181–190 of 342 posts
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News Guidelines: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Commenting on votes will only make you get downvoted more, regardless of how virtuous your comment was.
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The thing is it's not just religion. There's been a commensurate, if not larger, decline in participation in "civic organizations" as well. Sports leagues, fraternal societies (like the Elks or Masons), parent-teach organizations, volunteer organizations (like the Boy Scouts or Red Cross), and labor unions have all seen their memberships steadily decline for the better part of the last 50 years.[1] Doubly so among th…
Our social connections have been replaced with commercial ones. Where at one point we socialized to relieve boredom and need, now we have never ending entertainment and those that would capitalize on selling it to us over everything else.
This is an excellent analysis of the state of the modern internet, though I don't entirely agree with his diagnosis of the cause; I think it's more down to two main things: 1. We are all, at heart, covetous xenophobic apes, and we've been doing the same basic thing (arbitrarily define an in-group and an out-group and proceed to wage total war on the out-group) since before we were even human. This is just the latest…
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What a fascinating analogy. There's certainly a well-explored conception of Capitalism's benefiting from particularly "alienating social relations," but as I conceive if it, that benefit's not so much about deriving "energy" from breaking social bonds, as it is about lowering the cost of coercion. After all, social bonds can give us the self-confidence to stand up to our bosses orders, and to re-organize our work alo…
It's a commonplace today that people are defined by what they choose to consume; that one asserts their personal identity by what brands they buy and what media they watch. The ones who are selling membership in these "sub-cultures" therefore stand to gain from the destruction of any form of belongingness that they cannot sell as a commodity.
And are they not, also, affected by what they do not choose but nonetheless consume?
At some point people will realize that Twitter doesn't matter. The sooner that happens the better. For whatever reason, our elites and media are convinced Twitter is very important . Nothing is worse than getting criticized by the peanut gallery. Twitter can end careers, cancel television shows, bring down elected officials. That power quickly turned from, "complain about lost baggage on Twitter and get an airline ti…
This 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 remember it fondly from being a child even though I no longer believe in it.
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Observing what avenues for possible resolution exist seems like a good place to start and a productive line to pursue. But it seems to me that there are some conflicts with deeper roots than IoB culture that have gone on much longer than the internet has existed: whether or not people should be able to be understood as property, whether sacred texts are meant to be understood in the same way as scientific description…
If the architects of these conflicts behave in ways that maximize the duration of the conflicts and minimize the chance of resolution, then that sounds like beef-first thinking. If it's just two (or n-many) sides caught in an asymmetric struggle where they both want some sort of resolution and neither one has the resources to get there, then I see that as a stalemate. Most wars to me don't seem to be beef-first becau…
Conflict itself is not the signal of beef-first culture. Pitchforks aren't either, nor being able to pick out Mooks and Knights. All of those things can be done in the service of values.
Beef-first thinking involves personal/tribal status as first above all other values, perhaps even practically driving out all other values.
And personal/tribal status aren't really inherent values, they really only exist in contrast to some Other. Which means they're inherently tied to actively sustaining conflict.
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I want to upvote this 10x.
Every generation would always talk about the destructive increase in entertainment in their time. My grandfather said his parents told him he listened to the radio too much when he was a kid.
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I want to upvote this 10x.
Every generation would always talk about the destructive increase in entertainment in their time. My grandfather said his parents told him he listened to the radio too much when he was a kid.
You see what's unique about the overall style over and over, and you don't yet see what's unique about each work, so the art form seems simplistic and repetitive even if it is no more so than others you already enjoy.
This 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 read this article a few days ago and said almost exactly the same thing. The mook stuff is fun, but the line you quoted: >“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.” is the important part of the piece for me, and I'm happy to see you and othe…
I’ve noticed this trait in myself, beginning with hurricane Katrina. Half the world away, I immersed myself in New Orleans local live news streams, radio, webcams, blogs and forum threads from on-the-ground folks. I had a period of about three days solid obsessively scanning for new information.
There have been several other events that I responded to in similar ways, including the last US election and that airliner that got shot down over Ukraine a few years back.
The guilty enthusiasm you mention was present each time. The event is almost always something disastrous, yet the ‘rush’ to dig for information and get a sense that you’re witnessing unfolding major events is compelling.
I once got drunk with a German friend and, lacking all tact, lamented that the world hadn’t been very exciting since the end of WW2 and that it felt like we were overdue for something similar. I don’t think the point I intended to express was the one that registered with him, understandably.
Do you do the thing where worrying global stuff unfolding (e.g. North Korea’s periodic Sabre rattling) triggers you into obsessing about prepper SHTF stuff for a while? I feel like there’s a connection between the behaviours, but my sample size is only 1 currently.