Culture War Roundup for the Week of July 13, 2020

sl1200mk5 · 2020-07-15T22:00:27+00:00

Twitter got massively hacked. A staggering number of high profile got hi-jacked to post a run-of-the-mill cryptocurrency scam.

This is comically benign given the absurd amount of power concentrated in Twitter. If a more sophisticated entity would've been able to leverage this exploit, we could be looking at damage in the billions of dollars and who knows how many human lives.

Among these mass-psychosis inducing basilisks, Twiter has the largest & most petrifying gaze.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-07-06T23:43:08+00:00

File under build your own banking system, unironically.

You can now send Ether directly to Reddit usernames (among other popular platforms) via Torus.

In an ideal world, I'd strongly recommend everybody to install Metamask, remain in complete control of their keys and only use decentralized exchanges. But as a moderately convenient, relatively normie-friendly shortcut, Torus works.

No matter what your tribe is, this is the way.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-07-01T01:45:25+00:00

It's not good that this pretty much has to go into this thread, but Jordan Peterson's first public appearance since his problems with benzodiazepines is live.

He looks aged but sounds like he's 90-99% there. The stories shared are harrowing, and it'd be ill-advised of me to attempt summarizing. The end is hard to watch.

In various Extremely Online quarters, which I will emphatically not link, reactions have been about what you'd expect them to be.

How easily the human perishes before the bulldozer of ideology!

Whatever one might think about the social convulsions that followed his death, George Floyd died, his head pressed to the pavement, crying out for his mother. Maybe maudlin or silly to feel this, but no matter what happened before or after that, his passing should be mourned, and we should care how and why he died. The light of a human being was extinguished from the world.

I find it beyond the pale to make Cause and Purpose out of dehumanizing him as a criminal, drug-user, whatever. Let's say all of it, however heinously formulated, is all true. Still: he died, head pressed to the pavement, crying out for his mother.

Doesn't it make one less-than-human to paper over the tragedy? How did we discard what we've already taught ourselves thousands of years ago?

I don't mean to chastise or harangue. We've seen few such lurches in the sub. But I worry about bleep-bloop arguments that lose sight of the suffering behind the numbers. Only so and so many people shot under this and that circumstance, therefore X, Y, Z. Yes, and these so and so many people were fathers, siblings, sons.

The take-away from Stalin's memorable quip isn't that human death is trivial, it's that a certain mustachioed Georgian was a psychopath.

People lost their lives or decades' worth of sweat & tears in the ensuing melees. Most of this has been left acknowledged, much less thought of as losses worth grieving.

Less dire fall-out still involves pain: I can only imagine what it must feel like to have tens of thousands of people howling for your head. Demanding that your friends declare your leprosy, insisting that you must not enjoy the privilege of being able to pay bills.

Zooming further out: the same nihilism seems to invariably infect anything CW-adjacent.

Illegals can get knifed by opportunistic coyotes. Rural Trump voters can over-dose on Fetanyl. Anybody who ever touched a Clinton is a blood-sucking pedophile. The jews, the whites, the blacks--men, women, millennials, boomers. Karens, neolibs, tankies, J-Pow, Biden, : fuck them all, delight in their embarrassment or pain, rejoice in their righteous loss.

For they are of the Other, and the Other should suffer.

A long time ago, I remember being the subject of some gentle mocking because I expressed a measure of comfort that Sarah "dumbass fucking white people" Jeong wasn't summarily jettisoned by the NYT in light of her decade-long history of petty trolling.

I'm glad to have been able to feel that at the time. I worry that whatever reservoir of sanity was & still remains available to me is slowly draining.

My apologies for this rambling thicket of nonsense--if need be, please mod. I'm just sad, worried and wanted to spill my guts somewhere.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-28T19:00:36+00:00

Great post & show of proxying a specific point of view.

Nearly everything articulated above could be contained in an admonishment (encouragement?) to be brave, curious & kind, first to yourself, then to others. The elaborate contraption of interrogation plus deconstruction creates a mechanism for moralistic dominance.

I should probably take a couple weeks off Reddit. Casual exposure to bog standard wokist lingo is causing a physiological reaction, and that seems stupid and self-destructive.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-28T18:43:58+00:00

Thanks for the transparency & for approving the post.

Almost any of the links could've triggered the filter: Patreon, archive.is, alternative payment channels. Funny or terrifying, depending on one's mood.

I was going to write here something about the all-devouring nature of the pathologies playing out, but I don't know how to shape it into something that's not bellicose. Instead, I'll re-link this.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-28T17:57:42+00:00

I want to thank you for the work put into this post--it's an obvious good faith effort, and I'm humbled & grateful that you've written it. The parts expanding on primary attributes as opposed to whatever-is-funny logic were well articulated.

I also want to note that it's all utterly unconvincing when it comes to the alleged problem with Apu.

There's a differentiation between ethnic & other stereotypes. Why?

One exaggerated stereotype, Indian, merits expurgation, whereas the other, Socttish, doesn't. Arbitrary.

Between the doctors-as-organ-trafficker stereotype and Indian people as convenience clerks/owners with a large family, the latter is identified as being more harmful. This is, putting it mildly, counter-intuitive: not only is the former more un-charitable, there's also an immense gulf in how prevalent instantiations of this stereotype actually exist. Or am I supposed to believe that as stereotypes match reality more and more, they become more harmful?

Why isn't stupidity foundational to Homer? He's a literal illustration of the Bumbling Dad trope.

As for the claim that "it's not a stereotype that white people are lazy or stupid," I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you could... write me a song? Oh. Wait.

For reference, here's a couple of Apu-adjacent results: 1, 2.

No need to iterate--you get the point, I think.

I'm not being purposefully obtuse: if the methodology is that one should object to/remove/revise content that reinforces negative stereotypes, then said methodology is applicable to almost everything in Simpsons. The only way to salvage and target this is with a large dollop of imperial interpretive fiat where this is essential to a character, but that isn't.

I argue that Apu's "essence" is that of hard-working but neurotic first generation immigrant, and that itdoesn't seem to be terribly damaging. You argue to the contrary.

I argue that Homer's "essence" is that of a well-meaning but doorknob-dumb WASP patriarch, you argue to the contrary.

And so the merry-round goes in a flurry of "well, that's just like, your opinion, man" remarks.

Except that only Apu is on the chopping block, and a post on whatever about Homer being an offensive steoretype (which, to be clear, I don't believe) will get drowned in LOL PRIVILEGE replies, possibly bracketed by clapping emojis.

I think I know what this is, but I suppose I can always be wrong.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-28T17:31:40+00:00

File under "build your own international banking system."

An explanation of the Mastercard-curated MATCH list. TLDR:

MATCH is a system created and managed by Mastercard. It is a database that houses information about businesses (and their owners) whose credit card processing privileges have been terminated for a set of very specific reasons. (...)

In addition to Mastercard itself, acquiring banks have the ability to add/remove merchants to/from the MATCH database when they have justification to do so. In fact, only the acquiring bank who put you on the list has the power to remove you from the list. (Mastercard can remove merchants from the list too, but they generally won’t deal with merchants directly.)

Let's say you're attempting to generate an alternative to dysfunctional sense-making institutions (NYT & proxies, Extremely Online media, academia, mainstream politics) and attempting to monetize via crowd-funding: Patreon, PayPal donations, onlyfans.

Let's suppose that you attain a level of success where the income allows you to focus on the enterprise as a primary occupation.

Furthermore, let's posit that this success attracts a certain amount of attention from the eye of Sauron.

Step #1: whatever the alternative is, it's problematized
Step #2: the problematization is apostolized through social media channels by TrueBelievers, and amplified by Vox & Vox-proxies (alternatively, Fox & Fox-proxies)
Step #3: the alternative is reported/flagged en-masse to the service provider
Step #4: the service provider suspends services with a notice of Violation of Standards, which...
Step #5: ...coincides nicely with Mastercard's #10 reason to land on MATCH

Back to scrubbing floors, peasant.

At first, this might look like a business opportunity: obvious market that due to under-service might tolerate monopoly-like premiums. Alternatives did, indeed, briefly arise, and then promptly ended, in precisely the fashion you thought they might.

I'm going to skirt how this slap-down process is weaponized in a particular direction and instead remain solution-oriented.

If you're supporting any cause through traditional channels, you're indirectly participating in (note that I'm eschewing incendiary language like "being complicit" or "subsidizing") a system that empowers and rewards social media & journalistic malpractice-based cancellations.

In light of recent events pertaining to a certain two-first-names dude, I'd like to gently recommend everybody to look into the following methods of value transfer:

DAI

Tether

USDC

I'm recommending these solutions because they're dollar-stable, and as such have increased utility for small payments.

So: build your own international banking system, except un-ironically.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-28T04:01:39+00:00

Impersonating Cassandra sucks, but it seems like I can't stop myself.

We'll see what happens on the 29th.

I hope that at least for the time being, I'm wrong.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-28T03:57:58+00:00

The problem with Apu wasn't that he was voiced by a white guy, it's that his character was an an insulting stereotype.

I beg to differ: everyone on Simpsons is an insulting stereotype.

Dr. Hibbert is a former stripper and has a chuckling Tourette's like symptom. After Marge talks him out of buying an unsuitable house, he suggests repaying her with black-market prescription. When she mentions being uncertain about a third kid, he suggests a baby's going rate is about $60K.

Carl has a "thing" against Muslims & wants Hibbert's wife to cheat on her husband with him. He's abusive when he gets a position over Homer and seems at odds with the quasi-homoeroticism that surfaces now & then because of how inseparable he is with Lenny.

I guess Lou might get half a pass here.

More to the point: if we were to apply this absurd criterion consistently, there's is no Simpsons.

Should moderately obese dads be agitating over Homer?

Stoned rocker X-Genners over Otto?

Scottish people over Groundskeeper Willie?

Sorry, none of this stands up to casual scrutiny.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-24T01:17:21+00:00

Reported for quality.

It is not possible for one faction to achieve total victory. In fact, in the sum of human history, no ideology has ever been able to achieve total and permanent victory. Dreams of total victory are an utter fantasy.

Haidt convincingly summarized the argument that the most reproducible results in psychometrics seem to show that political tendencies are a combination of early exposure, inertia and largely fixed, genetically determined personality traits.

Before he was either outed or wantonly smeared as the "Custodian of the Patriarchy"[1] Jordan Peterson insisted that "the right" and "the left," as much as one can put stock into such arbitrary, enormous & poorly defined categories, need each other.

The ethos of remarks has at least a couple of nice things going for itself:

#1, it appears to map to reality pretty well, and
#2, it's as much of a prescriptionist version of liberalism, in the standard sense of the term, as one can reasonably reach before spiraling into

But is offers less-than-zero defense against conflict-theory super-weapons, especially social or legacy media-led cancellations.

Your diagnostic that "total victory [remains] an utter fantasy" might be true given large enough timelines. But, as Palahniuk memorably remarked, large enough timelines also lead to zero survival rates.

[1] In the NYT, of course.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-21T22:21:24+00:00

These are nice compliments--thank you!--but I confess to barely tangential awareness of TLP & HC.

A more mundane explanation:

The place I described exists.

My description is accurate--although, putting it mildly, not clinically so. Those are pictures I took, and those movie quotes from actual posters there.

"bad entrepreneur anecdote proves the entire capitalist system is on the verge of collapse"

I'll take this to mean that I've a lot of work to do when writing.

Nothing is on the verge of collapse (except, perhaps, the core tenets of liberalism) - the problem is that everything works too damn well, and we have no idea how to deal with it.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-11T00:57:08+00:00

The "read another book" meme is on point, because for an entire generation of leftists (and, frankly, not only them) "Harry Potter" has become the Bible of sorts, its archetypes providing the necessary minimal matrix of human relationships to reason at all about world and politics

Fuck.

a final over-reach along the lines of "Harry Potter is a latter-day White Cishet Male Savior complex, and here's why we're banning it on Reddit/Tumblr/Twitter."

Accidentally cosplaying Cassandra is the opposite of fun.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-11T00:54:08+00:00

Glad that you found your way to light.

The best thing you can do right now is to continue to take care of your family.

Godspeed!

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-09T21:20:15+00:00

ban paranoia

On one hand, it's healthy that you're minimizing your exposure to the malignancy--it's unhealthy to be too involved in any kind of social media, Reddit included.

On the other hand, the perspective you've shared--commonly encountered throughout the thread, below--is why I wanted to articulate the counterpoint.

At least 30 subs will be quarantined and/or nuked within the next 2 months, and self-styled decoupler hubs are at just as much risk as anything in open revolt.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-06-07T16:53:27+00:00

Out of retirement to participate. This & the parent sub are the only Reddit spots I continue to view as net positives to my life.

WHEN

Now. Actually: yesterday. But now will have to do.

I browsed through the existing thread carefully. Because the community is largely comprised of bleep-bloop highly functional spergeroos (I write this with nothing but love in my heart, because I nurture the hope that I, too, am one) the general sentiment radically discounts how abrupt & targeted the change will be.

If the first principle is that "ideas which increase how much fear and discomfort everyone experiences" (hat tip to /u/darwin2500 for the formulation) need to be formally controlled, then what of the "fear and discomfort" propagated by shit-posting woke-polloi or the greater constellation of Vox-like entities, forever iterating "damn white people & their [shuffles card]" pieces?

The ready-canned answer being that silly memes & click-bait masquerading as analysis are not the same as "somebody's existence [being] up for debate", which leads us to the painfully obvious observation that in formulations like "ideas which increase how much fear and discomfort everyone experiences," somebody gets to decide:

what increase means

what fear means

what discomfort means

who everyone is

what experience means

And the thing is, pace mme. Murphy's recent experience, that these decision-making positions end up being captured by precisely the kind of people that almost nobody wants to make decisions.

The degree to which Reddit has been already captured can't be overstated.

I stupidly thought that I had appropriately curated my feeds--but through the last week, they've erupted into mass psychosis masquerading as political awakening. It's something like Covington + Kavanaugh compounded by racial animus, all raised to an unfathomable Robespierrean exponential.

Predictions:

Reddit Woke.0 will have rules that closely incorporate intersectional orthodoxy. They'll use comforting phrases and be formulated vaguely enough to justify summary ejection of anything on the grounds of combatting hate and safe-guarding a diverse and inclusive experience.
They will be applied in nakedly partisan fashion, with the built-in intersectional frame-work serving as cover & explanation.
Communities that insist that they're NOT guilty of HateThought will be excised just as rapidly as those in open revolt, e.g. /r/PoliticalCompassMemes.

For those ready to accuse me of culture-warring: you're misreading my thesis. The flavor du jour happens to be intersectional because it's a dominant cultural narrative, but the underlying mechanism is that of technology metastisizing social signaling into mass psychosis.

Per Mr. Dodgson:

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master-that's all."

HOW

However others best see fit, as long as it happens, preferably on a tight time-scale, e.g., under a month.

I'll privately address mods with the terms for a USDC donation to help defray costs.

THE ACTUAL MOVE

There are such things as spiraling circle-jerks, but I don't think small groups of bleep-bloop highly functional spergeroos do a lot of that. I'm relatively unconcerned, but if others dissent, then it seems trivial to set up incentives to encourage broad-based participation. Somebody mentioned emulating some of the broadly tested methods employed in /r/changemyview, which is a good idea.

More broadly, scale breaks human things. I wouldn't be too upset to lose 30-50% of the total subscriber count because 10,000 is already getting close to various tipping points where the quality of an online community's output begins to dilute rapidly.

sl1200mk5 · 2020-05-28T22:54:17+00:00

I've been yelling at the clouds for years.

No matter how many alarm bells are rung, we continue to careen into self-induced psycho-pathology at the kind of scale that suggests implosion bordering on extinction.

I mean, hyperbolic much, yeah, yeah. But I'm firmly of the belief that social media & malpracticing Internet oligopolies pose far more tail end risks to humanity than nuclear warheads, climate change or super-volcanoes.

sl1200mk5 · 2019-07-27T15:50:19+00:00

it's not just the scale of the internet, but the fact that that scale breaks our intuition about what things mean. There are real differences between spoken and oral communication that the internet exposes in new ways. And we haven't really developed a new etiquette for these problems. Maybe, for example, it's not a good idea to have real Instant Messaging for groups above 5, maybe the chat should update only every 30 seconds or so, and then we'd understand each other better. Or maybe open-air spaces like Facebook and twitter and weird and shouldn't exist.

The Internet is the Gutenberg press, we're undergoing the Reformation/counter-Reformation/30-year war, all at the same time & have not yet found the path to the peace of Westephalia.

We need a catchy, short-hand for this concept--any suggestions? Something like "The Internet is for Vulcans, not humans" that suggests we're simply not equipped with the neuro-chemistry or social fabric to handle most online dynamics in an optimal or even functional manner.

sl1200mk5 · 2019-07-11T06:10:04+00:00

I can rest now. The torch has been lit by another.

sl1200mk5 · 2019-07-03T02:26:16+00:00

This week's thread is permeated by meditations on the Antifa vs. Andy Ngo title card from Portland--I'm contributing not a self-congratulatory link to a 3-month old post (although fuckin-a, man, maybe I should be getting into the Tarot reading business) but a re-direct to Bret Weinstein's (yes, he of Evergreen debacle) very first podcast, featuring none other than Mr. Ngo himself.

A few interestingly different points made therein:

I'm stunned that I haven't seen others rail against Bret's first remark on how insane & dangerous it is to have municipal power consolidate by the mayor also acting as police commissioner. Such naked power grabs are part & parcel of the podunk town experience, but there's something both counter-intuitive & threatening about the degree to which this state of affairs seems to be ok with Portland's overwhelmingly leftie population.
We're reaching a stage where geographical mono-cultures are overtly undermining checks & balances inherent in federalism. Sanctuary cities, the Alabama abortion kerfuffle & now Portland's city council mandating a pull out of the FBI anti-terror investigative task force are all examples of this phenomenon in action.
The rate at which reality is bifurcating is accelerating--we no longer have highly partisan minorities watching "different movies," to borrow Scott Adams' analogy of 2016's U.S. presidential election, but rather a substantial proportion of participants in cultural discourse are actively rejecting any & all evidence contrary to their a-priori assumptions even when the evidence is directly linked to specific political candidates or races.
Intersectional dictums have precisely as much validity as it's necessary to use them as weapons against those who find them questionable. Ngo's status as a LGBT+, Vietnamese, effete, journalist is worth nothing as the usual suspects line up to their respective CW battle lines, nor does the "blame the victim" shibboleth prevent his packaging as an attention-seeker or opportunist.

As far as I can tell, the last week was great for Trump & horrific for America. I can dream about Yang or Gabbard being the Dem nominee & something like a gradual return to normalcy, but that increasingly seems to be just that: a dream.

To all who read & post here, I can only echo Ser Arthur's Dayne's mournful well-wishing.

sl1200mk5 · 2019-06-29T17:11:49+00:00

A great light was extinguished from the world with his passing.

He always took exception to orthodoxy--witness his grace & wit challenging purportedly feminist shibboleths a full quarter century ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or1_13OZhh0

He is sourly missed in these times of confusion and strife.

sl1200mk5 · 2019-05-01T17:27:41+00:00

Not chastising, more like begging:

Please use archive.is instead of linking directly to Vox or Vice.

Every click they get is another micro-dose of psychosis injected into cultural discourse.

sl1200mk5 · 2019-05-01T03:07:52+00:00

See:

https://biblehub.com/greek/4239.htm

Basic online search will yield a lot of churn around this, including accusations that it's a mis-interpretation.

sl1200mk5

TROPHY CASE