“[Ghost in the Shell] is a perfect overlapping of form and function. They speak directly to the audience and say “the patriarchal corporation made Motoko white because they consider it more marketable.”
The irony of the film is that people [online] have bought entirely into the corporate logic and are now arguing that ‘authentic’ Japanese identity is superior because it’s even more marketable - literally that the movie would have made more money with an authentic Japanese on the posters.
In this view, Cutter was bad not because he was using billions of tax dollars to vicisect people for profit, but because he failed to make enough profit for his shareholders. He was not exploitative enough - he did not ‘Think Different". Cutter’s sneering racism is unfashionable, and so his Caucasian deathbots were left in the dust by the burgeoning Japanese-Looking Fucktoy industry.”
An interesting response, though I believe the arguers actually wanted it for authenticity/racial representation reasons and only made the argument about money because they thought “be more moral (according to our morality)” wouldn’t be convincing.
I hope McCain takes the time left to him to reflect on the experiences he’s lived through - for someone to suffer through some of the worst of the pointless cruelty war has to offer, to then turn around and work to inflict that on others, is something I’ll never be able to comprehend
Hearing about his brain cancer got me thinking, though…I don’t know that the rest of the world would forgive the US if we had something like the Nuremberg trials for everybody involved in the last few administrations, the targeted drone killing program, the decisions to begin wars in various countries under false pretenses or completely without justification, Guantanamo Bay and all the rest of it, and brought the country back under some semblance of the rule of law
But I’m pretty sure they won’t forgive us if we don’t do something like that before too many of the war criminals involved start dying of natural causes without seeing justice under the international law we once championed
It took the memetic force of Donald Fucking Trump to get the Republicans to admit the Iraq War was a bad idea. Hypocrites that they are, the Democrats have mostly given the Obama Administration a pass, even though from what I’ve read Libya is now worse off. Although really the worst thing about all this is this shit doesn’t even work and they have the backbone for drone strikes but NOT the backbone to properly occupy Afghanistan and forcibly modernize it over one generation so that the “nation building” sticks. And forcibly modernizing the territory SHOULD be a lot more threatening than just wrecking it!
It’s racist for a Swiss person to perform surgery on a Japanese one
No no, it’s racist because humans can’t just decide to make some dude half-Omnic. Omnics have a long and complex history of oppression at the hands of humans, and -
the other day i made a joke about manlets to my brother and he just said completely dead pan “brother, we cannot ridicule those of a stature that does not match our own” and i can’t stop thinking about it. it was like he got possessed by a manlet sympathizing spirit
I dunno @ranma-official, it sounds like you might be taking punching down a little too literally.
this is why they don't want to let birds on Tumblr. wildlife conservation is gonna be pissed after you've grimaced yourself to death on discourse. don't you owe it to Australia's environment to log off and go hunt small rodents?
I just find it amusing that every self-described leftist who accuses me of being a fascist invariably gets torn to pieces by other self-described leftists a week later, who then get torn to pieces in turn, and so on ad infinitum, like a bizarre political karma system.
also yes, the phrase asexual didnt used to exist, they just were part of the bisexual community because they werent attracted to men or women/because they were attracted to them equally
Well, how does one get people to become willing to literally fight to the death to support wishy-washy liberal multiculturalism and large-scale migration?
After all, under such conditions, one does not really own one’s country, or any country, and everywhere is just a multicultural blend, so the logical thing to is just leave whenever threatened until your back is against the wall and it’s reduced to one nation again.
Who will fight in the nation’s army if there is no national pride as all developed nations are in the debt of infinite sin?
Say what you will about Philippe Pétain, but at least he fought for the Third Republic.
This is something a bit worse than that.
In this world, only the willingness and ability to use force can ensure that an ideology is instantiated, even if it is in ways that are bound up in rules and procedures and called law.
Is that dangerous?
Yes. But it applies to every ideology, from the cruelest of the Second World War, to Human Rights.
If an ideology cannot even generate enough power to defend itself, then it will be replaced by one that can. That is why it is essential to construct ideologies that can create that power but which are still worth living under.
A fact about NATO that to me seems to go strangely elided in the discussion: the alliance has plenty more countries in it than just the US and the Baltics. US clearly has strongest single military, but even if assuming maximal US waffling and vagueness, any threats againt NATO members are still held in check also by, for starters, pretty much the entirety of Western Europe.
That’s fair, but I believe the United States has advantages in procurement, development, and air support, larger reserves of manpower and materiel, and more military experience than the Europeans.
In a non-nuclear confrontation with Russia, I believe only the Americans have the combined arms forces with the military superiority to roll back Russian positions in Poland and the Baltic states.
The United States has about 14,000 military aircraft, while Russia has 3,800. But the principal allies together have fewer aircraft than that: France has 1,300, Britain has 850, and Germany has 700.
Even if qualitative and personnel superiority allow the smaller allied forces to fight Russia to a draw – and the Russians will have combat experience that allies lack – I’m skeptical that Europeans will have the air superiority they need to advance on the ground.
On the ground, the United States has about 5,900 tanks and 41,000 armored fighting vehicles. Russia has about 20,000 tanks and 31,000 AFVs. The Europeans have fewer than that: France has about 400 tanks and 6,900 AFVs, Britain has about 250 tanks and 6,000 AFVs, and Germany has about 550 tanks and 5,900 AFVs.
I don’t have the technical expertise to evaluate those military numbers, but the Europeans are not prepared to fight and win a ground war against Russia without air superiority, and I don’t know how long it would take the Europeans to procure the materiel and manpower to reverse Russian gains.
They would need that, because Russia will have an enormous military advantage at the beginning of the war. NATO runs war games, and the outcome isn’t happy, even with US and European allies working together:
Across
multiple plays of the game, Russian forces eliminated or
bypassed all resistance and were at the gates of or actually
entering Riga, Tallinn, or both, between 36 and 60 hours after the start of hostilities. Four factors appeared to contribute most
substantially to this result.
First and obviously, the overall correlation of forces was
dramatically in Russia’s favor. Although the two sides’ raw
numbers of maneuver battalions—22 for Russia and 12 for
NATO—are not badly disproportionate, seven of NATO’s are
those of Estonia and Latvia, which are extremely light, lack
tactical mobility, and are poorly equipped for fighting against
an armored opponent. Indeed, the only armor in the NATO
force is the light armor in a single Stryker battalion, which is
credited with having deployed from Germany during the crisis
buildup prior to the conflict. NATO has no main battle tanks
in the field.
Meanwhile, all Russia’s forces are motorized, mechanized,
or tank units. Even their eight airborne battalions are equipped
with light armored vehicles, unlike their U.S. counterparts.
Second, Russia also enjoys an overwhelming advantage
in tactical and operational fires. The Russian order of battle
includes ten artillery battalions (three equipped with tube artillery and seven with multiple-rocket launchers), in addition to
the artillery that is organic to the maneuver units themselves.
NATO has no independent fires units at all, and the light units
involved in the fight are poorly endowed with organic artillery.
Third, NATO’s light forces were not only outgunned by
the much heavier Russian units, but their lack of maneuver ability meant that they could be pinned and bypassed if the
Russian players so desired. By and large, NATO’s infantry
found themselves unable even to retreat successfully and were
destroyed in place.
Finally, while NATO airpower was generally able to take a
substantial toll on advancing Russian troops, without adequate
NATO ground forces to slow the attack’s momentum, there
is simply not enough time to inflict sufficient attrition to halt
the assault. Airpower is rate limited, and against a moderately
competent adversary—which is how we portrayed the Russian
Air Force—NATO’s air forces had multiple jobs to do,
including suppressing Russia’s arsenal of modern surface-to-air
defenses and defending against possible air attacks on NATO
forces and rear areas. This further limited NATO air’s ability
to affect the outcome of the war on the ground. Without heavy
NATO ground forces to force the attackers to slow their rate of
advance and assume postures that increased their vulnerability
to air strikes, Russian players could meter their losses to air by
choosing how to array and move their forces.
Russia’s tactical advantages make victory in the Baltics a fait accompli. That means that Europeans can only make victory in a protracted campaign, and I am deeply skeptical that the Europeans are willing to go it alone. I’m not even sure they’d be willing to do it with American help.
European electorates outside the Russian borderlands are also deeply skeptical of military action, even in defense. Only 18 percent of Germans, 27 percent of Britons, and 29 percent of the French are willing to fight for their country. The French and British establishments believe in the alliance, but I’m skeptical that the deeply pacifist German electorate is prepared for conflict.
If there were a political solution available – supposing the Russians install an amenable client government in the Baltic states, and offer a compromise peace with the Western Europeans – I am not certain that the Germans would hold out for something more.
Without Germany, without the United States, and with the Baltic states already under Russian occupation, I don’t think the Atlantic alliance has a leg to stand on, even if the Balts and Poles put up a heroic resistance. Even with the Americans and the Germans, the Russian fait accompli in the Baltics presents the allies with hard choices, as RAND points out:
A rapid Russian occupation of all or much of one or two
NATO member states would present the Alliance with three
options, all unappetizing.
First, NATO could mobilize forces for a counteroffensive to
eject Russian forces from Latvia and Estonia and restore the territorial integrity of the two countries. Under the best of circumstances,
this would require a fairly prolonged buildup that could
stress the cohesion of the alliance and allow Russia opportunities
to seek a political resolution that left it in possession of its conquests.
Even a successful counteroffensive would almost certainly
be bloody and costly and would have political consequences that
are unforeseeable in advance but could prove dramatic.
Any counteroffensive would also be fraught with severe
escalatory risks. If the Crimea experience can be taken as a
precedent, Moscow could move rapidly to formally annex the
occupied territories to Russia. NATO clearly would not recognize
the legitimacy of such a gambit, but from Russia’s perspective
it would at least nominally bring them under Moscow’s
nuclear umbrella. By turning a NATO counterattack aimed at
liberating the Baltic republics into an “invasion” of “Russia,”
Moscow could generate unpredictable but clearly dangerous
escalatory dynamics.
On a tactical level, a counteroffensive campaign into the
Baltics would likely entail the desire, and perhaps even the necessity,
of striking targets, such as long-range surface-to-air defenses
and surface-to-surface fires systems, in territory that even NATO
would agree constitutes “Russia.” Under Russian doctrine, it is
unclear what kinds or magnitudes of conventional attacks into
Russian territory might trigger a response in kind (or worse),
but there would certainly be concern in Washington and other
NATO capitals about possible escalatory implications.
Finally, it is also unclear how Russia would react to a successful
NATO counteroffensive that threatened to decimate
the bulk of its armed forces along its western frontier; at what
point would tactical defeat in the theater begin to appear like a
strategic threat to Russia herself?
The second option would be for NATO to turn the escalatory
tables, taking a page from its Cold War doctrine of “massive
retaliation,” and threaten Moscow with a nuclear response
if it did not withdraw from the territory it had occupied. This
option was a core element of the Alliance’s strategy against the
Warsaw Pact for the duration of the latter’s existence and could
certainly be called on once again in these circumstances.
The deterrent impact of such a threat draws power from the
implicit risk of igniting an escalatory spiral that swiftly reaches
the level of nuclear exchanges between the Russian and U.S.
homelands. Unfortunately, once deterrence has failed—which
would clearly be the case once Russia had crossed the Rubicon
of attacking NATO member states—that same risk would tend
to greatly undermine its credibility, since it may seem highly
unlikely to Moscow that the United States would be willing to
exchange New York for Riga. Coupled with the general direction
of U.S. defense policy, which has been to de-emphasize
the value of nuclear weapons, and the likely unwillingness of
NATO’s European members, especially the Baltic states themselves,
to see their continent or countries turned into a nuclear
battlefield, this lack of believability makes this alternative both
unlikely and unpalatable.
The third possibility would be to concede, at least for the
near to medium term, Russian control of the territory they had
occupied. Under this scenario, the best outcome would likely
be a new cold war, with the 21st century’s version of the old
“inner German border” drawn somewhere across Lithuania or
Latvia. The worst be would be the collapse of NATO itself and
the crumbling of the cornerstone of Western security for almost
70 years.
If the Americans believe they must “trade New York for Tallinn,” or Rostock for Riga, or Calais for Kaunas, or Hampstead for Helsinki, I’m not sure they’d be willing to make the trade. So I’m a bit concerned. Yes, I’m a bit concerned about this, that, and the other thing, about events that might precipitate this eventuality, or perhaps something worse.
Americans and Europeans both might decide to “respect Russia’s interests in its traditional sphere of influence,” whatever that might mean for their six million Baltic allies.
Honestly, most of the people on the other side of the net neutrality debate are probably living in a completely different world from me. They have over a half dozen different options for ISPs, all of whom actually have to compete with one another to keep the customer happy.
Meanwhile I’m over here my little corner of Iowa, which in a duopoly in part because it’s LITERALLY ILLEGAL TO HAVE SATELLITE INTERNET.
said “Wait why in the world is it illegal”
I mean I’m pretty sure it’s because Mediacom and Centurylink want it to be. I have no idea what the justification is though.
Probably building out the lines (and then not spending money on upgrading them).
In some countries, the government builds the lines and then rents them out. Those countries have cheaper internet access.
What really gets me is that they won’t even let local power cooperatives compete on this, when they’re demonstrably better. (In fact, local utility cooperatives seem pretty good generally.)
Never forget that the Market actively pays people to sabotage itself.
“the word nazi has lost all its meaning now, thanks, liberals” is a cold take because people called each other nazis for no reason for over 50 years. what concerns me is the devaluing of the word “violent”.
Well, there was a time when the word “Neo-Nazis” meant something at least. Not so much anymore.
But yes, this equivocation over the meaning of violence is quite deliberate. Definitely trying to exploit the taboo sane people have against punching people who aren’t literally punching other people.
Also, all political ideologies can claim that their enemies being in power is “violent,” because states have number of cops greater than one (or anarchist villages use locals instead of dedicated cops). Really don’t want to normalize this.
life hack if you live in a flood zone and are worried put a sign up that says ‘welcome to california’ and then it floods the water will see the sign, realize it’s in the wrong place, and leave
this can backfire because incoming bills can also realize they’re in California and increase 5x
Oh fuck, the foreigners have found out how dysfunctional California is. We gotta get a big tarp and hide it.
Speaking of independent prosecution agencies for police misconduct, we should have those. Can’t have the prosecutors that depend on the cops for all their other prosecutions, bad cops could retaliate to cover for their buddy by refusing to cooperate with later prosecutions. Otherwise at least try it in another jurisdiction.
this awaken the horse ppl thing sounds like the hippie swpl progressive version of white identarians with a heaping spoonful of noble savage stereotypes abt native americans mixed in
from their website, about white people
This land does not belong to us. It is not ours.
We don’t know the stories here.
Our ignorant bliss offends and desecrates.
We remain an enemy to all life.
I fucking love being a white colonist holy shit
whiteness is basically the most black metal thing in existence
I mean, I don’t really want to hop on the “YAY WHITENESS” train, but like,
From a strategic standpoint, positioning white people as “an enemy to all life,” seems like a really bad plan, like when that one vegan started calling people “bloodmouth carnist” which does, indeed, sound like a metal band.
If you present only two options, and present them as “be evil or be destroyed,” people are gonna pick the former.
You want whities lobbying for independent police misconduct prosecution boards, you don’t want them shopping for jet black uniforms with silver trim.
thinking in equilibrium is hard and I’m not that great at it, either, but the additional insight I want to deliver is that technological innovation and capital accumulation responds to prices
Google invested in the driverless cars because it can create profits in the captured markets. That’s a Schumpeterian process: capital and labor for technological innovation is scarce, so rational firms allocate capital and labor where the captured market can deliver the greatest profits.
By necessity, that doesn’t happen “all at once”, as you suggested earlier. There are only so many software and intelligence engineers to go around. Google had to pay them dearly:
For the past year, Google’s car project has been a talent sieve, thanks to leadership changes, strategy doubts, new startup dreams and rivals luring self-driving technology experts. Another force pushing people out? Money. A lot of it.
[….]
A large multiplier was applied to the compensation packages in late 2015, resulting in multi-million dollar payments in some cases, according to the people familiar with the situation. One member of the team had a multiplier of 16 applied to bonuses and equity amassed over four years, one of the people said. They asked not to be identified talking about private matters.
[…]
It’s unclear how much the payouts cost Alphabet, however, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat talked about it during an earnings conference call with analysts in early 2016.
Operating expenses in the fourth quarter of 2015 rose 14 percent to $6.6 billion, “primarily driven by R&D expense, particularly affected by expenses resulting from project milestones in Other Bets established several years ago,” Porat said, according to a transcript. The CFO wasn’t specific, but one of the people familiar with the situation said the comments referred to the car project compensation.
Google is the most powerful firm in the world, but Google does not have limitless resources, and those resources are prudent enough to command their marginal product. Google already had an endowment here: detailed, comprehensive, machine-readable routes for every navigable roadway in the world; alongside efficient photograph recognition software.
Google, and competing firms, can make a coordinated push where the technology is right, but there are real resource constraints that limit the ‘revolutionary’ impacts of their technology. Technology doesn’t just develop itself, especially capital- and labor-intensive technologies like this one. Not yet, anyways. And not anytime soon.
Google isn’t making surgeonless-surgeries or builderless-buildings or teacherless-teaching, because there aren’t the profits in those markets to justify the costs of the technology and capital investments needed to undercut market incumbents – Google doesn’t have detailed, comprehensive, machine-readable databases of surgeries, building plans, or problem sets which it can process at nominal cost – which suggests that dramatic innovations in those markets aren’t just around the corner, either.
It takes work to do these things. It’s not going to happen all at once unless these are perfect general purpose technologies, with trivial adaptation and marketization costs. I don’t think that’s what they are.
The other constraint is that Schumpeterian innovation profits depend on market prices and incomes. Acemoglu makes them straightforwardly reflect factor prices: falling relative wages induce labor-augmenting demand, falling relative rents induce capital-augmenting demand.
But if you’re working from a model where capital elastically substitutes for labor, I think the equilibrium conditions look different. If your technology is so impressive that it materially reduces labor incomes by substituting for labor, then it will reduce the profits from the goods and services your technology produces.
Less demand for driverless cars means less people can effectively demand drives, right? That really cuts into your bottom line, doesn’t it? Why would you invest in capital-augmenting technology if the relative returns to that capital-augmenting technology are so low? Why would you develop a driverless car if no one could afford to drive it?
Even if you have dramatically different understandings of what the constraints are, I think you have to work out the equilibrium conditions, the individual, marginal choices they emerge from. Why would individuals and firms keep doing the things that get you to that outcome?
I’m not actually entirely averse to thinking of all production as a product of labor. It’s in search of the equilibrium in a closed system with labor that I devised a heuristical model I am adapting for the OTV game concept, because I wanted to figure out prices for a setting in the transhuman space future.
Of course, not all goods respond nice and linearly to labor (especially WRT time), e.g. land vs waitressing, so it doesn’t necessarily hold that, if differences in productivity between workers are sufficient, the price for someone’s labor cannot fall below the minimum in terms of absolute resources that they need to survive. Indeed, this already happens for sufficiently low-productivity workers, workers during famines, etc.
Anyhow,
If my technology is so impressive that it reduces labor incomes, that doesn’t matter unless I’m the majority employer within the system. I can pull the money from someone else hiring these people, at least for a while.
If I’m the CEO of most companies, I don’t get paid based on the conditions in ten years, I get paid on a much shorter horizon.
And unless I did, it’s a problem for the Commons, not me.
And it doesn’t matter if it’s incredibly profitable - it matters whether my competitors will pursue it. If my competitors make less profit per transaction but undercut my prices by 10%, soon I will be making no profit per transaction. (Although it’s true that at some point the correct decision becomes to exit the industry.)
But maybe I’m missing something here, since my own econ education didn’t go all that far.
Conservatives and others on the right have down-prioritized it because they thought the whole Trump-Russia thing was bullsht.
Which is why the reporting should change their minds, but won’t. It’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their politics depends on them not understanding it.
Probably doesn’t help that Hillary seemed hyped for war in Syria, which could have lead to war with Russia, both of which are pretty terrible.
As I said to @deusvulture, I think most people don’t know why they should care about the issue and why they should care if the facts are sufficient to support the pleaded claims.
Everyone on Tumblr, from reactionaries to conservatives to libertarians to liberals to the left seems to have the same indifference to the issue, and it mystifies me. I don’t know enough to write an airtight account of the controversy, but no one else seems to know the stakes at play.
I know that the stakes are pretty high, but everyone else seems to think that there are no stakes at all.
Conservatives and others on the right have down-prioritized it because they thought the whole Trump-Russia thing was bullsht.
Probably doesn’t help that Hillary seemed hyped for war in Syria, which could have lead to war with Russia, both of which are pretty terrible.
@mitigatedchaos it isn’t dodging anything. I’m looking at actions and deeds regardless of who they come from.
Plus I’m not sure what your overall point is. Nobody is tolerant of everything. We wouldn’t have opposition to tyrrany if that was the case. Having a bit of intolerance doesn’t negate being pro-diversity.
My point was laid out in the original post: it is entirely normal for people not to want their culture replaced, this is not a unique evil of vile Trump voters which crawled up out of a cave somewhere, and people on the left are the same way.
What I’m trying to explain is that when you lose cultural dominance, you don’t just lose cultural dominance over the little things like what music plays in the local bar. You lose them over the big things as well. It isn’t your culture’s decision anymore. And that can hurt.
Liberal/Progressivism itself has a sort of meta-culture which the Robert E. Lee statue violates. But if our hypothetical confedernecks establish themselves as a majority, then the progressives don’t get to make that decision anymore. Laws follow culture, not just alter it.
Some hostile cultural aspects can be neutralized without really trying to, but they aren’t all so vulnerable to liberal social atomization. My concern, in part, is that since you don’t understand just what it is you’re trying to do, you won’t be able to summon the political will to do what is necessary for your plans.
imagine if StackOverflow answers were written like recipe blogs
TeamCity build fails because of TypeScript - TS2304 and TS7006
I love the fall, don’t you? Nothing lifts my spirits like the crisp crunch of dry leaves underfoot as I walk through the local park with Casper, my corgi dachshund cross. The faint tang of wood smoke from the nearby cottages takes me back to my childhood camping trips in the Yukon. We used to grill sausages on sticks over the campfire and heat up our hot chocolate in tin mugs as the evening chill settled in around us.
The other day I was chatting to Susan about TypeScript. We go way back Susan and I, ever since we dated the same guy in college without knowing it, at the same time, oops! But although Chad was a jerk I ended up with a friend for life, so who’s laughing now!?
Anyway Susan was telling me about the TypeScript project she was working on in TeamCity, when the build failed-
Why did you leave that last reply to me within the comments? I want to be able to reblog it to add a reply! (though if more blogging sites took a cue from LiveJournal and implemented comment trees we wouldn't have this problem)
Wasn’t big enough to justify a full post since my followers have already seen the post on my feed.
Supposedly there’s some official way to do it, but eh.
Regarding that topic, while I don’t believe all Robert E. Lee statues were erected in the name of white supremacy, one in the news for being removed recently was.
So if rednecks putting up a Robert E Lee statue bothers you even if they’re not actually racist per se but because it’s symbolically racist and offensive, then it’s just part of their culture you don’t approve of, which makes you uncomfortable, which was the entire point of using rednecks as the example in the first place. Respecting such things is itself part of culture.
And if you’re assuming it means they’re actually racist, then that delves into more harmful/threatening territory.
(Yes, I know not all rednecks are like that, but I saw how libs/lefties responded to the election, including btching about rednecks, and that post is intended to have libs/lefties that say “HOW COULD ANYONE EVER BE OPPOSED TO DIVERSITY?!” stop and notice that they, too, don’t actually terminally value diversity.
And thus while it may be worth the tradeoff, the opposition are not actually a bunch of weird evil people being evil to be evil.)
Also, when it comes to race and politics in this country, I would like to point out that we have not tried having social policy that does not actually suck.
You mean learning history affects your present worldview?
Gonna be honest here - I no longer trust calls for “inclusiveness” and “diversity” from anyone who isn’t at least Rationalist-Adjacent.
One cannot trust, for instance, that people won’t attempt to overwrite the race of ancient Egyptians (which varied over time, but included people that look a lot like people there now, Greeks, etc) with whatever they prefer.
One can’t trust the /pol/acks either, of course, and whoever posted an image of contemporary Macedonia as what Egyptians looked like.
…Which is why I specified the rat-adjs, since IME rats/adjs tend to operate in good faith usually and are less likely to treat such issues as a political football to win points with. (Although I don’t see them discussing Ancient Egyptian migrations much, admittedly.)
Why did you leave that last reply to me within the comments? I want to be able to reblog it to add a reply! (though if more blogging sites took a cue from LiveJournal and implemented comment trees we wouldn't have this problem)
Wasn’t big enough to justify a full post since my followers have already seen the post on my feed.
Supposedly there’s some official way to do it, but eh.
Regarding that topic, while I don’t believe all Robert E. Lee statues were erected in the name of white supremacy, one in the news for being removed recently was.
So if rednecks putting up a Robert E Lee statue bothers you even if they’re not actually racist per se but because it’s symbolically racist and offensive, then it’s just part of their culture you don’t approve of, which makes you uncomfortable, which was the entire point of using rednecks as the example in the first place. Respecting such things is itself part of culture.
And if you’re assuming it means they’re actually racist, then that delves into more harmful/threatening territory.
(Yes, I know not all rednecks are like that, but I saw how libs/lefties responded to the election, including btching about rednecks, and that post is intended to have libs/lefties that say “HOW COULD ANYONE EVER BE OPPOSED TO DIVERSITY?!” stop and notice that they, too, don’t actually terminally value diversity.
And thus while it may be worth the tradeoff, the opposition are not actually a bunch of weird evil people being evil to be evil.)
Is anyone else bothered by how many news sources have begun referring to “the Russians” instead of “the Russian government” or “Russian officials”? It seems xenophobic. It’s troublesome to me that “the Russians” have begun to take on a sort of evil and alien aspect in many Americans’ minds.
You didn’t notice this in Hollywood movies before?
Why did you leave that last reply to me within the comments? I want to be able to reblog it to add a reply! (though if more blogging sites took a cue from LiveJournal and implemented comment trees we wouldn't have this problem)
Wasn’t big enough to justify a full post since my followers have already seen the post on my feed.
Supposedly there’s some official way to do it, but eh.
Regarding that topic, while I don’t believe all Robert E. Lee statues were erected in the name of white supremacy, one in the news for being removed recently was.
So if rednecks putting up a Robert E Lee statue bothers you even if they’re not actually racist per se but because it’s symbolically racist and offensive, then it’s just part of their culture you don’t approve of, which makes you uncomfortable, which was the entire point of using rednecks as the example in the first place. Respecting such things is itself part of culture.
And if you’re assuming it means they’re actually racist, then that delves into more harmful/threatening territory.
(Yes, I know not all rednecks are like that, but I saw how libs/lefties responded to the election, including btching about rednecks, and that post is intended to have libs/lefties that say “HOW COULD ANYONE EVER BE OPPOSED TO DIVERSITY?!” stop and notice that they, too, don’t actually terminally value diversity.
And thus while it may be worth the tradeoff, the opposition are not actually a bunch of weird evil people being evil to be evil.)
Why did you leave that last reply to me within the comments? I want to be able to reblog it to add a reply! (though if more blogging sites took a cue from LiveJournal and implemented comment trees we wouldn't have this problem)
Wasn’t big enough to justify a full post since my followers have already seen the post on my feed.
Supposedly there’s some official way to do it, but eh.
Regarding that topic, while I don’t believe all Robert E. Lee statues were erected in the name of white supremacy, one in the news for being removed recently was.
So if rednecks putting up a Robert E Lee statue bothers you even if they’re not actually racist per se but because it’s symbolically racist and offensive, then it’s just part of their culture you don’t approve of, which makes you uncomfortable, which was the entire point of using rednecks as the example in the first place. Respecting such things is itself part of culture.
And if you’re assuming it means they’re actually racist, then that delves into more harmful/threatening territory.
(Yes, I know not all rednecks are like that, but I saw how libs/lefties responded to the election, including btching about rednecks, and that post is intended to have libs/lefties that say “HOW COULD ANYONE EVER BE OPPOSED TO DIVERSITY?!” stop and notice that they, too, don’t actually terminally value diversity.
And thus while it may be worth the tradeoff, the opposition are not actually a bunch of weird evil people being evil to be evil.)
I hate this idea that “listening” equals “submitting.” Like if you don’t agree with someone, it’s not because you see their point but don’t agree with it, it’s not because you have your own reasons for feeling or believing differently. It’s because you’re not listening.
Like “I see where you’re coming from, but…” isn’t a thing here because if you see where I’m coming from then you would also be coming from there.
You mean more, “don’t listen to TERFs or Trump supporters” or more, “Why won’t you listen to me?” “I am listening, I just am not convinced by your position.”
I think this might be more the “sit down, shut up, and listen” thing you have to do to “be a good ally.”
Where you “listening” means you understanding that you must be wrong about something if a person who is marginalized in a way you aren’t tells you you are.
See also: People requesting that others “critically examine” why they like something when they actually seem to mean “adopt my beliefs about why the thing is bad and stop liking it.”
This is often said of “problematic” media, but anti-kink people as a whole do it all the time. It’s basically one of their most generic arguments by this point.
The belief that
people who play violent videogames will go do violence is internally
consistent, and you can pick out examples that seem to support it. The
belief that people who are predisposed to violent behavior are drawn to
violent videogames (potentially reducing their IRL violent behavior) can
also explain most of the same examples. But if we can accept that
religious texts dramatically alter behavior, it’s hard to see how more
immersive media can’t do the same. The primary difference seems to come
down to the responsibility of the user/consumer to distinguish between
fiction and reality. Obviously some people have trouble with this, so
it’s sort of victim blaming to ask sane people to limit their media
consumption based on the needs of the insane (especially if some of the
sane people claim that the same videogame or religious text helps them
remain sane). To what extent should global limits be imposed to
accommodate dangerous subgroups?
This also applies to affirmative consent, banned books, pornography,
profiling, immigration, internet privacy, satire exemptions, hate
speech, death threats, gun control, etc.
But, of course, everyone with a loud opinion on the matter clusters
at one of the poles. Ideological consistency seems to fuel zeal (maybe
people mistake it for correctness?) even if the internally inconsistent
middle ground is probably the most globally consistent position in this
case, given the limited evidence on both sides.
I’m starting to think maybe individual people just dramatically differ in degree and organization of neuroplasticity. Analogous to how only a few people make it to age 95, and a surprising fraction of them haven’t made particularly healthy life choices. Also seems analogous to alcoholism and other addictions. Or, well, not analogous. Probably closely physically related.
So then the question is how do you optimally distribute choice (freedom?) when people differ substantially in their proclivities and fail states?
Mass/few-to-many mediums (e.g. magazines, movies, religious codices,
not private letters, not home movies, etc.) seem to start out as mostly
homogenizing forces that end up becoming maximally customizable (e.g.
pre-industrial writing limited to scribe output –> movable type),
probably just because industry specializes in cheap clones and it’s
easier to sell new technologies when there is a large population that
can afford them (and industrializing customizability is hard). The
internet is a maximally-customizable amalgam of a lot of the preceding
mass media forms (movable type, radio, TV, movies, magazines, etc.).
Rather than catering to a mostly static collection of demographic groups
(e.g. Nielson qualifications were probably chosen to focus network
competition on optimizing the idealized American family unit, as opposed to…)
the internet uses link trees (and, nowadays, complex creepy profiles)
to sort people by preferences. So all this shrieking and tweeting and
recording and whining seem to mostly just reflect the ways presently
popular media shape the zeitgeist. Indie videogame culture seems to have
gestated the spark of a major critique about how virtual worlds are
critiqued (yes, a critique of critiquery) that has since been shown to
apply to many other trusted simulation media (e.g. symbols attempting to
accurately and honestly portray the real) that society has come to rely
on – including the newsmedia.
Assuming in-personcommunication involves nonclassical information that is robust against decoherence
(I know I’m alone in thinking this, but I have a soccer ball with a
bloody handprint to keep me company, so it’s cool), it’s at least
possible that mass media has been giving us a very lopsided view of the
observable world. A quantum internet might finally reverse the trend,
starting with Seth Lloyd’s secure search algorithm (a properly entangled
database can be searched with complete security in a way that is only
classically available if you custom encrypt the entire index for each
new query) and continuing on to some sort of “one observation per
transmission” snapchat/DRM thing for analoggish media (audio, video, not
text, etc.). I also expect smellovision to finally become a thing
because of the aforelinked vibrational theory of olfaction. Also-also, quantum voting.
Television slightly sort of ‘sobered us up,’ because the radio society was the worst society we ever invented, and the most dangerous one. That was Adolf Hitler in Germany the nineteen thirties and that was Rwanda in the early nineteen nineties and it was Yugoslavia in the nineteen-eighties…Radio societies - where a dictator [is] speaking on the radio and you can’t even see how evil he is - can really make you go out and kill your neighbor…Radio was a really dangerous thing.
Ignoring basic human variation also gets innocent people killed. It may even turn out to be as costly as assuming human variation is absolute and immutable. Classical media obfuscates subtle cues that are present IRL (vocal stuff, facial topology, probably also rest mass stuff like pheromones or microbiota, etc.). We’ll see if things shape up when we start communicating via quantum secure channels. Quantum voting should finally fix the douche vs. turd sandwich problem.
I think religion is different in kind here, as it has standing orders that tell you to do stuff in the real world, and video games do not.
How so? In a Petersonian sense, how is the mythological perspective not just a form of augmented reality (e.g. pre-psychiatry mental disorders = demonic possession)? Is the distinction here that claims are made about eternal damnation and stuff, but videogames don’t do that?
Most likely, it’s true that both media influences thought and that preferences influence media selection, but it was never 1:1. (Thus not everyone reading the Communist Manifesto becomes a Comrade, but sometimes Ayn Rand is recommended for those with excessive scrupulosity.)
Religion, then, if we’re talking about ones with established holy books currently vying for control of our countries, is more similar to political ideologies than it is to video games.
Grand Theft Auto famously presents a simulated environment in which you can run over hookers with cars. If that were the only environment one’s child was raised in, it could be a serious problem. But normally it’s just a little part of the day, stuck behind a plastic window, looking less real than reality.
And unlike the holy books, it does not tell you do anything outside of its media.
In my estimate, this makes it less likely to impact behavior.
Similarly, in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica (which was amazing for me back in the day), there are Cylon infiltrators within the last remaining fleet of human ships. But BSG does not insist that Cylons are real outside of its fictional context.
Communist, Libertarian, Liberal, etc texts all take it as a given that they’re describing reality.
I’m not sure that the GamerGaters even believe that media has no impact on development, so much as they know that if they give these people one inch, it will be used to crowbar the entire field of game development.
Honestly, the point of that post was just intended that Trump voters are not some uniquely evil thing, and that cultural groups around the world, of all races and religions, generally would not like to be edged out, including the reader. Now ofc you can bite the bullet on it, but it specifically says you might bite the bullet on it with a plausible reason.
I hate this idea that “listening” equals “submitting.” Like if you don’t agree with someone, it’s not because you see their point but don’t agree with it, it’s not because you have your own reasons for feeling or believing differently. It’s because you’re not listening.
Like “I see where you’re coming from, but…” isn’t a thing here because if you see where I’m coming from then you would also be coming from there.
You mean more, “don’t listen to TERFs or Trump supporters” or more, “Why won’t you listen to me?” “I am listening, I just am not convinced by your position.”
I think this might be more the “sit down, shut up, and listen” thing you have to do to “be a good ally.”
Where you “listening” means you understanding that you must be wrong about something if a person who is marginalized in a way you aren’t tells you you are.
See also: People requesting that others “critically examine” why they like something when they actually seem to mean “adopt my beliefs about why the thing is bad and stop liking it.”
This is often said of “problematic” media, but anti-kink people as a whole do it all the time. It’s basically one of their most generic arguments by this point.
The belief that
people who play violent videogames will go do violence is internally
consistent, and you can pick out examples that seem to support it. The
belief that people who are predisposed to violent behavior are drawn to
violent videogames (potentially reducing their IRL violent behavior) can
also explain most of the same examples. But if we can accept that
religious texts dramatically alter behavior, it’s hard to see how more
immersive media can’t do the same. The primary difference seems to come
down to the responsibility of the user/consumer to distinguish between
fiction and reality. Obviously some people have trouble with this, so
it’s sort of victim blaming to ask sane people to limit their media
consumption based on the needs of the insane (especially if some of the
sane people claim that the same videogame or religious text helps them
remain sane). To what extent should global limits be imposed to
accommodate dangerous subgroups?
This also applies to affirmative consent, banned books, pornography,
profiling, immigration, internet privacy, satire exemptions, hate
speech, death threats, gun control, etc.
But, of course, everyone with a loud opinion on the matter clusters
at one of the poles. Ideological consistency seems to fuel zeal (maybe
people mistake it for correctness?) even if the internally inconsistent
middle ground is probably the most globally consistent position in this
case, given the limited evidence on both sides.
I’m starting to think maybe individual people just dramatically differ in degree and organization of neuroplasticity. Analogous to how only a few people make it to age 95, and a surprising fraction of them haven’t made particularly healthy life choices. Also seems analogous to alcoholism and other addictions. Or, well, not analogous. Probably closely physically related.
So then the question is how do you optimally distribute choice (freedom?) when people differ substantially in their proclivities and fail states?
Mass/few-to-many mediums (e.g. magazines, movies, religious codices,
not private letters, not home movies, etc.) seem to start out as mostly
homogenizing forces that end up becoming maximally customizable (e.g.
pre-industrial writing limited to scribe output –> movable type),
probably just because industry specializes in cheap clones and it’s
easier to sell new technologies when there is a large population that
can afford them (and industrializing customizability is hard). The
internet is a maximally-customizable amalgam of a lot of the preceding
mass media forms (movable type, radio, TV, movies, magazines, etc.).
Rather than catering to a mostly static collection of demographic groups
(e.g. Nielson qualifications were probably chosen to focus network
competition on optimizing the idealized American family unit, as opposed to…)
the internet uses link trees (and, nowadays, complex creepy profiles)
to sort people by preferences. So all this shrieking and tweeting and
recording and whining seem to mostly just reflect the ways presently
popular media shape the zeitgeist. Indie videogame culture seems to have
gestated the spark of a major critique about how virtual worlds are
critiqued (yes, a critique of critiquery) that has since been shown to
apply to many other trusted simulation media (e.g. symbols attempting to
accurately and honestly portray the real) that society has come to rely
on – including the newsmedia.
Assuming in-personcommunication involves nonclassical information that is robust against decoherence
(I know I’m alone in thinking this, but I have a soccer ball with a
bloody handprint to keep me company, so it’s cool), it’s at least
possible that mass media has been giving us a very lopsided view of the
observable world. A quantum internet might finally reverse the trend,
starting with Seth Lloyd’s secure search algorithm (a properly entangled
database can be searched with complete security in a way that is only
classically available if you custom encrypt the entire index for each
new query) and continuing on to some sort of “one observation per
transmission” snapchat/DRM thing for analoggish media (audio, video, not
text, etc.). I also expect smellovision to finally become a thing
because of the aforelinked vibrational theory of olfaction. Also-also, quantum voting.
Television slightly sort of ‘sobered us up,’ because the radio society was the worst society we ever invented, and the most dangerous one. That was Adolf Hitler in Germany the nineteen thirties and that was Rwanda in the early nineteen nineties and it was Yugoslavia in the nineteen-eighties…Radio societies - where a dictator [is] speaking on the radio and you can’t even see how evil he is - can really make you go out and kill your neighbor…Radio was a really dangerous thing.
Ignoring basic human variation also gets innocent people killed. It may even turn out to be as costly as assuming human variation is absolute and immutable. Classical media obfuscates subtle cues that are present IRL (vocal stuff, facial topology, probably also rest mass stuff like pheromones or microbiota, etc.). We’ll see if things shape up when we start communicating via quantum secure channels. Quantum voting should finally fix the douche vs. turd sandwich problem.
I think religion is different in kind here, as it has standing orders that tell you to do stuff in the real world, and video games do not.
Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories. This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.
Those who control the culture control the laws, after all. Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.
Now some of you reading this are probably thinking this doesn’t apply to you, because you love diversity.
If you are one of those people, I want you to imagine the area you live in going from 5% redneck to 60% redneck over 10 years.
Most stores cater to redneck wants/needs. A statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee has been built in the public square. Serving alcohol has been made illegal on Sundays, and the churches are all redneck churches. Most bars play only country music.
The rednecks have not threatened anybody. But as the dominant local source of money, the businesses shift to accomodate - and businesses of your favored culture(s) close as they fall below the necessary density of customers.
You might believe that this is a necessary sacrifice for freedom of movement and commerce, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.
“And the churches are all redneck churches” may be a threatening thing depending on what you mean by that. The statue of Lee absolutely is.
But your example also hinges on all rednecks having identical tastes and only wanting to stick with their own culture instead of broadening. You’re talking about a stagnant population and frankly it doesn’t work that way in real life. Groups grow and change, both the people who move to a new area and the people who already lived there.
Provided that you didn’t mean what seems to be implied by the church example (since it would also assume them to all be bigots, which again isn’t realistic but to my knowledge rednecks don’t have any different churches than the rest of their natural areas) and kept the damn statue out of it, then the rest of it just sounds like natural cultural shifts. I don’t get what the problems would be there.
Oh, since you’re trying to wriggle out of the implications, let’s say then those churches are voting to suppress gays (and others) and that the Robert E. Lee statue stays.
If you think cultures are only aesthetic, you’re going to have trouble. And belief in “human rights” is cultural, so using “but it’s a human right!” is a dodge.
However, the post you responded to just says you won’t like it, which, given your feelings about the statue, is true. It’s not even unusual.
The other stuff may require a sort of cultural awareness to deal with, by new legislation (in the case of certain Robert E Lee statues, things like hate crime laws would be an example), but that’s a discussion for another time.
I was asked once “Why do you even want to have a girlfriend? What do you want to do with her? What do you want her to do?“
I replied “You know, the usual. You know?“
The guy who asked had a deep point to make, but I know he could not have answered this himself to his own satisfaction.
“Redundancy,” I answered. “Two mammals are more likely to reach task completion than one, as their failures are unlikely to overlap, significantly boosting performance as compared to one mammal.”
“The real girlfriend is the girlfriend that was inside you all along,” I answered. He rolled his eyes at my pre-mocking of his deep point.
“Vulnerability,” I answered. “Relationships are a cycle of mutually-increasing vulnerability, something that is dangerous in this world, and intimate physical contact builds bonding and trust, in addition to creating mutual vulnerability.” He was silent for a moment, but then opened his his mouth. “Well, *Actually” he says…
was shopping around before I renew earthquake insurance the other day and one of the agents was Old Cascadian enough (dedicated to virtue within their role for no immediate personal gain) to point out that even if my house came through *a bit* damaged, Portland would not have the infrastructure for rehabilitation for *years* afterward (the PNW only has superquakes every few centuries)
Huh!
America!
Yeah, PNW is overdue for a megaquake, and it’s not adequately prepared for it.
We aren’t really prepared for a Yellowstone Supervolcano explosion either, but that’s far less likely.
Honestly, if I were in control of the government, the level of disaster readiness I’d mandate would have everyone thinking America was preparing for nuclear war.
im thinking about that godforsaken fishing pyramid again
what the Fuck
why is there a hotel inside of it. This Is Bullshit
thats fucked up. thats fucking me up. if you go in there at like 3 in the morning you have to fight the fucking. Resurrected Mummy Of The Ultimate Dad
you cant do this without posting a picture of the fucking ominous glowing elevator leading to the final boss
oh you mean the LIFT POWERED BY THE DECK-BUILDING SOULS OF THE DAMNED
It took over 4000 years but Imhotep‘s true vision has finally been realized.
I LOVE buildings that build fake outdoors indoors. I mean not that having an actual outdoors is bad, but there’s this one restaurant out West that’s got this entire indoor fake village and it’s just so cool.
Are you responsible for knowingly sharing thathopeyetlives posts to a Tumblr harassment mob? I'm not sure how else they would have wound up in Bogleech's hands given thathopeyetlives' obscurity.
No, I don’t know any people who directly follow me and participate in harassment circles. If they do, I block them.
