young women, sure; you can have all the sex you want as long as the participants are sufficiently ugly...
I'll admit that I'm more focused on the gay and furry sides, which presumably aren't subject to the same pressures, but I was pretty sure the typical anti-porn complaint reflect people sure there's a firehose of pretty attractive stuff to otherwise pretty sexually-normal-people.
(the symptoms of this being things like PornHub recommending you drag queens and other nastiness when you type "teen" in the search bar; there was a thread earlier this year discussing this but I don't remember which week).
Probably this, though I'll caveat that a lot of the pull quotes probably had different intent or meaning than most normal people would read from it.
((eg, "...TransAngels is 'female-presenting' is to 'sell that to straight men. That’s the demographic.'" is probably more about almost almost chasers are straight-identifying guys, with a small number of bi-identifying guys and women, rather than pulling them away from any interest in PIV. "Convert" is probably meant in the convert-to-customer rather than convert-by-sexuality sense, if only for some orientation-play-porn-framing-related reasons that straight people probably don't want to hear about.))
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 drmanhattan16 U 52m ago But it feels like people tried to replace a crucible with iron bars, and then were proud that now, with a prison around the whole world, they were the only ones free.
There's certainly an extreme, ala Tom Scott, where we have sanitized the world to the point of making Paul Kingsnorth have an aneurysm. But there is also some value, I think, in letting people have their...I don't like the term safe space for this, so let's call it a "normalcy space". Where the dominant perception of you and your peers, your community, etc. is defined primarily by you and no one else. You can and arguably should be able to step into a world which doesn't cater to you or anyone in particular, but I don't see anything wrong with being able to sanitize at least some part of the ideological and cultural landscape to be fit for you.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 thrownaway24e89172 U naïve paranoid outcast 1hr ago I don't think child sex dolls, which I'll note do have legal restrictions in a number of places (eg, at least 5 US states, Canada, and the UK), are the best comparison here. I think such VR is more likely to be treated like pornography and thus more strictly regulated than sex toys through existing obscenity laws.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 hydroacetylene U 1hr ago But they sold the rocket fuel…
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 hydroacetylene U 1hr ago Is this the reason for low oriental fertility rates across nations and cultures?
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 sun_the_second U 1hr ago If that's a joke, then sorry, this is the place where something like that might be argued completely sincerely so I failed to laugh.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 sun_the_second U 1hr ago Even that assumes your mutations are unique to you, when in fact it's that particular combination of them that is unique.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 gattsuru U 1hr ago · Edited 1hr ago Human history is rife with people talking about how new experiences can fundamentally alter how we see things, perhaps even sending us on wild adventures. Segregating oneself from those experiences as a cosmopolitan observer instead of a traveler in a new land can prevent learning and change.
Yeah, my objection here is definitely along these lines, rather than mere principle or aestheticism or even fear about this. There's reason I've got "They're paving over the wrinkles so you can't think!" on my draft list.
Have you see this old Tom Scott video?
I hadn't seen that, but it's definitely an interesting (and funny!) piece. It tunnel-visions a bit from being so comedy-focused on setting up its punchline, to an extent that I'd expect a lot of people reject it for the dependence on tech that doesn't exist and may never be accepted, but the punchline is pretty well-delivered.
The other side that I think Scott's joke overlooks the breadth of possible problem space. He mentions friends sharing blocklists organically, and blocking, but in many ways there's a lot of pragmatic reasons that might not be what ends up mattering as much, especially in the next ten or twenty years. You can play a hundred hours with someone in FFXIV with Mare Synchronos, and not know their character's 'real' gender or race. We can share not just blocklists, but criteria for how things get blocked, and crowdsource and bulk ingest ways to fill them. We can list everyone's worst moments and dumbest mistakes, or their proudest successes, right by their heads; turn our opponents into ogres making the dumbest arguments in the most grating voices and our allies into halo'd elves. We can make things perfect.
At the same time, there's a TracingWoodgrains post about how valuable it can be to let a community define itself for those within it. He was talking about race, but it seems to be a universally valuable trait in that no one would like the idea that before they can even construct a defense against it, the world has already implanted an image of who they are in their own mind.
Perhaps, but I've got pretty badly mixed feelings. I've seen a lot of communities formed before social media tried to eat the world, and a lot of communities try to form afterward. There's reasons the modern day therian communities are the way they are, and maybe they are the end result of twenty years of the crucible going til the dross overflows.
But it feels like people tried to replace a crucible with iron bars, and then were proud that now, with a prison around the whole world, they were the only ones free.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 5, 2024 FCfromSSC U Nuclear levels of sour 1hr ago Let me put it this way, nothing other than reality exists.
Sure. And we can be highly confident that we have zero access even in principle to an unknown but significant portion of baseline reality.
There is zero proof of any one of 10000 gods having a direct impact on reality, despite billions of people and 100,000 years of history.
It is certainly true that beliefs in gods do not provide advances in engineering. Is your assertion that no belief that does not advance engineering is valuable?
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 TIRM U 1hr ago I'm a parent and I'm glad to say other parents mention how little screen time they give their kand particularly how bad unmonitored youtube use is.
Professional tech workers seem to be generally aware of the dangers these things have for kids. Just like we aren't giving little kids cigarettes and oxy pills.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 TIRM U 1hr ago They sell child sex dolls. Someone will make a child version of future VR super-porn.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 TIRM U 1hr ago antisociality
It would be things like denying that transwomen are women that would get you in trouble.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 Being U 1hr ago I look down on podcasts that do nothing on this front, and it's particularly inexcusable when they can afford way more.
I think this is the core of it and your claim is actually too narrow. Your podcast is tiny and low budget (no offense), yet you manage to take all of these precautions. Coming up with these precautions wasn't some groundbreaking discovery; it didn't take years, countless academics, or a multitude of thinktanks to develop. Which leaves the big question of if you can do it, why can't/doesn't anyone else? And this isn't just podcasts: radio can and should implement these rules as should journalism as should politicians (during senate hearings at least) as should public debates.....
I can see only two options:
Either they are all grossly incompetent (unlikely). Their goals are not your goals. They are optimizing their discussions for something other than intellectual discovery (less charitably: truth). The extent to which we judge a podcast or other forum for this shortcoming should depend on how they position themselves. Joe Rogan, for example, I don't think deserves much criticism (at least relative to others). He is a meathead who is clearly optimizing for topics he is interested in rather than the truth. If seeing him spend thousands of hours talking about the looniest conspiracy theories and admitting every time that he just thinks they are fun (and not necessarily true) doesn't convince a listener that his primary goal isn't truth, I don't know what would. Likewise, I think his lack of accuracy is less worth of disdain because I think he is less capable (I understand this is a dangerous argument, but I will make it nonetheless). This is a guy with basically no education whose team consists of only one other person: a regular joe whose only skill is being able to Google things and do basic audio "engineering". If anything I'm impressed he manages to have as much intellectual rigor as he does. When you are a major news station with entire teams capable of (and ostensibly dedicated to) researching yet you still manage to regularly underperform Joe Rogan in intellectual rigor, I think it's hard to overstate the level of failure. I suspect most Americans agree and this is why we see the trust in media approaching the lizardman constant (at least with certain demos).
I do think that your description of the gish gallop is incomplete and your solution isn't a great solution as a result.
I think a gish gallop is better understood as creating (deliberately or accidentally) an asymmetry of work: throwing a whole bunch of citations at someone takes MUCH less time than reading, evaluating, and developing a critique/counterargument for each of those citations. In the internet era it's never been easier to compile the gallop so we see them being trotted out more and more often. Having citations "pre registered" doesn't really address this asymmetry. A guest can still throw out four hundred citations and his opponent will be overwhelmed trying to dig into each of them even if he is given weeks to prepare.
The reason the gish gallop works is because most listener's aren't equipped to understand it correctly - they aren't using the correct Bayesian reasoning. I think this is easiest to explain with an idealized (both debaters are reasonable and participating in good faith) example:
Galloper cites 100 claims. CounterGalloper says "That's a lot, let's start from the top. Claim 1 is false because a, b, & c." Let's assume that CounterGalloper is correct AND convincing: the audience agrees that claim 1 is false/irrelevant Galloper typically responds, "I don't think you're correct in discarding it, BUT EVEN IF YOU ARE the remaining proof is overwhelming" Most listeners end up very slightly discounting the Galloper, but still think is thinking something like "Sure, the galloper may not be right on every single detail, but most of the evidence (99% !) supports him.
If the listener were using proper Bayesian logic they should instead be thinking something like "Of the claims CounterGalloper addressed, so far 0% have been correct. Therefore, I'll adjust the probability that the remaining 99 claims are correct downwards."
If both debaters are competent the interaction continues: The CounterGalloper points this out with something like: "If this one claim is false, the others probably are too." The Galloper (likely correctly) says something like: "You just cherry picked the weakest claim. Even if one or two of my claims are weak, the majority are facts that you can't disprove." The CounterGalloper may move onto the next claim in the gallop. The Galloper is free to make the same "CherryPicked" argument. We find ourselves trapped in this loop. In real life, this about when both debaters and the audience become exhausted and the debate is no longer productive.
I hope this, perhaps contrived, example shows the problem and the solution: you need to shift the burden of narrowing down which claims should be evaluated from the CounterGalloper to the Galloper. If you leave that choice on the CounterGalloper, the Galloper will always be able to retreat to the "just cherry picked" defense. I believe a good way to accomplish this is to do what you are doing with preregistering evidence but demanding that the participant choose for himself which evidence of his is the most compelling. In reality, a galloper will likely still try to gallop if he finds his supposed best evidence collapsing. In this event, the host/moderator should remind the participants and audience that these claims were the ones the Galloper himself found most compelling.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 TIRM U 1hr ago you are actually a transient with no permanent belongings
Some might say you will own nothing and be happy.
And if these chips make ground bugs taste like veal, then you'd presumably feel fine eating a tasty dinner in your sleeping pod.
Culture War Roundup for the week of February 12, 2024 sun_the_second U 2hr ago It doesn't appear that the coupling of memes and genes is that tight. The material capabilities and capacities of civilizations (i. e. environment) affect both the meme palatability and the extent to which the memes are capable to affect sexual selection a great deal.
Incidence of step-children abuse looks explainable enough by the plain issue that parenthood would often be only incidental for the non-genetic parent. They married the father/mother, the kid wouldn't be their first priority even if they're amicable. As for genetic similarities between friends - sure, I can see how there'd be a correlation, given that you'd need to share a language, often location, some interests, necessitating a shared non-aversion to those interests... Would have to read the study to know if it's pronounced enough to necessitate some special focus on "genetic correlation".
What I'm getting at... if the kid popped out of you and you raised them, I doubt that the intellectual knowledge that their genes have been altered would affect the instinctual attachment much, unless you let yourself be convinced that not sharing genes is bad.
A kid that I sired which was then modified doesn't appear harder to love than my own vanilla kid, to me. If they came from a sperm bank - sure, there'd be visceral aversion to raising the spawn of some actual, personified Chad. But otherwise, it feels more important to me to pass on my memes. Perhaps it caters to my pride more to think of myself as a collection of ideas that lived in a smart monkey body, rather than a smart monkey that had some ideas.
Would you rather raise the child of your enemy to be your most ardent ally, or have your child be raised by your enemy to be their most ardent ally?
Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 11, 2024 Gaashk U 2hr ago Only if each of those people also comments saying that's what they did (and that might just push the creators to say it at 16 seconds in, I'm not sure).
God bless the expanded character limit.
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