586 karma · joined May 17, 2016
It's called Utopia, it's a conspiracy thriller from Channel 4, and if it doesn't send chills down your spine and raise your hackles then you aren't alive.
I don't care about internet points jackass.
Many men feel the way I do about this. Making who you fuck the main part of your identity is as pointless as making your race the main part of your identity. This is a valid opinion and I'm sticking to it unless somebody has a good argument for why I'm wrong.
Why can't they get their own elk lodge, hmmm?
Money/Control/Power is not a fixed quantity jealously guarded by ragtag formations of men.
It's something generated by an activity of some sort.
Do the activity, reap the rewards.
I'll let Bill Burr explain the simple male brain.
That negative experience aside I think it is fine for men and women to spend time apart if it is voluntary.
When a member of the opposite sex, even one, is in a group of the other sex then the atmosphere changes. I don't have a better way to describe it, but unsurprisingly it suppresses some activities.
I think what I hate most, and I really do mean hate, about the left is how they have damaged something which used to be much stronger, which is male friendship. They associated male friends with homoerotic implications because gay sexuality is their fixation. There is nothing wrong with being gay, I support all forms of civil liberties for gays including marriage, I voted for it in the Irish election recently even though I had to visit 4 polling stations to get it in properly. Nonetheless I believe also that platonic male friendship has suffered badly in the last few decades for no good reason. Gay sexuality does not threaten male friendship, but the politically motivated and constant insertion of it into everyday life, especially through the media has been destructive. Many many men have not evolved a deeper friendship because they were afraid of being sniggered at as homosexuals, and I think that is wrong.
If you read books about generations gone by it is obvious that many men had much deeper friendships than they do today. Today those sorts of friendships are not really possible without stupid irrelevant discussions about sexuality.
I'm willing to believe somebody would try to smear Wikileaks.
I find it hard to believe they would reuse the same business address for both their overt and covert actions. Surely nobody is this dumb.
Democracy has existed for 100 years in most Western states!
In fact the majority of economic and social progress in Western states did not occur in democracies, but under constitutional monarchies with parliaments and an aristocracy.
I think the Internet will take us to a new age that looks strangely like a much older one.
New social conservatism on the Internet does not look like old social conservatism because it is out of living memory. It is a return to what I could only describe as aspirational Victorian Era with updates from the Diamond Age. It pines for a new Golden Age. Exploration and feats of strength. Great Men and Women. Charity for the weak. Gifts for the strong. Perhaps people can earn points to elevate themselves in the class system, which you can think of as an immersive MMORPG with AR but with real life consequences and rewards. There would be tea, iron railings, umbrellas, crumpets and art galleries with beautiful art once more. All UPVC would be replaced with timber.
The neoreactionaries would produce a government and society focused on artificial intelligence, advanced genetic engineering, nuclear power. The history books would be written to explain to schoolchildren that an evil cabal of religious marxists attempted to wrest control of the West. You may have formerly known these people as 'Social Democrats' (shudder). The entire history of the 20th century would be reframed in Spenglerian terms. A typical school exercise might read "Compare and contrast the 3 Demotic Terrors: Democracy, Fascism and Communism" and it should be understood that democracy and religion would be considered socially inappropriate since they were the reason the Third World War began. You can believe in them, but proper people don't. We shall also have an excellent array of hats to choose from, far from the dismal hatless tyranny we reside in today.
Since this world knows a vast amount about people's preferences, voting is not required. Your interests are duly noted and factored into a personalization of your local government's offerings. You are of course free to leave to the next Seastead or Landstead (formed by Climate Change and Demotic Warfare!), since each group has different interpretations we take the ability to opt out seriously.
Would this be a dystopia? Or a radical improvement on our age?
A boycott is fair if it is below. Consumers choosing not to buy products, investors deciding not to buy stock, halting a newspaper subscription or not associating with former friends.
But a boycott from above is a tyranny. Firing employees for their political views, trying to get your mutual friends to disassociate with your former friend.
But isn't the majority of funding Trump is receiving coming from small donations from lots of Americans?
I get that money in politics is a frequent source of concern but this doesn't look like one of those occasions.
I feel this is instinctively understood by every Sanders supporter who claims "we're not in a real democracy!" or "we don't have enough democracy", but they are using the wrong word. They are living in a republic with a democracy but they aren't seriously represented.
Representation is the telos of democracy but it does not always achieve it.
And that is why everybody should become a reactionary. Only by returning to first principals will everybody get what they really want. There's too much cruft!
> Feel free to point to a government that is non-democratic or imposes significant restrictions on democracy that has a free society.
China. Singapore. Japan. Korea.
All these states have some kind of democracy. Yes, even Communist China does have some democracy. All these states have significant restrictions on it. In the most democratic ones power has been in the same hands about 90% of the time.
> Of course it depends on what you mean by "freedom"; if you mean it is "free to move capital around" but not "everyone is free to elect their leaders" then sure, but that is not how I understand the term.
Let me help you out. It is certainly the case that the word freedom has become seriously overloaded, much like the word democracy. Most of us see freedom to mean autonomy in this context.
In a practical example if the BBC requires you to pay for a TV license because you own a visual display then your freedom is reduced because your number of choices is being narrowed. You have less autonomy because even if you don't watch TV or the BBC channels you are forced to pay for their services anyway.
Another practical example is I hear the people in Flint are paying for poisoned water and have no choice in the matter otherwise their houses and belongings may be possessed by the state sending debt collectors.
What we're seeing I believe is the old right and left coming up. You see that a bit with Sanders (who I see as a moderate leftist who'll be replaced by somebody further to the left), the new Labour leader and then UKIP/National Front and the neoreactionaries which hail from the 19th century.
This is why there is so much aggravation around and fur flying. Lots of people are being exposed to the concept that huge numbers of people seriously disagree with them for the first time. Old questions considered settled are being redebated and the old answers are no longer convincing.
If this is allowed to rise then a form of balance will be achieved. As President Snow articulated in the Hunger Games, you actually require a certain amount of change to keep long term political stability.
If not then yes, I do believe there will be war. I've felt that way for several years now. I think the CIA analyst's predictions and timeline on Europe are accurate.
tldr; If you allow Trump/Le Pen etc in power now, there will be less conflict later on. If the established order in the West cockblocks today then tensions will build into much worse outcomes.
Do you know if artificial gravity, nutrition and shielding will solve most of the problems?
He also said that the survivors will be stronger and fitter once the radiation dies down. Those extra limbs will enable our descendants to access all of Unicode on a single keyboard thereby enabling international peace and prosperity ... until the next time!
I'd flag this as political nonsense contributing nothing but it's just too funny not to leave up.
It's just that there's an unremitting tide of them, partly for the reason gus_massa pointed out to do with url filters.
It is where a political organization, among other things, puts headlines in the news to try and wrestle control away from the owners of a company.
This is not imaginary, in China this is explicitly done with the Communist party and small companies when they reach a certain size or amount of influence.
The right believe the left is doing this with Silicon Valley. Here social justice warriors are something like shock troops indirectly manipulated by higher level political organizations like the Clinton foundation. We know for example that Salon and Gawker were put up to specific stories in pay for play and they received mysterious anonymous donations when they did so.
You don't have to believe that, but perhaps this will explain to you the hesitancy of the other side in taking your proposition seriously.
When a right wing tech employer hires a person (esp. a woman or minority) they sometimes wonder if they are part of a leftist ideological struggle which is orthogonal to the business's interests. An example is that we see the CEO of Yahoo, a woman, firing large numbers of men to replace them with women for no conceivable reason relating to merit.
This sort of thing appears to be uncontroversial in Silicon Valley but it is very not OK elsewhere. Mayer is being sued for sexism against men with a class action lawsuit I believe.
I predict Silicon Valley bifurcates along leftist and rightist lines but there is also a chance political chicanery tears the industry apart.
All of this is to explain to you that we are very aware of this:
> community has a tendency to ignore other "soft" problems (like gender equality or diversity in tech) that are very relevant and important.
It's that if I were to start a company tomorrow I would explicitly make it clear that SJWism was something that would get you immediately fired for the same reason having a 'StormFront' club in the company would be bad news for the manager.
That is fine but our society does not appear to recognize 'social critic' as a formal job. I'm not sure that says anything positive about society and the power of credentialism. He could leave the university but in some way he kind of can't either.
I think Julian Assange had a similar problem only more dire. He must be called journalist or he loses a protective mantle even though he has long become more important than a mere journalist. Maybe one day we'll recognize 'leaker' as a formal title and a Wikileaks as an institution.
Is opening up communication channels responsible for social conflict?
Is Mark right or wrong in his last paragraph.
I've always assumed he was wrong but the premise should be examined explicitly.
Naturally I don't claim that the radio or newspapers invented the social conflict. I am saying they could be responsible for the actual incidence of conflict itself.
If you picture each person as a collection of memes, then;
> The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. - H.P Lovecraft
The potential for conflict in the individual is not resolved with conflict for the most part. We do know the more intellectual among us tend to be more neurotic, perhaps another hint at the essential lovecraftian truth.
That means barefaced conflict is only possible when an individual meets another and communicates. It is then latent contradictions become evident.
Far from the notion that communication acts as a meditator and leads to peace, the truth might be the opposite.
tldr; if we don't talk to each other, everything will be fine!
My opinion has always been that right brains and left brains really do think differently and comparing and contrasting is very important for metacognition.
As an Enlightenment scholar I often have trouble with with once said:
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... does not even understand that very well".
That quote is commonly known, but I find the next part most interesting.
"Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form."
J.S. Mill would have liked Scott Alexander.
Read the essay, it is not mine, I was partially quoting it. Then if you want to comment or have thoughts we can talk about it.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-...
I do not recall any complaints about financial aid being given to Clinton from Silicon Valley. Compare that to the vitriol dedicated to one person going in the other direction. That there is bias is unmistakable.
If you want to talk censorship you should look at the fact that a right wing opinion will get you downvoted on HN.
If you don't believe it, try making an account and make some standard right of center statements. It's like playing with one hell of a golf handicap.
https://vimeo.com/28437700 (complete with scientific innovation)
Only a ignorant person can think SA is a success story. It is a horror show from beginning to ending. What a colossal fuck up.
You'll never admit you failed will you? That this 'Rainbow Nation didn't work.
You failed and you failed real hard, I am so sick of the lies the media have told about SA. This was the mother of all failures and it is dressed as some success story. I feel sick in my stomach.
That is how most totalitarian societies punish their dissenters.
Scott Alexander explains it well:
"No One Expects The Spanish Inquisition, Especially Not In 21st Century America
People in ancient societies thought their societies were obviously great. The imperial Chinese thought nothing could beat imperial China, the medieval Spaniards thought medieval Spain was a singularly impressive example of perfection, and Communist Soviets were pretty big on Soviet Communism. Meanwhile, we think 21st-century Western civilization, with its democracy, secularism, and ethnic tolerance is pretty neat. Since the first three examples now seem laughably wrong, we should be suspicious of the hypothesis that we finally live in the one era whose claim to have gotten political philosophy right is totally justified.
But it seems like we have an advantage they don’t. Speak out against the Chinese Empire and you lose your head. Speak out against the King of Spain and you face the Inquisition. Speak out against Comrade Stalin and you get sent to Siberia. The great thing about western liberal democracy is that it has a free marketplace of ideas. Everybody criticizes some aspect of our society. Noam Chomsky made a career of criticizing our society and became rich and famous and got a cushy professorship. So our advantage is that we admit our society’s imperfections, reward those who point them out, and so keep inching closer and closer to this ideal of perfect government.
Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”
Congratulations. You have found a way to criticize the government in Stalinist Russia and totally get away with it. Who knows, you might even get that cushy professorship.
If you “criticize” society by telling it to keep doing exactly what it’s doing only much much more so, society recognizes you as an ally and rewards you for being a “bold iconoclast” or “having brave and revolutionary new ideas” or whatever. It’s only when you tell them something they actually don’t want to hear that you get in trouble.
Western society has been moving gradually further to the left for the past several hundred years at least. It went from divine right of kings to constutitional monarchy to libertarian democracy to federal democracy to New Deal democracy through the civil rights movement to social democracy to ???. If you catch up to society as it’s pushing leftward and say “Hey guys, I think we should go leftward even faster! Two times faster! No, fifty times faster!”, society will call you a bold revolutionary iconoclast and give you a professorship.
If you start suggesting maybe it should switch directions and move the direction opposite the one the engine is pointed, then you might have a bad time.
Try it. Mention that you think we should undo something that’s been done over the past century or two. Maybe reverse women’s right to vote. Go back to sterilizing the disabled and feeble-minded. If you really need convincing, suggest re-implementing segregation, or how about slavery? See how far freedom of speech gets you.
In America, it will get you fired from your job and ostracized by nearly everyone. Depending on how loudly you do it, people may picket your house, or throw things at you, or commit violence against you which is then excused by the judiciary because obviously they were provoked. Despite the iconic image of the dissident sent to Siberia, this is how the Soviets dealt with most of their iconoclasts too."
I still don't understand why you're suggesting journalists have a status different to that of Tom from down the street.
From whence doth their rights come forth?
I think most of the population puts journalists somewhere between rat catchers and dog walkers. Somebody has to do it I suppose but I don't like them putting on great airs.