isaacsapphire Are you referring to the weird Subaru blogs?
Not just Subaru, they come in a variety of car-themed flavors.
My running theory is that they gather followers and then change names and transform into some other kind of spam blog, since if they’re not being monetized, what’s the point? Little digital caterpillars, chomping away at pictures of lamborghinis.
Transhumanism just sounds really gay but also inevitable so I guess we’re all going to be gay cyborgs one day
I believe it will involve a lot of literal, rather than metaphorical, homosexuality.
The first generation to gain the ability to change to a new sex easily and cheaply and completely passing (on a physical level) will also start experimenting with new sex configurations, probably. For the generation after that, it will be normalized, and manipulation of hormones at key points in development may used to guide sexual orientation towards bisexual or pansexual.
In lieu of discourse, someone ought to make a hotornot clone where it just shows you a random statue somewhere in the US and you vote whether you think it should be destroyed or not.
Expert level: artificial neural network turns pictures of random people on the Internet into statues and imbues them with artificially-generated histories and ideologies.
Pretty sure that I became a liberal for the Beer and Tits more than for the “Liberalism” per see (whatever that actually is) considering that I always opposed Second Wave’s anti porn side.
The proto-rape appoligism from trans activists and “anti-racist” activists is getting extremely old. The anti free speech position, the pro violence position, the pro imprisonment and forced reeducation of people who have moral disagreement with the SJW party line, even when those who disagree are LGBTQ, or non White, or women themselves is getting to be more than I can take.
It is literally, ontologically, impossible to please them with anything less than ceasing to exist if one is straight, cis, and/or White, and even if you are LGBTQ or a PoC, that’s only good enough if you toe the party line completely, erase all evidence that you ever haven’t, keep up to date on the latest terminology and erase all evidence that you ever used old terms in the past, and never piss off someone who is more “disadvantaged” than you or has more social clout.
I can’t keep doing this.
I think that people should be treated based on their actions and the content of their character, not the color of their skin. I think that people should be permitted to love as they will, to form consensual relationship with adults as they will, and that minors should receive accurate information about sex and human reproduction and access to birth control if they so desire and not legally punished for consensual relationships with others of their age.
I think that gender and gender roles have changed, gender reassignment technology has advanced astronomically in the last half century, and our culture is struggling to absorb these changes. I don’t have all the answers for how to best accommodate all the permutations and changes. I do know that, at minimum, people should be permitted to do what they like with their own bodies and make whatever modifications they feel inclined to make, and as long as nobody is misrepresenting the body modifications that they’re selling, it’s not really any business of strangers what body mods other people choose to have.
I’m not sure exactly how all this should best be accommodated or not by schools, medical insurance, or employers though, or to what, if any, degree the government should enforce particular accommodations or forbid them.
I think that people ought to call people what they want to be called, but I also think that occasional accidental misgendering is a regular part of life and not necessarily intentional or meant to be harmful.
I don’t think that there is anything wrong with interracial relationships. (And JFC, WTF is wrong with the world that I’m saying that in 2017 to differentiate myself from LIBERALS?)
I don’t think that anybody is morally obligated to try to change who they are sexually attracted to, although you might be morally obligated to not act on some attractions (eg. Minor attracted people). I’m also pretty sure that attempts to change what you are sexually attracted to don’t work.
I don’t think that anybody has a right to sex with anybody else, whether in general or specific. Marital rape is rape, and you don’t have a right to have sex with x category of people either.
I don’t think that speech that isn’t outright direct “you kill that guy” type incitement has any business being called violence, and DEFINITELY should not be met with violence, but rather more speech.
I think that silencing those you strongly disagree with is a bad strategic move, not merely morally doubtful. If you are so right and they are so wrong, there is nothing to be gained by not publicly debating them.
I believe in freedom of religion, and freedom to not be religious, and freedom to say that other people’s religions are stupid and bad.
And I have to go get lunch now, so that’s where I’ll end for now.
I think most actual liberals are probably closer to you than the people you’re complaining about. I don’t know what your life is like so maybe I’m wrong, but it sounds to me like you’re reacting to social bubble and “the most obnoxious yeller gets heard” effects that create a very distorted picture of what the liberal Overton Window actually looks like.
Knock on the door of your average Democrat voter and my bet is you’ll find a person who has never heard of the Cotton Ceiling, has a basically liberal perspective on anti-racism and feminism and LGBT rights, thinks Hillary Clinton is kind of cool, thinks the rich have too much but doesn’t like communists and doesn’t want revolution, etc.. Heck, go to your average Tumblr leftist and my guess is you’ll find somebody with roughly the opinions you just posted. Opinions like “interracial marriage is actually problematic” get reblogged disproportionately because they’re unusual and therefore interesting.
I mean, Hillary Clinton won the 2016 primary and Bernie Sanders was the maverick outsider who fired the imaginations of the young and radical. Do either of them look like the kind of candidate a hard-core “SJW” type would get excited about to you?
I think this is why hard-core “SJW” types are so frustrated and angry: they know that most people are extremely problematic and unenlightened by their standards and this includes most of their ostensible allies.
This use of the word “Liberal” probably has something to do with the American usage not differentiating “Liberal” and “Leftist.”
I mean, it’s honestly kind of ridiculous to suggest that the proper answer to “too many Chinese buyers are holding empty apartments in our country as a store of value” is “remove the state’s monopoly on the enforcement of property laws” instead of the far less difficult and less likely to break every thing “change the laws so that so many housing units can be built that holding these empty apartment buildings is no longer economically sensible.”
The number of empty housing units acting as a real asset store of value for Chinese money fleeing capital restrictions is also probably quite small relative to the market size, much like those expensive apartments in London that people were complaining should be socialized, even though in practice it wouldn’t make much difference in the price.
the issue with loosening zoning regulations to encourage property development is that many people treat property as a safe haven asset and don’t care about actually living in it or even renting it out.
Build fast enough that they can’t make 5% real returns by leaving it empty though, and see what happens.
Without monopolized property rights enforcement by city planners preventing the full utilization of public land to organize communities in ways that are actually organic, emergent, and practical; these issues considered to be flaws of capitalism would be largely irrelevant.
Property rights are a social institution. They exist because a group of people/community mutually recognize and enforce it for each other’s benefit. If you have the building of some absentee speculator just sitting there for years unused while people struggle under a highly regulated housing market, that’s immoral. Many libertarians may turn a blind eye to that, but it should be criticized and opposed. And it certainly shouldn’t be considered the result of a free market.
Neighbors in historically decentralized communities have always taken common sense measures to ensure that mindless speculation and hoarding of land wouldn’t waste their local resources and artificially drive up rent and home ownership.
This exists because of monopolized property rights enforcement which, no surprise, exists largely to benefit crony big business at the expense of everyone else.
/in my estimation, this is the furthest left I’ve seen jaehaerys1 go on a libertarian topic/
Although I have to wonder to what extent local and decentralized measures are necessary.
Japan has famously good land use policy, and to my knowledge, no problem with speculators acting as absentee landlords. But Japan even more famously has a falling population.
So I have to wonder at what point these local measures to increase land utilization would have to kick in even if you started reducing land use restrictions.
Part of the problem in this specific case is caused by economic extortion of the Chinese people by the state, and their attempts to evade this.
As long as something fucked up is happening in one part of the world, other parts of the world are going to end up compensating for it in one way or another.
Abandoned homes are only a good investment if there’s a cheap way to prevent squatters from moving in and taking over, otherwise you lose all your money paying your guards.
In this specific instance, that would be “the police will do it for me for free.”
In the grand tradition of crony capitalism, they are wasting a public resource (police time) propping up their private capital.
These are mostly apartments, so it only takes a small number of people occupying the building and the possible presence of a caretaker to make squatters exceedingly unlikely.
What’s the caretaker going to do if he finds squatters?
Because I believe he’ll first threaten to call, and then escalate to calling, the police.
Actually if we take David Friedman’s rule on criminals having to compensate proportionally to the harm they cause (such as in the example of breaking and entering a cabin in the woods to recharge your cell phone to call 911), it would force equilibrium prices really damn quickly.
Someone squatting in someone else’s apartment is undoubtedly a violation of property rights, but the actual compensation for squatting an empty building might be really (surprisingly, so some) low.
If the squatters evacuate promptly once a paying tenant is found it’s definitely not the price of rent, because the building was not generating any revenue and thus the opportunity cost was zero. If they don’t cause any damage to the apartment the depreciation costs are negligible. It seems like it would mostly come down to utility bills, changing the locks twice (once to replace the original picked lock with one controlled by the tenants, once to replace that one with the landlord’s lock others don’t have keys to), rent for however long it takes for the squatters to move out once they’re informed that someone is actually going to live there (which could be just a few days), and whatever wear and tear has occurred.
Thus, if this were ancapistan, well-behaved squatters would be able to obtain housing for really cheap. This would quickly incentivize marginal apartment owners to find someone who pays actual rent, pushing prices down towards 100-friction% occupancy.
I think you guys are overestimating how much the market is actually in equilibrium, the difference of the average cost of providing security in today’s society to occupied and unoccupied apartment buildings, and the marginal cost of finding a clean squatter and ensuring that they are actually like that vs Airbnb which you know are kind of banned everywhere in the developing world.
Yeah, I agree with NN here.
Like, if you get a bad squatter that messes everything up, just how are you going to extract the value from them to fix things? If they had all sorts of money laying around they would not be squatters. If they could easily generate that money when ordered to do so they would probably not be squatters. If you have to throw them into a work camp to get that money, that’s really sketchy tbh and smells of slavery, and also it would probably depend on state subsidy.
“If only we didn’t have a monopoly on the enforcement of property rights” is a blatant overreaction to a situation that would be easily sorted out by just changing the zoning rules, and in London at least, Chinese value-holding housing stock is only a miniscule fraction of total housing stock.
Tsundere despotic technocrat:
B..b..baka, it's not like I actually care about my fellow citizens. I just want them to be healthy and productive members of society so I can maximize the expected risk-adjusted total real government spending over the next 50 years, including any spillover effects.
Asserting that the government of the Articles of Confederation springs from the revolution while the Constitutional government does not is sophistry, because the same body of politicians were involved in both documents. As a single example, Washington was a delegate to the 2nd Continental Congress, led the army under the government of the Articles, was president of the Constitutional convention, and 1st US president under the Constitution.
I do worry that the folks who believe the google guy had a real concern about the business consequences of google’s affirmative action policy are going to go broke someday trying to buy the Brooklyn bridge
mitigatedchaos: Eh, I do suspect it’s a drag on the company, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near enough to kill it.
What I want to know is, what is the business case for google donating 4 million to refugee-related organizations? This clearly has no benefit for google and I am very concerned that they would waste their money like this.
Right, right, PR blah blah. Manifestbro was also writing for an intended audience, blah blah.
But of course, the people saying it has business consequences aren’t actually that naive.
If you work for Google, it’s relevant. And if you have shares in Google, it’s relevant.
The consequences, though, aren’t limited to just Google. If Manifestbro is correct, it’s potentially a drag on the whole sector, depending on just what it is you want out of that sector.
What you call "time travel ethics" is more like "acausal ethics", people intuitively grasp the acausal negotiations that underlie our ethical systems.
In this case, I disagree. This represents a potential recommitment to bad policy on the grounds that you or your ancestors (who are not you) did it before. I’d say it’s more similar to a sunk cost fallacy than an acausal negotiation.
That’s why I gave an example of a 16 year old girl having a kid. This is, clearly and obviously, a bad policy.
And if you’re reading this, you probably either agree abortion should be legal (in which case you disagree with the logic of the argument), xor you probably agree that mass migration isn’t such a great idea (in which case you disagree with the logic of the argument).
Suppose there is a girl who was born when her mother was sixteen. And her mother was born when her grandmother was sixteen. And suppose this burden of caring for a child at the age of 16 has contributed to an intergenerational cycle of poverty that has harmed her family and her education.
A boy of sixteen comes to her and says (roughly translated),
“Hey girl, your mother recklessly had a kid at age 16, and her mom recklessly had a kid at age 16, so you should get with me and recklessly have a kid at age 16! After all, if they didn’t do the same thing, you wouldn’t exist!”
Is this a good idea? I mean, after all, if they didn’t do it, she wouldn’t exist.
No, it is not a good idea. In fact, this argument does not make sense…
unless, implicit in the argument, you have access to a time machine and can change the past.
However, if one did have a time machine, that opens up an entirely different bucket of ethics which this argument completely fails to address.
This applies to abortion
regardless of whether other arguments are also valid
- “but if your mother aborted you…” implies time travel.
This applies to immigration, regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if immigration laws were different…” implies time travel.
those who would celebrate strong women must celebrate weak men.
that’s a straw man
He means it as a good thing. I think?
Oh…maybe?
to celebrate women challenging feminine norms and adopting roles traditionally coded as masculine while scorning men who challenge masculine norms and take on traditionally feminine roles is simply to reinforce the idea that masculinity as is superior to femininity, not a progressive stance but highly reactionary.
cultural engineering that attempts to use traditional masculinity to subvert itself comes across as deceptive pandering (”are you MAN ENOUGH to accept your girlfriend earning more than you do??”) and builds resentment.
much like anxious femininity trying to excel at sport but still look pretty doing it, pictures of bearded lumberjacks wearing pink or bikies braiding girls hair only emphasise that of course men can be feminine: but only if they make sure to signal masculinity so hard that no one could possibly get the wrong idea.
saying “girls, don’t waste your time on a man who doesn’t have his life in order / has a decent job / has a car that works / owns a neat apartment” is an ostensibly feminist statement (”you’re worth it!”) that is just recapitulating gender norms that are centuries old: the woman chooses a man who will provide for the family.
Hollywood loves to match young actresses with old men and we love to decry that practice. support older women! yes. but are we willing to watch stories about young men, weak men, immature men, fragile men, failing men?
society hates nothing more than a weak man, and celebrating strong women only doubles down on that. those who would celebrate strong women must celebrate weak men.
You know, it’s not like science has fucking stopped entirely. So why the hell do none of these sci-fi shows seems to have any vision? It’s like ideas for sci-fi stopped being created in the 80s and they can’t use anything that wasn’t written about before 1990.
In some cases I think it’s just “near-future shows are cheap”, but with Spaceship Shows, I think there’s actually a retro-futurism thing going on. Spaceship Shows are so rare now that they’re wedded to a particular era and symbology in the popular consciousness, so there’s an element of pastiche.
Star Trek always had the particular problem that it wanted to be seen as serious scientific space thinking, but also didn’t want to threaten the Motherhood Statement in any way, which leads to this weird situation where it has to scrupulously avoid all the implications of its own tech. Obviously that just gets worse the more of it there is!
You don’t have to dive deep into sci-fi vision to be good, necessarily. Battlestar doesn’t and (IMO) it was great. But we never feel as though their technology is used radically out of sync with its implications, precisely because all their tech is fairly nerfed and there are in-story reasons about the issues with artificial intelligence.
Fk man, are you saying you aren’t going to greenlight my series about a retired white nationalist becoming a Pseudo-Han Chinese cyborg through genetic and surgical modification and working as a detective for a series of corporate-run faux ethnonationalist city-states on the Asia-Pacific rim?
You know, it’s not like science has fucking stopped entirely. So why the hell do none of these sci-fi shows seems to have any vision? It’s like ideas for sci-fi stopped being created in the 80s and they can’t use anything that wasn’t written about before 1990.
Because Eclipse Phase is too unrelatable to general audiences.
We even got a live action Ghost in the Shell movie, and it really missed tons of opportunities in trying to dumb itself down for general audiences. Perhaps the worst part of it is that Standalone Complex was really quite prescient about the power of memeforce!
Though really, I also think that many Hollywood writers are mostly not of the sci-fi visionary caliber to go from “what if some dude became part robot?” to “what if every dude became part robot?”
The latter includes all sorts of cascading changes throughout society, seen in shows like Standalone Complex, with ordinary people becoming vulnerable to cyberbrain crime and reserving organs to be grown in pigs. Psycho-Pass is really the spiritual successor here in that it will probably seem really prescient about the use of big data to analyze people for criminality in about 10-20 years, the way Standalone Complex seems prescient about crimes-as-memes.
But even then, those are what, two shows in a foreign country, where most of the shows are either not of that type, or not of that caliber.
How would American audiences have responded if Standalone Complex were a live-action TV show?
You know, it’s not like science has fucking stopped entirely. So why the hell do none of these sci-fi shows seems to have any vision? It’s like ideas for sci-fi stopped being created in the 80s and they can’t use anything that wasn’t written about before 1990.
Because Eclipse Phase is too unrelatable to general audiences.
We even got a live action Ghost in the Shell movie, and it really missed tons of opportunities in trying to dumb itself down for general audiences. Perhaps the worst part of it is that Standalone Complex was really quite prescient about the power of memeforce!
How the hell has Donald Trump managed to convince people that he's not a billionaire elite. He must be one of the best examples of detached wealth there is. He has a golden tower with his name on!
Standard answer is that don’t perceive it so much as rich v poor as educated coastal vs uneducated inland. He sells himself as an uneducated inlander, so that’s what think of him as.
Ah yes I’m sure your working class ideological forefathers would totally agree with all the shit you currently shill for. Like why the fuck can’t people admit that shit mutates and changes and that only the names and the most bare bones of beliefs tie current movements to those they claim to continue the legacy of.
You see Octopi, it turns out Leftists still want to tie themselves to history, to weave themselves into a tapestry of narrative connecting the past to the future.
The past still grants political legitimacy, even to those who would overthrow it.
will the japanese government push Catholicism on the populace to try and increase birth rates?
Contrary to conspiracy theories circulating in some parts of this website, I am not secretly an official within the Japanese government, nor the child of any such official, nor a contractor hired on their behalf, my darling Anon. (I consider myself an American. This nation’s fate is my fate.)
So let’s go farm Wikipedia:
In 1873, following the Meiji Restoration, the ban was rescinded, freedom of religion was promulgated, and Protestant missionaries (プロテスタント Purotesutanto or 新教 Shinkyō, “renewed teaching”) began to proselytise in Japan, intensifying their activities after World War II, yet they were never as successful as in Korea.
Today, there are 1 to 3 million Christians in Japan, most of them living in the western part of the country, where the missionaries’ activities were greatest during the 16th century. Nagasaki Prefecture has the highest percentage of Christians: about 5.1% in 1996.[39] As of 2007 there are 32,036 Christian priests and pastors in Japan.[26] Throughout the latest century, some Western customs originally related to Christianity (including Western style weddings, Valentine’s Day and Christmas) have become popular among many Japanese.
About 2.3% of Japan identifies as Christian.
A number of Asian-Americans within America are Christian, but that does not necessarily apply to the ancestral countries.
Korea, on the other hand, is far more Christian for some reason.
According to the national census conducted in 2015, 19.7% of the population belongs to Protestantism, 15.5% to Buddhism (Korean Buddhism), and 7.9% to the Roman Catholic Church; in total Christianity is the religion of 27.6% of the Korean population.
I can’t pretend to see inside the minds of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, but apparently, while it is showing signs of strain, the LDP is in a coalition with another party closely aligned with a Buddhist religious movement…
So I’m going to guess that no, they won’t push Catholicism to try to increase birthrates, that it isn’t really part of the vision of Japanese national identity the ruling classes in Japan have.
But someone currently living in Japan would be better to ask.
With that said, given the outcomes for Protestant countries vs Catholic countries, that certainly isn’t a tradeoff I’d make until after I’d exhausted other options, like getting Japanese people to spend less time at work so they can actually meet members of the opposite sex and form families.
The Democratic establishment reminds me of like, that 19th century history thing where a state realizes it’s in bad need for modernizing reform and there’s a clique of nobles that are like “actually we must never abandon the old ways that serve our immediate self-interests even if doing so is self-destructive in a wider scale”
I don’t like this analysis as it makes the DNC into samurai
Your blog is fascinating (and fun), and your posts about possible futures are making me consider aspects of politics I'd never thought of before. Thanks for writing.
You’ll regret this in time, Kindness Anon. Mark my words.
Am I crazy, or do post-pile-on, post-death-threat “I’m so so so sorry and promise to make myself as small as possible and defer to my betters” posts sometimes sound like the statements they make hostages read in front of the cameras?
A bit. Hadn’t realized before this that the OP had blocked me, had to do my usual work around to see if they’d deleted or blocked.
Honestly, these sort of gushing “I’m sorry for not being sufficiently woke” posts gives me some degree of schadenfreude, though it is a little bit sad that people seem to be afraid to take the Michael Tracey/Fredrick DeBoer route in terms of not backing down in the face of public pressure.
Is it really the correct route? I’m unsure.
Maybe the correct route is to bow and scrape, wait several months, then go back to doing exactly what you were doing before.
In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.
whoever drank that particular flavour of neoliberal koolaid deserved it
Oddly I haven’t missed them. Hell, I didn’t even notice their absence.
I noticed they were gone because Mic actually had me blocked here
Every so often I’d try to comment on some long discussion and I couldn’t because the OP was a shitty Mic article
I was blocked also, but their pandering shit kind of blended into the rest of tumblr I guess.
In a sense Tumblr stole their thing because any self-loathing hubris filled tween could write for them.
Wait a second don’t bury the lede, Mic blocked people on tumblr (as a way of making sure the reblog chains of their official ports-to-tumblr never went through ancaps and were more hugboxy) ??
One more thing I didn’t realize could happen until someone broke a norm and it looked obvious in retrospect. 2017!
Yes, this is fascinating! And I say this as someone quite averse to Anarcho-Capitalism.
Basically every benefit we give to the working poor ends up being an indirect subsidy for business - see, for example, employers telling their employees how to obtain food stamps.
One of the complaints about a wage subsidy over a higher minimum wage is that it will just be captured by employers, who will pay their employees less by that amount. That’s also potentially true of a basic income, and with a minimum wage, employers may opt to gain non-monetary compensation (e.g. terrible hours).
Now, here’s where the limits of my economics education probably show a bit, in that I’m not familiar with the literature on how, empirically, this works out. (Maybe @xhxhxhx can chime in.)
I realized that this is actually related to the marginal productivity of labor - how much revenue (and thus, potentially, profit) does each additional employee bring in, across the whole economy? There are limits to this based on the amount of equipment/capital needed for a marginal employee or marginal hours, including facility size, as well as the potential customers it might bring in (e.g. why haven’t they hired additional labor already?).
The reason for this is that to determine the leverage of a low-wage employee under a wage subsidy system, we need to know how many potential jobs our wage subsidy can create, and at what quality. How easy is it for an employee to just walk right out of the store, walk right in to another store, and get a new job? Even if the pay is somewhat lower, this creates a much stronger incentive against bad hours, bad bosses, and unsafe practices, about which employees will then either demand higher pay, or just tell the employers to knock it off.
However, that increase in leverage only occurs if enough potential jobs emerge, and this is more or less an empirical question.
The greater the marginal increase in the number of jobs per marginal decrease in minimum wage prior to subsidy, the more of the subsidy that will be captured by the workers. However, if cutting the minimum wage creates no new jobs, then leverage doesn’t change much at all and employers capture the majority of the subsidy.
If the leverage is high enough, wages may even be driven higher than they were prior to the subsidy, depending on employer margins that they were exploiting leverage over against employees.
However, since employers capturing part of the subsidy is potentially true for all subsidies for the working poor, even rental vouchers or healthcare, it has to be compared with other alternatives (such as basic income).
(For my preferred implementation, the accompanying decrease in minimum wage should be lower than the wage subsidy, and the wage subsidy should be paid directly to the employee, thus at least not resulting in a decrease in effective income even if the entire subsidy is captured.)
like if i see an ad on facebook most of the time i don’t wanna click on it but at least i generally believe there is probably a real product that they want to sell me
if i see a tumblr ad for like, a watch, my alief is that they 3d rendered the watch and it literally doesn’t exist
how do you make ads this bad! i can’t believe they’ve sunk to “literally failing to convince me that they’re marketing a real thing”
If I see a tumblr ad for a “watch”, I’d just assume that it’s an alien tentacle-frog infiltrator psychically releasing spores into my brain to disguise itself as a watch. This is my opinion of tumblr ads. None of them are from this world, none.
1) maybe nobody buys tumblr ads because they know we don’t buy things based on ads, but tumblr still has to make it look like they have ads in case anyone *does* want to buy some useless spam propaganda, so they make their own fake ads which no one will click on?
2) the only people clueless enough to buy tumblr ads are also really terrible at advertising (i once had one trying to sell me “TANKS. Sturdy, reliable, durable. London area.” no image of what sort of tanks)
possibly both
Also I’ve seen NASDAQ ads here? Legit ones, not uncanny-weird ones. Wtf. How did they decide this was right channel to advertise in, what are they even trying to sell or achieve, what.
At one point Tumblr really wanted to sell me B2B software. There are good marketing departments advertising on Tumblr, but they do it by getting actual Tumblr users to shill for them. The actual adroll stuff is like a cry for help from someone who faked their way into a job interview by pretending they had 10+ years of marketing experience.
I think part of the problem is that they’re mostly not marketing real products that people might conceivably want. I could do a better job than some of these guys, although I admit “Are you investing in the right kind of Asia?” is a lot more innocuous than some of them.
One of the reasons I enjoy writing standalone novels is that it allows me to tell stories that have a beginning, middle, and an end. Series fiction is, almost universally, stuck in the second act by its very nature.
ACT ONE: Peter Parker gets bit by a radioactive spider, gains superpowers, learns a lesson on personal responsibility.
ACT TWO: Spider-Man struggles to fight crime and redeem himself in his own eyes and the eyes of the city he defends.
ACT THREE: Spider-Man learns to balance his obligations as both a superhero and an ordinary man, gets married, has some kids, stops being such a sadsack.
Yes, it’s that Act Three that’s the problem. It NEVER happens. It was never intended to happen. Spider-Man is stuck in that second act, and he will never actually get out of it. This is why he’ll never have a successful marriage (even when married to his beautiful dreamgirl who is both understanding and a supermodel), he’ll always be an outcast (even while a prominent member of The Avengers, his world’s preeminent superhero team), and why he’ll always be broke (did I mention his wife was a successful supermodel?), and always ALWAYS debating whether or not he should even be Spider-Man in the first place (regardless of how many times he has saved New York and the world).
I actually think this is why I’m wary of trying to get into some of the longer-running comics series. I mean, when I read something, I’m almost invariably reading it for the characters; I want to see who they are, what they struggle with, how they deal with those struggles, and how their story turns out. I want good, solid character arcs! And the thing about arcs is that they have to have a beginning and an end–otherwise they just loop back around and… become circles. (I think. My grasp of geometry is a bit fuzzy.) And circular characterization is just not something I’m interested in.
(I mean, seriously, Bruce Wayne is never going to get a happy ending, unless it’s in an animated/movie ‘verse or some kind of Elseworlds ‘verse. For that matter, he’s never going to get a sad ending. It just isn’t gonna happen, because DC will never let his story end. Sure, he can have character development arcs within his ongoing series, but… well, we can’t have too much of that either, because heaven forbid he ever move too far away from his broodiness and angst-ridden-ness! No, any “character development” he gets will a) make him even darker and grimmer–and eventually you have to wonder just how much more grimness this guy can take before he goes completely bonkers [I will not turn this into a rant about Damian’s death, I will not turn this into a rant about Damian’s death…]–or b) it will eventually be overturned in favor of the more profitable and comfortable status quo. This is why I have next to no desire to pick up any of the mainline Batman titles, past or present, even though I love the Batfamily.)
This is pretty much why I gave up on the old comic series too. I like to pretend that X-men ended with the Dark Phoenix storyline.
this is exactly why i like comic books. as far as i know, most fiction has beginnings and endings, but long running comic books are one of the big exceptions when it comes to endings (the others that come to mind are i guess finnegan’s wake and dhalgren). the characters get explored endlessly, their past isn’t set in stone, everything reflects society, stuff like that. there’s of course lots of bad comic book arcs out there but the good ones are really good, seamlessly tying together things from disparate parts of a character’s decades of history. but it’s interesting to me how the entire character’s history can change as the plot moves forward (i.e. through retcons). i get why people don’t like retroactive continuity but i think it happens all the time in both myth/folklore and in reality (i.e. our interpretation of history is updated).
but i also get why people don’t like this aspect of it. the idea of fiction that lasts for decades and decades is amazing to me tho
So I definitely don’t mind the length, or the retro continuity. What bugs me about the comic stories is that they don’t have endings they’re heading towards.
Like, I’m happy to read four million words on one subject. (My favorite fiction is the Wheel of Time). But I’d like the sense that there’s an ending, that people will get to a conclusion, that they’ll be allowed to be happy.
Honestly, my biggest problem is with the continual regression. I want to read stories about adults behaving in an adult manner; about good people making good decisions. I’m potentially willing to read stories that start out with characters who don’t make good decisions, but only as a road up to emotionally stable people being good. And comic books never get there because they keep doing the same character arc over and over again.
This is why I love fanfiction. It’s the best of both worlds – writers can explore every possible variation of characterization, plot and genre, readers can enjoy some more of what attracted them to the original story, and characters don’t have to be artificially stunted or stuck in an endless loop of reversible development.
Interesting idea: Alternate timelines/universes- similar to the non-canon-ness of fanfics- allows the same effect of endless stories that comics want (i.e. repeatedly producing content for and making money off the same title), while allowing stuff to wrap up. An example that comes to mind is the Fate series, which produced at least 6 different conclusions in the very first installment, but has produced like 10 different series since then- although I think those are mostly prequels and side stories, only one or two alternate continuities. Still, the idea could work: keep adding branches to the VN, telling different possible outcomes. This would also allow new fans to get into it without committing to 4 million words, while still having plenty of content for dedicated fans.
I suppose the constant reboots that TV adaptations of comics keep doing is essentially a way of doing this, although they don’t tend to actually use it for concluding their stories, nor for systematically exploring different ways things could have gone.
Eyeballing the results of this study, things that don’t affect whiteness of a school: racism, history, geography, or media attention to racism.
Things that do: how technical is it?
Don’t Filipinos count as Hispanics for legal purposes?
That’s… actually a good question.
As for technical schools drawing more white people (and Asians), that sounds like something closer to persistent cultural problems earlier in the pipeline.
when you announce your vision of america’s future as a little aryan kid less than two weeks after helping nazis throw a death rally because you’re a little eichmann
given the white supremacist line of protecting a “future for white children” this is.. chilling
people in the tags: no, this is not “bad optics.”
it’s called a dog whistle, and one made by a guild of lawyers that exploit plausible deniability for a living.
gothhabiba is right. they didn’t put up a visual depiction of the 14 words with the nazi’s discursive shield of “free speech” on an aryan-looking child on accident.
go look at their tweet and see who’s upset (stupid liberals), who’s not surprised or expressing suspicion (the left) and who’s rejoicing (the nazis).
perhaps a small part of it might be that unlike, say, the Trojan War or King Arthur, Harry Potter, is, due to copyright-and-canon culture, unimprovable. I mean, fanfiction exists, but it's secondary and can't supersede the earlier versions of the myth
this is bad but you don’t see the read another book people saying it’s bad
I was in a crowded place when a fire alarm started going off. There was the typical beeping and flashing, complete with the tinny voice on the intercom saying “there is a fire emergency, please evacuate, avoid using elevators” in between beeps. It probably wasn’t a big deal but I got up to leave the building because that’s what you do and then I noticed everyone else was staying where they were. They were eating and chatting like everything was normal, people were even entering the building unfazed and continuing on to their destination. So I stuck around for a few minutes just to see if anyone else would act like there’s a fire alarm on and nobody did.
We have fire drills regularly at work and the way they ended up having to do it is that every floor has two People Who Get In Trouble If The Fire Drill Doesn’t Go Right, and those people have to run around hassling everyone into obeying the actual rules because if not they’ll get in trouble.
This works pretty well, but even when it goes flawlessly, nobody really evacuates in order to drill in proper procedure, or out of fear of dying in a fire – they just don’t want to get into an argument with the designated fire drill busybodies. I feel like this probably has implications for social policy more generally, but I haven’t figured out exactly what yet.
I just read the newest of the recurring Bleeding Hearts Libertarian “Say, it is really awkward that so many neo-confederates and Nazis are connected to the libertarian movement, isn’t it?“ article.
These articles are almost always really bad, the poster doesn’t even approach the connection, saying the standard “libertarians believe in cosmopolitanism“ line. I can see that some of them in the comments
(Protip: never read the comments) think the connection is the free speech thing, I will say that the free speech thing can annoy some leftists and there’s always a suspicion of hypocrisy there but it’s not the core connection leftists see between libertarians and fascists.
The best short version of that core reason is expressed ,“Libertarians become Alt-Right at the moment they realize that
maintaining present property relations in the future will require
genocide.” (And some shit about being able to exclude races/sexualities you don’t like) I can see people dance around it in the comments with the usual Charles Murray shit and implying that libertarianism is dead once the US becomes truly multiracial.
What bugs me is that him and so many of the bigwigs can’t even approach the refutation of the real connection, he says some “oh we’re not the same” shit but he totally fails to distance himself from the actual problem. It gets to the point that I’m not even sure they can conceive of it. If I was an asshole, I would say that this is why he’s not alt-right yet.
I would say that’s roughly the relation, although Libertarianism/Anarcho-Capitalism aren’t really the current property relations - they aspire to become the property relations.
And they don’t actually require genocide, but they would require closed borders or separatism. Libertarianism and Anarcho-Capitalism fundamentally require sufficient cultural belief or social power mass in order to be implemented.
Forbidden racepol writers have analyzed how long it takes immigrant groups to go from wanting higher state intervention than the local mean to wanting something closer to the local mean in America, and from what I recall, we’re talking generations. (Cultural, not genetic.)
So the hard economic rightist has two options - create or modify a state such that the population is majority economic rightist and stays majority economic rightist (strict borders), or abandon democracy.
Of course, I’m not a Leftist so I don’t see it in some of the same collective intergenerational ethnic justice terms about the evils of Capitalism. Collective intergenerational ethnic justice, after all, is the basis of many an “ethnic tension” random violence feud.
Fortunately I’m not a Libertarian, either. I want better government intervention.
if red pill ideology is all about taking an honest look at human behavioural characteristics driven by evolution and leveraging those drives to achieve happiness then you would expect that by symmetry “red pill women” would be all about how to maximize female reproductive fitness at the expense of men-
haha no it’s focused on how to suppress feminine nature and “minimize negative characteristics like sexual manipulation” in order to be a better wife
The thing you describe as “red pill women” already exists and is called feminism. “Red pill” is most accurately modeled as the inverse of feminism, which reverses feminism’s prescriptions for men and for women, giving us exactly what you observe above.
I just find it hilarious how we’ve circled back to a point where feminism is considered to be the purest expression of the essential nature of womanhood and traditionalism is a strange modern invention to subvert the natural order.
like there’s critique of capitalism in nazism but it’s self-contradictory and does not mesh with the whole ‘the weak need to fear the strong’ thing, so they skip over it and go “but the problem really is the jews”, hello false consciousness
Honestly, reading one of Hitler’s speeches, it seemed the “weak need to fear the strong” thing was a bit weirder than that.
Great Ppl make the nation great
To have more Great Ppl, we need to have more population, and to heck with resource conservation thru limiting population growth
Instead of saving our land, we’ll invade other places, kill their people, and take theirs
Which, you know, what the fuck. It’s very nation-as-organism in one of the worst ways possible, and so weak fearing the strong is also in those terms.
What gets me is that if you’re going to be an evil eugenicist, you have a lot more options that don’t require endless invasions and expansions.
