Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not heterosexual. The LGBT community has made it crystal clear they want nothing whatsoever to do with me. Care to expand on your experience?
Nope.
Great.
The Internet of Beefs
261–270 of 342 posts
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory is that people have replaced religion with politics. They've fallen away from organized religion, but they still need somewhere deep down, the comfort and certainty, (or "faith"), that spiritual belief conferred. Many have found that comfort and certainty in the ideological tenets of the political groups with which they form affinities. As a bonus, people find a sense of belonging that is fairly similar to…
When I went to church as a kid I don't remember being anywhere this much beef between the religious vs non-religious. It's way worse. It's not just politics, it's sports, sexual orientation, gaming, and many more domains.
I grew up a strict southern baptist in Wisconsin of all places. And I can tell you that while there was very little "beef" between the religious and the non religious. There was a metric $#!t Ton of "beef" between religious people.
Between Baptists and Catholics for instance. Or between jews and muslims. Etc etc etc. Clashes of religious dogmas have been raging just about as long religions have been around. If I remember correctly, Ancient Egyptians attempted to strike entire dynasties from the record because this Pharoah believed in One God, or that Pharoah moved the capitol too far from more appropriate lands.
There has been history altering levels of "beef" between religious peoples over the millennia.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#263I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are? I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking…
Agree. Out of context, this takes a ton of effort to understand. Some examples - Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird - underground Internet that I’ve previously called the CozyWeb - unflattened Hobbesian honor-society conflict - Mookcoins are mined by knights through acts of senpai-notice-me - retreat into what I call waldenponding or to the CozyWeb Several of these link to other essays which, in turn, use ever…
And the first essay linked, about crash-only, screwed up the analogy so badly...
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#264I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are? I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking…
I suppose you could have shortened your comment here to "Why is this article so long?". Why all the extra words?
Explaining yourself is good. That two-paragraph comment explains itself. Get off your strawman horse.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#265In the same way that Spark turns a program into a plan for cluster computation, there's some sort of process by which an idea and a bunch of talking points gets compiled into a big distributed staged media campaign through all channels and institutions that forces culture change that no one asked for. The canonical and somewhat "innocent" example of this is a major advertising campaign for a new pharmaceutical like P…
One of the main ways Facebook succeeded was that it started at Harvard and expanded to other elite schools, then gradually opened to more people. The platform was rationed such that it was something you just got access to, that the cool kids were already using. I’d argue that social justice organically grew through a similar pathway.
Top schools are full of high class young adults. That includes wealthy kids and lower-income kids who nevertheless have high status in their own communities. Many thousand such people studied social justice in humanities classes in the 90’s. They spread those ideas to their classmates, and after graduating, moved on to lead successful careers in law, education, politics etc. where they spread those ideas to more people until they filtered out to society at large.
The missing link you are asking about between academic papers and mass media articles is that the journalists who wrote the mass media articles studied the academic articles in college. I know this firsthand, I went to college with some of these people.
For me personally, a big part of the appeal of the social justice mindset is that it helps me feel like I’m on the good team while earning gobs of money for doing easy work in the tech industry while a lot of others are working hard and struggling. I imagine it’s similar to the popularity of communism in intellectual circles many decades ago, before that ideology was discredited by practical failures.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, yet, here you are talking with other people all over the world for free. Someone older than me, of the hippie generation, once said to me "There were like three TV channels and they went off the air at 10pm. If you were still awake after that, there was nothing to do but sex and drugs." I strongly suspect the 24/7 availability of free entertainment, live online discussion, etc is a large contributing factor to t…
Why do you think the celibacy rate has risen sharply in young men over the last decade, but remained constant in young women? They both have access to the same entertainment options.
I suspect it's because women can now be far more selective about the men they sleep with.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, and I too kept thinking "Hmm, that is a really good point." but I found the statement you called out somewhat at odds with the rest of the thesis. What I understood him to say was that his thesis is that culture wars are not about identity and yet this endless conflict is about a lack of identity. So where does identity really fit in there? The economic and political incentives of inciting "beefing"…
"And there is nothing like amping up the inequality of the distribution of wealth" You're adding a little bit of beef flavor to your comment with that one. Inequality of wealth is something that is increasing. That's a fact. The causes and effects of it have pros and cons that should be debated. People "amping it up" is an assertion that tastes somewhat of beef - but it can be made about both sides.
I can see that interpretation, it wasn't my intent. One of the questions that comes from reading the piece is "what drives people to complain?" The article describes the empowering of "mooks" and in my experience complaining is common but it generally dies down if there is a general feeling among the complainers that everyone is in essentially the same situation. Whereas the complaining does not die down, and gets more intense, when there is perceived inequity between one group and another. My observation has been that if the 'haves' group is about the same size as the 'havenot' group then the complaints are constant but relatively stable in intensity, as that ratio shifts with a smaller and smaller 'have' group, it seems the intensity is increased.
The article discusses this effect a bit in that the size of one's army defines the amount of energy that can be thrown into the fight. I would not be surprised if there was a correlation between group sizes of groups that identify as "havenots" and the intensity of their beefing.
That suggests to me a hypothesis that wealth inequality ratios would correlate strongly with the energy of the conflict. There are some famous conflicts, the French Revolution comes to mind, which, as I understand it, were driven by this sort of energy.
If that hypothesis turned out to be true, then it would suggest one course of action to reduce the 'beefyness' of the conversations.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#268This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…
I wholeheartedly agree but also don't know how to fill those gaps. I'd love a church-like institution. I think about going to church almost every sunday just to experience being together with people in that way. I remember it fondly from being a child even though I no longer believe in it.
if you're in the US, see if there's a UU congregation in your area; it might be just what you're looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Albeit I didn't know about those communes, but I think LGBT acceptance was extremely rapid. The only other change I'm ready to compare it to was slavery and black civil rights: consider that the first state to legalize same sex marriage was Massachusetts in 2004. Over the next 11 years, we reached 37/50 states total, and then in 2015 with the supreme court decision we reach all 50/50. For civil rights: we had slavery…
That's framing things from a legal perspective, but even then there are some key legal steps you're missing (and this isn't conclusive at all): Beating someone based on sexual orientation was recognized as a hate crime first in 1984 at the state level. 1995 and 1998 were when Clinton banned discriminating against gays at the Federal level via Executive Order. 1996 was when Clinton signed DOMA, which is the reason leg…
No states legally recognized same-sex marriage before 1996. Same-sex marriage was a relatively new controversy at the time, but one major reason for that was because Republicans were able to use the issue to motivate their base by trying to preemptively curtail it. Furthermore, DOMA was passed with a broad enough majority that any veto would have been overridden anyway. Picking a fight on DOMA would have only further motivated efforts at the time to prohibit same-sex marriage with an amendment to the US Constitution.
The 1993 ruling in Baehr v. Lewin simply remanded the case to a different count; it did not "find bans on GLB marriage unconstitutional". In fact, by the time the final ruling happened (as Baehr v. Miike), the Hawaii constitution had been amended anyway.
Re: The Internet of Beefs
#270This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…
People like you who did not created ties to a group like that are quite better and less scary then people who have strong loyal unquestioning ties to groups - whether nationalist, traditionalist or radical Christians (some of Catholics in my country lately tie themselves to extremists). Membership and trust in these apparently feels great. That feeling is dangerous. That trust is not build on truths being told, it is…
Yeah it's possible that fearful people have intentionally made us lonely and isolated so they can feel safer.