banned
Nobody is denying that group interests are a useful lens to look at politics.
You are denying however that it is the only useful lens at a foundational level, which is my claim (well really, that of Machiavellians).
Why does the white college-educated woman care about an unemployed black man getting shot by the police?
Because they are in a political coalition that relies on the black vote. When they were not, they did not.
Why do grown adults care about the abortion of fetuses which are not family, for the most part?
Because they don't want to be murdered and attacks on the sanctity of life undermine their security, and that of their community; moreover it has been banned by their religion, which is an organizing principle of their socio-political interest group.
In Europe, similar groups with similar interests don't find this to be a political issue despite holding similar principles. Because neither they nor their enemies would benefit from upsetting the compromises made. And insofar as they benefit, European politics start to look more like America's on this issue.
Why were so many intellectuals Marxists?
Because Marxism is a movement that primarily serves the interest of intellectuals.
War is famously the continuation of politics with other means.
I disagree with Clausewitz here. The natural state of Humanity is not peace. It is diplomacy that is the continuation of war by other means.
some wars can be adequately explained by group interests. Two knights feuding might indeed be just a zero sum power struggle between two groups. But to frame the US war of independence as simply a group conflict between the colonies and England while ignoring all the ideological differences seems overly simplistic
Nonsense, the ideology was an entirely self serving framework to organize a revolt desired by a specific class with specific interests with the support of the English Parliament. And evidence of this is plain: many of the ideas of self governance that were claimed as such were totally destroyed in the Federalist coup that ensued against the Articles of Confederation.
This is as ridiculous as saying the French Revolution was caused by the Enlightenment instead of both being downstream from the ascendancy of the Bourgeoisie.
Human life today in the Western world is a lot less shitty than it was in Sparta. Part of that is technological progress. But a lot of it is also ideological progress, e.g. the long term aggregate result of politics.
Unlike Liberals like to believe, this does not change the nature of politics. Fukuyama was wrong. Liberals didn't win so hard they broke the game, their Reich won't last a thousand years. It's just a passing fad, as every political idiom that believes itself eternal has been.
People sometimes do what is good for them and their in-group. But they also have beliefs, religious or otherwise, and sometimes these beliefs guide their actions. Ignoring them will severely limit your predictive powers of human behavior.
No. People have individual and collective interests, and they use ideas to justify and organize those interests into coalitions such that they may act upon them.
It is wrong to believe that ideas animate people. And many political phenomena disprove that theory. The only way to hold onto it is to claim that exceptions are simply vices. As a scientist I refuse to entertain moralizing as an explanation framework. Politics is.
WandererintheWilderness
21d ago
Having been made unwelcome or outright banned from virtually every hobby space I enjoyed since I was a wee child in the 80s by pure dint of being conservative
Yes, but the Left is universalist. It wishes to push forward a prescriptive vision of Being A Decent Person™ which should apply globally. @Skibboleth was making the point that this is different from the Conservative focus on defining Americanness.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
21d ago
In general, they seem much more inclined to pushing forward a prescriptive vision of American culture than other factions in American politics.
Having been made unwelcome or outright banned from virtually every hobby space I enjoyed since I was a wee child in the 80s by pure dint of being conservative, this is rich. Also requires ignoring Biden's rage speech where he repeatedly described "MAGA" as the greatest threat to America. IMHO describing the opposition party as a threat the nation ranks pretty high above merely describing their policies as unamerican.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
21d ago
Claps very hard, it took me 6 months to finish it the first go around, 4 on my second!
I will return to overdosing on copium, on the basis of author interviews from a few years back where Gu Zhen Ren said the story was far from over, he's got a lot more material, and there might be a road map to getting it unbanned and published one day.
I quit reading Ars Technica when they banned me for roasting them for keeping an open pedophile on staff until he was arrested by the FBI in their "Republicans Pounce" defensive review of Cuties. I think all I said was "What, was Peter Bright not available to review this?" I don't recall exactly and can't look it up because it's been deleted. The degree to which it's devolved into senseless resistance slop was evident during Trump's first term.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
Are you beetlejuice? Or do you, gattsuru and germ have some kind of discord group? I don't see how else you could find a 6 day old comment in a two week old thread, short of trolling my comment history or someone else doing so and reporting everything I write.
I read 99.5% of the comments that get posted to the motte using the firehose view, and especially make an effort to read anything you post, because I consider you "the iron that sharpens". This one I wanted to reply to, but between crunch at work and kids didn't get around to it till this weekend. Plus, the last couple times you name-dropped me, I didn't get around to a direct response; I get the feeling you enjoy our exchanges less than I do, so I've generally tried to give a bit more space lately. Anyhow, when I finally had time I just searched your name in the bar and scrolled down a bit to find "that CPAR post I missed earlier".
It's foolish to ignore the actual issue being discussed and chalk it all up to what you view as a propaganda apparatus, both because you're ignoring a half dozen other issues (gun control? trans people? climate change? Taxation and social welfare?) that failed to achieve anywhere near the same level of unity and because you're going to fail when you try to spin up your own propaganda apparatus.
I disagree that it's foolish; I think Blue Tribe's dominance was largely built on propaganda, and I think the decay of the propaganda apparatus is why Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing. This has been my thesis for near-on to a decade now. I think my side will win because, to put it as succinctly as possible, we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.
I think the propaganda worked better for LGBT for the same reason it worked so well for Feminism and for the thrust that ended up as BLM; all three are core social justice narratives that lend themselves very directly to a model of bad people oppressing good people, and where a large majority of the action happens in peoples' thoughts, which conveniently for the narrative can't be read, and where even the parts happening in the real world depend heavily on the unknowable intent of those involved. Guns, taxes and global weather patterns don't hinge on peoples' mentality, and so are less amenable to the core Social Justice strategies. Even trans impinges far more on the physical world, and it is these impingements that have resulted in resistance and, seemingly, downfall.
...political hardball? Winning the hearts and minds of a significant majority of the population is not political hardball.
I question whether you won hearts and minds, or generated a preference cascade through a massive social pressure campaign backed by threat of legal force. And sure, most people "believed it", in that when they were polled they truthfully told the pollster that they "supported LGBT". That's a thing that can be done by lying to cover all the negative aspects of one side and all the positive aspects of the other, in an environment where one enjoys total control of the knowledge-generation apparatus.
But the people who such a campaign can't flip don't cease to exist, and their arguments were never defeated, only suppressed. Lincoln had it that you destroy your enemy when you make him into your friend, and that's not a victory the LGBT movement ever achieved. And then it went too far with Trans, and the grip began to slacken, and the old opposition comes popping back up like dandelions as things begin to slide the other way. Not that I particularly expect Gay Marriage to be banned again, given how debauched the institution of marriage is anyway... but I genuinely think we've seen the high-water-mark of LGBT, and even if the downslope is gentle, it's still down from here. Certainly no one is ever going to buy that it's about what what adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms any more. I grew up hearing about how the lethality of the AIDS pandemic was greatly exacerbated by society's intolerance and bigotry, which showed how necessary Gay Rights were to protect the marginalized. My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history, with a compare/contrast to the handling of the COVID pandemic, because that will provide them a straightforwardly better picture of the realities of the world they actually live in.
You can't even reflect on whether the change was a net benefit to the country, you're just bitter that 'your side lost.'
I reflect on that plenty. I think shoving Christianity into the closet was bad for society in strictly material terms, because it unleashed much harm that Christianity might have helped to mitigate or restrain. I note that many people on all sides express considerable nostalgia for the 90s, and even the 2000s; the point where we lost and were cast out is also pretty close to the point where things started taking a very serious turn for the bad, and not by my assessment alone.
On the other hand, "Cultural Christianity" is trash, and it's arguably better for Christianity itself to have good contrast between the moral order of the Almighty and the chaos of the world. I'm aware of and even sympathetic to the arguments of the Christians who wanted to impose that moral order through law, but Christianity is, at its core, voluntary. You cannot mandate love, nor loving obedience. No Christian end I can see is secured by imposing such things on the unwilling through the power of the state.
You're so blinded by your obsession with realpolitik, so deeply steeped in the culture war and obsessed with small-minded zero sum games that you can't see anything beyond conflict and winning or losing.
Maybe.
You've called me out twice in recent months, asking where all the worsening violence I was predicting is; and to be clear, I don't mind the call-outs one bit, and consider them entirely fair. The first time, before I could get a reply constructed, Luigi shot the healthcare CEO and the whole internet lit up with enthusiastic grassroots support for ideological murder. The second time, again before I could get around to a reply, Kirk was shot and the internet lit up again, and in much more of a concentrated and clearly tribal way. The first time, I thought it would be more charitable to just let it lie. This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down? And since no FCfromSSC post would be complete without a link to some other excessively-long comment, nor with a listing of recent violence datapoints, here's both in one from last week.
I do not think I am obsessed with small-minded, zero sum games. I am interested in what is going to happen next, and what is happening next is, it seems to me, largely determined by such games. Most people are obsessed with winning and losing, and because their values are now mutually-incoherent, cooperative victory is no longer a viable option. I think that internalizing this insight gives me a clearer picture of where we are heading, which is of course the main question we've debated for some years now.
As for myself, I am already saved. I think my side will win, but whether it does or not does not is a matter of no true consequence; nothing that truly matters to me is protected by victory or lost by defeat. I do not believe in progress, moral or otherwise. There is nothing new under the sun, all things are wearisome more than one can say. This is the bedrock truth as I understand it, and while I freely admit that it does not come naturally to me, I try to maintain a clear sight of it, even at some personal cost, even here.
Is a more perfect union simply one where your side wins, and blue tribe is eradicated?
No.
Kirk's murder pretty much ran over the story about the Ukrainian lady that got stabbed. I have an effort-post on that in the works, but the short version is, the local officials pretty clearly did their best to bury the story, delaying its viral breakout by two weeks, and then a lot of Blues got very visibly upset when people started talking about it. The local official's statement at the time of the murder was something like "we can't incarcerate our way out of this problem." The murderer had been convicted and released 14 times previously, with a long history of violent crime and clear signs of serious mental illness.
What I see there, briefly, is a situation where Blues are using a dominant political and social position to prevent a serious problem from being solved, while offloading all consequences generated by that problem to their outgroup. A more perfect union, to me, is one where they don't get to do that any more.
And what comes after that? You'd just fracture into normiecons and groypers, neolibs and church fundamentalists and repeat the cycle. Your path is just one of endless conflict.
If we can restore something like accountability to power, and if we can generate common knowledge of where we are and how we got here, it seems to me that many of our problems are solvable. One of our original conversations was about how education sucks for black kids, and how this doesn't seem likely to change. Well, since then, we've had the "Mississippi Miracle". One of the places where education sucked the hardest for black kids changed to being a place where it sucks a lot less than it used to. That's good! That's a win! ...And my understanding of how it happened, possibly flawed or excessively simplistic, is that entrenched Blue control got broken, and actual reforms happened. I want more of that, but it isn't going to happen so long as entrenched (and pretty clearly Blue, from my perspective) structures maintain a dominance that insulates them from all accountability.
Tell me, then, your model of ethically influencing the electorate without playing 'political hardball.' Or are you so far gone as to think it's impossible?
By no means.
Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition. Sexual continence and self-control were a hard sell in the 90s; now we have OnlyFans and online dating and a generation of intense porn consumption and cratering relationship rates to do the argumentative heavy-lifting for us, to give an example on one of the relevant axes. We believe we genuinely have a better way of living, and it requires only our willful action and communal cooperation, not federal law or corporate funding. The further the cultural consensus moved away from us, the more obvious and undeniable the benefits our faith offers become, even by the materialist metrics of the World. We have stable marriages, children, even, amusingly enough, higher sexual satisfaction. We can forgive and turn the other cheek; we can offer a hand up to a defeated foe, we can restrain ourselves in the heat of the moment. We have a basis for charity, in all senses of the word, to the point that the pagan Right routinely mocks us for our pacifism, for doing nothing, for being cucked. And yet, we can also fight fiercely, when that seems necessary and prudent.
Or take the example of Red states versus Blue states. It's been noted for some time that people are leaving Blue states and moving to Red ones; this is not a consequence of Red states somehow coercing or bribing these people to do so, but seems to simply be a result of differences in governance and the living conditions that governance produces.
When truth is truly on your side, no political hardball is necessary, only contrasting outcomes and the ability for people to choose freely.
Quantumfreakonomics
22d ago
Grading on the curve of being a leftist podcaster/streamer I think Vaush is quality. He is legitimately funny and doesn't give off the kind of feminine energy that typically drives men away from the left.
It was fun watching him tee-off on the snowflakes in his chat about trying to get Jesse Singal banned from Bluesky for... something I guess?
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
22d ago
If he is Turok then we should be thankful that he has been gracious enough to return, as Turok never should have been banned in the first place.
TIRM
22d ago
I'd go further and let them take any job at any employer. Assuming the new employer will sponsor them. I think tying people to their jobs is generally bad. And if the market determines such a person is suited for a different job title with more or different responsibilities then they should be allowed to do it. The fact that they have to ask bureaucrats for permission to professionally grow by accepting new job titles with more or different responsibilities is horrible.
For instance, supposedly decades ago Massachusetts' enforceable non-compete contracts slowed their tech industry growth and resulted in California overtaking them. Locking employees into their jobs is enforced stagnation and yet another scheme to push down wages. Such contracts were greatly restricted in scope in 2018 and completely banned last year. Good riddance.
gattsuru
23d ago
H1bs are simultaneously undercutting wages but also not actually a replacement for domestic equivalents?
The simple existence of InfoSys is a strong argument against the efficient market hypothesis, the legitimacy of whatever contracting process got them involved, and a kind and loving God. The expectations for that class of ‘IT’ shop are low, but it is very, very hard to understate their competence. They’re banned from contracting with the Indian government. Cognizant and Tara are only a little better, and that’s in the sense that they’ve been caught benching (rather than replacing) employees that were such a liability as to be actively dangerous.
It’s most obvious in IT: a bad employee can absolutely wreck your entire business at the outlier, and cost you five or six times their annual salary at the more common end (go go gadget AWS). But there’s a lot of areas with the tail end risk are extreme.
eee
23d ago
Your final paragraph seems weird when Destiny has been banned from twitch for a while and youtube demonetized his whole channel yesterday. I seem to remember a big stink about them demonetizing Alex Jones before some time passed and the pendulum swung far enough that they could ban him outright. However, I wasn't able to find anything supporting that. I still think it probably happened to some other someone that was unpersoned, but I could be mistaken completely.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
23d ago
Have you seen subcontinental domestic economies? If these people were actually given they full opportunities they deserve and are capable of actualizing then the subcontinent would be at least China level today, instead [redacted because I don't want to get banned immediately after coming back].
JarJarJedi
24d ago
Trump knew or kinda knew about Epstein's proclivities during the 80s and 90s
That may be plausible, Trump is not exactly a saint himself, and being in business, you have to deal with all kinds of sleazy people, so until it didn't affect him personally, he might have at least heard the rumors and didn't care much while it stayed on the level of vague sleaziness. When Epstein started to mess with Trump's own grounds, he was promptly banned. It's unlikely Trump ever was involved in Epstein's shady business (as far as I understand, he didn't need anybody's help in that aspect of life anyway) but it's not unlikely he had some common dealings early on. But the note implies the level of intimacy that Trump has never demonstrated to anybody, and frankly is a harsh mismatch with anything he has ever done and how he behaved in public. It's something Hunter might do (I don't say he did, but his character - artistic pretense, etc. - would fit much better) but Trump wouldn't. If the allegation were he knew Epstein - nothing do deny, he did. Even that they for a while were friendly is true - so if somebody implied Trump sent a congratulatory note to Epstein on one of his birthdays, nothing to deny here either, he very well might have. But not this particular note, it's just not him.
The sha256 above was calculated from this. I'll skip over a couple inside baseball ones because Amadan has convinced me that they're pretty, but they don't really break the specific metrics and they're easy for anyone who wants to call me out to check themselves:
Not a single person from that RPGNet thread is getting a ban or a warning for it: this is what their definition of A+ means.
Not a huge surprise, here; zero infractions for this entire thread. There's been one person slapped in their Infractions forum in the last week (for fighting over the Superman movie). Trouble Tickets has a thread asking about boycotting people for supporting Kirk; the mods haven't condoned it (though it's happening anyway without their intervention)... because they're worried about brigading and user safety. Today, there's a new thread terrified of the fascism going after Jimmy Kimmell, by an entire forum that's incapable of even noticing what Kimmel said or what the murderer did or was.
To be explicit, that means that there's a mainstream part of the web where "Do not feel sorry for this piece of shit. He, in an absolute sense, got what he wanted. He succeeded. And so laughter, sneers, and a desire to piss on his grave are much more appropriate reactions than grief or empathy. In a real sense, the world has been made better by his death. His killer committed a just act. There will be less tragedy on this Earth because he is underground and cannot commit further harm. And therefore my only reaction is 'good!'." and "I am grateful that his evil influence has been removed." is acceptable and 'Dobbs was correctly decided' is a dire attack.
And, unsurprisingly, they have not gotten the ARFCOM treatment from their DNS registrar. There's no boycott of their advertisers, or panicked newscasters diving into their politics, or anti-hate-groups supported by Harvard hacking in to call anyone's employers.
Not a single one of the Discords I've seen tolerate or blast out this sort of advocacy are going to get banned.
The same, and as far as I can tell, not a single one has. Most of them haven't even updated to reality as-is -- the best I can offer is the FFXIV FC that's at least struggling to recognize the obvious.
Julia Ioffe won't be blackballed from every publishing outfit right of TNR.
Ditto.
Neither Megan McArdle nor Conor Friedersdorf will have called out Matt Yglesias on an X page, and I've give 60% odds that they don't have three specific bad actors at all that they've called out.
Obviously on Yglesias, harder to prove for calling out specific bad actors. McArdle has two pieces at WaPo, pretty clearly all without specifics (albeit some humor when she 100%'s her cohost warning about "Democrats are so feckless as an opposition party, more disgruntled young men (and women) will give up on the political process"). Friedersdorf's only post-assassination article is a short piece blasting... Bondi, which fair and technically a name and also a got a fascinating case of dancing around the elephant in the room. Neither look better from their twitter feeds, but I'm open to correction if I missed something.
Nope. He's also promoting a conspiracy theory about some other schmuck's suicide as a racially-motivated lynching, not that anyone cares about disinformation anymore.
The SPLC isn't going to trim back its "hate map" to only focus on actualfa; it's not even going to public recognize that TPUSA didn't fit...
Duh. Also promoting the same conspiracy theories, coincidentally, as the only post on their Apathy Isn't An Option-branded website.
... and none of CNN/NBC/CBS/New York Times will go the full Palin.
Hahahahaha. CNN, NBC, CBS, even now seem to be trying to push hard on the We'll Never Know The True Motive. NYT finally got there despite their own best efforts. I missed them in my list, but ABC had a reporter give the shooter a loving and entirely hallucinated tongue-bath of his own. And that's just for the killer, specifically.
No left-wing or 'centrist' media is diving into rhetorical motivations, and you'd think Trump had banned the word stochastic.
We're not going to get the name of the guy who yelled "Hell No" at the federal house of representatives...
I'm open to correction, here, but as far as I can tell, no.
Pritzker isn't any more likely to get censured than Lujan Grisham was.
Okay, that's less of a prediction than 2+2 = 4. He's in the news now for asking everybody else ratchet down the rhetoric, while (falsely) denying that he called Republicans Nazis. Someone filed a bill of impeachment, and it's going nowhere, and everybody with an IQ above the single digits knows it. (also for taking a photo-op with a different murderer.)
I made some other predictions, in the last week, in PM. On Friday:
Will the DNC censure Ilhan Omar before the Republican Congress does (or will neither)?
The answer is neither; not a single Democratic congresscritter voted in favor of censuring Omar, and four people with Rs after their names refused to as well. I would like to make a contrast.
Will news organization slap down reporters publicly before the
Eye of SauronLibsOfTikTok brings it forward?
Today's conversation is about the government pressuring ABC over a 'comedian' making pretty overt lies, and the only thing remotely funny about it is that it'll end up with ABC's entertainment section having higher standards than their newscorps by a significant amount, and only thanks to harsh pressure. I haven't been able to find a single example of someone coming out of the blue and say they were fired before publication or the conservative outrage; I'm certainly open to correction.
Will any college treat a professor endorsing murder more harshly than they do a prospective student that said the n word, without the threat of conservative oversight?
Hah. There's been firings, but even the most overt calls to evil action by professors has taken direct threat from conservative lawmakers to get anywhere.
Will twitch and youtube start purging Hassan-likes before subpeonas start flying, where they already booted guntubers for such crimes as 'lawfully firing a machine gun'?
No. Hassan specifically got an NYT opinion slot to promote his positions about increasingly punitive rhetoric, and no one on the Grey Lady of Bullshit Record has felt it worth mentioning his less-than-one-month-old call to literally disembowel his political opponents. There is a post of Destiny getting banned from Twitch floating around... and it's from 2020.
Will the people -- even now! -- trying to confidently paint the murderer as some Groyper get banned from reddit for disinformation posting?
somethingiswrong2024's still there, and still apparently huffing whippits as hard as possible. Open to having missed anything, here.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
25d ago
I believe that you should have access to Kimi K2, GLM and Qwen, which are the current best Chinese models. Can't imagine they'd be banned in China.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
In the US? Not really, no. There are a tiny handful of radical gun control activists that want some kind of east Asia tier scheme where hunters can apply for permission to own bolt action rifles kept at the local police station when not in the hunting field. But they’re about as fringe as animal rights activists(not that they necessarily overlap but the same level of hardcore nut).
It’s very plausible that if the DNC could abolish the second amendment and rewrite US gun control from scratch, many kinds of guns would be banned. It’s very plausible that purchasing the ones that are not, such as the one in this attack, would require some kind of waiting period/weekend class/whatever that serves no purpose except being annoying. But an actual ban-or near enough ban- on grandpas deer rifle is about as plausible as mandatory nude exercise or giving dogs standing to sue- yeah, you can find someone advocating for it, but you know…
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
27d ago
I assume you are jewish.
This is the definition of an ad hominem. Even if he were Jewish, "Your opinion is invalid because Jew" isn't acceptable.
You've been warned and banned repeatedly because of your antagonistic obsession with Jews. As we are obligated to repeat over and over, you can hate whomever you want, but your posting needs to follow the rules.
Banned for two days, but next time you are looking at a longer term ban.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
28d ago
You are getting very agitated for someone who "didn't read lol." This post is terrible: antagonistic, full of personal attacks and mind-reading, and the final flounce. Additionally, we're informed you're sending abusive DMs. The only reason I'm not banning you for the latter is that I have only the recipient's word for it. However, if this behavior continues, you will be banned.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
28d ago
Writ large, I'd consider that an example of Mostly Peaceful and Well Intentioned propaganda and PR campaigns which successfully won supermajority support among the American people.
Yeah, fair. I certainly don't agree with all the downstream effects despite my [redacted], but mostly? Yeah.
I would 100% go with Walz or Shapiro or Newsom over Stacey Adams. Are you arguing that there were better-qualified non-white/non-cishet-male candidates that were passed over because Walz is white?
Setting the bar pretty low with Adams! No, I'm saying there were candidates passed over because Walz was (thought to be) a generically inoffensive white nobody. Old, non-Group, didn't show up Harris in any way. White wasn't the only requirement, but it was the one he and the campaign leaned into the most in a way that pissed off non-Dems.
Buttigieg had pre-existing name recognition, but gay counts as a Group and apparently is so unpopular with black people it's a statistical oddity. Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard? Maybe Harris didn't want one of the people that did better than her in the primaries. Shapiro, purple state governor that's young enough to have a future, might show up Harris, and Jewish poses an issue to elements of both sides apparently. Bernie, way more name recognition, old, ~white, but definitely shows up Harris when public speaking and again the Jewish problem (ooo that feels unpleasant to type). Charlie Crist could've been an interesting dark horse pick as a former Republican that fulfilled the old and mostly-white requirements.
And that's with like 5 minutes thought of really prominent people. Surely the DNC has a list of potential state politicians since they pulled Walz out of a hat; some of them are undoubtedly less white, less old, less goofy?
What, exactly, were the consequences for the profession for all that shit, and why was the public too stupid to know better?
Lobotomies and thalidomide eventually got banned, so maybe I should give it a few more years to see if GoF gets banned again? Feels too polarized and no one's even asking the question.
The consequences of the Tuskegee experiments were that 50 years later black people still have much lower trust in doctors and vaccines, nobody seems to have an idea of how to fix that, and sometimes that leads the big brains at Harvard and UPenn to really crazy places.
the point is that you're weird relative to the population norm
Guilty as charged. Go weirdos!
Somewhere along the line I lost interest in people bashing Fauci and other causes I care about
Yeah, that's how I feel in liberal-progressive spaces that don't think 2020 was mass insanity and prefer criminals over their victims, and why I've gotten chased out of them. To be clear I did phrase things much more gently back when I was trying, but here among disagreeable acquaintances it's not really the point.
They haven't lost the public trust, they've lost the trust of Republicans.
The trans issue has reduced trust in a fair number of family-minded Dems, but not in the blanket way to turn against vaccines in the stupid way a subset of Republicans did. Hopefully it doesn't take 50+ years to fix the damage that experimental mandates did.
There's bound to be a really interesting anthropological study involved in recent polarization dynamics, but nobody willing to would produce something unbiased enough to be worth reading.
the chasm between the way you see things and the way they do is...significant.
And I could've written the question in a less-steamed manner. Mea culpa.
what you call anti-white racism
The indifference angle is about as far as I am willing to go to bridge the gap. I recognize that it's not entirely hate in the way that a Grand Red Dragon of the Klan hated black people. The underdog factor is... whatever it is, but after 2020 I don't buy it as sufficient explanation unless we're being uncharitable enough to tag on the soft bigotry of low expectations. It gets pretty exhausting putting up the epicycles to explain why the Occam's Razor explanation isn't right.
Would you do this kind of hedging for someone that really likes posting crime stats and HBD commentary? Would you extend so much charity when they say that no no, they're not actually anti-black? When there's Harvard professors arguing that old white people should die for health equity, Yale lecturers fantasizing about shooting white people, the whole insanity around "being on time is white supremacy," are you able to wonder if it exists and isn't something I (and Jeremy Carl, and others) nightmared up?
But what do I know, I've been largely wrong about every prediction I've made in my tenure here.
I'm with you there, hoss.
- The UK (Terrorism Act 2006, Section 1 - "Encouragement of terrorism")
- Germany(Section 130 StGB (Criminal Code) - "Incitement to hatred" (Volksverhetzung))
- France (Article 421-2-5 of the Criminal Code)
- Spain (Article 578 of the Spanish Criminal Code)
- Italy (Articles 270 quater and 270 quinquies of the Criminal Code)
- Poland (Article 255a of the Polish Criminal Code)
- Austria (Section 282a of the Austrian Criminal Code)
- Belgium (Article 140bis of the Criminal Code)
- Cyprus (Article 12 of the 2010 law on combating terrorism)
- Bulgaria (Article 320(1) and 320(2) of the Bulgarian Criminal Code)
- Lithuania (Article 250(1) of the Lithuanian Criminal Code)
- Luxembourg (Article 135(11) of the Luxembourg Criminal Code)
- Romania (Act 187/2012, amending Law 535/2004 on preventing and combating terrorism)
- Slovenia (Article 110(1)(1) and 110(1)(2) of the Criminal Code)
Most major European nations have laws on the books for this, and there are two EU directives and frameworks expressly referencing "glorification" in a "public provocation to commit a terrorist offense" that may be banned within that framework.
It's a norm that has a long past in Europe (since you know, we've not exactly been a peaceful continent), and though there are exceptions and enforcement varies, free speech that includes support for terrorism has essentially never been the norm in Europe.
FarmReadyElephants
29d ago
My opinion, already expressed on this thread, is that celebration of assassination is something we should have a bipartisan "cancel culture" about, because it's a load-bearing taboo that allows the rest of freedom of speech to function. This is similar to how Lee Kwan Yew banned the communist party in Singapore at a time when SE Asian countries were falling to communist revolutions. A 99% commitment to liberal norms is more durable than one that commits to 100% with obvious loopholes for bad actors to end the liberal system.
Cancel culture for other things are bad, since it cordons off plausibly true ideas from public discussion. You shouldn't be cancelled for "misgendering", or stating FBI crime statistics, or making the okay sign, or having once made racist jokes, or donating to a conservative cause, or saying riots are bad.
The effect of cancel culture over support for assassination is to preserve liberalism. The effect of cancel culture for slight deviations from the Left platform is to end liberalism. This isn't hard.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/365663?context=8#context
roystgnr
29d ago
This guy needs to be banned.
Only took another hour, albeit for a short ban.
He states views that are basically unfalsifiable.
The failure at "making beliefs pay rent" is ironic when juxtaposed against moaning that "This place used to be LessWrong and SSC", but epistemology is hard and sometimes you can come up with an idea that's falsifiable in principle even if you have trouble figuring out how it might be falsified in practice. I think the point where he really went off the deep end was the thread where one of his claims actually got falsified and instead of taking the opportunity to literally become less wrong he started misinforming everyone about the response and insulting the respondent and calling correctness "pedantry". I've seen people speed-run the decay that LessWrong described as "pass from lying about specific facts ... to lying about the rules of reasoning" before, but I've never seen someone doing it while approvingly citing LessWrong!
who the fuck would say that if Kirk was more “gracious,” the shooter wouldn’t shot unless they were tacitly explaining away the murder?
But, to be fair, this is exactly the sort of distinction between causality and blame that autism-adjacent LessWrong-type folks have no trouble making correctly. There is no logical incompatibility between positive claims like [if you hand over your wallet a mugger is less likely to shoot you] or "if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all" and normative claims like [the mugger is completely at fault and the victim not at all at fault for the negative consequences of the mugging] or "I'm not contending any of this was remotely justified", even if the positive claims feel like victim blaming.
SnapDragon
29d ago
Blame the "interesting, intelligent" posters who got themselves permabanned because they just couldn't help making everyone else's experience worse. The rules aren't arbitrary or hard to follow.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
29d ago
Is this what you mean by "Interesting, intelligent people being banned for petty rule violations"?
You are filling the mod queue with these obnoxious attempts to bait people. I'm sure in your own mind you're a brilliant debater pwning the chuds. I am not impressed.
I'm not going to permaban you. I'm going to ban you for two days. In your own words: "Do better."
It had to be hard-coupled with autism because RFK Jr. positioned himself as the "I'm going to solve the autism epidemic" guy, was getting raked for basically falling for Wakefield's frauds, and had to either double down and/or find something else he could point to instead.
There are still a couple pain-relief use cases for acetaminophen, though, even if it should be obsolete in general.
First: it doesn't interact with other pain relievers, so you can "double up" in cases of extremely strong pain, alternating doses of acetaminophen with a NSAID, taking both at full strength. My son had to do that recently for a broken arm; for the first few days of healing his only other sufficiently-effective option was a prescription for codeine (pre-combined with acetaminophen; not sure how much of that is "synergy" and how much is "we can deter opioid addicts by holding their livers hostage"), which he saved for when he needed to sleep.
Second, and more significantly in this context: it has been basically the only pain relief option that (assuming you're not allergic and don't overdose) is still thought to be safe during pregnancy! Even if you banned it for any other use case, there'd still be a strong argument to make it available for pregnant mothers, where the liver risks are the same but the next best alternative is "no pain relief" rather than "ibuprofen". NSAIDs increase risks of miscarriage when taken early in pregnancy, and risks of premature birth and birth defects when taken late. I've never dug into the research to see how much they increase risks, and of course typical lists of side effects never include probabilities, but these are the sort of qualitative risks that steer mothers and ob-gyns away from a drug regardless of the numbers.
Yeah, and it's not like we've all got formidable cognitive defenses to begin with.
Consider how "typical lists of side effects never include probabilities" gets treated as a normal, reasonable state of affairs - how can humanity be so innumerate that even teams of MDs can default to functional innumeracy without noticing? I like Mark Liberman's use of the Pirahã language (which has no words for numbers more specific than "some" or "many") as a metaphor, seeing their hand-wavy attitude toward numbers as a reflection of ours towards probability distributions ... but, damn it, the median first-world citizen educated enough to read his medication's fine print still isn't expected to be past the point of being hand-wavy about numbers! When it comes to questions like "how likely is it that the medicine you're about to swallow will make you sicker", we're not just simplifying "the Bayesian posterior looks like a lognormal with mean 1e-4 and standard deviation 1e-5" to "1 in ten thousand", we're effectively simplifying "1 in ten thousand" to "some"! We could translate it to Pirahã and back just fine!
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