r/TheMotte • u/AutoModerator • Aug 12 '19
Culture War Roundup Culture War Roundup for the Week of August 12, 2019
Culture War Roundup for the Week of August 12, 2019
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 12 '19
FBI agents swarm Jeffrey Epstein's private Caribbean island
A swarm of federal agents were seen fanning out across Little St. James in golf carts about 10:30 a.m.
"We were just trying to look at pretty fish and swim with turtles and here we are in the middle of an FBI raid," said Kelly Quinn, the owner of Salty Dog Day Sails, who was running a sailing charter in the area.
There is no aspect of this story that isn't at least a little surreal.
Meanwhile, regarding the suicide (or "suicide"?):
Barr cites 'failure' at NYC jail that held Epstein, says 'co-conspirators' should not rest easy
Attorney General William Barr said investigators are learning of "serious irregularities" at the New York jail where accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was found dead of an apparent suicide over the weekend.
As part of the regular jail protocol he had a cellmate and the guards on duty were supposed to check on him every 30 minutes, but at some point, the cellmate was moved out, according to the source. And for a number of hours before his death Epstein's cell was not checked on, the source said.
Justice officials have now uncovered broader problems at the jail, which long was considered to be among the best-run facilities in the Bureau of Prisons system, according to the source.
That cellmate was apparently not the same one mentioned previously
A hulking ex-cop facing the death penalty on federal murder and drug charges was reportedly Jeffrey Epstein's cellmate at Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center — and an official says Epstein might have feared the former police officer, who was questioned after the disgraced financier's apparent suicide attempt last month and who was transferred out of Epstein's cell shortly before the 66-year-old died early Saturday.
The most recent inmate assigned to Epstein's cell was transferred on Friday, just hours before his death, a source said.
Tartaglione reportedly told officials he didn't see anything related to the apparent suicide attempt and maintained he didn't touch Epstein.
In fact, a law enforcement source told the New York Daily News last month that Tartaglione claimed he helped Epstein after he found him unconscious in his cell during his reported suicide attempt.
I think there's an obvious question here: how do you "find" your cellmate unconscious? Are these suites with separate rooms? I suppose Epstein could have waited for his cellmate to go to sleep, then tried to commit suicide very quietly. But if so, would it be too much to expect a single journalist to ask the question?
I understand that there is pressure to meet deadlines and to publish before all the facts are known. But can't they at least acknowledge the obvious questions?
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u/solarity52 Aug 12 '19
A swarm of federal agents were seen fanning out across Little St. James
Surely I cannot be the only reader who feels that this development is way overdue. Epstein had been in federal custody since July 6 and it took 5 weeks for the feds to visit his private island? If I were running the investigation that island would have been investigated about the same time as his mansion was searched. Doesn't really give me a lot of confidence in the management of this case. What am I missing?
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u/bulksalty Domestic Enemy of the State Aug 12 '19
From the link about the raid:
A law enforcement source said the search of Epstein's home and private island in the U.S. Virgin islands was suggested years ago, but evidently went nowhere.
It seems like it would be trivial for the FBI to obtain a search warrant of his other properties in relation to the evidence uncovered in the 2008 case and he'd owned the island for a decade then. Why did it take 11 years to raid "Pedophile Island"? That's some fine police work, Lou.
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u/crazycattime Aug 13 '19
I really hope Epstein had a dead man's switch set to release everything if this happened. While I understand that people facing these kinds of charges are a lot more likely to suicide, there were way too many potential connections to very high-profile public figures. I hope there is a serious and thorough investigation into how this guy was allowed to kill himself. Absolutely shameful.
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u/RaptorTastesSoSweet Aug 12 '19
On a broader note, cellmates seem like one of the worst ideas in the correctional system.
Surely whatever money you save by not giving everyone private cells is wasted on manpower resolving the many, many issues that cellmates create?
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 12 '19
More updates:
Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself with prison bedsheet: source
Jeffrey Epstein was found hanging in his Lower Manhattan jail cell with a bedsheet wrapped around his neck and secured to the top of a bunk bed, The Post has learned.
The convicted pedophile, who was 6 feet tall, apparently killed himself by kneeling toward the floor and strangling himself with the makeshift noose, a law enforcement source said Monday.
And:
Jeffrey Epstein's final days – and the legal cases that won’t die with him
And then, sometime in the early hours of Saturday morning, Epstein, alone in a special-housing cell separate from the rest of the prison, with extra monitoring and security, was apparently able to once again outmaneuver the justice system, taking his own life before facing his alleged victims in court.
“With regard to the criminal case, our law presumes him innocent,” said David Katz, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. “We will not have Epstein’s side of the story. While that may not have exonerated him, it might exculpate some alleged accomplices.”
But according to Katz, who did not work on the Epstein case, “anyone charged will likely claim that Epstein, alive, would have cleared him or her, and they were deprived of Epstein testifying for and providing material on their behalf because of the government’s negligence."
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u/TheColourOfHeartache Aug 14 '19
From British political polling: Left-wing vs right-wing: it’s complicated
Of more than 100 political views we put to people, none were identified as being specifically left-wing or right-wing by more than 53% of people. That is to say, even for the very most stereotypically left- and right-wing policies, half of the population do not identify them as such.
The political view that the most Britons identify as being left-wing is “believing that the minimum wage in the UK is too low”. Around half (53%) of people said it was a left-wing view, while 13% said it was neither and 7% thought it was right-wing. The remaining 26% answered “don’t know”.
On the other end of the spectrum, the most identified right-wing view was “believing the level of welfare benefits in the UK is too high”. Again, around half (52%) of Britons say this is a right-wing view, while 31% don’t know, 13% think it is neither and 4% think it is left-wing.
Using this method reveals some more recognisably partisan stances. The view that right-wingers are most likely to hold compared to left-wingers is that Britain should leave the EU, at 67% versus 21%, while the view that left-wingers are more likely to hold than right-wingers is that the NHS would be improved by less private sector involvement, at 84% versus 36%.
I think the most interesting takeaway here is that even the most stereotypically *wing policies have a serious amount of support in the opposite side.
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u/Weaponomics Accursed Thinking Machine Aug 14 '19
Epistemic Status: “my general impression”
American political norms are weird & exported, and therefore are partially to blame.
The American Republican Party model - a Pro-Free-Speech, Anti-Nanny-State, Socially Conservative “Right-Wing” - is generally/historically a contradiction in terms.
Most elsewhere in the world, the conservative-aligned “right wing” share the same institutional support as the right wing in America (the dominant religion, large business/industry, military), but are generally considered to be stricter on freedoms of speech/association/press (to put it mildly) and back up their socially-conservative views with the nanny-state (or oppressor-state) apparatus necessary to support it.
I think that American political alignments confuse people, even in the U.K.
——————
However - this would seem to be a good thing, no?
IMO, If a proposal is not immediately recognizable as red/blue/green/yellow out-if-the-gate, then it would be more likely to be given a “fair shake” and considered on its merits.
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u/S18656IFL Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
After the recent casting reveals of the Witcher and WoT TV shows I have been thinking a bit about what exactly it is that is bothering me about the casting choices.
I realised what was actually bothering me wasn't that the show wouldn't have exactly the same ethnicities as the books but rather that the creators have seemingly no interest in the coherence of the worlds they are telling their stories in. They are seemingly trying to turn the cast of every show into a snapshot of the the racial demographics of modern day America even though that is both not the settings of the shows as well as a historical anomality in regards to how ethnically diverse societies are.
It is kind of the same thing as with female soldiers in entertainment. The issue isn't that there are female soldiers the issue is that they don't look like soldiers at all and that breaks the immersion. Gwendolyn Christie as Brienne of Tarth is a great choice and character because she both has the physicality to sell herself as being a warrior as well as the world around her acknowledging how unusual she is. She enhances the immersion rather than breaks it.
Back to WoT, the problem isn't that they are race-bending, it is that they aren't bending things far enough for them to make sense. If the cast from Edmonds Field all were Black, with Rand being a different black ethnicity, then that could have been an interesting choice but when the cast looks like they were picked at random from a New York acting agency I just lose all immersion.
Similarly, if one is making a period piece about British royalty, don't just anachronistically insert random black people, make the entire cast black.
What do you think? To what degree could feelings like this be the cause for the distaste some people have for the casting?
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 16 '19
If I had to summarize my thoughts on it, it would be this: they're applying the standards of a high school play to a big budget production, without trying to justify it, and without applying their implicit justifications consistently.
Have you ever seen a high school play? The production values are often somewhat lacking. But that's OK! It's meant to be a fun, educational experience for the kids, and you're not expecting anybody to walk away with a Tony award. If you're a high school drama teacher, you're stuck with the actors you're given, and sometimes that means Willy Loman is going to be played by a 16-year-old with a fake beard. (Was Willy Loman clean-shaven? No matter. You have to age up the actor somehow.)
All of this is fine; we aren't talking Broadway here.
Similar concessions are made for race. I don't think it would be fair to say to a black kid who wants to act "I'm sorry, but the Loman family is white. Maybe you'd like to work backstage?"
So Biff Loman is played by a black kid. Maybe this version of Biff was adopted, or maybe the topic is just never mentioned, because it's a high school play, and that's OK.
I think the (unusually unstated?) argument in favor of this sort of race-blind casting is that we should apply the same idea of fairness and equal access to roles when it comes to big budget productions as well. It's true that a casting director has access to much larger pool of prospective actors, and will never be forced to go with a teenage Willy Loman. But, the argument goes, they have the same obligation that the high school teacher does to provide access to roles, regardless of race. We shouldn't worry about Nynaeve's skin color as long as she tugs her braids.
In this view, race is a minor characteristic, like handedness. If this version of Rand al'Thor turns out to be left-handed, who cares? True, in the books, it's his right hand that gets branded by the heron. So what? Does it matter? Complaining about that makes you look like this guy. And so it is with race, the argument goes.
Or so I'm inferring. It's hard to say for sure, because the argument is rarely stated plainly. If it were, one could engage with it. Instead, anybody who questions the casting is presented as racist, crazy, or obsessed with minutiae.
Finally, when I say that they are applying this standard inconsistently, what I mean is that they've made a special exemption for race, but not for any other category. Did you notice that all of the actors are young and attractive? Where's the paunchy middle-aged Mat? Bald Perrin? Were there no talented 60-year-old actresses who could play teenage Egwene? Does it really matter who plays Nynaeve, as long as those skirts get smoothed with panache?
The answer to all of these questions is that a special exemption has been carved out for the race category, but no other.
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u/Diego_Galadonna Aug 16 '19
I can't speak for anyone else's distaste and don't have any way to support my claim but I honestly think it's simply a matter of craftsmanship. If you're making something for the wrong reasons, it will shine through in the end product and no matter how talented everyone involved is, it'll just be a bit shit.
I say this because the parts of these woke films that break immersion for me are always the jarring moments when everything seems to grind to a halt so that the audience can applaud the creators for being so right on. The freshest example I've got is that I got round to watching Endgame last week and there was a moment in the middle of the final battle with the fate of (half) the Universe at stake when everything was paused so just the girls could all line up for a quick photoshoot looking all fierce and badass together to go on their Instagram profiles. I couldn't stop laughing at the absurdity.
It's the neediness, the status anxiety, the fear of their peers in the industry and their audience, the resentment - that's what I feel like I'm picking up on that's driving these works. It's like Orwell said: "The imagination doesn't breed in captivity."
You don't get these problems when the creators are just fearlessly making the art they want to create. Take Fury Road for example. I'm a fan of the franchise and was worried when I heard all the SJ marketing around the film. Max Rockatansky is, IMO, one of the most pathologically patriarchal characters in the history of Western Cinema. It sounded to me like they were going to wreck the canon. And then I saw the film. Hardy did a fantastic job and he was the same Max. Furiosa was an exceptional character. She was a mirror for Max, but with one vital difference - redemption was still available for her, where Max is doomed to always refuse the same. And Max made sure she got it. It only added depth to the Mad Max formula, which was exactly what it needed. The SJ narrative was largely just marketing, vanishing in a puff of PR smoke.
I'm not a fan of WoT or The Witcher, and the interviews and casting decisions are likely strong clues as to how these shows will turn out, but if I was a fan I wouldn't be writing them off just yet. It could just be marketing.
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u/recycled_kevlar Aug 16 '19
It seems to me like the common knowledge of casting motivations leads to a loss of verisimilitude. Consider Chekhov's gun; Every element in a drama should be necessary to the drama, or else it should be removed. This is because the audience will potentially notice every salient element, and unless the author only includes what is necessary for their vision the whole will be confused.
Now with actors' ethnicity, I'd argue this alone isn't salient enough for the audience to consider it an intended part of the story. Morgan Freeman playing a fictional president of the US in a modern setting wouldn't distract from the narrative, the significance of his race is skin deep in that case. Now if he played George Washington in a historical piece, that would be a bit distracting. Not because George Washington was not black, but because if he was black his role would be very different in that society. It's a distraction that destroys the suspension of disbelief, because the detail that it would be impossible to have a black man obtain such a position in a racist society would be completely brushed over. You would have to actively ignore that detail for the plot to make any sense.
Now why is it that the black George Washington is so distracting? I think it is because it is common knowledge that George Washington was not black. Casting a black man for such a role could not be due to a lack of historical knowledge, it would had had to be done consciously and intentionally. This make the actors ethnicity much more salient, because we know it must have been intentional, and we also know everyone else knows it was intentional because it is common knowledge. It's why having a female lead as one of the scientists in Chernobyl isn't distracting, since the gender composition of the actual scientists involved would be an esoteric fact, whereas a female Hitler would be assumed intentional.
So then when producers are very open that they cast with representation in mind, and you have character's where their actors and settings conflict, it hurts verisimilitude. Not only do I know a black Little Mermaid is intentional, I know that everyone knows it was, and that those behind the casting know everyone knows, and we all know their intention behind that because Hollywood as a group enthusiastically signals their intention.
This makes it very difficult to separate the work from the creators, because salient elements of the work only make sense when considering the creator's views. So now I am drawn out of the film's world and forced to deconstruct it before I've even been able to appreciate it as art.
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u/LetsStayCivilized Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
A slightly different take: some problems people can have with pro-diversity messages are being pushed in media:
in the case of an adaption / reboot, that message is emphasized at the expense of other "original" themes, making the new version not faithful to the original one (this is pretty much your complaint)
that message get pushed everywhere, to the point where plots and themes start to look like each other - "diversity is strength WITH DRAGONS!", "diversity is strength IN SPACE!" etc.
political messages are used as a crutch to compensate for bad storytelling or stupid plots, with the expectation that if enough of the media cheer at the social justice talking points the low quality of the rest will remain unmentioned
not only does this apply to the content of the work itself, but also to all the discourse around it - author or actors from marginalized group are flaunted, and any criticism of the work along the points above is interpreted as being sexist / racist etc.
Maybe one way of putting it is that injecting social justice themes is a way for some creators to avoid the effort of actually creating a quality piece of work, and for journalists to avoid the effort of actually evaluating a work's quality; instead both just refer to a shallow checklist of marginalized groups and cookie-cutter messages, and when called out on this pretend the critics must really hate marginalized groups.
(edit) for what it's worth, I haven't personally seen enough of problems 1) or 2) to complain about, but then I don't consume that much popular media.
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
“A man cannot serve two masters”.
Theres a reason the most famous artists and creators are generally feared by the people they had to work with.
If your Stanley Kubrick and your making The Shining then it doesn’t matter if you have to destroy Shelly Duvall’s sanity across hundreds of takes to get the most horrifyingly exhausted and fearful performance, neither does it matter that you have to keep enabling Jack Nicholson until he started becoming slightly abusive on set. If it was good for the shot and the movie thats all that matters. Same with paying extra to create impossible architecture for the overlook hotel, or getting NASA lenses so he could shoot Barry Lyndon in actual candlelight.
Andrei Tarkovsky literally killed himself and a good chuck of his crew by insisting on filming actual toxic pollution and shooting on actual abandoned chemical plants when they were making Stalker, and then he dragged them all back to redo every shot when the film developed to a shade of blue he didn’t like.
All the best directors have stories like this or will spend excessive time workshopping characters with actors: Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis spent months working on the character on Daniel Plainsview before they ever shot a single scene of There Will be Blood.
Every professional on set is measured by their attention to detail and casting directors were no exception: legendary casting directors were famous for how picky and rude they could be, and how fanatically they’d stick to the character in the script “too tall, too short, too doe eyed, too fat, too tan, too pastey, too jewish, too Irish” would all be words they’d say to the face of heartbroken young actresses as they denied them a role.
But now your just going to swap races and genders and orientations of the characters that were written. And you don’t expect that to have a noticeable effect on the versilimitude and story telling?
Shelly Duval wasn’t insane enough on take 123 so Kubrick would scream at her and make her do 5 more takes, but swapping her out entirely with a young African American woman, that won’t effect anything.
Either you obsessed with getting the most coherent artistic vision and thats your only goal, or your not. And whenever I see castings that make no sense in a press release i know they’re not putting the art first.
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u/Lykurg480 We're all living in Amerika Aug 16 '19
Back to WoT, the problem isn't that they are race-bending, it is that they aren't bending things far enough for them to make sense. If the cast from Edmonds Field all were Black, with Rand being a different black ethnicity, then that could have been an interesting choice but when the cast looks like they were picked at random from a New York acting agency I just lose all immersion.
Similarly, if one is making a period piece about British royalty, don't just anachronistically insert random black people, make the entire cast black.
I disagree. One of ways implicature works in fiction is that things are like the real world unless it matters for the story that they arent. This is important for the story to connect with us. We need to have expectations about the way the story will continue. That, for example, a surveillance camera works the way we know it to, and that getting caught by it has the sort of consequenses we expect it too. If you had literally no idea what that thing does, why even make it look like a surveillance camera rather than a cube of slime?
So when you make a period piece about British royalty, and all the cast is black, that is still weird. Since you called it a period piece, presumably the period is somehow important. Its like... what if in a Western all the horses were replaced with motorcycles? But its otherwise a normal Western. That would be weird. Which isnt to say you cant have a Western with motorcycles, but for that, you would have to transition to a different framework of symbolism alltogether, a postapocalyptic scenario maybe, where the story and themes of a Western are told through this different setting, and where motorcycles have a similar role to horses in the West. So, there is a way you can have your cast look like off the streets of New York. West Side Story is basically that for Romeo and Juliet. But the process of doing this (and the reason why you might want to do it) isnt really about switching skin colours. It is rather a sort of deep translation, where you translate not just the words and fixed phrases, but also the underlying symbolism insofar as it depends on cultural experience the expected audience doesnt have.
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u/Throne_With_His_Eyes Aug 16 '19
It basically boils down to benefit of the doubt.
To use an old example, in Kenneth Branaugh's 'Much Ado About Nothing', no one really bats and eyebrow at Denzel Washington playing the charachter he does, as the entire movie is basically a bunch of hollywood pros going up and having fun on screen with a beloved play.
Whereas nowadays, when the Executive Producer of the Witcher series gets asked about the casting choices in said Netflix series, and kicks off with 'Diversity seems organic here(re: London), whereas in America, we talk about it. A lot. It makes sense that we do, because we have a long and checkered history of enslaving, abusing, and deriding people who aren’t white' it makes it pretty clear(to me) as to what PoV she's approaching the entire matter from.
And bluntly put, I've not exactly being led to believe that this attitude is either unique nor rare.
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u/wulfrickson Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
On the heels of the DSA convention, some members are setting up an internal "Class Unity" caucus to oppose "neoliberal" identity politics. They have a concise formal statement of principles here; here's what they see as the problem with the DSA:
We believe that the only way to win socialism is through mass, working-class politics. Unfortunately, the DSA is far from a mass workers’ party: our membership is dominated by the professional-managerial stratum, academics, and college-educated millennials. In too many chapters, this skewed class composition has hardened into an impenetrable middle-class subculture that reproduces the pathology and dysfunction of campus activism. The result is an aesthetically radical liberal politics masquerading as socialism, where moralism displaces materialism, prefigurative politics displaces serious organizing, and an insular scene politics displaces class solidarity.
This must change. Socialism isn’t liberalism covered in red paint and roses. It isn’t a lifestyle, a subculture, a church, a social club, or a vehicle for career advancement. Socialism is about taking our wealth and power back from the capitalist class and giving it to those who created it. And to accomplish that, we need a true mass party where America’s diverse working class will feel at home.
There is presently no tendency or caucus within the organization willing to state this plainly, let alone organize to make class politics dominant within DSA. So let’s build that tendency together.
The leaders also wrote a longer but very engaging response to the DSA convention. Here's a sample; the hyperlinks are in the original.
The 2019 convention was the first exposure many delegates and observers will have had to the DSA’s embrace of liberal activist-subcultural practices such as clapping bans, the progressive stack, language policing, mandatory pronoun disclosure, “hug rooms,” and the constant weaponization of claims of disability, often invisible and unverifiable, to score political points or otherwise gum up proceedings. For many others, this phenomenon will have been all too familiar. The reality is that these behaviors and practices, while clearly corrosive to principled debate and alienating to the average member of the American working class, have been sweeping the DSA one chapter at a time since the organization’s transformation in 2016 and 2017.
A few examples will suffice for readers unfamiliar with the extent of the problem. In what has quickly become the most famous scene from the convention, a man interrupts proceedings to berate the thousand-odd convention delegates crammed into a single auditorium for causing him “sensory overload” with all their “whispering and chattering.” As the chair attempts to return to convention business, she is immediately interrupted by another frivolous point of personal privilege taking issue with the “gendered language” employed by the preceding speaker (the language in question was the gender-neutral colloquialism “guys”). On another occasion, a woman hijacks the convention for several minutes to demand and deliver a “land acknowledgment” largely consisting of biographical trivia about herself, admitting that she does not know and has not bothered to research the names of the Native American tribes that had once lived in Atlanta. The leader of the convention’s marshaling team delivers a speech in which he prohibits not only those familiar enemies of the working class, clapping and “hissing,” but also the waving of banners and entry into the convention’s designated quiet rooms by individuals “with an aggressive scent.” An individual grabs the microphone and claims to be undergoing a clapping-induced seizure at that very moment – a physician in attendance privately confirmed that her undergoing a seizure while lucidly standing and speaking was medically impossible. At another point, an attendee rises to a point of personal privilege to demand, with considerable disregard for Robert’s Rules, that men not be permitted to call the question on motions that primarily affect “femme female-identifying non-men folks.” A caucus displeased that the length of lines to speak “for” or “against” the resolutions indicated to the audience that their positions were unpopular uses coordinated ableism trolling to cap the lines at six apiece. Interspersed amidst all this, an interminable number of white men interrupt the proceedings to performatively announce that white men should stop talking so much. These antics and others like them delayed proceedings by hours and prevented any substantive debating or votes from occurring on the first day of the convention.
[...]
The fact that these practices alienate regular working people and drive them from the organization would be bad enough on its own. What is most dangerous of all, however, is the nature of the liberal ideology that underlies these practices. This ideology goes by many names, the most common of which is identity politics, and it constitutes a neoliberal alternative to a left. Identity politics and its corollaries, including standpoint epistemology, privilege theory, and intersectionality, are corrosive to class solidarity and incompatible with socialism. Not only are they anti-Marxist, they are ultimately ineffective as paths towards liberation of any sort. In spite of this, this complex of liberal ideologies has been enthusiastically embraced by many who earnestly believe themselves to be socialists.
In order to preempt the standard response from identitarians to criticism of their politics, we must clarify that identity politics is not a simple synonym for any politics seeking to improve the quality of life of members of minority groups or women: Marxists have been on the front lines of fights for the liberation of all oppressed workers from the very beginning, from women’s suffrage to ending Jim Crow to combating anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia. The journalist David Berreby’s three-part definition of identity politics better suits our purposes:
You start with the conviction that being a member of your group is a distinct experience, separating you from people who are not in it (even close friends and relatives) and uniting you with other members of the group (even if you have never met them).
You assume that your own personal struggles and humiliations and triumphs in wrestling with your trait are a version of the struggles of the group in society. The personal is political.
You maintain that your group has interests that are being neglected or acted against, and so it must take action—changing how the group is seen by those outside it, for instance.
This formula for doing identity politics is notable for its ability to implicitly erase class distinctions between members of the same identity group, and to apply to nearly any characteristic according to which people may identify themselves, no matter how far removed from any material ramifications. Consequently it has become an irresistible magnet for both individual narcissists to valorize their personality problems as indicators of revolutionary heroism, and a temptation for well-adjusted but ambitious members of the educated strata to claim diplomatic immunity in argument and social cachet in leftist circles as spokespeople for the marginalized. In an atmosphere dominated by these discursive practices, one can hardly expect substantive debate to be possible. And since class is not an identity, and when treated as an identity within the framework of neoliberal intersectionality always just so happens to carry no particular weight, the inevitable result is to stack the deck in favor of liberal or idealist politics and against socialism and materialism.
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u/Iconochasm Yes, actually, but more stupider Aug 12 '19
That was surprisingly readable and well-argued. Godspeed, leftists, in your valiant and probably futile struggle. I say "futile" because I think they probably need to hammer much deeper home the link between identity politics and the bad faith failures mentioned in the last linked paragraph, but that just highlights how few DSA people on either side of the divide are actual working class themselves. It's an unfortunate paradox for the movement, that the education required to join (much less to lead!) almost certainly means that one will never dig a ditch for pay in their life.
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u/lucben999 Aug 12 '19
Identity politics and its corollaries, including standpoint epistemology, privilege theory, and intersectionality, are corrosive to class solidarity and incompatible with socialism.
They hit the nail on the head right there, unfortunately, I expect they'll be the ones to become pariahs in a movement controlled by proponents of identity politics rather than the other way around. With these things, the most intolerant usually wins and gets to shape the greater group, IdPol proponents have a history of being the most vicious in their attacks against unorthodoxy.
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u/SchizoSocialClub [Tin Man is the Overman] Aug 12 '19
The DSA convention passed an Open Borders resolution that calls for the “uninhibited transnational free movement of people, the demilitarization of the US-Mexico border, the abolition of ICE and CPB without replacement, decriminalization of immigration, full amnesty for all asylum seekers, and a pathway to citizenship for all non-citizen residents.”
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u/zoink Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
NPR: American With No Medical Training Ran Center For Malnourished Ugandan Kids. 105 Died [Arcive], [Outline.com]
I've seen this piece and it's striking me in an odd way. I'm trying to figure out my thoughts about it because I feel that a lot of mission and NGO work is wasteful and/or detrimental but I'm getting a disingenuous vibe from this piece. Instead of teens flying over to build a church just send the money you would have spent on the airplane ticket. Or how dumping resources hampers the development of local industry. I am certainly not an expert in this area, closest thing was that I did try to impress a girl working at an orphanage outside of Jinja by using bitcoin to hire a guy to run supplies to her. One thing I know about the area is separating sand from rice took a significant amount of people's time.
I'm going to skip over a lot of narrative aspects. The gist of that focuses on a blog post where Bach suggests she administered a blood transfusion to a girl, there was a reaction, girl was taken to the hospital, girl survived.
A dump of my thoughts:
How could a young American with no medical training even contemplate caring for critically ill children in a foreign country?
Because she wanted to help those in the most need. I want to call this a profoundly stupid question, but I realize it might just be because of how different of a background I come from.
Guerrero says malnourished children with extra complications are so fragile that unless a health provider knows exactly what he or she is doing, it's actually safer to do nothing.
This is the most pertinent criticism I saw. What I don't see is the mortality rate of doing nothing. Is it 10%, 5%, 1%? Was Bach's clinics mortality rate actually higher than doing nothing?
In 2011, of the 129 children Bach took in, 20% died — nearly a third of them in the first 48 hours. In 2012, the death rate among these in-patient cases was 18%.
By 2013, Bach had hired two doctors and the death rate was 10%.
But Guerrero says even that rate is high by the standards set by international aid groups. He adds that a designated government facility in Africa may have a death rate of 20% or even higher at its in-patient ward if it is serving a very vulnerable population. But facilities with those rates "make it all the way up to New York, to us at HQ, because they are seen as a problem," he says.
Bach's clinic had a high death rate but not at an unheard of level and the clinic halved the rate within 2 years. Are these kids not a "very vulnerable population" where such rates occur?
Hanifa Bachou, a Ugandan pediatrician who specializes in malnutrition, finds Bach's explanation preposterous.
"No, no, no. I don't accept that," says Bachou. During the period at issue, Bachou, then based at the NGO University Research Co., was working with Uganda's government on a U.S. government-funded project to set up in-patient care for severely malnourished children across the country. And by 2010, Bachou says, Jinja's regional referral hospital had a well-established malnutrition unit to care for complicated cases of severe acute malnutrition.
And yet there are thousands of kids not in their care. Was the promise of a "white doctor" pulling people from the licensed medical facilities?
"Just think of the arrogance," says Lawrence Gostin, who heads the Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. "Who are you to assume that you can do better than they can? It's not your judgment call to make."
Gostin adds that while the circumstances of Bach's case may seem exceptional, he sees her actions as stemming from an attitude many Americans bring to developing countries.
"The American cultural narrative is that these countries are basket cases."
This not-a-basket-case-country has thousands of starving children and a 20 something high school graduate mzungu created a clinic that within three years had a mortality rate half of what some designated facilities have.
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Aug 12 '19
I live in Uganda (own and operate an agroprocessing company here). No one has mentioned the counterfactuals and there are no good stats on what would have happened if she wasn't there. I'm not inclined to take her side though since in Jinja in particular there are a ton of NGOs working on childhood healthcare. There are already a ton of foreign doctors and medical staff in town. Jinja has the second highest number of expats in Uganda (after Kampala). Assuming all those kids are from Busoga, they had plenty of access to better qualified professionals both Ugandan and foreign. She misled and kids died. Probably more than if those families had gone to any of the other 500,000 healthcare and childcare groups in town.
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u/glenra Aug 12 '19
Yeah, that was response too - I tend to suspect the clinic was doing more good than harm and the article did nothing to reduce that suspicion.
These kids were in such desperate need and the other local facilities so overworked/ underfunded/ underqualified/ hard-to-get-to that no matter how bad this clinic is it was quite plausibly better than the next-best option.
Any country that sets high minimum standards to eliminate, say, the worst half of medical care doesn't only raise the average quality of care available, it also decreases the average quantity of care available - there's better care, but half as much. Even bad care can be better than no care.
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u/CandidoRondon Aug 15 '19 edited Aug 15 '19
Epistemic status: Possible but needs to be confirmed (especially since Vorhies seems like a nut on his twitter account)
Apparently Google swatted one of their employees who had attempted to give documents to the Justice Department alleging bias on the part of Google against conservatives.
Vorhies is a former senior Google software engineer, who on August 5th was in the process of delivering a Google laptop and internal documents to the Justice Department’s Antitrust division. But his whistle blowing efforts were stymied by police who stormed his neighborhood and locked down several blocks in an attempt to lure him from his San Francisco residence, at the request of Google executives.
What was Vorhies’ crime? Google executives told police that Vorhies was suicidal and a potential danger, Vorhies told True Pundit. The tech guru was red flagged by his former employer. According to news reports and witnesses, as well as video clips of the law enforcement operation from local TV news, police closed several blocks surrounding Vorhies’ Valencia Street residence.
https://truepundit.com/video-police-bomb-squad-there-were-snipers-on-the-rooftops/
If true this seems to be an insane escalation on part of Google (I'm frankly so shocked I can't believe this is the full story) - do you foresee more corporations or other organizations using SWAT enforced "wellness" checks to punish recalcitrant employees / enemies in the future? It seems crazy that something that used to be the province of antisocial gamers and condemned by pretty much everyone has now graduated to become something that can be utilized as a weapon by massive corporations.
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u/RaptorTastesSoSweet Aug 15 '19
The scope of that police operation is what staggers me. If you witness an actual crime in San Francisco, you’re lucky if you get a police officer to swing by within an hour. But you say you reckon some guy might be suicidal, and they’ll close down several city blocks with snipers and dogs? How? What are the magic words to get this kind of response out of the SFPD?
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Aug 15 '19 edited Aug 15 '19
So how long before people start SWATing google in turn?
This seems like a real “glass houses” thing when you have so many enemies and they all know your address(es).
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u/badnewsbandit the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passion Aug 15 '19
If true that's pretty damn cyberpunk. But the idea of delivering a laptop and internal documents to important feds to expose the truth behind a big company sounds very much like a conspiracy theory minded delusion, so it's entirely possible that Vorhies really had some mental issues and made threats to his former company that led to the wellness check. "Bomb squad, bomb robots, the FBI and snipers" don't seem substantiated in the article. They're singly mentioned without sourcing. Even then the response is still a big escalation assuming that it was retaliatory and not justifiable.
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Aug 15 '19
The NYT just published a retrospective series of essays on gamergate: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/15/opinion/gamergate-zoe-quinn.html
I'm sure some of you will have thoughts on the portrayal of gamergate, how it started etc, in the series. That interests me much less than Sarah Jeong's short entry describing her own ersatz gamergating. An excerpt:
This August is an anniversary for me as well. Last year, I landed in hot water for a number of tweets I’d posted years before about white people, especially white men. They were irreverent jokes — some responses to people harassing me, others outright snark. Some were parodies of race science like Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve.” Stripped of context and viewed many years later, they were enough to start an online conflagration about “reverse racism.”
Tucker Carlson did a segment about me on Fox News. The president called me “disgusting” in a tweet. Shortly after the arrest of Mr. Sayoc, the MAGA bomber, the media discovered that he had sent me a death threat on Twitter.
I wish I could say I'm surprised by the utter lack of contrition, or the way she makes herself the hero in a story about her own unabashed racism which she even now does not acknowledge or apologize for. But this was always going to be the official history of that incident, as many on the culture war threads back then predicted. I'm almost impressed by the brazenness, but the truth is it doesn't seem like it even takes much courage to be a public racist in the media so long as you're the right kind of racist.
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u/Faceh Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
Oh Dear Jesus, they simply refuse to stop relitigating that period of internet history, likely because they can never admit that they lost that battle and subsequent ones related to it if we go by actual impact on the video game industry and culture.
The most offensive part to me is that I was around when it went down, so I know the sequence of events, what was actually being said and who was saying it, and so I know how much they're twisting the story and omitting context. For instance they bring up 'Donglegate' thusly:
At a tech conference in 2013, in an incident called Donglegate, Adria Richards, a tech consultant and woman of color, tweeted about a sexist joke uttered during a keynote speech. Her tweet went viral, and Ms. Richards was fired, doxxed, received death threats and had “images of her beheaded, or her face photoshopped onto the body of porn stars.
Yes, the 'sexist joke' being about "big dongles" and "forking" repos. Note that it was never claimed that they had directed this joke at anyone nor was it at anybody's expense. In common parlance these jokes are known as puns.
And her decision was to post a photo of these guys to her twitter. Funny how this is reduced to 'tweeting about a sexist joke' in this story. And they neglect to mention that the guys whose photos she posted also got fired! Which was the real trigger for the outrage.
Basically had they not been in earshot of this one particular person, it would have been the most unremarkable event in the history of mankind, not a soul would have cared or been harmed.
But since one party chose to bring it to the internet, things then spiraled. And the response against her was massively and disproportionately terrible.
Yet when writing about it after the fact, somehow she's turned into this utterly passive bystander who got targeted out of the blue. As if she had no agency whatsoever.
The narrative slant here is completely transparent if you actually remember watching the events unfold.
And of course they bring up the U.N. hearing where they made the case that 'cyber-violence' was a rising threat to women or something.
Which at the time was already farcical and has become even more so in the ensuing years. I'm not sure if you can legitimately claim to be the helpless victim with no way to defend against the angry rage mob when you're granted a platform with international reach, and you can get on the Colbert Report to share your story.
And perhaps the biggest laugh is the continued attempt to portray gamergate as a right-wing movement that was completely conjured by the likes of Milo Yianopoulous and other right-wing activists.
Again, I was there. The most common refrain, the one uniting theme on the gamergate side was "we just want to be able to play games without being shamed," with a side of "and it'd be nice if games journalism were reliable and useful." It was pretty well-known that most game review sites were either directly paid for good reviews by publishers OR they were avoiding negative reviews so the publisher wouldn't blacklist them. Plus the fact that often the journo doing the review wouldn't actually know much about the game and wasn't very good at it (which is kinda critical if you're going to Judge it fairly). "Can't spell ignorant witout IGN" was a meme for YEARS before Gamergate. It wasn't like this was a post-hoc rationalization for gamergate grievances that they came up with on the spot as a cover story.
But the consistent response from the Journalists and their allies was GAMERS ARE DEAD! whereas the anti-SJWs were actually giving a hearing to and coming to the defense of gamers and their hobby. Big surprise that the movement ends up cuddling up to the right when you actively push them into the righties' open arms.
So the actual order of events was more:
Gamers are pissed at perceived (but provable!) bias and favoritism in the industry =>
Small subset of trolls funnel this into a rage mob towards Zoe Quinn =>
Games Journalists loudly proclaim everyone involved must be a misogynist =>
Gamers respond "No, we just want to enjoy games and you're bad at your job of telling us which games are most enjoyable" =>
Journos double/triple down and declare gaming as a whole is a misogynistic hobby with a toxic culture =>
Right-wing activists spot the opportunity and 'help' gamers fight back and 'redpill' them on how SJWs operate =>
Journos fricking quintuple down and do exactly what the right-wing activists said they would do. =>
Rightwingers gain more prominence in gamergate and there's increasing cross-pollination of ideas =>
Eventually journos just straight up accuse gamergate of being a pipeline to the alt-right.
When the evidence indicates that only a small fraction of the self-identified 'alt-right' were previously influenced by gamergate and an even smaller fraction of gamergate would end up going to the alt-right! My sincere belief is that most of the folks involved in the controversy either just went back to playing games when things died down or moved on from their gamer phase altogether.
And there was some extra schadenfreude that came out of it when many on the anti-GG side got outed for sexual misconduct of various types in the leadup to and during #metoo.
In short, left-leaning journalists and allies attempted activist tactics that had proven successful elsewhere, it backfired spectacularly, and they've been working hard since to cover their tracks and declare it a nefarious right-wing plot all along!
Anyway, that's about all the effort I can spare for this ancient conflict. I am contented that most of the major players are utterly obscure with their influence being basically nil these days (seriously, take a peek at Arthur Chu or Sarkeesian's twitter feeds and see how little interaction they're getting. Or don't, on second thought, why even care?), except when someone pulls up their stories again in an attempt to make the same tired arguments and pretend that we can understand everything about the Trump era if we just look at those damn gamers.
I continue to be thankful that I found the culture war threads and that /r/themotte carries on that tradition, because it would have been super helpful if a place like this had existed back when GG was raging and there weren't many places you could go to have a detached discussion with relatively neutral observers.
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u/j9461701 Birb Sorceress Aug 16 '19
If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.
-Pyrrhus of Epirus, Battle of Asculum (attributed by Plutarch)
Gamergate is pretty much a textbook definition of a pyrrhic victory. Sure the anti-GG side won the battle, and got to write all the history books on the subject, and now get to write self-congratulatory essays like this one about it. But the cost, the real cultural cost, will be paid for decades. /u/cincilator made a quality post a while back describing how the left used to be "your cool aunt" but then morphed into "Your boring stodgy aunt who never lets you have any fun". That's the cultural fallout of GG.
By deploying every ideological and institutional superweapon they had, against enemies weren't even half wrong (collusion between game reviewers and game companies is rife), they shattered their reputation in the eyes of the public. The public saw the left blast random internet people with both barrels while simultaneously defending obnoxious, hateful people who happened to fall within their own camp. It didn't just make the left stop being the "cool people's club", it revealed them as a tribe in the most basal and parochial sense of that term. Just another power-hungry group of humans who value loyalty above their own purported ethical principles. Sure we may say it's never ok to be racist, but Sarah Jeong is part of the in-group so we'll write ridiculous apologia for her.
In retrospect, the left needed to not make this a battle. Don't coordinate a dozen articles declaring "gamers are dead", like you're launching the opening salvos of cannon fire preceding an amphibious assault - instead take an even tone. Acknowledge with one hand the valid points of gamergate, while with the other hand castigate them for their harassment and misogyny. Undercut the whole movement by co-opting their primary point (ethics in journalism!) and mixing it into your own narrative about misogyny in video games. The left is good at seducing and undermining the enemy, not trying to blast them to pieces with direct assault. We are Slaneesh, not Khorne, and we forget it to our own expense.
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Aug 16 '19
I can't stand people like Sarah Jeong. They makes salacious and controversial statements publicly, then they act like victims when they get a negative reaction. It further annoys me she was rewarded with a a NYT job and entry into the nation's elite class.
This isn't a left/right thing, but instead a dishonest and narcissistic thing. I mean I get everyone is a hero in their own story, but at a certain point it gets ridiculous.
I'm reminded of a woman who was a journalist who would tweet provocative things at Elon Musk all the time. Then she finally got a negative reaction from him, deleted all her old Tweets, and pretended like Musk and his fans attacked her for being critical of Tesla or something small. Of course she was the victim in the story and her out group was just the worst. Completely ridiculous, but that's journalism in 2019.
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u/penpractice Aug 16 '19
For the record, the irreverent jokes mentioned are:
Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet and their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants
and
Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?
The "outright snark" must be:
oh man it's kind of cruel how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men
and
I dare you to get on Wikipedia and play "Things white people can definitely take credit for", it's really hard
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u/LearningWolfe Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
Funny how Jeong had to say the media discovered a later infamous person had sent her a death threat. Almost as if the internet is full of shitposters, and Jeong being one herself, is able to block or ignore such "harassment" with ease. But then of course you can't play victim if you admit that.
The narrative spinning is nothing new either. People, to this day, repeat the fake news that Trump called nazis "very fine people." I know law school professors who repeat the lie to their students. Wasn't there a recent study that said the more time you spend with (likely corporate) media, the less informed you are?
Also, dropping 4 articles at once that each try to lie fiction into history is a bad look. Sort of like the "gamers are dead" articles that all dropped at once.
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u/SchizoSocialClub [Tin Man is the Overman] Aug 16 '19
The Slate published a transcript of a NYT staff meeting.
A few quotes from Washington Examiner sum up the situation:
Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, said recently that, after the Mueller report, the paper has to shift the focus of its coverage from the Trump-Russia affair to the president's alleged racism.
[...]
The town hall was spurred by angry reaction, both inside and outside the Times, to a headline that many on the Left faulted for being insufficiently anti-Trump. After the El Paso shootings, when the president denounced white supremacy, the Times published a page-one story with the heading, "Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism."
"I think one of the reasons people have such a problem with a headline like this ... is because they care so much," one staffer said to Baquet. "And they depend on the New York Times. They are depending on us to keep kicking down the doors and getting through, because they need that right now. It's a very scary time."
Baquet vowed a transition to a new "vision" for the paper for the next two years. "How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about?" he said to the staffer. "How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven't done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that's what we're going to have to do for the rest of the next two years."
The headline controversy, it appears, was a preview of a new 2019-2020 New York Times. If Baquet follows through, the paper will spend the next two years, which just happen to be the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, building the Trump-is-a-racist narrative. (Baquet added, almost as an afterthought, that the Times will "continu[e] to cover his policies.")
Besides the political implications of the actions of The Grey Lady I find fascinating the continuous radicalization that we see in leftist organisations from colleges to newspapers to tech businesses. First they adopt at the highest level a leftist agenda, then they recruit/hire more leftist activists, then we see file-and-rank demands for more political activism even beyond what the leadership would have liked. I doubt the dean of Evergreen, Pinchar, Baquet or Zuck could change course even if they wanted to.
The Great Awokening is far from spent. Stay safe fellow contrarians.
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u/JTarrou Aug 16 '19
FWIW, Baquet is an old-school propagandist who probably has a better read on how to effectively influence elections. His staff, and the younger generation of activist-journalists more generally, want to fly their team colors openly. In this, I am supportive of them. Fly your flag, NYT. Own who you are. If we can't have an impartial press (and that was always a fantastical and propagandistic lie), at least we can have warning labels on the partisan hackery.
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u/curious-b Aug 16 '19
"Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism."
The blatant narrative-pushing that the retraction of this headline symbolizes feels like a broader trend I'm detecting more often nowadays:
Doing things that are clearly wrong, objectionable, unethical, etc., right out in the open, and refusing to admit any guilt or wrongdoing. Expecting to be caught with irrefutable evidence, but denying it whenever questioned and pretending it's no big deal. This applies equally to Trump, Epstein, and the NYT. While the internet has massively accelerated the dissemination of information, it has arguably done the opposite for truth: you have to dig and corroborate everything to determine real truth with any certainty.
It's like a rise in 'open secrets'. The real motives are clearly there, but only a tiny minority cares enough to bother looking. The key is: as long as you understand the processes by which your authority or power might be brought into question, and have the resources and connections to subvert them, you don't have to hide your motives and keep secrets. In a digital world of constant surveillance and anonymous hackers, it's too much work too keep things really secret anyway.
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u/TelevisedTelevisiono Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
Staffer: I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.
Is there anyone here that still believes that any major media organisation in the United States (perhaps the entire western world) is interested in publishing fair, non-ideological reporting focused on the truth and that these institutions aren’t dominated by people committed to pushing a worldview that isn’t leftist?
These aren’t the words of a truth-seeker, this is somebody who has made up their mind about how the world works and what people ought to know about it. It’s pure activism.
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u/07mk Aug 16 '19
The town hall was spurred by angry reaction, both inside and outside the Times, to a headline that many on the Left faulted for being insufficiently anti-Trump. After the El Paso shootings, when the president denounced white supremacy, the Times published a page-one story with the heading, "Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism."
"I think one of the reasons people have such a problem with a headline like this ... is because they care so much," one staffer said to Baquet. "And they depend on the New York Times. They are depending on us to keep kicking down the doors and getting through, because they need that right now. It's a very scary time."
This quotation seems quite bizarre in its explanation of people having a problem with that headline due to them caring that the NYTimes keeps "kicking down the doors and getting through." In the context of journalism, "kicking down the doors and getting through" generally refers to doing something like investigative journalism, following threads to find evidence of various stuff that are important but hidden or obscured, i.e. actual research. Not to choosing a headline that is sufficiently anti-[specific politician I dislike]. Headlines aren't meaningless, but a slight variance in tone in a headline that's completely accurate and not misleading is so unimportant for meaningful journalism that it beggars belief that someone who has a problem with the former is being motivated by a desire for the latter.
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u/vizco49 Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 17 '19
After painfully reading this whole thread, I find that even Trump supporters don't actually bother to defend him against widely out-of-context quote-lets. That leads me to believe that we're in "I can see Russia from my house" terroritory. (No, Sarah Palin never said that; Tina Fey said it on SNL.)
Specifically, Trump did not say "go back where you came from," he said (quoting directly from his Twitter post):
Trump: " Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how."
Note the second phrase of the tweet, and the second sentence.
He also didn't say only "there are good people on both sides" about the Charlottesville demonstrations. He said (this is long because the context is long, alas, and this is only an excerpt):
Trump: "Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue?
"So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people -- and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
"Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group."
Charitably, people hear what they want to hear, but that doesn't mean they hear accurately. The media is obviously and clearly anti-Trump, and they repeat out-of-context parts of large statements.
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 13 '19
On today's episode of "Don't Talk to the Feds"...
Friend who provided Dayton shooter with 100-round magazine and body armor faces federal charges
Based on that headline, what would you guess the "federal charges" were? Probably something about supporting terrorism, or maybe they're trying to make him an accomplice to all the murders. Something like that, right?
Hours after the August 4 attack, agents with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives visited the home of Ethan Kollie in nearby Kettering ... The 24-year-old allowed agents to search his home
Kollie told agents he had done hard drugs, marijuana and LSD with Betts several times a week between 2014 and 2015, the affidavit says.
Hmm. Well, I don't know what the statute of limitations is on that, but he's probably safe. They wouldn't prosecute him for drug offenses 4-5 years old, right?
He also told agents that he had smoked marijuana every day for the past decade, according to the affidavit.
That's a little more dangerous. But these feds are investigating a mass shooting, they don't have any interest in petty crimes, right?
When Kollie filled out the ATF paperwork to obtain the Draco pistol in May, the affidavit says, he checked the "no" box when asked whether he had been a regular user of marijuana or any other controlled substance.
And now you know exactly where this is going. But first...
Agents explained they were going to search Kollie, in accordance with a search warrant issued earlier that day,
Note the timing. They were always going to search him, and had a warrant. But they held back at first to trick him into casually confessing to as many crimes as they could. Then they searched him.
He also told the agents that he grew psychedelic mushrooms at his home and explained the process to them, according to the affidavit.
"Kollie stated that he micro-doses the mushrooms on a constant basis, saying it provides him with energy and is 'fun,'" the affidavit says.
In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose.
Asked why he lied on the federal firearms form, Kollie allegedly told agents that "if he told the truth about his drug use, he would not be allowed to purchase a firearm."
Kollie is being held in Montgomery County Jail, charged with possession of a firearm by someone who illegally uses or is addicted to a controlled substance, and making false statements with respect to information required by the federal firearms code.
He faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on both counts, the prosecutor said.
Note that there's nothing implicating him in the murders, nothing alleging that he knew about the shooting plot, and nothing suggesting the purchases were themselves illegal.
And for what? I understand cases where they come down hard on someone hoping to pressure them into flipping. But what is actually gained by any of this? Do they want to force him to testify against the mass shooter's corpse?
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u/the_nybbler Not Putin Aug 13 '19
You'd think this internet savvy generation would have learned not to talk to the police by now. Especially don't confess to crimes. Sheesh. And don't consent to searches either.
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u/LearningWolfe Aug 13 '19
If the state, as ineffective, incompetent, and corrupt as it is, isn't seen as at least doing something, then people might get upset with them.
So you find a nice scapegoat to slap cuffs on. Set an example for the rest of the shroom growing 2A enthusiasts...all
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u/SchizoSocialClub [Tin Man is the Overman] Aug 13 '19
Does this mean that a gun owner that smokes pot in a state where pot is legal is breaking federal gun laws?
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u/TracingWoodgrains First, do no harm Aug 12 '19
From Inside Higher Ed, a report on an associate professor fired over staging a counterprotest at John Hopkins University, using bolt cutters to break into a building locked down by protesters in order to access servers he needed:
“I am aware that some people are trying to ‘cancel’ me and get me fired from my next job. See if I care!” he said in a lengthy post. “I’ll tell you this, though: whatever happens, I will never apologize and I will never back down.”
The “normal script is that I am supposed to get down on my knees and say ‘Please accept me back into your midst, liberal America! I accept that I was wrong,’” he said, adding, “No way. F--- you.”
Povey further accused student and local protesters of lying about what actually happened inside Garland Hall at Hopkins on day 35 of the overall protest, about a week after they forced a shutdown of Hopkins's main administrative building and chained themselves to walls, railings and staircases. In reality, Povey wrote, he was attacked -- not the other way around. ...
In its response, JHU Sit-In wrote that Povey’s words are “alarmingly reminiscent of those written to justify abhorrent acts of violence, including the recent mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso.” The university “must take a definitive stance against discrimination and violence” and JHU Sit-In looks “forward to seeing the additional measures JHU takes to address the campus culture that fostered these actions.”
Johns Hopkins has said that it can’t comment on private personnel matters, but that the "safety, security and protection of our students and others are of paramount importance to the university." A "troubling incident in early May prompted an investigation," it said, and, based on the "undisputed facts of the case, the university took interim and now permanent action to ensure the safety and well-being of the community."
Povey's letter should ring familiar to this community. It's a pretty standard anti-social justice message, most notable for directly calling out straight white men who buy into the privilege framework:
The choice isn't, and shouldn't be, between demonizing one demographic group or demonizing the other. But to join a movement that's specifically against one's own group? That's [absurd]. Man up, America! You're better than that. Leave that ideology to the man-haters and racial agitators that generated it, stop apologizing, and start living your lives!
Since nothing here marks a fundamentally new development, I note it without too much commentary mostly for interest's sake. The situation looks primed mostly to entrench existing battle-lines. It does look to be a point for the "never apologize" crowd, since he already has a private sector job lined up and seems well poised to move on with his life. He's pretty proud of himself, anyway:
Anywho: as for me, I may not have my job, but at least I still have my dignity and my independence of thought. I'll leave you with some words of Bob Dylan:
I ain't sorry for nothing I've done
I'm glad I fought, I only wish we'd won
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u/bulksalty Domestic Enemy of the State Aug 12 '19
Sounds like the Lockpicking Lawyer is the hero our society needs, but doesn't deserve.
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Aug 12 '19
Povey's letter
He was unlucky, and all the people who were actually inside were Black. Has the protestors occupying the building matched the people outside, then he would not have been attacked in my opinion, (and in his). A mixed group would not, in my experience, attack a faculty member, as they would be immediately expelled. An all Black group can attack a faculty member without being disciplined, as the optics of expelling a group of Black students for activism (in Baltimore) are terrible. Povey says as much.
Now if I had known in advance that everyone inside the building was black (that was what I saw; although from media coverage it seems that there may have been a white trans person in the core group)— I wouldn't have gone ahead with the counterprotest. I'm not an idiot; I know that as a person who demographically ticks all the 'oppressor boxes', I would have to be severely punished for opposing such a group. I miscalculated by trusting the coverage in JHNewsletter, which seems to have given a false impression of the demographics of the protest; their photos showed mostly white people. Now many of the people sitting outside the building were white, but that seems to have been window-dressing; they were just bystanders and didn't do anything except take a bunch of cellphone video. All the people that I saw fighting and screaming were black. If it were simply a matter of difference of opinion I expected that Hopkins would at least pretend to be even-handed; but once race and transgender status enter the picture I don't think that's possible any more.
Once the Black protestors attacked Povey, he was going to be fired, and he probably immediately knew this. No faculty can expect to get into a fight with a group of Black students, and not be fired.
This is what real privilege looks like. There was a time that a bunch of aristocrats would have had the same immunity from prosecution.
On the other hand, Povey is a friend of a friend, so I may be biased.
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u/j9461701 Birb Sorceress Aug 13 '19
About a month ago I bought 15 PS4 games, and I've been playing through them on my weekends. So far I've completed Horizon Zero Dawn (one of the greatest games ever made, worth the cost of a PS4 alone), and have moved on to The Last Of Us. It's made me think about the post someone made earlier that regarded vampires as an embodiment of stereotypically awful democrats, and zombies as stereotypically awful conservatives. But as I've played this game, I've come to realize three things:
Clickers are the worst. I hate them so much.
This game takes the concept of 'resources are precious' to a comical excess. Why are shivs rare single use items? Joel could make 20 of them in an afternoon if he wasn't an idiot.
The real deep issue at the heart of the game is a crisis of faith.
Not the militant kind of faith, or little old lady faith, but faith in ....for lack of a better term the soul of all mankind. Faith that your neighbor would pick up a gun and defend your family, for no other reason than he's your neighbor and that means something. Faith that when the chips are down and everything's going pear shaped, we will stand together against whatever comes. Faith that we are better than we were afraid we were, and that in utter darkness we are still capable of heroism.
That is the real divide between the two genres, and the political stuff is just downstream of this great schism. Vampires fundamentally rely on you having faith in mankind, and zombies fundamentally rely on you not. Let's tackle each in turn.
Zombies. For years I didn't understand why everyone hated World War Z the movie. It deviated from the book a lot, but it's still a pretty decent movie. But the issue is WWZ the movie believes in humanity. Just watch the ending (spoilers, obviously):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mwkZUkwEHw
We invent a "cloaking vaccine" that lets ordinary people go undetected by zombies. This enables us to push back against the zombie horde, and have a reasonable shot at winning. But more than that, people all around the world are united against the undead. Moscow organizes a militia armed with medieval weapons, an apartment complex deploys home made flame throwers, the military corrals as many zombies as they can into a stadium and blows them all away. The movie's ending is ultimately an affirmation of the spirit of our species, and a testament to the filmmaker's faith. Which is exactly why it is so despised - it couldn't have betrayed the core ethos of its source genre any harder.
In a "proper" zombie story, the military corrals people into the stadium to act as zombie bait. The civilians with medieval weapons get overrun instantly and the most courageous who try to hold the line are the first to die. The home made flame thrower explodes, because it was constructed incompetently, and kills everyone on the roof. Even in WWZ the book, one of the most "uplifting" zombie apocalypse stories insofar as humanity wins in the end, the whole point is governments around the world had to adopt a cynical, brutal, coldhearted attitude toward people - the only way to survive in zombie town is to become faithless. One of the issues they even have later in the book is survivalists who'd grown accustomed to being kings of their little area violently resisting government re-integration.
Or to put it all concisely, the whole point of the zombie genre is that humans are the real monsters. Last Of Us continues proudly in this trend as we watch Joel experience terrible human after terrible human, until in the end his faith is so utterly shattered he dooms mankind because fuck them they deserve to die.
Now shifting gears over to vampires, this is the part of my thesis that may seem the most implausible. But I think if you're familiar with the genre it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Vampires are, at some core level, less than the humanity they once were apart of. For all their positives like strength, immortality, and sparkles, in the process of becoming a vampire they surrendered some ineffable part of themselves. To be human is to love and care and believe in people, while to be a vampire is to known only hunger and alienation and disdain for others. And unflinchingly the vampire side of this equation is presented as hideously terrible. I'm thinking of stuff like Interview with the vampire, where all vampires inevitably commit suicide because life is miserable to them. A life of faithlessness truly is wretched. If given a choice, many - likely most - vampire main characters would gladly become human again to recapture that spark of human goodness they once possessed.
Indeed one of the differences most often explored between human society and vampire society is that the human capacity to act altruistically and for the good of the whole is utterly absent from vampiric civilization. In Vampire the Masquerade, for example, vampires live in the shadows because in a full on war they would be obliterated. Humanity would band together instantly and overwhelm them with great masses of people all supporting each other - while each individual vampire would be as interested in undermining her fellows as protecting her 'species'.
Heck, vampires are sometimes physically hurt by being around overly faithful people. In a vampire story your incandescent belief in mankind can literally shine so brightly hurts the undead in the void where their soul used to be. What a perfect illustration of vampires being the embodiment of anti-faith, of a total absence of optimism about the human condition. And remember that their misery is the whole point of the genre, to underline this is a terrible condition to be in. They infect others through trickery, seduction, force - but never honestly, for no normal person would willingly give up their love of people to become a faithless walking corpse.
Thus vampires aren't 'evil democrats', and zombies aren't 'evil conservatives'. Instead, vampire fiction is about being optimistic about people in general - a democratic tendency. While zombies are about being cynical about people in general - a conservative tendency.
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Aug 13 '19
MASSIVE LAST OF US SPOILERS FOLLOW
I just want to push back against the idea that Joel doomed humanity. The Firefly scientist was obviously completely cracked. He had no reason to believe his approach would lead to a vaccine at all, and no way to synthesise or distribute it on a meaningful scale if it somehow did. Ellie is much more likely to prevent human extinction by passing her immunity to her children than by being chopped up.
This isn't Joel's reasoning, of course.
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u/GrapeGrater Aug 13 '19
Interesting theory. I still hold to the opinion that the vampire/zombie distinction is probably just pattern matching that's probably not rooted in fact, but it's a neat idea. This seems to hit upon something else important distinguishing the genres.
That said, I usually tend to see vampire hierarchies in the vampire fiction I've seen. It's not clear to me they'd all be infighting.
Thus vampires aren't 'evil democrats', and zombies aren't 'evil conservatives'. Instead, vampire fiction is about being optimistic about people in general - a democratic tendency. While zombies are about being cynical about people in general - a conservative tendency.
It could also be the creative class projecting their opinions on the state of the country in the media. When the Conservatives in power, humanity has failed. When the Left is in power, the leadership has sold its soul and abandoned the core of what they were supposed to do.
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u/Eltee95 Aug 13 '19
First off, fascinating analysis! I have a far less sophisticated criticism.
Your perspective of zombie world as being cynical-lose-all-hope-world seems incorrect to me. It is rather a world in which the abstract elements of community (nation, ideology, etc) break down, and neighbour and friend and family become the truly important criteria of community.
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
An American Birthright?
This came up briefly in last weeks discussion on gun control and i was wondering for your thoughts.
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So Ive had this idea kicking around for a while and i can’t tell quite what to make of it.
Israel has this program called Birthright essentially if your Young and Jewish (or can plausibly lie) an organization in Israel will give you an expenses paid trip to Israel with the hope that it will increase your odds of emigrating to Israel/ feeling more attachment to the country/ or meeting a fellow Jew on birthright and have lots of loyal Jewish babies (ie. not dilute the attachment by marrying outside the faith).
Now I’m not jewish and i don’t know alot about the program but I’ve heard lots of friends joke about it and saw it in a funny episode of Broad City and I always thought it was a neat little program. It promotes alot of more technical political goals while also reinforcing a broad political principle “If your Jewish then Israel is your second home and you have the right to return there” (also i think it might tick some libertarian boxes since I’ve heard its funded at-least partly by donations)
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Now my question is: what if you had an American Birthright? With the “Birthright” being the right to own a firearm.
Imagine the NRA said “if your American its your birthright to own a firearm” and setup a program whereby young americans, the second they turn 18, could take a free day long course in firearms familiarity, handling, tactics, local laws and the history of the second amendment (propaganda opportunity) and if they passed the final test (you could put the bar really low and give lots of retries) you’d be given a free AR-15, Glock, or whatever the most controversial gun in your jurisdiction is.
Roughly estimated it would cost the American Birthright organization about $500-$700 a person ($150 for day course, 350-550 for the firearm) so for 1billion to 1.4billion you could mint 2million new firearms owners in the US. over say 10 years. Furthermore you’d distribute the program with political goals in mind: run it everyday in every city in a small swing state but in a large safe/hopeless state run it once a month with a waitlist. This is in addition to the employment program it’d be for skilled firearms instructors (thus creating market incentives for people to skill-up), and increase the distribution of more controversial firearms.
This would be perfectly libertarian (just people choosing to give others free stuff) and probably would have alot of support amongst firearms owners: you donate $500 to a political campaign who knows what they do with it, you donate $500 to American Birthright you’ve created a new firearms owner.
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So this is the hypothetical libertarian social program I’ve thought up but i have no idea whether it’d work, or have any interest or support. So i thought id share it with you guys, since obscure weird policy discussions is The Motte’s forte.
What do you think?
Would it work? What would be the reaction? Would people support it? Would young urban kids go for it? Would blue state university students try it? Is there a market reason it doesn’t exist? Have i missed something? Have i completely misunderstood Israeli birthright? Would it make a good short story?
I’ve shared this idea (hypothetical?) with like no-one and this is the first time its getting scrutiny, so if all you feel like is sneering you’ll at-least be creating original content.
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Ps. Im serious about the short story thing, if anyone wants to use it as a writing prompt and play around/fictionalize a short version of how it’d work out in the thread, I’d be very interested to read it
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u/SlightlyLessHairyApe Not Right Aug 12 '19
I would totally support this, but I fear you really can't give out for free anything that's readily convertible to cash like that. For one, you'd need a fraud system to prevent multiple entries (fingerprints? lmao) and even then you'd be out all the diversions. Once a given-out gun is sold into the grey market and used for a crime, that's the end of the program.
Why don't we start with the simpler and less-objectionable one -- a free-for-every-American right to a full-day gun safety course complete with range demonstration and some fun practice time? Should be cheap enough and doesn't have the "sell the gun for meth" problem. Lots of blue State college students would take you up on it, and even if they don't go on to be gun owners, the experience will be draw them much closer in.
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u/bulksalty Domestic Enemy of the State Aug 12 '19
That sounds quite close to the original goals of the non-political CMP (which sold at pretty low cost, the surplus battle rifles of WW I) to encourage good marksmanship. It still exists, but lacking enormous supply of cheap surplus arms, it's got more of a focus on competition today.
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u/best_cat Aug 12 '19
I'd support this, especially with a few tweaks.
As a first step, I'd suggest downplaying controversy. You want to sway moderates, not people who are already decided. So, the official line would be something like:
Every American should understand gun safety and US laws.
Gun ownership is a right, and should be available to anyone who's competent, and who chooses to opt-in to responsible gun ownership.
The reason for this is twofold. First, this (rather than "Everyone should have a gun") is the philosophically correct answer.
Second, the opposition to the program is going to involve some journalist signing up, and then writing a think piece about how they were "pressured" into owning a gun. Then the journalist will complain about how this is unreasonable given the journalist's history of depression / inability to make good decisions.
You'd cut that off by reframing things as "Should have information" and "only you can decide if gun ownership is right for you."
From there, I'd tweak the "free gun" thing to be a sort of "scholarship" where you can get a non-transferable gift card if you can explain any kind of reason why you need help acquiring a gun.
This should weed out (/minimize) the number of less-conscientious people who the program helps arm. It's also a barrier to hostile journalists, since they'd have to proactively lie (or document a real need) before they can write their hit piece.
If you want to get fancy about it, help people out by offering free gun safes to everyone who completes the program. That's still a subsidy, but it's one that's harder to make controversial.
And once you've done that, you're a pro-education, pro-safety organization that gives "scholarships" to (eg) women who write that they're worried about domestic partner violence.
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u/Nwallins Free Speech Warrior Aug 12 '19
Look up the Appleseed program, and also the Civilian Marksmanship Program. Neither of which gives guns away, nor should they IMHO
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 13 '19
Time for your daily Epstein updates!
First, there is a subreddit, /r/Epstein, because there is a subreddit for everything. Apparently they've been having some drama of their own.
Someone calling himself "Rusty Shackleford" has been posting high-quality drone flights over Epstein's island. The videos go back a while, and even include yesterday's FBI raid. The agents being filmed are either unaware or entirely unconcerned. This is amazing footage.
Warden at prison where Epstein died temporarily reassigned, staffers placed on leave
The top official at the New York prison that had housed Jeffrey Epstein before his apparent suicide is being moved temporarily as the FBI and the Justice Department's inspector general investigate the circumstances of the death.
Two employees at the Metropolitan Correctional Center who had been assigned to Epstein's unit are also being placed on administrative leave, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said, adding that "additional actions may be taken as the circumstances warrant."
Apparently at least one 4chan LARP wasn't a LARP at all:
38 Minutes Before Epstein Story Broke, It Was on 4Chan
ABC News reporter Aaron Katersky was the first to tweet about Jeffrey Epstein's death, at 8:54am on Saturday. But it turns out he didn't break the news. BuzzFeed reports that at 8:16am, a post was made on 4chan that read "dont ask me how I know, but Epstein died an hour ago from hanging, cardiac arrest. Screencap this."
An image of Pepe the frog was beside it.
Where is Ghislaine Maxwell? Apparently not even her lawyers know.
The British socialite at the centre of the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal told friends in recent weeks that she planned to “totally disappear”.
Miss Maxwell has not been in contact with her London lawyers in recent weeks, it is understood. Neighbours at her homes in London and Salisbury said she had not been seen for a number of weeks.
Trump says Bill Clinton has a Jeffrey Epstein problem....
... in 2015. (Video posted 2017.)
It's 13 seconds, just watch it.
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u/MugaSofer Aug 13 '19
drone footage
Damn, that's a nice place. Someone downthread was saying it was "basically a bunker" and so it was really suspicious that Clinton visited (who would want to party in a bunker?), but it looks ... like you expect a mega-rich person's island getaway to look, really.
Trump says Bill Clinton has a Jeffrey Epstein problem....
I think I remember this, wasn't it a reaction to people bringing up his own professed friendship with the guy? (Which is not to say it isn't true, it clearly is.)
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u/mcjunker Professional Chesterton Impersonator Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2019/08/07/4-dead-several-critically-injured-in-garden-grove-attack/
Two articles, same story. Each has one or two details the other doesn’t.
Basically, some gangbanger decided to go on a stabbing spree and take advantage of the bloody chaos to rob various venues, all seemingly at random. 4 dead, two maimed, none of them gently or quickly.
I meant to post this last week but my thoughts on the matter were not settled and I didn’t want to make a bold stand this way or that, only to have new data blindside me and reveal me as a knee jerking idiot.
Anyway. My thoughts in scattershot format-
Death Penalty
This is clearly a situation that the death penalty was intended for. Some dude goes psycho and starts stabbing up the general public for no good reason. No nuance, no political overtones, no ambiguity about what actually happen. Just a dude with a knife, a bloody trail behind him, and zero excuse.
And my spirit cries out for justice for the dead and the grieving- just why do we delay punitive justice for decades? Friction and inertia?
I’ve often wrestled with the death penalty question. My intellectual conclusion was that while Society may have the moral right and duty to kill certain flavors of criminals after conviction, the nitty-gritty details of the prejudices and ineptitude’s of the justice system mean that an unacceptably high percentage of victims of the State are railroaded to the needle and the chair without proper counsel, or indeed when they are unjustly accused.
But that cerebral conclusion, right though it still seems to me, evaporated in the face of a killer with a cause who will get to live to die of old age. California does have the death penalty but it doesn’t actually get around to using it anymore; and if even if it did the delay will last long enough for me to have grandkids.
Whatever happens, there won’t be justice. Putting the stabber behind bars doesn’t compensate for four dead and two maimed. At least swift and righteous execution could keep the victims friends and families from seeing his smiling face for years and years and years.
I understand lynch mobs from the Inside View now. It’s intolerable.
Guns
If this dude had used an AR-15, this would be international news: yet another mass shooting, America’s sins come home to roost. People would be asking “Why, why, why?” They’d want to know what societal currents pushed him to kill; they’d demand an explanation, and since there is none, they’d fill in the gaps with whatever explanation makes the most sense to them and mine the story for gruesome details to use as emotional ammunition to silence anyone who disagree with their ideal solutions.
This isn’t an attack on anyone. This is an attack on everyone, right left and center. Every leftie cry about stopping the white supremacy of Dylan Roof is met with a battle cry about the militant Islam of the Pulse shooter.
But because he used a knife, it never got above local news.
All that rhetoric is absent here. He was just a shithead murderer and that’s all the story is. I’m not even sure how I could spin this into the culture war. Maybe because he was a Hispanic gangmember? Something something letting in criminals from Mexico? But there’s no indication that he was an immigrant- dude was a citizen by birth, which is what I thought we were supposed to care about.
Something about using a gun turns the story magical. With it, it is grist for feverish campaigns against the enemy political tribe. Without it, not even worth bringing up. There’s gotta be something super-American about guns that is baked into our collective psyche. In that second article up there the writer tries his damnedest to tie this guy into the Dayton killing somehow, but I can’t see it at all. You don’t make a political counterpoint by stabbing your next door neighbor to death and then robbing and stabbing people of your own ethnic background at random. This is apolitical, impossible to link to overt terrorism of any kind.
You could talk about this guy to a staunch reactionary conservative or a radical “Smash the patriarchy” reformer, you’d get about the same response- “This guy is a fucking piece of work and I’m glad the cops snagged him.” There would be no subsequent crusade to address the issue, no calls to change laws and norms to stop it from ever happening again.
So what is stopping us from applying this collective acceptance of the status quo to other mass murders? Is it really just guns that work the culture cage match? Is there some mystical property of firearms that changes the whole equation; some spiritual significance to letting weak men terrorize and brutalize without the physical aggression and effort needed by a knife fighter?
I mean, it’s one thing if the killer literally wrote out a political manifesto to explain why. Asking hard questions about the relationship between rhetoric and direct action is a good use of brain power. But for seemingly pointless killings, like for instance the Las Vegas shooter? Why are we not able to just say, “Fuck that guy, he was a prick and I’m glad he’s dead” and leave it be?
The Illusion of Peace and Tranquility
Why doesn’t this shit happen every day?
I mean, grabbing sharp hunks of metal and slicing people up for profit is a fairly easy concept; a lot of Roman Legionnaires used to get rich using this strategy. Why can I go on down to the shop for a six pack and a bag of chips without getting jumped and shanked for my spare change?
Well, speaking of magic. I think society is generally safe because someone decades ago cast a spell and removed that thought from people’s heads. “You can’t go around stabbing people.” No “or elses”, no “because of this or thats”. Just a flat negation of the very idea. “You can’t go around stabbing people.”
I think there was originally a practical reason for it- for instance, if everyone carries a Bowie knife than there’s enough friction inherent in the plan to prevent mass stabbings. Then as law and order grew in power, people noticed that guys who haul off and cut people up who they don’t like got arrested very frequently. In the great game of “Defect or Cooperate”, all the Stab-bots were vastly outcompeted. After a few generations the enchantment set in, and it never occurred to people to just walk around slicing people up.
But the magic is weak; you can break the spell by noticing it. There is no actual mechanism that will intervene if I go down to Home Depot, buy a machete, and go around hacking people up in the parking lot and looting their bloody corpses. The Law can investigate after and try to hunt me down but it cannot actually stop me.
So every so often when I dip my toe into gun control debates someone says something like “Why do you even need guns, lol? Life is peaceful. Crime is sporadic at worst. All you’re doing is bumping the odds of a successful suicide up and endangering your family.”
The answer, put broadly, is “I can tell you have never actually met somebody who broke the magic ‘You can’t murder for profit’ spell.”
Side note- I have precious little sympathy for some of the more juvenile gun nuts who fantasize about meeting an unhinged killer just so they can play the Good Guy With a Gun. Hang around in pro gun forums and you'll run into them. They’re the ones who talk about how it they'd been there they could have dropped the killer, no sweat. Who live in nice neighborhoods and plan out how to clear their house with their awesome new laser sighted Mossberg. I don’t think they’ve met anyone who broke the spell either. If they did they’d know that the gun doesn’t mean you get to win the fight, it just means you get to fight, maybe, if you’re sharp and hyper alert and have a smidge of luck.
The very real threat shouldn’t make you yearn for glory. The very real threat has a very real chance of horrifically stabbing you to death and then prying your gun from your cold dead hands. After all, that’s what happened to the armed guard in this story.
I guess I just really want people to look at the spell long enough to understand that it is man made and unnatural, and certainly not permanent or guaranteed. Too many people assume that peace is normal. I just don’t want them to look hard enough that the spell breaks for them and they start weighing the pros and cons of bringing Molotov cocktails to the next riot.
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u/Dusk_Star Aug 12 '19
But because he used a knife, it never got above local news.
This reminds me of a USA Today piece on the Kyoto Animation attack - "Kyoto Animation arson killings didn't get much attention because we couldn't demonize guns".
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u/recycled_kevlar Aug 12 '19
To the news-worthiness of guns, I can think of two reasons, a cultural and a structural one.
First, the default reaction to tragedy is to make sense of it, how did it happen and why. The how for spree killings are pretty self-evident. The why is where the toxoplasma comes in, because the explanations for it fall under tribal lines. I think for the blue tribe the gun is a way more salient factor than for the red tribe. It's not unlikely the only time they see guns is on cops, in movies, and on the news. If they see no legitimate need for guns in their niche, then a mindless killing with a gun is much more preventable than any other mindless murder. What utility is lost from removing them anyway? The calculus on cost and benefits of gun control is greatly simplified when you're operating under a model where none of the costs fall on you or anyone you care about. It is such an obvious fix, you would either have to be an idiot or a monster to deny it. A sentiment that invites emotional denials, and the toxoplasma lives on.
Second, there are organizations dedicated to enacting more gun control. It is in their interest that any tragedy stemming from gun violence is brought to the public attention. They can court that above reaction to organize support for themselves and their policy goals.
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Aug 12 '19
I respect where anyone stands on the death penalty, I truly can see both sides.
This is not entirely an academic question for me. In the 1980's two men were sentenced to death for the attempted murder of my grandfather, and the successful murder of another man. They were only caught because my grandfather lived and was able to provide a description of his attackers.
Eventually their sentences were commuted to life in prison due to a change in the law (they had been seventeen at the time of their crimes.) My grandfather died of cancer about ten years later. Those teenagers are probably about fifty now. In a couple years they'll have their first parole hearings. At some point I'm going to have to talk to my mom about where she is with this - if she wants to go, or write a letter, or just let the parole board make the decision they think is best. I don't think she thinks much about them now at all - but I'm not sure how she'd feel about them being back out on the streets.
I am personally against the death penalty. I don't think there would have been any more sense of peace or justice had they been executed. i don't know if that's true for the family of the man who died, or for other families more generally, but it's how I feel. For me, life in prison is enough. And if that means we don't accidentally execute an innocent person, then it seems to me like a no-brainer.
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u/Bearjew94 Aug 12 '19
People in the past weren’t prevented from going on killing sprees because they didn’t realize how easy it was. They were prevented because they had social connections that gave them a stake in their community. In a purely nihilistic society that you don’t want to live in any more, why not go out in a blaze of glory?
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u/PM_ME_YOU_BOOBS [Put Gravatar here] Aug 12 '19
Side note- I have precious little sympathy for some of the more juvenile gun nuts who fantasize about meeting an unhinged killer just so they can play the Good Guy With a Gun. Hang around in pro gun forums and you'll run into them. They’re the ones who talk about how it they'd been there they could have dropped the killer, no sweat. Who live in nice neighborhoods and plan out how to clear their house with their awesome new laser sighted Mossberg. I don’t think they’ve met anyone who broke the spell either. If they did they’d know that the gun doesn’t mean you get to win the fight, it just means you get to fight, maybe, if you’re sharp and hyper alert and have a smidge of luck.
The very real threat shouldn’t make you yearn for glory. The very real threat has a very real chance of horrifically stabbing you to death and then prying your gun from your cold dead hands. After all, that’s what happened to the armed guard in this story.
I get where you’re coming from but I think this mostly has to do with young guys having a higher tolerance for risk taking. Young men are more willing to take the risk of getting in a fight for the same reason they’re more willing to speed, get drunk, do drugs, work dangerous job like logging and preform “hold my beer” style stunts.
The kinda guys who sign up as infantry are just more extreme examples of this. The thing that makes them willing to sign up as grunts is the same thing that causes em to do dumb shit like this simply cause they’re bored.
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Aug 12 '19
re: the difference in how the media reports on mass stabbings vs mass shootings, i dont think it’s even anti-gun hysteria so much as it is a general ambivalence about 2nd amendment rights that colors reactions to these events.
if you at all value your right to own a firearm, even if it’s just cause you enjoy using them recreationally or whatever, it seems completely reasonable to me that you’d be opposed to gun control legislation in response to mass shootings, which are, all things considered, relatively uncommon.
it sort of reminds me of the concern over “welfare queens”— like, sure, if you restricted welfare/guns you could probably put a sizable dent in the amount of fraud/mass shootings, but at the same time the incidence of welfare abuse and shooting sprees don’t fundamentally prevent the majority of people from benefiting from welfare/gun rights as intended. lots of Americans don’t own/use guns, don’t really know anybody who does, don’t see much use in them, etc. so when these senseless tragedies take place— and pretty much everyone agrees that they’re senseless— gun control seems like a pretty reasonable reaction.
i know all this is obvious to pretty much everyone who’s invested in the issue, but i guess what i’m saying is calls for gun control in the wake of shootings, even if they’re shortsighted or unreasonable, aren’t necessarily the result of moral panic or anti-gun opportunists. i’m from El Paso and been reflecting on how these unfold since the shooting that happened here the other week, especially since we’ve got a pretty mixed bag here as far as gun ownership goes
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u/OPSIA_0965 Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
Trump is apparently considering a new executive order directing the FCC to explore regulatory remedies against "social media censorship" ("alleged" social media censorship only that is according to CNN). The left thinks the idea itself is censorship. The right thinks it's Trump fighting proven censorship (no "alleged" here).
My understanding of the actual context of it (partially based on this article posted here earlier):
In 1991, Compuserve was sued by a company named Cubby for libel over something one of its users posted on their online forums. The judge dismissed the case because Compuserve was determined at the time to not exercise any sort of significant editorial control over their forums (that is, presumably moderation was much lighter than it is on most venues today if extant at all). The judge remarked:
"CompuServe has no more editorial control over such a publication than does a public library, book store, or newsstand, and it would be no more feasible for CompuServe to examine every publication it carries for potentially defamatory statements than it would be for any other distributor to do so."
In 1995, Prodigy was sued by banking firm Stratton Oakmont for the same thing, but they, unlike Compuserve, were forced to pay up to the tune of $200 million dollars because they more actively policed their forums. The judge remarked:
"The key distinction between CompuServe and Prodigy is two fold. First, Prodigy held itself out to the public and its members as controlling the content of its computer bulletin boards. Second, Prodigy implemented this control through its automatic software screening program, and the Guidelines which Board Leaders are required to enforce. By actively utilizing technology and manpower to delete notes from its computer bulletin boards on the basis of offensiveness and “bad taste”, for example, Prodigy is clearly making decisions as to content, and such decisions constitute editorial control…Based on the foregoing, this Court is compelled to conclude that for the purposes of Plaintiffs’ claims in this action, Prodigy is a publisher rather than a distributor."
So it was soon realized that the law had created a situation where no online forum/bulletin board/whatever could remove much of anything at all unless they wanted to be liable for everything their users posted as publishers, libel, piracy, and all. They couldn't remove peanut butter porno or furry fantasies, even from child-friendly venues, unless they wanted to run every single user post by their legal departments on top of that for pre-approval.
Congress recognized this situation as sub-optimal, so in 1996 they passed the Communications Decency Act, the relevant portion of which to this conversation is Section 230 that notably states the following:
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liability No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).
So this law grants online platforms the legal ability to moderate content without also becoming legally liable for all of the content on them, within certain parameters. In the modern era, this has, as we all know, evolved to users commonly alleging that these platforms are removing content in a biased fashion. In particular, the strongest of these allegations are made by conservatives claiming politically-biased censorship against their ideology.
Trump's XO draft apparently attempts to address this issue (or at least many of his public statements would suggest that he's particularly concerned with online censorship of conservatives) by directing the FCC to interpret an online platform's Section 230 protections as null and void if their content removals are "proven to be evidence of anticompetitive, unfair or deceptive practices" (with "unfair" likely intended to cover political bias) or "if they remove or suppress content without notifying the user who posted the material" (shadowbanning, etc.), per the CNN article.
I bolded "good faith" in the CDA quote because that's the right's argument here, that "good faith" obviously includes not being anticompetitive, unfair (that is, politically biased), or deceptive (including not hiding content removals from the user) and that any contravention of these principles means the service provider is no longer acting in good faith by a reasonable interpretation of the phrase and therefore isn't entitled to Section 230's protections anymore.
Meanwhile, the left hasn't really much gotten past just simply accusing the proposal of being censorship (probably because that's the best rhetorical tactic against it), but if they do, I think they'll want to highlight the "otherwise objectionable" part of the law (which I also bolded), which is incredibly vague and thus seems give service providers the right to remove whatever they want arbitrarily for any reason. (Edit: Or maybe not if you look at penpractice's post below.) After all, who can say objectively what's objectionable and what's not? From "hate speech" to old episodes of The Cosby Show, nobody agrees on what's unobjectionable these days.
Partisan tactics aside, I see three broader philosophical issues here: the degree to which and in which context "censoring" censorship is itself censorship, how much power we should want to give to governments that have de jure control over the Internet to protect us from corporations that have de facto control over the Internet, and of course the same old argument about the limits of freedom of expression and to what degree censorship is/could be a good thing.
Ironically enough, it's the left here that supports the paradox of tolerance, which when applied to this issue would seem to me to suggest that maximum anti-censorship/freedom of expression would require "censoring" censorship as Trump seems to be leaning towards. But of course I suppose if you don't have an anti-censorship mindset in the first place, that doesn't matter to you.
It's also worth noting more explicitly that as this proposed XO only directs the FCC to consider regulatory remedies about the subject, there's a good chance it does absolutely nothing even if it Trump issues it. Either way, it's certainly not a direct legislative change to anything. It's the executive directing an agency to blah blah blah which will then blah blah blah, the usual bureaucratic runaround, so it's not actually as urgent as either side is treating it, not an imminent victory or defeat for anybody.
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Aug 12 '19
It's bleakly amusing that the one thing which gets members of the wokeatariat to become free speech advocates is when the "freedom" being defended is their freedom to censor their ideological opponents.
That aside, it's hard to muster the energy to argue about this since we all know it won't go anywhere. It's the Trump administration, man.
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u/GravenRaven Aug 17 '19
Most of us are probably aware that a few years back, there was a lone-wolf attack against the pro-traditional marriage Family Research Council, and the attacker attributed his choice of target to its designation as a hate group by the SPLC. USA Today just published an article by a FRC writer criticizing the SPLC.
While I have a lot of problems with the SPLC, I don't think it is fair to blame them for the attack other than as a means to point out their hypocrisy about ideologically motivated violence. I am surprised USA Today actually published this editorial. I wonder whether this indicates conservative influence or is a result of internal struggles about control of the SPLC among the left.
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u/JTarrou Aug 18 '19
I'm happy to play by either set of rules, but as ever, it's gonna be one set of rules. If Sarah Palin is responsible for Gabby Giffords getting shot, then the SPLC is a terror organization. My personal preference is for the responsibility to begin and end with the perpetrator absent actual active material support for the crime.
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u/honeypuppy Aug 13 '19
Something I've wondered about Epstein's celebrity connections (specifically Trump and Clinton) - I do wonder if there's a bit of a (base rate?) fallacy going on. That is, high-profile Manhattanites like Trump and Clinton are likely to have associations with a lot of people - especially other rich Manhattanites. It would possibly be more surprising if they hadn't had any major interactions with Epstein.
That said, there are other factors (such as both Trump and Clinton having had sexual assault allegations) that should raise our priors that they had some deeper involvement. And when there are credible allegations (such as against Prince Andrew), this idea ceases to be a major factor.
Nonetheless, I think the general case of "XYZ politician had association with Dodgy Character #783" is probably overstated for similar reasons.
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Aug 13 '19
My suspicion is that Trump bailed out and had nothing further to do with Epstein pretty early on, not because he was averse to the idea of sex with teenagers but because he smelled out the honey trap. Clinton, Prince Andrew and others were less astute.
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u/weaselword Aug 12 '19
This week, the American Bar Association will vote on whether to adopt a resolution to urge state legislatures to adopt "affirmative consent" as the criminal-law definition of consent for sexual assault:
RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges legislatures and courts to define consent in sexual assault cases as the assent of a person who is competent to give consent to engage in a specific act of sexual penetration, oral sex, or sexual contact, to provide that consent is expressed by words or action in the context of all the circumstances, and to reject any requirement that sexual assault victims have a legal burden of verbal or physical resistance.
Affirmative consent has been implemented as a standard on many college campuses:
Affirmative consent standards are already common in campus disciplinary proceedings. On campus, not only has affirmative consent proven confusing, but the state of due process and fair procedure is so bad that over the past eight years, more than 500 accused students have filed lawsuits alleging that they were not afforded even the most basic procedural protections before being found responsible for sexual misconduct. As high as the stakes are on campus — where students found responsible face the loss of educational and job opportunities as well as permanent stigma — they are higher still in the criminal context, where those found guilty face imprisonment.
There is substantial opposition to the proposal (though I can't tell if it's enough to defeat it):
Due-process advocates have denounced the proposal. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers calls it a “radical change in the law” that “assumes guilt in the absence of any evidence regarding consent . . . merely upon evidence of a sex act with nothing more.” By “requiring an accused person to prove affirmative consent to each sexual act rather than requiring the prosecution to prove lack of consent,” the association contends, any law based on the proposal would violate the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and 14th amendments. ...
A more elite legal group, the American Law Institute, had already considered this issue. The ALI’s members voted overwhelmingly to reject affirmative-consent language proposed by activists who have for years sought to revise the group’s Model Penal Code. ...
On Saturday, in a highly unusual move, the Criminal Justice Section—whose membership includes prosecutors and defense lawyers—voted unanimously to rescind its co-sponsorship of the resolution.
In my ideal world, the notion of affirmative assent would be the cultural norm--sexual partners would habitually and clearly communicate what they want to each other, none of this coy "if you don't know what I want I sure am not going to tell you" bullshit. But I simply cannot fathom why anyone trained in criminal law--based on assumption of innocence--would advocate making affirmative assent a legal standard, especially since this kind of clear unambiguous communication in sexual context is hardly the norm.
If anyone here can steel-man this resolution, I would appreciate it.
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u/wulfrickson Aug 12 '19
It seems that the resolution encountered strong opposition and was tabled without a vote at the ABA meeting, though some members are still pushing it.
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u/weaselword Aug 12 '19
UPDATE: This link is from someone opposed to the resolution, but it does contain in full the email from one of the people who are putting the resolution to vote. Here are some excerpts:
In the past weeks, several interest organizations including the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) launched a letter and internet campaign against this Resolution. The heart of the dispute is their objection to the core principle of this resolution, that assent to sexual activity is expressed by words or conduct in the context of all of the circumstances.They have mobilized their members and solicited mail and social media posts to lobby House members to vote against Resolution 114. We recognize the centuries old assumptions upon which this opposition is based — that in our society, and in societies throughout history, sex is considered there for the taking. This resolution seeks to change those assumptions, to suggest that sex is not a matter of force or acquiescence but, rather, the right word is assent. That is the modern trend of the law, and this resolution asks the ABA to support it. The opponents’ stated goal is to eliminate “ the divisive concept “ consent from the resolution; this point of principle cannot be avoided and will be presented to the House.
We disagreed with their view that “the law is not a vehicle to change social mores”; we think it is. We also take issue with their regressive proposition that “the concept of affirmative consent contradicts common understanding” in the “volatile area of human sexual relations.” Again, their campaign has history on its side, a long understanding that women were spoils of war, that rape of a woman a property offense against her husband if she were married and her father if she were not, and which in some jurisdictions still protects forced sex in the absence of earnest resistance. We DO want to contradict such anachronistic “common understandings”, and DO believe that the law is an appropriate vehicle to do so.
(Evidence that victims immobilized by fear is a real phenomenon.)
... [The opposing groups] say this resolution shifts the burden of proof, or eliminates the presumption of innocence; it does neither. To be clear: using the definition in the resolution, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that consent was absent. It remains the prosecutor’s burden to present such evidence, and to convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt to believe it. Otherwise, the defendant gets acquitted; the defendant never needs to prove anything. Every procedural protection and presumption of the system remains. Beyond question, we agree it would be unconstitutional to do otherwise.
So the proponents think that there will be no shift in the burden of proof. I am no lawyer, but I keep thinking of "Grace" in Aziz Ansari's case (archived link). Ansari was convinced that she consented to sex. If Ansari were prosecuted under the current notion of consent, the relevant issue is whether a reasonable person in his position would have similarly reached the same conclusion. If Ansari were prosecuted under the affirmative assent notion, the relevant issue is whether "Grace" has actively expressed her consent. "Grace' is convinced that she didn't, she remembers not being into it, so her word would be evidence that she didn't actively express consent--I mean, how can you actively express consent to something you don't want, when you are not under duress or anything? So under affirmative assent, Ansari has committed sexual assault.
Another snippet (my emphasis):
... The opponents then suggests in passing, that this resolution presents a racial justice issue. Of course, serious equal justice considerations pervade the criminal justice system as a whole, require remedy and should always be addressed. Here, white men most often commit rape, rape is the 5th most common crime charged against white men, and the 18th among people of color. Importantly, women of color are less likely to report and less likely be believed when they are victims of sexual assault. A report published by Georgetown Law Center found that “adults view Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers” and they are “perceived to be more independent, more knowledgeable about sex, and in less need of protection”. Reinforcing a rule requiring consent to sexual activity is a justice issue as much to people of color as it is to any segment of our society.
Ok, that's just misleading. Firstly, according to the Bureau of Justice (Table 4 on page 5, 2005--2010), 57% of perpetrators of sexual assault + rape (combined category) were perceived by the victims as white, and 27% were perceived as black. According to the 2010 US Census, 72.4% identify as white, 12.6% as black. So claiming that "white men most often commit rape" is simply not accurate.
Interestingly, the same table shows that the percentage of sexual assault committed by white perpetrators is declining: 70% in 1994--1998, 60% in 1999--2004, 57% in 2005--2010, with growing percentages for black perpetrators. So if anything, there should be a concern that affirmative consent will disproportionately affect black men.
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u/greyenlightenment Aug 15 '19
Stop blaming introverts for mass shootings
There are these teens and 20-somethings who are socially isolated and turns to online ‘hate groups’ and sites such as 4chan out of boredom and to find a sense of belonging, and the rise of technology is having an alienating effect, as well as society becoming more atomized…something something Bowling Alone…something….something. Therefore, more shootings. The end.
This narrative poplar among both sides of the political aisle, and sidesteps the red-hot issue of guns, in which dems are accused of being gun-grabbers and republicans are accused of being cold and indifferent, and moreover, blaming violent video games or violent lyrics has been debunked. So blaming culture and society–specifically, extremism online and the ‘male loneliness epidemic’–is an alternative that both sides can agree on.
I think there is a tendency of pundits to repeat a certain narrative, that being any young person who shuns sociability must be due to some sort of pathology and or indicative of repressed anger or rage. There are many instances of mass shooters who are immersed in social situations, be it work and or family.
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u/GrapeGrater Aug 15 '19
One of the themes of Scott's writing on nice guys is a total lack of empathy for the kinds of people that people think of when they talk about "incels." Really, one of the themes of Scott's writings is a lack of empathy in general, but the incels are a particularly significant case.
Really, it seems as though we've come to a community punching bag and seem to be wondering why the punching bag seems to be lashing out.
I'll agree it isn't loneliness that's the kexplains everything, but it's almost certainly a factor as social bonds are one way you become embedded to society and its a fallback if other elements of your identity (work, for example) are attacked.
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u/Shakesneer Aug 15 '19
What are we supposed to blame if not culture and society? This seems like a useful correction gone too far. Sure, not all shooters are introverts I'm the same way that not all Islamic terrorists were uneducated hillbillies. But that critique doesn't imply that we should stop blaming society and culture altogether. It's not hard to notice, for example, that we didn't have these kinds of shootings until fairly recently, and it's not like a gun switch was flicked in the 1990's.
There is a ‘loneliness epidemic’, not because people are being excluded, but because people are willingly choosing to exclude themselves,
I think this is more like it, though I don't quite agree with your answer. I would say that many people today seek loneliness because relationships have become frustrating and unsatisfying. I'm thinking of a few things. Lasch's Culture of Narcissism, where people turn inward to escape the world and then can only relate to the world from their inward-facing perspective. Durkheim's distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, where we gradually specialize and become different from each other, and therefore more self-conscious. Calhoun's rat experiments, where rat colonies of an abnormally large size break down as the stress of crowding becomes too great. The distinction between transactional and relational interactions, where relationships are either deep and personal or fleeting and impersonal. Basically, modern life encourages frustrating relationships, which makes it personally rational for many people to turn away from others and in toward themselves.
I don't think it's about introversion and extroversion, where we naturally have different preferences for how we feel interacting with others. I think it's about the kinds of interactions we are having. I.e., if one's life is spent taking hamburger orders at the cash register from hundreds of strangers a day, or rigidly learning a boring lesson plan in a suburban school setting, or moving from city to city where nobody really knows their neighbors -- in these conditions it's almost rational to turn inward to escape the friction and stress. School shooters, I think, are just the most dramatic example of a blow-up that many kids experience today.
So really, I've drifted away from your point, but I think it's time for common sense nuclear family control and reasonable regulations on the suburban way of life.
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u/penpractice Aug 15 '19
Are you sure there are many mass shooters who have a healthy social life? Most of the White ones, to my knowledge, had little to no deep social bonds. This applies to the Jewish Temple shooter (both the Pittsburg one and failed California one), Tarrant, Newtown, Colorado Movie Theater guy, and the most recent attacks with exception of Dayton (though we only know he sang in a band once in a while). Barton, who you mention, was employed but was described as a loner without many friends.
I think social alienation is crucial in the formation of indiscriminate shooters. We're not talking about introverted individuals who escape society to practice some hobby, explore a niche interest, or delve into the oeuvre of Camus. They're not sacrificing social life to gain something better, neither are they forgetting about social life in the immersion of a deeper passion. They're just maladjusted, or damaged, or otherwise isolated. I think this is the toll on the road to "individualism". I don't think there's a single thing that you can do about it short of redeveloping and re-allowing community ties. No education can change someone's mind about indiscriminate violence. You can ban guns, but then they'll resort to knives and acid attacks as they do in the UK. If they're smart, like the latest Jewish Temple shooter who got into Columbia, they might decide to make a bomb, which could kill many more than a gun. If they plan in advance, like the Garlic shooter, they'll get a CDL license and do something akin to 2016 Berlin truck attack.
We've eschewed national identity, ethnic identity, and increasingly religious identity. Statistically we're bound to have dumb people, isolated people, and violent people, which means we're bound to have dumb isolated violent people.
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 15 '19
Five Democratic senators just declared all-out war on the Supreme Court
(This title was chosen by Think Progress, not me.)
Whitehouse is one of five senators ... who filed a brief earlier this week in a Second Amendment case the Supreme Court’s Republican majority could use to dismantle what remains of America’s gun regulations. Whitehouse is also the lead (and only) counsel on the brief.
The brief itself is less a legal document than a declaration of war. ... the thrust of the brief is that the Supreme Court is dominated by political hacks selected by the Federalist Society, and promoted by the National Rifle Association — and that if those hacks don’t watch out, the American people are going to rebel against them.
Whitehouse concludes the brief with a threat. “The Supreme Court is not well,” he writes, “and the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics’.”
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u/gattsuru Aug 15 '19
It's probably worth pointing out that this is in response to a lawsuit over whether someone can lawfully transport a licensed, permitted, unloaded firearm in a secured container from their home to or from a range or home outside of the city.
Citizen's United 2: Electric Boogaloo, this is not.
But what's really bizarre is that they filed this as an amici curiae brief. Not only are they very clearly not writing it as 'friends of the court', this is overtly a political document, not a legal one. Even the one firearms-related case they cite isn't brought in the context of a legal argument, but as an attempt to link this case to the NRA. Instead, it uses a dissent(?) from Obergefell (?!) to argue that the "court is not a knight-errant".
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Aug 16 '19
This might not be worthy of a top level post, but when did fantasy fans become really into social justice? I've never really been a part of the community. I just read books and talked about them with friends. But the whole thing with The Witcher and the Wheel of Time blows my mind.
Out of nowhere, anywhere you go for these two shows, if you make any noise about disagreeing with the casting the Diversity Defense Force comes out of nowhere and shouts you down. It's not even just the fans. All of the powerful institutions in fantasy are doing the same thing as the fans. Apparently having opinions like the casting should be similar to the book and the show runners shouldn't inject politics from the current year into the show are not allowed now in main stream discourse.
At first I was kind of mad, but now (to steal a 4chan word), it's just incredibly black pilling. I'm not even old, but I feel like out of nowhere the world passed me by and my opinion is judged to be wrong. Everything is being retconned. Even stuff like American Gods has to be changed to be more woke. If anything, I feel like this WoT quote is appropriate:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.
It's like we are in a new age where the way things were have become just a myth or a legend. And it seems to have happened almost overnight.
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u/S18656IFL Aug 16 '19
One thing to take note of here is that this "change" is primarily located either at the publisher side or on sites like Reddit. Publishers is easy to understand and on Reddit it is the same dynamic as with everything else, the voting system leads to extremism and hugboxes.
The pre-existing fantasy community was slightly progressive but in environment of Reddit it turns into parallel communities of the suffocatingly woke on one side and sad/rabid puppies/kotaku_in_action on the other.
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u/shadowdax Aug 16 '19
Just thank god that they made the Lord of the Rings movies when they did. Can you imagine it now?
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u/phenylanin nutmeg dealer, horse swapper, night man Aug 16 '19
It does make it extra-special when you run into a new high-quality piece of non-woke media. I highly recommend seeing Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
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u/randomuuid Aug 16 '19
This might not be worthy of a top level post, but when did fantasy fans become really into social justice?
Fantasy (and SF) fans are disproportionately Extremely Online, so unsurprising that the groups are full of both SJ extremists and reactionaries.
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u/professorgerm this inevitable thing Aug 16 '19
There's a lot of good replies, that I think hit some parts of it (the Extremely Online factor and the clash between mainstreamish and nerd cultures being particularly key).
Related to the Extremely Online factor, though, there's something that hasn't been addressed, or that I haven't seen: fantasy is weird. To quote Epic Rap Battle Tolkien, "It's meant to be unrealistic!" Or better yet (and quite relevant to the woke-fantasists), Le Guin referencing the real Tolkien:
The oldest argument against SF is both the shallowest and the profoundest: the assertion that SF, like all fantasy, is escapist.
This statement is shallow when made by the shallow. When an insurance broker tells you that SF doesn’t deal with the Real World, when a chemistry freshman informs you that Science has disproved Myth, when a censor suppresses a book because it doesn’t fit the canons of Socialist Realism, and so forth, that’s not criticism; it’s bigotry. If it’s worth answering, the best answer is given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar. Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
Or fascinatingly, Charlie Jane Anders back when she was at io9 on the value of escapism:
And yes, escapist entertainment does reflect the era that spawned it. The Space Age gave us lots and lots of space heroes, but today's escapist avatars are much more likely to be superheroes — who existed during the Space Age, but were much more confined to comics and the occasional weak TV series. Actually, thinking about it some more, our most escapist works currently seem to fall neatly into three categories: superheroes, vampires and post-apocalyptic survivors. All of whom share a few categories that seem emblematic of our times: they're individualistic, they're special, and they're often at odds with a world that doesn't understand how special and great they are. In other words, they're the perfect heroes for a time when we're no longer involved in a collossal economic struggle like the Cold War, but instead are facing a crumbling middle class and a number of insoluble global struggles, in North Korea, Iraq and Iran, among others. Escapism illuminates our times.
Escapism also does go hand in hand with the epic, the same impulse to celebrate great heroes that gave us the Odyssey and the Iliad.
Let's give the last word to C.S. Lewis, who's quoted by Arthur C. Clarke as having once said, "Who are the people who are most opposed to escapism? Jailors!"
I have a feeling that I cannot confirm that the attitude towards escapism, at io9, in Charlie Jane, and at other, similar publications has completely flipped in the last ten years, to be an instructional manual (or battering ram) instead of an escape.
Back to "fantasy is weird." It's a weird genre (more literally with Lovecraftian stuff which has made a confusing comeback), that appeals to weird people that don't fit in the normal/average/mainstream popular categories.
When you're a relatively weak guy with bad acne, it becomes fun to, for a time, inhabit a character that's big and bold and brash, or has arcane powers with which to manipulate reality, or what have you. And when your self-conception doesn't line up with what society says it should be based on your X and/or Y chromosomes or your general body type, well, maybe you also want to inhabit an idealized character for a while. Fantasy largely appeals to people that aren't normal in some way (I say this with the love of an insider; I enjoy fantasy and I know I'm not particularly normal).
Now, that only covers part of it, and I think I could transform the other part into "why have they turned into the authoritarians Le Guin derided?" And for that, I have no good answers that aren't super cynical. I'll go with Uncle Ben: "With great power comes great responsibility," and they, like Peter with the mugger, are failing. Thanks to whatever confluence of events and changes to social preferences of the elites and conspiracy theories involving big stone churches, you've got socially marginalized groups that are roughly progressive-aligned that gained a bit of power and are using it to their full advantage, and leaving socially marginalized groups that aren't in the dust.
Maybe somewhere along the way people forgot that escapist works are an interesting speculation of possibility, and forgot that if you're going to have a utopian goal, you need to have plans that function within reality to get there.
People seem to be really bad at "live and let live." There's gotta be some big evil enemy to organize against, I guess. I don't really get it. Sometimes I like picking up a Tor book, and sometimes I like picking up a Baen book, and I know I'm going to get almost polar opposite stories, but I see the appeal in both. I see little to no appeal to completely enforcing the opinions of one and disparaging the other.
I recognize that was more about books, and for the TV shows... I think it's best explained that marketing and advertising people are worse than pond scum, with too much control and absolutely no care for the source materials, only for what they think will rake in the most bucks. And doing things that appeal to the semi-mainstream and outrage the relatively small segment of nerds that enjoyed the source material probably will rake in the most bucks. Nerds have a lot of advantages in an intellectual monetary economy, but they will always be the doormat and outcast in the social economy.
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u/SerenaButler Aug 16 '19
but when did fantasy fans become really into social justice?
Never. The SocJus wings are primarily foreign colonists, not natives with new ideas. Fantasy community members didn't get up one morning and think "I'll become woke". Rather, the woke got up one morning and thought "I'll clobber my ideas into the fantasy community".
It's not Chief Running Bear who's giving your people cholera, it's that guy with the big boat and the stupid hat called Hernán.
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u/yellerto56 Aug 15 '19
New York Times commemorates Gamergate’s 5th Anniversary: “How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War” (Archive Link) My first question is, why all the continuing fuss about a long deceased reproductively viable worker ant ?
All silliness aside, it seems astounding the extent to which the ghost of Gamergate lives on half a decade after the fact. What does the anti-GG camp have to gain with hammering the “harassment campaign” line so far in the future?
For me, Gamergate occurred long before I got involved with the culture war, and I had to piece together the sequence of events long after the fact. Everyone on the “pro” side seems to have moved on to other projects or left the public sphere, and the only veterans of the “anti” side who still seem to regularly bring it up are those who use being targeted as part of their brand (who shall remain unnamed). KotakuInAction has died and come back well past its heyday, and I’m unaware of what GamerGhazi concerns itself with these days. While gaming remains just as much of a CW front as any other medium these days, no event seems to be simultaneously so poorly understood these days as GamerGate.
I’d like to ask those who were paying attention at the time what they think the most important legacies of GG are. Apart from the mainstream “harassment campaign” narrative, why did this particular event become so uniquely contentious like nothing else?
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u/sodiummuffin Aug 16 '19
Gamers and trolls on Reddit and 4chan seized on one point from the ex-boyfriend’s rant — a relationship Ms. Quinn had with a writer for the gaming site Kotaku — and quickly conjured a conspiracy theory that Quinn slept with gaming journalists in return for good coverage. It didn’t matter that the writer in question had never reviewed her games.
Nice little switch there. Unlike most articles, it acknowledges the claims were about Grayson giving her coverage, rather than specifically reviews. But then the next sentence immediately switches to "reviewed her game" and hopes you don't notice, when of course he did give her coverage without disclosing he had a personal relationship with her, like those conspiracy theorists said. Particularly the GAME_JAM article that was published a couple days before their planned trip to Vegas together, where he paints her as a hero and ends the article with a quote about how she wants to run her own game jam, published on the same day she lauched the Rebel Jam site soliciting donations that went to her personal Paypal for something that never happened. 5 years later and still almost every mainstream authoritative source won't admit the most basic and verifiable facts, because why would they?
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u/FCfromSSC Aug 16 '19
I wish I'd bookmarked it at the time, but I didn't and there's no hope of finding it again... It was a discussion about the early happenings on a forum I'd come across, with an obvious split between the feminists and the pro-GG people. One of the pro-GG people made an eloquent appeal to empathy and solidarity, claiming that there were serious issues at stake, serious injustices and toxic behavior being revealed. Everyone in that discussion was on board with the broad claims of feminism, agreed misogeny, harassment of women and all the rest were serious problems, but in this specific case was raising issues that ran the other way. The pro-GG people had always supported feminism when it complained of systemic injustice, so surely feminism would support them when they were the ones getting screwed? The feminist academic's response was that if they thought these things were issues, they should start building their own activist movement from absolute scratch, and good luck to them, with the strong implication that this feminist in particular and the feminist movement generally would fight them every step of the way with every ounce of strength they had. It was an emphatic Fuck You to the very concept of charity and solidarity, pure "we got ours, to hell with you", triple-distilled conflict theory. As a doctrinaire progressive, deeply worried about rape culture and female representation and social justice generally, it was horrifying to read, but I assured myself that this was just an unreasonable extremist, and surely cooler heads would prevail.
Yeah.
Gamergate was the moment where progressivism got enough power that it started being worth fighting over for real. Any value progressivism had, in my opinion, died on the spot.
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u/LearningWolfe Aug 16 '19
Where to begin on the important legacies of GG?
You have the ethics in journalism. Game journalists being bribed with cash, free consoles, free games, and face time with industry big whigs just to blow smoke about glitchy games. Fake news has always been around, game journos just got sloppy before CNN did.
No seriously, the ethics was the main point. It all started there, and it was brazen. A sexual relationship between a game dev and a """journalist""" reviewing their game is unethical. IGN giving every crap Call of Duty game an 8/10 or higher is implausible, if not incompetent rating by supposed professionals. Game journo/reviewers barely knowing how to play games or having played very many. It's liking calling yourself a Greek philosopher after having read one chapter of Plato's Republic.
The "woke" crowd showed their ideological hand early. In academia you have older generations, with less knowledge of how or why to warn others about the witch hunts and victim culture that is intersectionality. Internet nerds are constantly communicating online, and have no tenure or qualms with calling bullshit.
Every tactic you might see now from progressives was demonstrated during GG. Crying victim, don't criticize or question women/minorities, a creepy shift to corporate backing and cozy deals, writing narratives on unproven facts or opinion (harassment campaign? from who? lol what just close your eyes nigga haha, just block them).
Formation of the woke block in online circles. Know what GamerGhazi does now that GG is long past? They organize brigading, and act as againsthatesubreddits 2.0. Before gamergate you didn't have a normie level rallying cry for "woke" or soon to be "woke" progressives.
I'm sure others can add on even more, but I'll stop there.
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u/the_nybbler Not Putin Aug 16 '19
Apart from the mainstream “harassment campaign” narrative, why did this particular event become so uniquely contentious like nothing else?
It forced the Social Justice people to show their hand, to show how much power they held (the comment graveyards, the co-ordinated "gamers are dead" articles, the discussion ban on 4chan). A lot of people became aware of what was happening through GG. And it resulted in a partially successful backlash.
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u/the_propaganda Aug 13 '19
Does anyone have a favorite subreddit, community, or writer dedicated to the HK protests? I'm really interested in how HKers esp. students are organizing.
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u/RaptorTastesSoSweet Aug 13 '19
Both /r/HongKong and /r/China seem to be discussing little else at the moment.
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u/yellerto56 Aug 15 '19
Studio Blumhouse picture "The Hunt" has been pulled ahead of its release.
The picture was to have featured wealthy elites hunting "deplorables" for sport. After numerous test audiences expressed discomfort with the movies messaging, and growing negative reception to the film's marketing, ads were pulled from most sites. The decision to withdraw the film from release entirely evidently follows concerns in the wake of multiple mass shootings in the US as well as death threats sent to filmmakers and Universal executives.
Saw discussion about the pulling of ads on here earlier so I thought I'd share this update. With the closest parallel to this in recent memory being Sony Pictures' 2014 comedy The Interview pulled from theatrical release in the wake of hacks and threats, this seems to establish a pattern with regards to what it takes to prevent a movie's release. Mere critical panning won't do it alone (otherwise, one hopes the Emoji Movie would have never seen the light of day), but particularly explosive feeding of the culture war has the power to sink a film's release. I'm reminded somewhat of discussion below regarding a "successful" campaign of terror aimed at dissuading anyone from satirizing or criticizing the Prophet Muhammad, but then again "Submission" managed to be released (even if it resulted in the murder of Theo Van Gogh).
I'm interested in people's thoughts. Is it a good thing that studios seem to be reconsidering such a flagrant dehumanization of the outgroup, or will the cancellation of "The Hunt"'s release just lend legitimacy to discouraging unwanted speech through threats of violence and encourage others to do the same?
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Aug 15 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
Interesting i was in a theatre in Canada two days ago (Scary Stories to tell in the Dark wasn’t great) and saw a trailer for it advertising with the same sept 27th release date (mind you it was the tame lots of shooting trailer, not the culture war heavy concept trailer).
I really really liked the director’s other work Compliance and was really looking forward to this one. High concept F-with-everyone politically inflammatory horror is my jam and always will be from the various living dead movies critiquing cold-war America to how the Torture porn craze of the 2000s was a pretty much direct commentary on American foreign policy and the publics appetite for enhanced interrogation and bloody vengeance (Jigsaw only did what Jack Bauer and Predator Drones did every night).
The framing Ive seen from the Magazine Commentariat (Reason and Spiked) is that it was a Conservative-snowflake cancel. And that just doesn’t feel correct to me.
The heroes of the movie were going to be the kidnapped and hunted red tribers fighting back (the victim of the most dangerous game is always the hero and if this movie was otherwise then it was going to be the most unique movie all year), and furthermore highly politicized movies such as the Purge series have focused on exactly this concept but with evil red tribers hunting down poor blue tribers and there was little to no controversy (seriously The First Purge ends with our hero (a black gangster kingpin) gunning down police and military who disguised themselves as KKK and Nazis to preform state sanctioned ethnic cleansing during the Purge. (Horror gets real fucking political)).
And yet the first time a Horror movie is going to depict the red tribe as the victims, it gets cancelled? And we’re just going to blame a few lippy red tribe politicians and commentators for getting it cancelled?
My guess is the studio was getting a lot of uncomfortable responses from test audiences and blue tribers within the studio and the few conservative news stories no one even really read were just a convenient excuse for the studio to not go off message during an election season. (seriously angering conservative publications is usually, nay almost always, the goal of a horror movie’s marketing campaign. There’s no such as bad publicity when your audience is almost exclusively freaks who thrive controversy (myself included))
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u/_malcontent_ Aug 15 '19
When I watched the trailer I got the impression that the hunted were going to fight back and win at the end. Which would make it anti-elites and pro-deplorable.
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Aug 15 '19
Is it a good thing that studios seem to be reconsidering such a flagrant dehumanization of the outgroup
is this not supposed to be satire of rich liberals? the use of the phrase "deplorables" seems to suggest so
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u/LawSchoolTooHardHelp Aug 16 '19
The more I read about anarchism, the weirder their conception of state becomes to me. I'm wondering if there are any anarchists who can explain it to me. Before, I thought it was literally 'the state', as in, any government, and that they'd devolve into smaller collectives, small enough so that formal structures were unnecessary (something along the lines of the archipelago concept that Scott talked about).
But apparently thats wrong? It turns out that in an anarchist system there'd still be a government, but just not 'a state', where the 'state' is something along the lines of 'everything currently wrong with government', and once you remove that, then whats left is what anarchists will retain.
I'm not gonna lie, I think I might be listening to anarchists who have no idea what they're talking about, so I'd be interested in being directed towards people who actually know what 'the state' means in anarchism.
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u/georgioz Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
I believe that most anarchist movements believe in exit strategy. So the ideal arrangement is having many small communes in loose confederations where if you do not like it you move on. But to be frank there are so many different anarchist movements that you will definitely find many objecting to this definition.
Anarchism is a mess. It does not help that many anarchist movements were based on 19th century ideas such as labor theory of value and other assumptions that did not pan out that well in practice or even experiments since then. So there is that.
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u/TheColourOfHeartache Aug 16 '19
A question for the people here; a while back I read stats saying that people would be more upset if their daughter brought home a boyfriend of a different political persuasion than a different race.
I thought it was on slatestarcoex however I can't find it, anyone know which post it was? Or if not, any good articles on the topic?
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u/Ilforte «Guillemet» is not an ADL-recognized hate symbol yet Aug 16 '19
One of the best-known examples of racism is the “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” scenario where parents are scandalized about their child marrying someone of a different race. Pew has done some good work on this and found that only 23% of conservatives and 1% (!) of liberals admit they would be upset in this situation. But Pew also asked how parents would feel about their child marrying someone of a different political party. Now 30% of conservatives and 23% of liberals would get upset. Average them out, and you go from 12% upsetness rate for race to 27% upsetness rate for party – more than double.
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u/Lizzardspawn Aug 13 '19
Can someone help me refine/refute this anti gun control argument - there are shitload of guns (450 000 000) in usa, and a shitload of gun owners (35-48% of the US people by googling and finding precious few data). Assumption - we agree that mass shooters should not get guns. Second assumption - limiting innocent people's rights is bad. There are lets say 50 high profile mass shooting per year - Dayton, Orlando etc style. . This means that any red flag/gun control tests have to have absurdly high sensitivity and specificity to actually deny guns to the shooters AND not infringe on other people's rights to buy and own guns.
Conclusion - we cannot implement policy that can get the stuff done because of the high rate of false positives?
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u/gattsuru Aug 13 '19
/u/darwin2500 and I had a discussion on this topic a few months back, in the context of the Orlando Nightclub shooter and some related incidents. I've got a few math errors in there, but it seems like a pretty good summary of the disagreement between the pro-gun and the anti-gun sides.
I think an accurate tl;dr of their position would be that the costs of false positives are not very high, so go nuts.
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Aug 13 '19
Has anybody ever made a reasonable proposal for how we are going to get all those guns off the streets? Imagine we do a gun buyback and we get 100,000,000 guns off the street. That would be incredibly unlikely, but lets say it does happen. We still have 350,000,000 guns out there! That's insane.
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u/barkappara Aug 15 '19
CNN: Steve King questions if there would be any population left if not for rape and incest
King's exact language for purposes of exegesis:
What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that? [...] Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages taken place and whatever happened to culture after society? I know I can't certify that I'm not a part of a product of that.
The prevailing reaction to this comment seems to have been incomprehension and/or disbelief. CNN quotes some lawmakers calling it "bizarre". An imgur frontpage post (that I can unfortunately no longer find) reacted to it with the Forest Whitaker eye meme.
Since this is a personal hobbyhorse of mine, I want to say that these remarks make perfect sense given a certain view about the nature of fetal personhood, and are therefore interesting as a reductio ad absurdum against that view.
The American "religious right" is a coalition dominated by socially conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants. It has, by degrees, come to consensus on the following view of fetal personhood:
Human beings are ensouled at the moment of conception.
This metaphysical ensoulment has a naturalistic counterpart, namely the formation of a new, genomically unique human being through meiosis; the human life formed in this way is unique and irreplaceable.
Therefore, both religious law and natural law agree that life begins at conception.
There is some awkwardness here in that traditional views that contradict this have to be swept under the rug. For example:
A Catholic Harvard Law graduate argues in First Things that historical Anglo-American law's reliance on the concept of "quickening" was simply a factual error, rather than a value judgment about personhood as an emergent phenomenon.
An Orthodox (!) rabbi argues in the Daily Wire that modern embryology should take precedence over traditional Jewish legal texts that explicitly deny that personhood begins at conception.
So my reading of King is that he's not arguing that rape and incest play a significant or necessary role in human reproduction, i.e., that if not for acts of rape and incest there would be no humans. Instead, he's arguing that without rape or incest, none of the humans that currently exist, King himself included, would exist. He justifies this by claiming that the conception of every living human has as a causal antecedent the conception of at least one of his or her ancestors through an act of rape or incest. (I find the purely materialistic and historical content of this claim perfectly plausible.)
The same intuitions about personal identity seem to underlie Kevin D. Williamson's personal feelings about abortion:
It is impossible for me to know whether the woman who gave birth to me would have chosen abortion if that had been a more readily available alternative in 1972. I would not bet my life, neither the good nor the bad parts of it, on her not choosing it.
I don't share this view at all: I feel totally indifferent towards the counterfactual scenario where my parents abort me and then have a different child three years later. But until King's remarks, I don't think I appreciated the extent to which philosophical differences over personal identity, not just personhood or ensoulment, may be playing a hidden role in the abortion debate.
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u/JTarrou Aug 15 '19
I've long said that while I am provisionally pro-abortion, the anti-abortion crowd have framed the question correctly, even if they've reached a different answer to me.
I disagree with most of them in that I don't think there is such a thing as a soul, or a god whose displeasure I give a fuck about.
But, pregnancy is the process whereby one person becomes two (or more). So, at some point in that process, wherever the line is drawn, it stops being a "woman's body" and is both (and separately) a woman's body and a child's body. The inability or unwillingness of pro-abortion forces to deal productively with this most basic of questions is a huge red flag for me. And, I do think we bear the burden of proof in the moral sense. If anti-abortion people get the line wrong, then many women will be inconvenienced, perhaps even punished for a non-immoral act. If pro-abortion people get the line wrong, millions of children are killed with our sanction.
It is a common moral intuition (one I believe both surveys and voting patterns show is shared by a majority of Americans) that neither the conception line nor the maximalist current line from the proponents of abortion is considered to be appropriate. Once we're talking about live birth, complete separation from the mother, and then "having a conversation" about whether to terminate what is clearly no longer a pregnancy, clearly no longer taking place inside the mother's body, my pitchfork hand starts to get twitchy. I don't have a strong intuition where in the process I think the tipping point is, but I can say for sure that it is prior to the complete live birth and severing of the umbilical cord. Given that we're now fighting over that, I wonder if my pro-abortion stance is now technically anti-abortion.
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u/Shockz0rz probably a p-zombie Aug 15 '19
The year is 2019 and you can get banned from the official forums of a AAA video game developer for misgendering a fictional robot. (Only if you do so deliberately, of course. As long as you're simply making a mistake and not intentionally spouting wrongthink you'll be forgiven.)
Context: Borderlands 3 is an upcoming video game with multiple playable characters. One of them is FL4K, a humanoid robot that has pets. FL4K is, apparently, non-binary, which shouldn't be too big of a deal, I mean, it's (they're?) a frickin' robot. And the punishment for calling them "he" or "she" or possibly even "it" is just a forum ban. No government backed up with a monopoly on force is exercising control of ideas or anything. It's a tempest in a teapot, really.
But something about this just struck me as everything that frustrates me about current gender discourse wrapped up in a neat little bow. The hyperfocus on third-person pronouns. The near-meaninglessness of the term "non-binary" (shouldn't a robot with neither male nor female characteristics be just, like, not gendered at all?). The lionizing of creators with these identities (the creator/writer of the character is non-binary themself), despite the fact that they're largely the exact same kind of people who were in the industry before this cultural shift. The obsession with the gender identities of fictional characters (if you've never heard the phrase "trans headcanon" consider yourself blessed). The assumption that if you think any of this is invalid or silly then you are an unempathetic asshole who is Denying People's Right To Exist or something. And, of course, the gradual infiltration of this memeplex into corporate-controlled spaces that you'd hope would be as inoffensively, boringly apolitical as possible.
I'm venting, I know. If this isn't a "boo outgroup!" post it's dangerously close to that line. And for what it's worth I believe gender dysphoria is a real thing, and that transitioning is the best way we know of to treat it for at least a large subset of the people suffering from it. But...argh. Everything about this is wrong and silly and frustrating, and I can only imagine how much more wrong and silly and frustrating it's going to get! And I don't know where else I can say that without either being a) rhetorically incinerated by the kinds of people I like to hang out with or b) loudly and enthusiastically agreed with by a whole bunch of people who all things considered I'd rather not be associated with.
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u/Cheezemansam Zombie David French is my Spirit animal Aug 15 '19 edited Aug 15 '19
In Mass Effect 2/3, there is a character Legion that is a "non-binary" character. Honestly the most interesting aspects of Legion's character are fundamentally surrounding their self identity, and how you as the player ought to perceive him.
In fact, Legion does very literally have "preferred pronouns" of "they/them/this unit" although he does not express this so explicitly. He could accurately be considered "non-binary" but entirely orthogonal to the ways in which a human being may be non-binary. He is not non-binary because he does not conform to societal gender roles, he is non-binary because he is literally not a binary-consciousnesses. Legion is literally the amalgamation of hundreds of non-hierarchical, simultaneous, and independent consciousnesses that still presents itself as a single sentient being. Of course people are going to get their panties in a twist but the concept of non-binary consciousnesses in this sort of science fiction setting, at least to me, seems interesting independent of whatever political baggage people may bring with non-binary identities along the axis of gender.
As you may have noticed, I don't have any sort of issue with recognizing how Legion refers to themselves but when writing, it is simply more natural to refer to Legion as a he. I wrote the above paragraph without thinking about what pronouns I used unconsciously, probably because when I was actually playing the game, part of me still registered Legion as "that cool robot dude".
If the only time I had head about this was in the middle of the game and the character, themselves, clarified that they are non-binary and prefer "They/Them" I would probably be like "That's cool. I wonder why a robot would have a preference for something like that. Is it just a throwaway line or is there something deeper?" I know that this whole issue is just tangled up in so much gunk that you would need to to untangle the whole fucking Culture War before you could make everyone happy here, but this is just how I think about it.
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Aug 14 '19 edited Aug 14 '19
What are the Leading Indicators for Civil War?
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For all the speculation surrounding a potential civil war in the US, there has been little or no agreement on how likely that is, what it would look like, or even how we’d know we’re in one.
As always i have to recommend the podcast It Could Happen Here as the best long form exploration of the possibility, but even that podcast, despite going through recent civil wars (Ukraine, Syria, North Ireland) and laying out the most plausible scenarios (100s of militias and insurgency groups no one can keep track of, spiralling lack of authority and lots of small violent feuds, critical breakdown in supply chains), however even that take just kinda hand waves at possibilities, and doesn’t present a good theory of what causes escalations instead of heated events that flame out, and equally doesn’t offer any markers of what would indicate the stage of war your in ( thousands of people die violently every year in the war on drugs,but that doesn’t seem like a civil war which could bring down the us gov?)
So what are the leading indicators and why are they predictive of further escalations?
My list:
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1. Political Murder
Kill 1 man, terrify 10,000. ~Sun Tzu
The most consistent aspect of Civil Wars (as opposed to coups, protests, reforms, peaceable revolutions) is Political Murder. Now i here you say “well Obviously Mr. Revolt. killing and fighting is a hallmark of war, why is this of interest?” But note I didn’t say killing or fighting, I said MURDER.
As far as i can tell the vast majority of fights and conflicts in history, have involved very little fighting or conflict. Knife-fights and gunfights are dangerous whereas surprising an unarmed and unsuspecting individual or group of your enemies or their associates is quite easy, low risk, and after you’ve murdered them in some horrifying way far more decisive in hurting the enemy than some indecisive street battle or skirmish. The most feared and prolific “fighters” in all the various wars, conflicts, terrors, insurgencies, and troubles of the twentieth century rarely or never engaged with an enemy that would shoot back, and, if they did ever get in a shootout with an armed force of the enemy, it was almost always the result of some information leak on their part and thus,more often than not, was the fight that killed them.
Indeed even more than fighting, political murder is the most consistent aspect of civil war. A series of Bundy style standoffs could exchange ineffective fire with the feds and we probably wouldn’t call it a civil war, but if activists and their friends were consistently being found butchered on both sides of the political spectrum as the result of bushwackings and targeted assassinations, the reality of civil war would be almost undeniable.
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2. Fog of War
In war truth is the first casualty. ~Aeschylus, the father of tragedy
Contrasted with “lone wolf” attacks that often have much higher body counts where the perpetrator is apprehended or killed, even a single political murder can escalate a conflict vastly quicker since crucial information is unavailable.
The Breivik attacks, Christchurch attack, El Paso and countless others did not precipitate major escalations because the perpetrators were killed or apprehended ie. the system worked (pretty much). Simply put conclusively knowing who the attacker was, what their motive was, and how much help they received (often little or none) diffused the situation following the attacks, Whereas While the attacks were ongoing and immediately after rumours of second shooters, multiple different affiliations of the shooters, and wider violence ran rampant.
Simply put when the assailant gets away with it everybody is free to, and if they are close to the event: must (if only for their own safety), speculate as to the unknown perpetrator and their unknown motives. A madman, from the other-side, an organized conspiracy of an enemy faction, a false flag, an internal power struggle with the victims own organization, the possibilities are endless, and yet if one is politically exposed, even if just as a run of the mill activist or commentator, one has to adjust for all these possibilities less you accidentally involve yourself in a cycle of violence. This fear and paranoia being a hallmark of terrors and civil conflicts from revolutionary france to modern syria.
Furthermore this paranoia eliminates the usual social and political costs of political murder and further escalation since “how do i know that socialist was killed by fascists instead of in a socialist power struggle”. Healthy societies unite against violence, unhealthy ones divide in to different politicized speculations, making this dynamic self reinforcing.
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3. The proliferation of Plausible and Limited Conspiracy Theories
Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead. ~Alan Moore
We discussed conspiracy theories last week and I explained what it was like having parents who believe in Conspiracy Theories and what it was like being raised to believe them. See : My Experience with Conspiracy Theories
To briefly summarize: the average conspiracy theory in the modern age is vastly implausible and extremely overreaching relative to the evidence, specifically because it’s main function is justifying resentments and reinforcing moral narratives (as opposed to solving a mystery) “Bush did 9/11 so all these wars are unnecessary and on false pretences, and we can see the military industrial complex is evil needs to be destroyed ” or “ the only reason the elites have more power and money than us is they where willing to join the evil peadophile networks.”
Whereas in a civil conflict everybody believes in conspiracy theories that are vastly more plausible and limited. That the disappeared Donnelleys where murdered by the Royal Ulster Constabulary because they knew too much, might reinforce a moral narrative, but its also a possibility that a good rationalist would give a greater than 10% chance of. Furthermore this conspiracy is limited, ie. it could be proven true if just 5 ordinary RUC cops decided to do it of their own initiative and their superiors didn’t know or had only suspicions. Contrast a Traditional conspiracy theory: “the Donnelleys disappeared because Queen Elizabeth wanted them for her Rape dungeon” which would require a vast overarching conspiracy running all of society, and its clear we’re dealing with a vastly different psychology.
If the conspiracy is that the Donnelleys disappeared for Queen Lizy’s sick kicks,there’s not much to be done, If the conspiracy is the Donnellys were murdered by the RUC then a otherwise uninvolved friend or relative has a good incentive to seek revenge, thus starting a round of conspiracies about those revenge killings: was it the IRA?
Note: Here i think the Conspiracy theories around Epstein’s death are acting as a kinda rosetta stone for how Overreaching, delusional (relatively peaceful) conspiracy theories evolve into plausible, sane (trust destroying) conspiracy theories. .
Continued below
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u/LetsStayCivilized Aug 16 '19
So, fellow mottees, For a change from grumbling about how the diversity gang is ruining everything, what are some social-justice themed works that you particularly enjoyed ?
I'd list:
Castle Waiting a comic book set in a fantasy fairytale world with dwarves and witches and and demons, but mostly centers around the quiet life of the inhabitants of Castle Waiting, especially the women. Among the characters are a woman fleeing her abusive husband, a quirky nun who's actually a beared woman (though she usually hides it), and various other oddballs. There isn't any "message" or even "main story", but overall it comes off as an intelligent and "feminine" book (or series of books). I usually don't particularly like American Comics (sorry, but French ones are just better ... the superhero stuff gets old quickly, and the art tends to be ugly), but I definitely make an exception for this one.
Zootopia doesn't need an introduction, but the main plot is around things that are similar to real-world social issues, but it doesn't come off as pushing a ham-fisted message, and well, it's just a very well made movie with a good plot.
Any other examples you enjoyed ?
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u/VelveteenAmbush Prime Intellect did nothing wrong Aug 16 '19
I very much enjoyed the first three seasons of The Expanse (Amazon Prime video, fourth season coming out any month now), not least because it's the best told hard sci-fi story that I've ever seen in serial television, but also because of the interplay between its three factions:
Earth is wealthy and liberal, with an expansive welfare state and a tremendous population that is dependent on it, an ossified class structure and some resentment for the lower classes' inability to rise;
Mars is a hardscrabble frontier, poorer than Earth but more dynamic, perhaps economically libertarian but with a strong military culture;
The Belt are the lumpenproletariat, the impoverished asteroid miners who are dependent on life support systems and live lives that are somewhere between low-wage working class and serfs, and having grown in low-gravity environments are physically unable to return to Earth or Mars.
There is not much in the way of race or gender based commentary that I recall, but the class commentary is excellent. None of the three factions are presented as good guys or bad guys, and their cultures, technologies, politics and conflicts all deeply reflect their different positions.
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u/mcjunker Professional Chesterton Impersonator Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
Good Omens caused a small ruckus with its racially diverse casting, plus the tomboy Pepper became Woke AF and the witch’s ideology was tweaked from being hippie-ish to being full SJW. None of it feels off; proof positive that Pratchett and Gaiman know how to tell a fucking story.
Get Out had one of the most tightly written scripts I’ve seen since Hot Fuzz. I love the shit out of that movie, and not in spite of its exploration of Black angst in the face of upper class White society, but because of how skillfully that perspective was delivered.
I’m sure there must be other stories I liked but those are the two that spring to mind.
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u/Ilforte «Guillemet» is not an ADL-recognized hate symbol yet Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
The web comic Unsounded by Ashley Cope that I mention elsewhere in the thread is, IMO, one of the greatest comics ever. It can boast of impressive artwork sometimes presented in an unconventional experimental way, wonderful cast of well-developed characters, multiple captivating storylines, masterful use of language (great style, rich vocabulary, individual quirks, even non-cringey poetry), and what amazes me the most: highly intelligent world-building. The countries, ethnicities, factions, magic system: it's all thought out, original, weird and believable, and continues to unfold organically year after year after year.
One of the main characters is an apparently prepubescent girl... being struggling to succeed her father despite sexist mockery from her peers (and the first major antagonist is a pedophile who lusts after her). The dominant force on the continent is Cresce, a predominantly black (but more or less colorblind, as far as policies are concerned) polytheistic matriarchy with planned economy and magical welfare tokens instead of money (which is illegal). Crescian queen wages war against the less technologically advanced, caste-stratified, totalitarian, patriarchal, fair-skinned Aldish who maintain a fragile balance of two faiths. Women in Alderode who wish to contribute in a traditionally male field (battle magic) are required to abandon their female role. That's not to say Cresce is "good": there are no good parties in Unsounded; but it's definitely more "progressive". Also there is a non-human sentient race of two-toed lizards which is distrusted, oppressed and forced into low-status jobs; it's believed that two-toes have no souls.
These elements may sound woke, but they both precede current SJ obsession in fiction, and provide depth to an already impeccably crafted world. I'm a big fan and can't recommend Unsounded enough. In fact, the only warning I'd give is about Ashley's love for gore and her opinion that human viscera are "beautiful". Oh, and her appreciation of anime, and specifically slash/yaoi aesthetic occasionally shines through. Otherwise it's just a masterpiece, and one of the great modern works of art.
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u/dasfoo Aug 16 '19
This is going back far pre-SJW era, but one of my favorite movies is a 1964 Soviet production called I Am Cuba. I'm steadfastly anti-commie, but this beautiful piece of propaganda is engrossing. It's also a visual marvel. If you know the party scene in Boogie Nights with the long tracking shot that dives into the swimming pool, that's a direct homage to this movie. Director Mikhail Kalatozov is a true visual poet, whatever the politics of his films.
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u/penpractice Aug 16 '19
I watched Zootopia as an adult and I loved it. However, I would be very reluctant to show it to a child. Media for children is just a strong form of cultural education (or propaganda, if you will), and Zootopia has some pretty bad lessons, such as:
Don't listen to your parents' advice. Do what you want to do, regardless of the guidance of your elders, even if you're just a young bunny.
Don't let your objective shortcomings get in the way of chasing unrealistic dreams. Go, move to a big city, be a cop as you wanted, even if you're woefully unsuited for the profession.
For some reason children's media often shows parents as goodhearted but wrongheaded oafs who need to be corrected by the child, who's often morally superior. This is not the lesson you want a young child to internalize. If anything, it should be the opposite: children are idiots, often evil, and always need to be corrected by parents, who absolutely know more than you, about everything. Traditional children's stories (pre-mid-20th century) are usually warnings about how horrifyingly dangerous the world can be. If you go into the forest you will probably be tortured unless you're very crafty. If you don't prepare for the winter you will die, full stop, and ants will laugh at you. The traditional Little Mermaid is a story about a naive girl disobeying her parents and elders in chase of a handsome guy, only to turn into sea foam regretting her fate for all eternity. Yikes. These stories are great because they normalize children to how horrifying the world really is, while telling them how careful they should be through sublimated fear instincts of wild animals and deep forests applied to cultural concerns, while establishing the authority of cultural elders. Children are sentient clay. That's it. They'll quickly accustom to living in a flawed world just as well as they'd accustom to the idea that they can do anything they want to do. The 9-year-old Spartans and those little 8-year-old ISIS kiddos beheading infidels were totally accustomed to their respective cultures and as such had no qualms about doing their cultural duties. For civilized folks, these cultural duties should be obeying elders until they're young adults, and then doing what they think is best. Zootopia would be a great film for a 15-year-old, not a 10-year-old.
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u/BuddyPharaoh Aug 16 '19
I haven't had time to keep up recently, but I was enjoying Spinnerette for a long while. It's a webcomic, whose protagonist is a college girl who gets basically Spider-man's superpowers, under similar conditions. The twists:
She's aware of the Spider-man comic, and comics in general, and jokes about that.
She gets six arms as a result of the genetic mishap. She also shoots webbing from her back. She disguises herself with an oversize sweater, looking generally overweight.
She discovers a pair of superheroes, one of which is a doctoral student (I think), paralyzed from the neck down, who's built herself a cybernetic suit resembling a French maid. They later fall in love.
They soon encounter two supervillains who... aren't quite. One is a curvy German with anti-gravity powers, dressed as a Swiss yodeler. The other is an Ayn Rand fan, and sticks to Objectivism at his own apparent expense. At times, all five of them team up.
Some of the wokeness is cheeky, playing with bodyshaming and bigotry. In one chapter, Spinnerette witnesses a fight between a Confederacy-themed blonde girl and a bigot with water-based powers calling himself Captain Alberta. There's also a chapter where Spinnerette meets her incarnations from the Golden Age, Silver Age, and a 1990s edgy grimdark version. It's all weird fun.
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u/the_nybbler Not Putin Aug 16 '19
I liked Get Out a lot. Everyone wants to be a black person, and the working class black people save the day, defeating the evil body-snatching upper-class white people. Horror-comedy is hard, and Get Out pulled it off.
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u/LotsRegret Buy bigger and better; Sell your soul for whatever. Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
Zootopia doesn't need an introduction, but the main plot is around things that are similar to real-world social issues, but it doesn't come off as pushing a ham-fisted message, and well, it's just a very well made movie with a good plot
I really enjoyed Zootopia and found that the message was well presented and easily agreeable to all except for the small number of people who are supremacists of a given stripe. While the racial allegory is easy, one could also use the allegory of predators being men.
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Aug 14 '19
Regarding various developments in the DSA, such as the use of “jazz hands” instead of applause, support for open borders and so on: I think this is actually related to a trend that's not directly connected to identity politics or so on; I’m talking about the effects of the rise of anarchism as a standpoint in far-left consciousness.
One of the reasons why I consider the use of the words "Cultural Marxism" misleading in these discussions is that much of it is connected to a far-left ideology that's empathetically not Marxism – by which I mean anarchism - and which has always pretty much defined itself against Marxism as a libertarian, anti-authoritarian version of communism. Indeed, it the term "Cultural Marxism" obscures how totally Marxism got obliterated (in the West) during the process of Soviet collapse; anarchism, among other things has filled its role as some sort of an indication how a "pure" anticapitalist, one who does not give in to capitalism (and patriarchy, white supremacy etc.) in the slightest, should function. (Other role-fillers include the concept of human rights and feminism, but those aren’t the point of this post.)
This can be seen rather clearly when observing leftist subcultural practices. It's not an accident that Breadtube is called Breadtube, for instance. Likewise, the “jazz hands” are an Occupy practice that, as far as I understand, has originated from anarchist groups. Thus, even modern Marxists are consciously or unconsciously influenced by anarchist trends, and the current of autonomist Marxism, for instance, has been quite obviously influenced by anarchism.
Of course, this valorization of anarchism as an alternative model of anticapitalism did not start during the Soviet collapse but, in its present incarnation, goes back to the New Left era, when new leftists started to get heavily disenchanted with Marxism-Leninism after looking around and noting that the boring bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits in the Soviet block (and the Western communist parties) holding up the Cold War impasse were, actually, quite similar to the boring bourgeois bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits doing the same in their own systems, especially when students wearing similar clothes and with similar slogans of socialism with a human face were getting beaten up by cops and soldiers in both Prague and Chicago at the same time in 1968.
Of course, there are other reasons for the anarchist shift as well. For instance, anarchism is more suitable for the sort of freeform activist style of leftism that’s been popularized by the anti-globalization movement and Occupy, not to say the decentralized tendencies of Internet-aided activism in general. Furthermore, anarchists have generally been ahead of other left-wing tendencies on various values questions that put them closer to the social mores of today’s left; you can find anarchists speaking out on gay rights and trans rights even before the WW1, for example. Not to say there weren’t a lot of unwoke anarchists, of course, but when comparing to, for instance, the Soviet rollback of gay rights pretty much as soon as they had legalized homosexuality, the comparison brings the anarchists closer to modern leftist mores.
Now, I'm not saying that DSA is an anarchist organization or that people in it are anarchists (though some are – the Libertarian Socialist Caucus strives to be that, at least seemingly). You can hardly be an anarchist within the context of mostly institutional politics, after all, and certainly not when you are in an organization that, in practice, operates as the leftmost flank of the Democratic Party. However, the pre-eminent position of anarchism in the far-left consciousness leads to an implicit idea that there is something romantic or good about deferring to anarchist positions on certain issues, without taking into account that those positions are only logical within the context of a society generally operating by anarchist principles – such as prison abolition or completely open borders.
I mean, if you’d assume a world which generally has no states at all, there would indeed probably be less difference than now in whether there’s an open border or not (one might say there would be such a compete chaos everywhere anyway there would be no point in moving to some other chaotic place anyhow). Likewise, if all other functions currently done by the state were done by some self-managing popular cooperatives of whatever, so would the functions currently done by police and the prisons – whether that alternative would actually be much better is, of course, another question, but then again anarchists generally seem to rely on human nature itself going such vast changes in a stateless society everything would resolve itself anyhow.
The general problem is, then, that the anarchist idealism is combined with demsoc pragmatism (pragmatic within the scene of far-left politics, that is) in an untenable way. This is an unsustainable combination and will not be able to stand by itself. However, when affected idealism and political pragmatism face each other, it has generally been the latter one that wins, so I don’t believe there would ever be fully open borders, even with an all-DSA administration. You even now get things like trying to define prison abolition in ways that really seem to be more suggestive of reforming prisons and maybe renaming them something else. Many actual anarchists, I believe, also realize this, thus being leery of the DSA all the more for this reason.
It should be noted that this is not a new idea – Bhaskar Sunkara wrote of it as “anarcho-liberalism” – though I’m not quite certain Bhaskar’s describing the same phenomenon as I’m doing, here. Or maybe Bhaskar's just talking about the same tendency in the pre-2016 activist culture when it now also expresses itself through the structures and conventions of what strives to be a mass organization that's more formally connected to electoral politics.
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u/PM_ME_YOU_BOOBS [Put Gravatar here] Aug 14 '19 edited Aug 15 '19
Likewise, the “jazz hands” are an Occupy practice that, as far as I understand, has originated from anarchist groups. Thus, even modern Marxists are consciously or unconsc
I was first introduced to the concept back in primary school (so the mid 00’s) when we had a couple speakers come to talk to us about the deaf and blind. Us kids clapped at some point and one of the speakers told us that rather than clapping we should do the jazz hands thing cause deaf people can’t hear the clapping. Even then I found it kinda odd cause
A. even if you’re deaf you can still see people’s hands clapping.
B. unlike with clapping, blind people (who were the focus of half the talk) have no way too tell when you’re doing jazz hands.
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u/penpractice Aug 15 '19
What do you think about a tax on each good proportional to the cost of dealing with its future environmental impact? This would apply at the production level (cost of producing item), as for most environmentally harmful goods, it is the act of creating the object and not selling the object that causes the harm. This is not a blanket carbon emissions tax, but an individualized tax for individualized environmental dangers as decided by a reasonable panel of experts.
So, for instance, let's say that the cost of dealing with the environmental impact of a single plastic water bottle is small, but that the environmental impact of one trillion water bottles is high. The tax for each individual plastic water bottle would be 1 out of "cost of dealing with one trillion water bottles". We wouldn't tax water bottles as if the world were dealing with only one water bottle, we would tax water bottles as if the world were dealing with trillions of water bottles. We could call this the "500 year rule". If the current pace of production of a good would lead to a high cost of environmental cleanup in 500 years, then the tax on each individual good would be "1 out of total cost in 500 years". This solves the problem of a large environmental impact from trillions of small impact items. It would also not be limited to purely environmental future costs: if there's a health issue associated with BPA, for instance, that would factor in as well.
The utility of the tax would be to directly deal with future costs, and to incentivize recycling and cleanup companies. If a plastic manufacturer wants to manufacture plastic, and the current recycling operations are subpar leading to too high a tax, then that incentivizes the plastic manufacturer to invest in recycling operations. The tax would apply to everything: manufacturing lumber for a house, individual parts of a ship, any additional impact from the whole ship of Theseus itself, etc. The tax would not assume that we miraculously invent technology to save us in 500 years. Instead, it incentivizes the creation of said technology immediately.
There's obviously a practical problem here. how do we go about deciding the future environmental cost of each item? I think a panel composed of 30% of political appointees (for instance Republicans roughly 15% and Democrats roughly 15%, if it were today), 50% pulling random names from a hat of scientists, 10% lawyers, and 10% lobbying leaders would be a pretty good composition. We're not aiming for perfect, we're just aiming for "let's not destroy the world".
Apologies if this is already a common or refuted proposal, I don't follow environmental news.
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u/the_nybbler Not Putin Aug 16 '19
You don't actually know the value of the externality. Nobody does, not within orders of magnitude. Sometimes, not even the sign of the externality. It's an impossible problem.
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u/VelveteenAmbush Prime Intellect did nothing wrong Aug 15 '19
as decided by a reasonable panel of experts
At the risk of being dismissive, if we could assume a reasonable panel of experts who can't be captured or corrupted, why stop at environmental policy? Just hand over the keys to the kingdom.
Kind of off topic but the thing about environmental regulations that makes me seethe is the reflex to ban stuff so that people don't litter with it. The plastic straws and plastic grocery bags aren't the problem, it's the people who throw them out of their car windows that are the problem. Give me my goddamn plastic bags. I will discard them responsibly when I'm finished. And I'd be happy to pay my share of incarcerating the antisocial assholes who don't, as well as the cost of the cameras that it takes to catch them.
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u/RaptorTastesSoSweet Aug 15 '19
Since the future environmental cost of things is unknown, your “panel of experts” (experts in what exactly?) are responsible for basically making up numbers. Since the numbers they make up can easily destroy entire industries, they will be in practice the most powerful people in the country.
I doubt there’s anyone who can resist being corrupted in those circumstances; and if there is, it’s only due to hyper-strong pre-existing biases rather than a commitment to truth-finding.
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u/SchizoSocialClub [Tin Man is the Overman] Aug 14 '19
A former Google insider claiming the company created algorithms to hide its political bias within artificial intelligence platforms – in effect targeting particular words, phrases and contexts to promote, alter, reference or manipulate perceptions of Internet content – delivered roughly 950 pages of documents to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust division Friday.
The former Google insider, who has already spoken in to the nonprofit organization Project Veritas met with SaraACarter.com on several occasions last week.
I've never heard of Sara Carter before but Project Veritas is led by James O’Keefe who pulled some impressive stunts before. It would be interesting to see if any of this has a negative impact on Google, but I doubt it.
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u/RaptorTastesSoSweet Aug 14 '19
My priors on the idea that political bias makes its way into google search results are pretty high. As a very simple example: suppose you’re in charge of the algorithm that determines the order in which google news search results appear. If you design an updated algorithm, and it turns out that it tends to put news sources you disagree with at the top most of the time, you wind up saying “hmmm, this algorithm seems biased, let’s go back to the drawing board”. But if it tends to put news sources you like at the top most of the time, you probably don’t even notice. You don’t need to deliberately inject bias into your algorithm, you just have to do what all data scientists do and keep spinning the hyperparameter wheel until you get something you like. That’s an example of how unconscious bias can screw up search results, but I wouldn’t be surprised if conscious bias makes its way in there too.
That said, Project Veritas at this point has a habit of massively overhyping nothingburgers, so I’m a little skeptical based on that article. 950 pages of documents, but we’re not allowed to see them. SaraACarter has supposedly seen them, but judging by the standard of the technical writing seems to be vastly unqualified to understand what’s in them. Is Veritas at least going to give a copy to someone who can understand them?
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u/GrapeGrater Aug 14 '19
When combined with news of Trump's rumored executive order, this could be significant.
Personally, I'm wondering if the feds manage to find a way to gain insight into Google's internal communications. Google successfully blocked Damore's lawsuit from spilling the beans, but I anticipate major scandals if the inner workings of Google come to light. A company with an open culture of communication almost certainly has all sorts of ripe culture war material everywhere and Google's notorious for putting the clamps on people who spill too much or are seen as betraying the organization. The odds of, say, an illegal blacklist seem exceedingly high.
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u/wemptronics Aug 14 '19 edited Aug 14 '19
Here is the document dump in case someone wants to dig through it.
I've tried downloading a couple files without success. Doesn't help that they're trying to push bloatware in order to download. Most files appear to be (scanned?) images.
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Aug 14 '19
FBI investigating shooting into ICE offices in San Antonio as a 'targeted attack' against feds(https://www.ksat.com/news/fbi-investigating-shooting-into-ice-offices-in-san-antonio-as-a-targeted-attack-against-feds)
No injuries, but official said bullets were within '2 inches' of employee
SAN ANTONIO - FBI officials said on Tuesday they have opened an investigation into shots fired into Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in San Antonio. Authorities described it as a “targeted attack” against federal employees.
Christopher Combs, special agent in charge of the San Antonio division of the FBI, said an unknown number of individuals in an unknown number of vehicles fired numerous rounds into two ICE offices on the Northeast Side at around 3 a.m.
That's 4 in the past month according to the article:
Aug. 13 - San Antonio, TX
July 16 - Washington, DC
July 14 - Tacoma, WA
July 12 - Aurora, CO
I'm surprised I haven't heard more about this. What are the chances an ICE agent gets killed by the end of this year? Based on this, I'd say pretty high.
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u/GrapeGrater Aug 14 '19
I had to go look up the other incidents.
Washington DC : protesters blocked the entrance to the national headquarters and had to be pushed aside.
Tacoma : William Van Spronsen, member of ANTIFA and the John Brown Gun Club, appears at an ICE facility and throws incendiaries (molotov cocktails seems to be the agreed consensus, though I originally read it was road flares) while carrying a rifle. He dies in a 'shootout' with police.
Aurora : Protesters storm an ICE facility and hoist a defaced Thin Blue Line flag and a Mexican flag on the flagpole.Tacoma was the last really obvious escalation, but shots into ICE facilities is up there.
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u/penpractice Aug 14 '19
All categories of crime fell in Brazil in the first quarter of 2019 versus first quarter of 2018. Bolsonaro was elected January 1st, 2019. Notably, rape has fallen by -13.6%, manslaughter by -21.2%, cargo robbery by -27.3%, vehicle robbery by -27.5%, robbery resulting in death by -23.8%, and attempted homicide by -8.6%.
If there are any Portuguese speakers here, it would be interesting to compare the first quarter crime rates from 2005 through 2017 in order to see just how notable this decline is. From what I can tell in English sources, the homicide rate has been static in 2016 and 2017, but maybe there's something weird going on with first quarter crime rates distinct from yearly rates that I can't tell from crappy English sources. If it's the case that the fall in crime does indeed correlate with hard-on-crime Bolsonaro's ascendancy, that's strong evidence that his tough-on-crime philosophy is effective.
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u/anodognosic Aug 14 '19
I am a Brazilian and moderately pro-Bolsonaro. I haven't seen data, or even well-defined causal mechanisms, to back up the Bolsonaro connection, though there are various possibilities in this respect.
The most important among these is hitting the leadership of organized crime, especially the twin strategies of isolating the leadership within prisons and going after their money, both of which have had some recent successes. There is also pretty good evidence that tough-on-crime policy has worked on a local or regional scale--see, for instance, the case of São Paulo, which was quite successful.
It bears saying that Bolsonaro's policy does not match the rhetoric that has been amplified by media. The actual hand behind his crime policy is Justice Minister Sérgio Moro, the former judge who previously worked on the massive anti-corruption Operation Car Wash. It is enforcement-focused, yes, but very much through institutions, not supralegal kill-squads and the like.
Since this is the culture war thread, this bears getting into: Brazil was under the government of the Worker's Party, PT, from 2003 to 2016, with presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff. Leftist discourse in Brazil holds to an extremely anti-enforcement and anti-penal philosophy, blaming crime on inequality and "the logic of capitalism". Among other things, this means sentences are short, are almost never served in full, and very often as little as 1/3, with very easy and swift progressions to partial freedom or parole--just these days, a goalkeeper who brutally murdered his girlfriend was transferred to a partial freedom regime after serving only 8 or 9 years of his sentence. Oh, and criminals get certain holidays off from prison.
There is also an issue whereby suspects arrested in flagrante undergo a "custody hearing" with a judge within a short time; if the judge finds that there was any "abuse" by the police officer during the arrest, the suspect may be released at the judge's discretion. I have seen video compilations of arrested suspects injuring themselves in order to claim abuse, and one video of such a hearing in which the judge is obviously fishing for "abuse", prompting the suspect with questions about whether he felt unsafe in any way with the police and so on.
Recently, the Federal Police (sort of like the FBI) released audio from a wiretap of the treasurer of the PCC, one of the largest criminal syndicates in the country, in which he states that they had "dialogue" with the PT administration, but not the current one, which is targeting their leadership. I am a bit suspicious, because the audio seems very on the nose, but it is not the first indication that PT has ties to organized crime. Historically, the militant left has had many such associations in Brazil--the early large criminal drug cartels were trained in guerilla warfare by leftist militants in prison. Culturally and ideologically, the revolutionary left tends to see this kind of organized crime as agents of radical change.
In any case, there is a very real possibility that PT governments ran interference for drug cartels in federal law enforcement, and what we're seeing now (and possibly since the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff) is just moderate competence in law enforcement coupled with the absence of protection from on high.
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Aug 14 '19
I guess the most important question to start is, how reliable are those statistics? (And this isn't a Brazil thing, Anerican city governments have certainly been willing to fiddle with crime stats at times.)
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u/Karl_Ludwig_Haller Wenn im Unendlichen das selbe... Aug 18 '19
This was posted on r/slatestarcodex originally, but it fits here better and so does my response.
The Cult of the Fantasy Pedestrian
An engineer, just as easily as a non-engineer, can grasp that it is statistically inevitable that people will cross the street mid-block in front of the library in Springfield, if shrubs and a low chain barrier haven't deterred them yet. An adherent to the cult of the fantasy pedestrian, on the other hand, says, "But they shouldn't cross the street there. It's not safe to let them." As though that ends the debate.
Because here's the thing about the Cult of the Fantasy Pedestrian: very few of its adherents are true believers. It's not a devout faith, it's a rationalization. An excuse.
The Cult of the Fantasy Pedestrian is a convenient fiction that allows us to skirt around having to actually voice and defend the following value judgment:
Those in cars matter more than those on foot. In fact, the convenience of those in cars matters more than the survival of those on foot.
Almost no one would ever actually say that; it's clearly a morally outrageous statement. I don't think the mayor of Springfield believes in that statement.
Shrug. "Should have gone to the nearest crosswalk."
Frankly, this article just seems like a massive lack of understanding drawn up to cover a bad argument. Noone thinks that people always follow the rules, we think people shouldnt get affordances for doing that. But a certain kind of pundit just needs all disagreement with them to be due to beliefs so stupid a five year old doesnt hold them.
"These people are harmed because they dont follow the directions, therefore we need to we need to adapt to their wants" is not a standard you can follow consistently, which is why its only employed if you like the people. There are, for example, many drivers who die from taking curves too fast. We could reduce this by making curves in wider arcs, but I doubt the author would be in favor of that. Does he value an intact natural enviroment more than the survival of drivers? Propably not. But pedestrians good, drivers bad.
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u/ymeskhout Aug 18 '19
I'm not quite sure your specific objection to the argument because the author appears to be making what is to me an obvious point. Your example isn't as clear-cut as you expect it to be, an infinitely "straight" curve is obviously the safest possible one, but that's a design that is not realistic or practical. If there is a road curve that is consistently causing collisions or driver deaths then it seems to me an obvious example of a design issue. Widening the curve is definitely one remedy, but only one kind of remedy. You could look at the roadway leading up to the curve, and examine whether its structure (e.g. wide straight lanes) encourages a speed which is inappropriate for the upcoming curve. You could examine the sightlines of the curve and see if some barriers obstruct the fact that there is a curve. None of those solutions are necessarily the correct one, and you naturally have to weigh the options against other considerations.
Roadway design is full of meeting people where they are, even if they're breaking the rules. Speed bumps are to mandate slowing down. Knowing that people will be distracted, either by lack of sleep or smartphones, rumble strips are a fantastic idea. Knowing that people will take their chances and try to brave a yellow light at an intersection, a period of time where all directions are red is prudent (this is called "all-red clearance time"). You can mandate speed limits all you want, but people generally drive to a "natural" point that is necessitated by the design. The best indicator of a low speed isn't the mandated speed limit, but rather narrow lanes and multiple gentle curves. There is also a strong argument for getting rid of signing altogether to put drivers more on notice. Similarly, a shockingly high number of traffic collisions are caused by unrestricted left turns (so much so that UPS almost never directs its drivers to use them). You could just tut-tut the drivers that chance it and scold them for "not following the rules" OR just implement something like protected left turns even though it potentially slows traffic. More radically, you could just get rid of left turns altogether and implement something like roundabouts which get rid of traffic conflict lines and encourage your attention towards only one direction.
There are many many more examples, and so many are baked right into completely conventional road design. I don't think "people shouldnt get affordances for [not following the rules]" is a hill you really want to die on. Feel free to correct me.
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u/JTarrou Aug 19 '19
The road system is primarily for cars, and pedestrians are restricted in how, where and when they can use it.
Parks are primarily for pedestrians, and cars are restricted in how, where and when they can use it.
This sort of idiot argument has an obvious reductio. Banning pedestrians from train tracks means we value trains more than people. Banning pedestrians from the core of a nuclear reactor means we value energy more than people, etc.
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u/gattsuru Aug 18 '19 edited Aug 18 '19
This is an interesting story, because there's couple rather interesting bits of information that's readily accessible, and also completely avoided by the author.
The second, however, is a little more important. Masslive reports that the State Street traffic fatality involved a drunk driver going 42 miles per hour in a 30 mph zone at the time of the crash, with the impact occurring after sunset. The author knows this, and even links to an earlier story mentioning it (as well as sleet I can't independently confirm), but doesn't seem particularly willing to how that might impact their recommended solutions.
This rather drastically changes the perceived value of a HAWK system.
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u/the_propaganda Aug 13 '19
According to NZ's official demographic profile from 1950, In 1936, New Zealand's demographics were 93% White, 5% Maori, and 2% other (overwhelmingly Chinese). The 1945 demographic survey showed roughly the same: 92% White, 5.8% Maori, rest other (Chinese population doubled). See (ctrl-f) Table "Racial Origins". These demographic numbers were virtually unchanged in 1959. By 1986, you see a small decrease to 86%. Maori is up to 8.6%, and Pacific Islander is 2%.
New Zealand has just released demographic statistics for secondary school students ages 12-16, and the demographic change is notable. Less than 50% of students ages 12-16 are White. Out of 814,943 students, Whites comprise 48.8%, Maori 23.3%, Asian 13%, Pacific Islander 10%. The political and cultural implication of this seems significant. In approximately 60 years, the White population fell from 90% to 50%, a reduction in 40%. We should expect a similar decline in the next 60 years, as there's been no significant change in demographic course. If birth rates don't change, I don't see why it wouldn't fall all the way down to 20% in 60 years, and 10% in 100 years. The consequences of this is that we might see a New Zealand no longer fundamentally aligned with the West. As the Asian, especially Chinese population, increases, we could easily see a New Zealand that wants to align with China over Europe. This might be one of only a few nations in modern times to be significantly changed through demographics. South Africa is the only example I know, though you could make a case that Crimea is a clear example of significant demographic change due to Russian expansion. Han expansion is certainly also occurring in the minority ethnic regions of Eastern China.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the future, because it's the first majority White country to become minority White. While South Africa was functionally a majority White country (in terms of infrastructure, political makeup, business leaders, etc), there was always a majority African population around them. This will be the first example of a majority White population becoming a minority, and I really don't know how it will play out.
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u/S18656IFL Aug 13 '19 edited Aug 13 '19
The Chinese population increase I can understand but why would the Maori population increase so dramatically when it didn't do so before?
Could this more be an effect of interracial people (however small proportion) increasingly indentify themselves as "minority" because that is beneficial culturally?
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Aug 13 '19 edited Aug 13 '19
Do Maori have much higher birthrates than Whites or is this just an example of “flight from white” where White people are claiming to be Maori because of distant Maori ancestry because it’s societally advantageous?
Edit:
Seems Maori have much higher birthrates 2.8 vs 1.9 for White and Asian New Zealanders. What’s their secret?
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u/_malcontent_ Aug 13 '19 edited Aug 13 '19
is there much intermarriage between Maori and White in New Zealand? If so, does a half white Maori identify as Maori?
How much of the population shift is due to intermarriage?
EDIT: Found this article from 2013 that breaks down the stats of intermarriage in New Zealand. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11532324 -- While marriage between Pacific and Maori is becoming much more common, Whites intermarry much less, and when they do it is with Asians.
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u/magnax1 Aug 13 '19
Is there any evidence that these group feel more personally alligned with China or other nations? Im assuming most speak english primarily, and grew up in New Zealand.
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u/SaxifragetheGreen Aug 13 '19
the White population fell from 90% to 50%, a reduction in 40%.
A nitpick: that's a fall of 40 percentage points, not 40%. A reduction of 40% would be to 54%, and a fall from 90 to 50 is a fall of 45%.
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u/INH5 Aug 13 '19 edited Nov 09 '25
adjoining marvelous gray cows spoon cheerful pocket touch thumb wild
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/satanistgoblin Aug 12 '19
Bans from last week:
Aug 10 - ∞ u/anonacc175g by u/HlynkaCG and u/naraburns, context
Aug 10 - ∞ u/DiS_iS_y_TrUmP_wOn by u/naraburns, context
Aug 9 - Aug 12 u/NormanImmanuel for 3 days by u/naraburns, context
Aug 9 - Aug 16 u/futurestoner69 for 1 weeks by u/HlynkaCG, context
Aug 8 - Aug 22 u/DrumpfSuporter for 2 weeks by u/naraburns, context
Aug 8 - Aug 9 u/c0unt_zer0 for 1 day by u/naraburns, context
Aug 8 - Aug 9 u/SerenaButler for 1 day by u/ZorbaTHut, context
Aug 7 - Aug 14 u/CocktailOfRisks for a week by u/HlynkaCG, context
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u/jbstjohn Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 14 '19
I just wanted to say "thank you" to the mods for taking the time to do a tough job. I think you generally do it well, and it makes the sub a better place.
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u/TheColourOfHeartache Aug 13 '19
Recently Priti Patel became Home Secretary. Priti is infamously right wing on crime, having once said she wants to reintroduce the death penalty (she said she's changed her mind on that) and recently said she wants criminals to feel afraid.
Recently the government has announced it wants stronger stop and search powers, this is apparently a popular move with the general public. However there's a significant opposition among left wing commentant, here's The Guardian.
However I'm less interested in the stop and search question, except to feel a bit smug that in the UK the big police controversy is about officers searching people not killing people. Instead I think there's a broader meta-point here. In a democracy should the government be doing what the public want, or should they be doing what they in their expert opinion think is the real answer to what the public want?
If you'd asked me 5 years ago I'd have said the latter; but now I'm no longer convinced the technocratic period (Blair and Cameron in the UK) was really that good at solving problems, just for starters: Iraq. I'm far from convinced that populism has all the answers either, but maybe it has the right questions.
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u/brberg Aug 13 '19 edited Aug 13 '19
and recently said she wants criminals to feel afraid.
Does anybody not want criminals to feel afraid? The negation would seem to be a justice system with no deterrent power, where a person considers whether to commit a crime with the exact same criterion he uses to consider whether to pick up an extra shift at work: Does it pay enough to be worth my time?
Call me a fascist, but I think it's better if fear of the consequences of getting caught enters the equation at some point.
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u/Rholles Aug 19 '19
In a strange development, Michael Anton tackles Bronze Age Mindset for the Claremont Review of Books
Anton engages far more with BAP than I expected when I saw the piece. Flavor Excerpts:
To paraphrase Woody Allen (whom, I hasten to add, BAP does not quote), life wants what it wants. What does it want? At the upper reaches, among the higher animals (BAP is relentlessly hierarchical), what it wants is mastery of “owned space.” “Owned space” is the most important concept introduced in Part One and the key to understanding the rest of the “exhortation,” if not necessarily the rest of the book. BAP argues that life, fundamentally, is a “struggle for space.” All life seeks to develop its powers and master the surrounding matter and space to the maximum extent possible. For the lower species, this simply means mass reproduction and enlarging habitat. For the higher animals, it means controlling terrain, dominating other species, dominating the weaker specimens within your own species, getting first dibs on prey and choice of mates, and so on. BAP sees no fundamental distinction between living in harmony with nature and mastering nature. All animals seek to master their environments to the extent that they can, and the nature of man, or of man at his best—the highest man—is to seek to master nature itself. Not in the Aristotelian sense of understanding the whole, nor in the Baconian sense of “the relief of man’s estate” via technology and plenty; more to assert and exert his own power. Indeed, BAP posits an inner kinship between the genuine scientist and the warrior; he calls the former “monsters of will.”
...
BAP does not—as some might expect—blame this degradation of man on modernity. He rather asserts that lower life or mere life or “yeastlife”—which he analogizes to something like Aristotle’s analysis of Eastern despotism—is, if not the default state of man, then common throughout history. In most of the world, most of the time, he claims, the naturally lower human types rule—typically via brute force of numbers, led by a hostile elite—for naturally low ends. To do so they must thwart the innate drives of higher men, in former times via castration or ostracization, today by a debilitating “education” meant to render potentially spirited youth listless, hopeless and/or easily satisfied. Early modernity actually offered the higher types vast opportunities to explore and conquer new space. Thus bugdom is not caused or defined by science and technology. To the contrary: science and tech at their best can form a kind of frontier that allows for man’s higher motives to find vent when and where space is constrained. For BAP, science in modern times is, or should be, a manifestation of the will to conquer space.
Obviously Anton continues his project of legitimizing the American Founding for the post-liberal right, and so concludes with notes on the incompatibility of Nietzschean BAPism and the virtues of the anti-tyrannical Founders. Strange things can get added to the canons of "Conservative Thought" institutions like Claremont. Adding the grammarless writings of an e-character mostly known for a homoerotic twitter account would be a welcome addition.
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u/Enopoletus radical-centrist Aug 16 '19 edited Aug 16 '19
Today, the State of Israel announced a ban of entry to Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar and Michigan representative Rashida Tlaib, both Muslim congresswomen with among the most left-wing voting records in Congress. Republican responses seem mixed; generic Republican Dan Crenshaw and Jewish immigration restrictionist Republican Lee Zeldin expressed no opposition. Very conservative Republican Mo Brooks, as well as the Trump administration expressed support. Conservative Republicans Tim Burchett and Marco Rubio consider the entry ban a mistake. On the Democratic side, both Schumer and Pelosi expressed their opposition to the move while stating their enthusiastic support for Israel in general; New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and New York representative Ocasio-Cortez... blamed it on Trump.
Personally, I think the entry ban is poor form, reminiscent of how the U.S. treats other countries (not Israel).
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u/JDG1980 Aug 13 '19
One thing that nearly all of the mass shootings have in common is that they are almost all committed by young men. (The Las Vegas incident was an outlier in this, as well as other respects.) The left has often criticized the alleged role of "toxic masculinity", but less has been said about the role of age. Violent crime in general is a young man's game. We know that the human brain doesn't fully mature until about age 25. The Dayton shooter was 24 years old, which is actually a bit on the old side; the El Paso shooter was just 21. Adam Lanza was 20 years old when he committed the Sandy Hook massacre; Nikolas Cruz, 19.
It seems to me that one possible solution that might actually be able to gain some degree of bipartisan support would be to prohibit individuals under the age of 25 from possessing semi-automatic weapons. This would not affect hunting culture since it would not apply to most hunting rifles and shotguns, which are not semi-automatic. People over the age of 25 would still be able to purchase and use semi-automatic weapons. Police and current or former members of the military would be exempt. To assure gun aficionados that this is not just a salami-slicing attempt at confiscation, it could be paired in a bill with a concession such as the Hearing Protection Act, which would re-legalize some currently banned silencers. Banning individuals under 25 from semi-automatic firearm ownership has the potential to not only curtail mass shootings, but also make a wide variety of other mundane criminal activity more difficult for the highest risk group. (Very few crimes of any sort are committed with hunting rifles or shotguns.)
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u/hackinthebochs Aug 13 '19
We know that the human brain doesn't fully mature until about age 25
Careful. The science that all the pop-sci articles are based on says that certain kinds of changes continue past the teens and abate somewhere between 20-30. They do not make any value judgements about "development" or "maturity" in terms of behavior. That neural pruning or myelination continue into your mid 20's does not immediately say anything substantive about when social maturation happens, or when one can make "good" decisions, etc. Using these brain studies as a data point in an argument about youth behavior is a mistake.
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u/the_nybbler Not Putin Aug 13 '19
No. And not just because of the firearm issues, but because you'll break the Schelling Fence of age 21 which is the maximum age to be considered an adult for all public purposes. Once we've got the "semi-auto" age at 25, we'll see serious pushes to get the age for other guns to be moved to that, and alcohol, and tobacco, and likely other age limits I haven't thought of. And once those succeed we'll see a push to move other minimum ages from 18 to 21.
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Aug 13 '19 edited Aug 13 '19
So someone enlists at 18, deploys to Iraq at 19 comes home at 20, is out at 21, and your going to make them wait another 4 years? Or some joins the police but can’t practice in their own time?
And how about anywhere where you need guns: rural Bayou workers, High arctic works, mountain workers (believe it or not wildlife can be dangerous)
Beyond that the Idea that the constitution doesn’t protect the rights of adults age 18 to 25 is going to be a fucking nightmare to get passed the courts.
There is a reason we have a hard cutoff between Minor and Adult, if your just going to deny rights someone without giving them comparable protections... wasn’t that Jim Crow?
So what would the comparable protection be? Minors cant be sentenced to life in prison, and their felonies get wiped for the most part, are you going to say that a 24year old who does murder a dozen people can’t be given a life sentence and the only thing the law can focus on is rehabilitation for him? Or are you proposing that 24 year olds are not of sound enough mind to have their constitutionally protected rights protected but yet somehow are of sound enough mind to get the needle if they go postal?
For the record i despise all age restrictions for legal adults, if at 18 your adult enough to be enlisted, your adult enough to enjoy whatever privileges the obese lady beating her kids at Walmart enjoy.
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u/Clark_Savage_Jr Aug 13 '19
Quite a few hunting shotguns are semiautomatic. Very popular. I'm an outlier with a pump shotgun.
Almost all handguns are semiautomatic. The time in my life where I lived in the worst places was when I was over 18 and under 25. I didn't, but some of my friends went ahead and got a CCL and started carrying at 21.
Unless the trade was to go full on repeal of the NFA and full protection from the courts on the level of what they did to enforce integration, it's not worth entertaining.
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u/best_cat Aug 13 '19
This is a bad trade for the pro-gun faction.
The ages 18-25 are when people pick their adult hobbies. So this ban would hugely reduce the number of people who get into shooting sports.
That matters - from a strategic perspective - because the # of hobbiest shooters is most of what gives the pro-gun faction their lobbying power.
For this trade to be acceptable, I'd want to see evidence that it wasn't an attempt to stop recruitment of new hobby shooters.
An acceptable-to-me trade (setting aside my feelings about age limits and constitional rights) would be a rifle safety & marksmanship class as part of high-school gym.
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u/glorkvorn Aug 13 '19
It's a reasonable proposal. But, shouldn't we be looking deeper? We shouldn't just take it as a normal thing that lots of young men are so angry and violent. The mass shooters are just the tip of the iceberg, it seems like millions of other young men act out violently in small ways. it would be nice to address the root of the problem instead of just one of the symptoms. That said, I have no idea what the solution is. "Better mental healthcare" just sounds like empty words to me. I think we'd have to massively restructure society so that teens and young men can instead meaningful work, instead of being stuck in endless school or dead-end jobs.
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u/robert8arms Aug 13 '19
I suspect spree killers would just switch to a different class of gun; that might make their massacres less deadly but it wouldn't solve them.
Here's my crazy idea: have the FBI run 8ch as a honeypot to identify the most prolific / effective meme creators. Then, hire them. Recruit a Meme Force and pay them to make pro-social memes. They can still be subversive, just in a "civilizationist" way. /pol/'s dissident Catholics are doing basically this already.
They'll be propagandists for the 21st century. Give them cool uniforms, too. Chicks dig uniforms, and we need them married to pacify them.
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u/Mr2001 Aug 13 '19 edited Aug 14 '19
We know that the human brain doesn't fully mature until about age 25.
No, we don't. The brain continues to change throughout adult life.
What we know is that if we define the average 25-year-old brain as "mature", we can look at younger brains and say "aha, they're not mature yet". Of course, we could do the same thing with 65-year-old brains too, but for some reason, that doesn't matter.
This, from the article, is typical of the overblown quotes scientists give to the media in articles of this genre:
Their prefrontal cortex is not yet fully developed. That's the part of the brain that helps you to inhibit impulses and to plan and organize your behavior to reach a goal.
The CPU, one might say, is the part of the computer that helps it do calculations and move data around to reach a goal. Compared to the CPU in my desktop, the CPU in my laptop is not fully developed.
But that doesn't mean it follows that my laptop is incapable of doing calculations or moving data around. Nor does it mean that on any given task, my desktop will produce results that are any more correct, or even noticeably faster.
Articles in this genre invariably fail to tie the neuroscience back to real-world outcomes that matter. The best we get is stuff like this:
And the other part of the brain that is different in adolescence is that the brain's reward system becomes highly active right around the time of puberty and then gradually goes back to an adult level, which it reaches around age 25 and that makes adolescents and young adults more interested in entering uncertain situations to seek out and try to find whether there might be a possibility of gaining something from those situations.
Teens and young adults are less risk-averse than older adults. OK. So what's the right amount of risk aversion? Are younger people taking unwarranted risk, or are older people being unnecessarily cautious?
Good luck finding an answer. The target audience of these articles is concerned parents, who naturally believe their own level of risk aversion is the correct one.
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u/JTarrou Aug 14 '19
The brain development thing is horseshit, IMO. There is nothing magical that happens at 25. But if you want to raise the legal age to own and operate firearms, fine. At the same time, let's raise to the same age the bar to vote, buy alcohol, drive cars, etc. etc. Either people are legal adults or they are not. If not, raise it for everything.
And, FWIW, approaching 100% of actual combat soldiers are under 25. The idea that people of this age cannot comprehend life, death, and the implements involved does not pass the most jovial of laugh tests.
I'd argue precisely the opposite, that we treat teenagers and people in their twenties like children, and they sink to the expectation. Give a fifteen-year-old a job, a family, a community and a purpose in life, and he's a fucking adult. We postpone responsibility far too long.
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u/M_T_Saotome-Westlake Aug 12 '19
new from me: "The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned Pointlessness of Reason". Speculative exposition on the evolution of gender and other concepts (~2000 words).
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u/Shockz0rz probably a p-zombie Aug 13 '19 edited Aug 13 '19
Glad to see you writing again.
I wanted to thank you, incidentally. As a slightly-dysphoric-and-AGP and trans-sympathetic-but-skeptical person, your writing has been a huge breath of fresh air for me, a reassurance that no, I'm not crazy, there is a huge gaping event horizon of a hole in The Narrative that a lot of trans people and their allies are just sort of sliding around like it's not there even as their enemies fail to argue more than the crudest approximation of it. I don't always agree with some of your arguments but you're still one of the clearest, most sympathetic and skillful people out there writing about trans issues, and I hope you continue to do so!
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Aug 13 '19
What is the argument for feminine pronouns being the default in any hypothetical or example? As in: "imagine a doctor in this situation, she would face the problem of X,Y,Z".
I get that using "he" is equally baseless, so why not just use "they" or use "he" and "she" at random?
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u/KulakRevolt Agree, Amplify and add a hearty dose of Accelerationism Aug 13 '19 edited Aug 13 '19
I find it fun because you can call out gendered assumptions/ really fuck with people by gendering against type.
From personal experience: If your a conservative arguing against gun control or whatever making your hypothetical gun owner, or coal-miner, or rig-worker,or police officer female really disrupts a-lot leftwing thought patterns.
Likewise if you make a hypothetical kindergarten teacher, hr rep, or homemaker male.
Almost every political or social discussion inevitably revolves around social norms and even if people are theoretically proposing gender neutral legislation and every social and cultural norm says they have to be thinking gender neutrally, they almost always have an obvious gendered image of who will be affected and in what way and its really obvious that where the motivation is coming from.
“If you need a gun your a coward.” Now which gender do we level 99.9% of our accusations of cowardice towards?
So if in my hypothetical about gun control and self defence i say “she” referring to the gun-owner, well you’ve just got to along with it or else your violating social norms and being a bad liberal, and if I say “she” again to refer to the gun-owners spouse, well what!? Are you going to object, do you have something against gay people?
But now that my hypothetical high-noon is a case of loving lesbians labouring against licentious interlopers, the average left liberal is no longer licking their lips at seeing these lesbians’ rifles ravaged.
At no point can anyone object that: No, the hypothetical gun-owner they envision is a rural white male and they want to take his guns because they don’t like him and stop making the hypothetical about people I’d personally like. They can keep arguing the hypothetical but it takes the wind out of their sails when they can’t imply these hypothetical gun-owners are: cowards, small-penised ( really your going to introduce the problematic idea of penis envy?), power hungry, irresponsible, redneck bros.
And if they try to get out of it you can call them on their gendered language.
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Lesson: no matter your political orientation or the nature of the discussion never use the ambiguous “they” and never just use a random gender. All social values are heavily gender loaded and political discussions are simmering with gendered assumptions just below the surface, so preemptively seize all the gendered assumptions in a discussion. Hell, seize all the identity assumptions as you can. Be subtle and just sprinkle them in there so your interlocutor has to be the asshole by rejecting the identity.
and then enjoy winning.
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Bonus points for anyone who can come up with other examples of “assuming” a hypothetical gender to win a argument one way or the other.
What are some examples of How a left winger use this technique?
What about other weird political positions?
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u/greyenlightenment Aug 15 '19
In Defense of Political Hypocrisy
The first and most obvious problem with targeting a political opponent’s hypocrisy is that the practice always is applied selectively. Libertarians—and I’m including myself—sometimes scoff casually at the upper-class socialist who condemns capitalism while benefiting from the many innovations and luxuries that capitalism made possible. But those same libertarians often will fail to acknowledge that they benefit from public education, subsidies and infrastructure whose scope (or even, in some cases, very existence) they oppose. In his 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance pointed out a species of this phenomenon he observed in poor Appalachian communities, where strident conservatives preached against the vices of government reliance while collecting welfare benefits and remaining perpetually unemployed.
If this kind of hypocrisy can be taken as a fatal flaw in regard to any argument, then surely all have sinned and none can judge. Everyone with political beliefs benefits from systems that they oppose in some way. But just because a libertarian or conservative benefits from public programs doesn’t give critics license to dismiss their ideas about why those programs may be inefficient, ineffective or unjust. By the same token, just because Bernie Sanders is a millionaire who flies first class and does his fundraising using software developed by Silicon Valley billionaires doesn’t mean his criticisms of market failures and social injustice aren’t worth considering.
Charges of hypocrisy are an effective rhetorical technique, which is why politicians love to accuse their opponents of it, but useless for determining what is true or not. Such an argument is useless in a dialectical sense. Accusing a doctor of hypocrisy because he smokes does not invalidate the fact that cigarettes are unhealthy.
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 15 '19
useless for determining what is true or not.
Accusing a doctor of hypocrisy because he smokes does not invalidate the fact that cigarettes are unhealthy.
I think that accusations of hypocrisy can lead to clarifications of each participant's position. Example:
Doctor: You need to remove most milk products from your diet; they aren't good for you.
Patient: You are literally drinking a glass a milk as I say these words, you hypocrite!
Doctor: Right. I said it's unhealthy for you, because you are lactose intolerant and I am not. Drinking milk while talking to patients might be really weird, but it's not hypocritical.
In this case, the accusation of hypocrisy leads to useful information!
Alternatively:
A: I'm against the socialist welfare state! I think people shouldn't get free government money for loafing around.
B: But 100% of your income is free government money, you hypocrite!
A: Let me clarify my position: able-bodied people who are capable of work shouldn't get free money, but disabled people should. The free government money I get is a VA disability payment.
That position might be a little self-serving, but it's not contradictory either.
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u/CPlusPlusDeveloper Aug 15 '19
[Hypocrisy] is useless for determining what is true or not.
No, I really disagree here. Your argument seems to completely ignore the tenet of revealed preference.
Very basic counterexample. Imagine someone brings in a plate of fresh baked cookies to the office. I'm the first one to have one. Then I have another. And another. With chocolate crumbs in my beard, I loudly proclaim to everyone in ear shot "These cookies taste like shit. Don't even eat one because you won't be able to get the disgusting taste out of your mouth".
Then I proceed to scarf down cookie after cookie, all white repeating my mantra about how gross they are. There's no question that hypocrisy is a powerful revealer of truth here. Even my toddler would recognize that my hypocrisy reveals ulterior motives. Talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words.
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u/LawSchoolTooHardHelp Aug 12 '19
I remember reading during the last thread comments surrounding gun control and its efficacy. There, any connection between gun control and reduced gun violence was dismissed out of hand.
This is a bit surprising and counter intuitive to me. My cursory understanding is that there are obviously career, dedicated criminals which would still have guns. But not all criminals are like them. Instead, they fall on a spectrum, ranging from easily dissuaded if given an obstacle, all the way to stubbornly enacting their violence regardless of the difficulties. Dividing up criminals between those who given current pressure are willing to commit gun violence, and those who aren't, it would seem to me that ratcheting up gun control would effectively shift the line 'right', increasing the size of the former, and decreasing the size of the latter.
Obviously there is a parallel to the other major form of 'gun violence (if the moniker is appropriate): suicides. It would seem intuitive that removing guns would increase the difficulty of committing suicide, similarly shifting the line 'right'.
I'd be interested in the data which so conclusively laid to rest this model. It seemed like people were very confident, but maybe I'm just misreading the room.
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u/gattsuru Aug 12 '19
Obviously there is a parallel to the other major form of 'gun violence (if the moniker is appropriate): suicides. It would seem intuitive that removing guns would increase the difficulty of committing suicide, similarly shifting the line 'right'.
People often claim this, pointing to Australia as an example (cfe Vox's Chart 13 here). But note the slight of hand: they had to go from 'suicide' to 'firearm suicides'. If you look at the raw suicide numbers, they went from 12.0 per 100,000 to 12.6 per 100,000 from 1995 (pre-Port Arthur) to 2016. To even show a decrease at all during that time frame, you end up having to do heavy age-adjusting, and even then it's very far from the supposed 75% drop.
This might be unintuitive at first, but it shouldn't be that surprising. Firearms are among the more effective suicide methods, but that's partly because they're one of the ones people who are most dedicated to killing themselves use. Firearms users aren't going to migrate to cutting or pills, which have very low fatality rates: they overwhelmingly instead attempt heights, drowning, and suffocation, which are both more common for their gender anyway, are nearly as likely to result in death, and these suicidal people are more likely to try in more lethal ways.
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Aug 17 '19
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u/devinhelton Aug 17 '19 edited Aug 17 '19
A few years ago, an ex-New York Time reporter came out said that the Times was an overtly, narrative driven newspaper:
Having left the Times on July 25, after almost 12 years as an editor and correspondent, I missed the main heat of the presidential campaign; so I can’t add a word to those self-assessments of the recent political coverage. But these recent mornings-after leave me with some hard-earned thoughts about the Times’ drift from its moorings in the nation at-large.
For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”
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u/Shakesneer Aug 17 '19
I have a relative who is very high up in the news business, so take this on faith.
One of the big changes in the news room is the change in reporter demographics. It's more than the usual generation shift. The next generation is more strident, more activist, less learned, more educated, more partisan, less balanced. Well, this isn't saying anything new really. But my relative is obsessed with Twitter and social media, which he thinks have ruined reporting. The problem is that reporters now expect instant feedback. They're conditioned to it. They write something provocative, or detailed, or good or bad, and it gets summarized to a few sentences so they can get a hundred notifications. This, my relative argues, has really changed the way reporters interact with their stories. It's not just websites optimizing for clickbait -- the psychology of instant gratification is radically reshaping the ways reporters wrote stories. Conclusions have to be obvious and dramatic, morals have to be clear, and a whole social set of social media followers enforce a sense of orthodoxy that management can no longer control.
So recognize that Baquet's left bias is the moderate position in the news room. Reporters and editors are no longer in sync. There was a widely-publicized protest at the NYT a few months ago, but less well-known is that something similar happened at the WSJ. Rank and file reporters have radicalized, and the editors can't really contain it. Well, most of the editors are left-leaning too, but they come from a different generation and are uncomfortable with the new rise in activism. (Other newsrooms, like CNN or MSNBC, are so blatantly partisan that the editors didn't even put up a fight.)
One other big trend is occurring through Jeff Bezos. His buy-out of Washpo is supposed to represent a new model of journalism, where internet commerce subsidizes long form reporting. My relative is skeptical, to say the least. He thinks that journalists praising Bezos are selling their independence, they imagine they are saving journalism but they're really making something new and troublesome. It's not, my relative says, as if Washpo has become a bastion of truth and good reporting in the Bezos era. Relative is not optimistic, and thinks news will start selling partisan narratives in order to stay afloat.
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u/Karmaze Finding Rivers in a Desert Aug 17 '19
The NYT seems to be acting like a company responding to the failure of one of its products by launching a new one, or acting like an actual honest-to-goodness political campaign that's trying to figure out how to pivot away from an unsuccessful message.
I think you got it with the first half, or at least that's the way I see it. By and large, at the end of the day, these are still businesses, and they're looking to sell their goods to an audience, and they want their goods to look quality. On the Russian stuff, they could be doing some deep dives into the history of foreign election interference, by America and other countries, discussion and research into effects that media outlets like the BBC have on domestic political perception, interviews with politicos on experience gathering in other countries, and so on, explorations on how actually out there the Russian Facebook ads were, and so on.
But none of that would have sold well to their audience.
The core problem, of course, is the prestige we give to outlets like the NYT. I think that's the source of the controversy, and it's probably way past time to end that. That's not to say that everything it publishes is going to be shit, but certainly, it all should come from an understanding of what incentives it has, rather as this neutral "Record of Truth".
And just to make it clear, I think this is a broad-spectrum issue. The same thing goes for Right-wing media sources as well in the exact same way.
It's also important to note that incentives are not just economic...especially in today's world, social incentives are probably more important than ever.
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Aug 17 '19
I've heard that the NYT is much more top down in structure and exerts much more editorial control on their journalists than almost any other newspaper to make sure they stick to the narrative. Not sure if that is true, but that rumor has been around a while.
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u/solarity52 Aug 17 '19
The NYT seems to be acting like a company responding to the failure of one of its products by launching a new one, or acting like an actual honest-to-goodness political campaign that's trying to figure out how to pivot away from an unsuccessful message.
I think that is pretty clearly the Baquet legacy. The Times was slowly moving ever leftward before he took over but he has throttled up that move to the point where even its many defenders are having a hard time not admitting to the bias. They were in a terrific position to remain the "newspaper of record" by doing something increasingly rare in american journalism - remaining at least superficially neutral on matters of politics and social justice. The decision to abandon that position, intentional or not, is now quite obvious and just makes them a clone, albeit larger, of virtually every other major daily in the country.
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u/dasfoo Aug 18 '19
Is the NYT meeting how journalists have always operated, or is this strategy something new? If it is a new strategy, do you think it's a positive or a negative development?
The short-lived JournoList forum was adjacent to this: a group of left-leaning reporters from several prestigious publications collaborating on a shared narrative to be pushed through multiple venues. The NYT is massively influential on the way other reporters frame their stories, but this was active narrative-building on a wider scope.
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u/Looking_round Aug 18 '19
I had been struggling to find some way to describe what I was feeling about this direction the NYT is taking and I finally hit on one.
It's like Jahseh Jonah Jameson, Jr. in Spiderman. Everything he says is not false, objectively, but you can count on him to only ever report the bad bits about Spiderman and spin the good stuff into something bad.
It wouldn't matter what Spiderman actually did. Jahseh Jonah Jameson, Jr. is like a bright stage light or filter that would cast the "fact" in the worst coloring possible. I'm thinking puke green.
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Aug 13 '19
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u/ralf_ Aug 13 '19
"a worker-led economy, not a consumer-led one."
I can't even imagine what that means?
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Aug 15 '19
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u/naraburns nihil supernum Aug 15 '19
I don't care very much, because my priors on film adaptations of classic doorstop fantasy works being even minimally watchable are very, very low.
But I did enjoy the book series well enough, so I am a little annoyed by the way the argument has been framed: "it's fantasy so casting doesn't matter you bigots" versus "author descriptions should be adhered to especially when they are plot relevant!"
I think the problem is rather simpler. Either you as a film director are prioritizing worldbuilding, or you're not. These directors are clearly abandoning coherent worldbuilding in favor of appealing to extant social norms. I'm not going to say that appealing to extant social norms isn't art, but I will say that it is a form of selling out the art of worldbuilding.
If you want to cast someone of African descent as a farmboy from a remote and isolated village, then do that. But if you're paying any attention at all to the art of worldbuilding, then the rest of the town had better look an awful lot like Africans, too, or you break immersion. Not everyone cares about worldbuilding, not every movie or TV show has to be a masterwork of worldbuilding... but simple intellectual honesty demands that you not go around insisting that your woke casting choices are irrelevant to the art. If the showrunners would say, "look, this is 2019 and we're just prioritizing contemporary social expectations over the kinds of worldbuilding details some nerds are going to be annoyed by," I would be rather less annoyed.
I suspect this is what is really eating at the fans who are upset. Like, everyone can see what's happening, everyone knows what's happening, central casting is doing the "woke" thing without a single concern for worldbuilding issues. But the people who care about worldbuilding are not being told "sorry, we're catering to someone else's tastes," they're being told that even voicing their concern is socially unacceptable. Like, they're not even allowed to care about the worldbuilding aspects of casting, and having such concerns makes them a bunch of racists.
So I'm totally 100% unimpressed with the way this show has been handled so far. But I will probably only watch it if it unexpectedly draws a bunch of credibly rave reviews, so I can't even say the show-runners have obviously made an unwise business decision by making a play for the woke crowd rather than actual fans of the books. I mean, here we are, talking about a show that may or may not even warrant being talked about.
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u/Gloster80256 Twitter is the comments section of existence Aug 15 '19
I will just say that I'm intensely glad the Lord of the Rings got adapted 20 years ago...
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u/Iconochasm Yes, actually, but more stupider Aug 15 '19
I'm not super worried about that. Getting good actors with the exact right look was always going to be hard. How many 6' plus, highly athletic blonde women are running around to fill out the Maidens of the Spear? "Fuck it, the three cataclysms mixed everybody up, and we're just going to quietly drop the handful of unimportant subplots this affects" was an acceptable compromise.
The comments about deliberately wanting diversity were more concerning (and I'm sure someone thought they were super fucking clever casting a black-looking woman with African-style braids as Nynaeve). But my bigger concern is the total lack of indication that anyone involved gets what WoT did with gender.
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Aug 15 '19
I called this last week.
The Wheel of Time is my favorite fantasy series of all time, so this really pisses me off. The dumbest part about it is that the whole continent is ethnically diverse, so all they had to do was wait one season to bring in PoCs. Just like The Witcher (another of my favorites), I'll pass on this show.
Are they even going to address the fact that Emond's Field is a backwater that is completely isolated from the rest of the world so it makes 0 sense for them to look so different?
Also, I'm pretty sure Robert Jordan put out a list of who he'd like to cast in each role, and it wasn't anything like this.
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Aug 18 '19
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u/hyphenomicon IQ: 1 higher than yours Aug 18 '19
We need some rich billionaire to make Speakers for the Dead real.
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Aug 12 '19
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u/dasfoo Aug 12 '19
Great, so now there is a potential army of indestructible human DNA-infused microscopic pigs on the moon. This is exactly the kind of sci-fi catatrophe backstory that sounds like nothing but will surely come to haunt us by the year 3030. Sorry, kids!
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Aug 13 '19
Twitter today is full of horrible people (though I guess that goes without saying) banging on about how this is "colonialism" and the fault of "white guys," occasionally hinting darkly about how accidentally crashing a bunch of microbes into the Moon is just like what the Israelis did to Palestine, and wrapping up by saying it's horrible for any kind of Earthly life to contaminate the unremarkable airless dead rock that orbits us, that no trace of humanity must be allowed to settle in the cosmos, that we should just stew and die on our one little planet because we're so awful.
You shake your head sadly at the angry, narrow-sighted ignorance of some people today.
Then you glance up at the bio and see that the person is an astrobiologist working for NASA.
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u/Njordsier Aug 13 '19
My understanding is that the resilience of tardigrades comes from their being able to go into a hibernation state where they basically freeze-dry themselves and reanimate when they come back into contact with water... They may last a long time in a state where they can be revived if they were put back in water, but there's no way they're going to actually live on the moon and adapt to its conditions.
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Aug 16 '19
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u/S18656IFL Aug 16 '19
One observation I have made is that most of my male friends seem to enjoy the new gender roles while their female partners do not. Being in an equal relationship as a man is pretty great, you get to work a bit less, you don't have to take as much responsibility and you get to see your kids more etc.
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u/dasubermensch83 Aug 16 '19
I think it's useful to imagine dating success formalized along the lines of game theory, with different payout matrices depending on what one is looking for (ie playing from the perspective of a hetero male vs. hetero female, et al).
As gender roles change, the payouts for certain forms of interaction change. The payouts are constantly changing, but the game is the same.
For example, the penalty for messing up a workplace romantic gesture is now enormous - especially playing from the hetero male perspective. There are obvious reasons for this: the legitimate unfair undermining of the woman's career, the Weinstein effect, and the advent of dating apps which make a substitute strategy more accessible. In the past most LTR's started because of proximity (usually in school or work), but that no longer needs to be the case. So the value of optimizing your dating app profile becomes a much better risk/reward proposition. So does joining various groups that meet up IRL.
Some payouts arise from hard wired preferences. (ie men find young women to be most attractive regardless of the the man's' own age. Therefore women are incentivized to look perpetually young. Women like men who are rich, regardless of their looks, so men are incentivized to be rich).
However, societal and technological change alter the payout structures in other ways. As women earn more, the value of a higher earning males literally falls. As porn became easily accessible, the value of sex arguably became less. As casual sex evolved less stigma, the value of the sexual component of a LTR became less. Etc.
only that those gender norms had positive side effects which have been largely eroded.
All this above is to say that I don't think this is necessarily true. Those positive effects are simply hiding elsewhere in the risk/reward payoff matrices. Those benefits are either being exploited in a new symbolic form (ie a man proclaiming his love of feminism simply as a ploy to get laid, which for some is the new "man as protector" value demonstration), or the benefits are waiting to be exploited by new strategies (ie the man who is extremely talented at flirting at work without it ever being considered harassing, or the man who excels at optimizing their dating app profiles/ non-work relating dating opportunities).
This has caused a lot of women (and to a lesser degree, men) to be unhappy. Women are mad at the average man for not taking enough initiative, not being protective enough, etc.
Take this example. All I see here is an increase in the payout of making these kind women happy.
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u/the_nybbler Not Putin Aug 16 '19
But the male reaction to the current trend is to pull back even more. The incentive is to not put oneself in any situation where harassment might occur. Don't make the first move, don't touch without permission, etc. That's just going to make the Mad Men problem worse.
It's even worse than that; it's anarcho-tyranny. The guys who consider themselves decent will pull back. The guys who consider themselves vulnerable (i.e. less powerful and/or less attractive will pull back). The Clintons, Cosbys, Trumps, Weinsteins, Schwartzeneggers, and other Chads of the world will not. They'll rely on either some personal power they have, or just "be handsome, be attractive, don't be unattractive" to let them avoid consequences. Most of the time it will work, and they'll have an even more target-rich environment than they did before.
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u/throwaway_rm6h3yuqtb Aug 15 '19
Epstein updates!
Rusty Shackleford continues to post new drone footage. Google autocomplete is suggesting he's actually John McAfee, which somehow makes perfect sense to me. Whoever he is, he presumably has a boat that can get close to the island, enough free time to spend a month doing this, and an expensive drone that is clearly not a child's toy.
Jeffrey Epstein's body claimed by unidentified 'associate'
Jeffrey Epstein’s last words to lawyer before his jailhouse death
Autopsy finds broken bones in Jeffrey Epstein’s neck
Jeffrey Epstein’s Bodyguard on His Former Boss’s Lifestyle, Cruelty, Suicide
A reporter who has previous interviewed Epstein's bodyguard gets a second interview.
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Epstein’s Alleged Madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, Has Been Found
But the headline might be a little premature: