It's the cheating, stupid.
I posted a comment about this, but I think it's worthy of a post. I will summarize very briefly.
In 1973, David Rosenhan, a psychologist, published a study of mental institutions that basically went viral. In "On Being Sane in Insane Places" Rosenhan claimed to have sent 12 average people to voluntarily be assessed by different mental institutions. He catalogued the diagnoses they received and how long they spent institutionalized. This study was shocking in purporting to show how poorly diagnoses work and in exposing flaws in treatment. His claims, followed in 1975 by the famous movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest essentially killed off institutionalization in the United States and around the world. Those who supported chemically treatments, as opposed to psychotherapy and hospitalization, won a resounding victory, and that's the world we live in today.
The only problem is, Rosenhan's paper was a complete work of fiction, and he lied repeatedly about the experiment, about the results of the experiment, even about the people in the experiment. Rosenhan, himself was one of the participants, and the alleged experimental protocols that participants were supposed to follow simply did not exist. When experiences didn't match what he was looking for, he simply dismissed and ignored them, and made up 'alternative facts' instead.
Investigative reporter Susannah Calahan and history of psychiatry professor Andrew Scull have thoroughly destroyed Rosenhan's paper and results, and yet it is still the most formative and influential piece of work in the field in at least the last 75 years.
Andrew Scull's lengthy article. I highly recommend reading it all:
https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/schizophrenia/rosenhan/2023-scull.pdf
Archive: https://archive.is/fqt8z
This needs to be more widely known. Along with the perverted Kinsey (enough said) and the fraudster Ancel Keys, of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, whose work lead directly to the false belief that "all fat is bad" and who is personally responsible for the high-carb low-fat diet trends of the 1960s on that have killed hundreds of millions, it shows the power that corrupt, fraudulent, and narrative-driven activist scientists can have on reshaping society around us.
No, we should NOT "trust the science," and to say otherwise is distinctly anti-scientific.
https://modretro.com/blogs/blog/the-future-is-retro
Looks pretty cool. Plus, Palmer seems like an ok guy: https://archive.is/LMNJF
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey donated $100,000 to fund Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations through shell companies named after elements from classic video game Chrono Trigger, The Washington Post and Mother Jones report.
I'm being lazy by asking, but... My library is pretty much split between Steam and Gog. I want to get Manor Lords. Is there a preferred platform these days? I've generally stuck with Gog for downloadable installers, but my knowledge is out of date.
Random poster in a thread about games: "Please tell me you've played more than a hundred games in your life. Think about it. A hundred. Should seem like a small number, compared to probably over a million games out there"
Interesting question. How many games HAVE I played? For the purposes of this question, let's say games you've played for a minimum of one hour. Beyond that, the definition is up to you (arcade, phone, flash, console, PC, whatever).
How many games are in your Steam/GoG libraries today?
I'm going to work on a more accurate count, but my GoG/Steam libraries have about 150 games, and I have certainly not played all of those. I would guess my bodycount is between 300 and 400, spanning from the late 80s to today, with a greatly diminished count in the last ten years.
What's yours?
Explosion: https://archive.is/indn0
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/arlington-home-explodes-arlington-virginia-neighborhood
Amazing. Seems like this should be all over the news.
https://twitter.com/townhallcom/status/1714276316382683511
What a guy! I don't know if I like him or Melei better.
This is also in honor of a former poster--Mashiki. He never knew it, but he got me into GG, Kotaku in Action, etc., years ago when I read some of his posts on Slashdot. I was completely unaware before that. He seems to have stopped posted about 2 years ago on all sites, so I hope he just upped his opsec and is still around.
Cheers mate.
This topic came up in an IRL conversation with some coworkers recently. An old-GenZ/young-Millenial type was talking about how important it was for teachers to share their sexuality, etc., with students in order to be good teachers. Crazy town.
I was in K-12 mostly in the 80s and 90s. For the most part, I didn't know if my teachers were single, married, gay, had kids, had pets, etc. They were teachers and they taught. Their personal lives rarely came into the classroom.
There were, of course, exceptions. An English teacher who fancied herself an artist had a meltdown one day over NPR's funding being reduced. To her credit, she set up a debate in her class one day and allowed left and right students to debate the NPR issue. She was not a great teacher, but that was a pretty cool thing to do.
One teacher stands out in my memory. A highschool science teacher. He was an excellent teacher, he was very demanding of his students, and he was gay. He didn't tell us he was gay. There were no pride flags in the room. Perhaps he mentioned a husband or partner at some point, though I don't recall that. He had some stereotypically gay mannerisms, but it was primarily student rumor mill that spread the word he was gay.
One day in this class a girl exclaimed "Mr _____, someone wrote on the desk that Mr ____ is GAY!"
Silence.
The teacher looks at her and says "Really [sarcastically]. Have I ever made any secret of that? Does my personal life have any impact on {whatever topic we were learning about}? No? Let's continue."
And that was that. It never came up again.
What has happened to us that there are people who truly argue for teachers bringing their sexuality, sex lives, and personal lives into the classroom?
I'm visiting a small town, a generally red area, but with some very blue parts due to a local university.
I went into a gaming store today for some Christmas shopping. The door said "Masks Required" but I assumed it had just been left up. I enter and the proprietor says, "Masks are in the box." I say, "Oh, masks are still required?" Answer, yes.
I turn to my kid and say, "Ok, we'll go back out."
As I turn to leave, the owner immediately gets upset and yells "Well EXCUSE ME for not wanting to die. I'm immunocompromised, I want to stay healthy, THANKS FOR CARING."
It's worth noting that the owner appeared to be some non-binary blobfish of a human. Honestly no idea if he or she. If s/he REALLY wanted to be healthy, xer would lose about 75 lbs.
That's pretty much the craziest covid interaction I've ever had.
For more than 15 years I spent time, almost every day, on a small forum for alumni of my undergraduate institution. There were a small number of very regular posters who would participate every day (maybe 30-50+), another group of less-often posters (maybe 100+) who might participate a time or two a week, and then a very large number of people who might pop in a couple of times a year.
There are (were) threads that had been going for years. Certain posters would, like clockwork, start a "Football season is here" thread year after year (made up example). There was a culture.
It was a really nice community, many people had met in person, most hadn't, all had some shared experiences, it was civil, and for many years the poster base was very consistent. I've known some of these guys for literally 15 years now.
About 2 years ago, a new member joined. He is civil, he's not a shitposter, nothing too objectionable on his own. What he is though, is completely fucking obsessive. He's always the first to comment on a new post. He responds to most comments as if they were addressed to him personally. He gets his own point of view--multiple times--out there in every single discussion.
Again, he's not rude, he's not a troll, and he's not insane (he does have an annoying tendency to humblebrag flex), he's just a super poster times ten...times a hundred.
And he has completely destroyed the community. One guy.
I got tired of seeing his name so much, and I found I've stopped reading the forum more than once a week or so. I haven't posted in a couple of months. A good IRL friend of mine commented the same thing to me out of the blue. The "familiar" names that have been ever present for many years are dropping off the forum one by one. I noticed today that a December Christmas thread that reactivated every December since like 2010 hasn't been posted in since last year.
As the longtime regulars are disappearing, new names are becoming regulars, and the tenor of the place is changing.
I guess I'm just amazed that one guy--literally one guy--was able to destroy a community than had been around for decades.
It's not really a case of gatekeeping--he is an alumnus of the school. It's not like the moderators have a rule: "Don't post too often." I don't know what could have stopped this guy. It's just crazy.
that's all
Just curious, does anybody know if the present day Western gender rot is having any impact in China?
I'm wondering because so much of traditional Chinese thought is based in binaries. Male-Female is a core part of Confucian thought (and similarly in Taoism, etc.). The Ying and the Yang are Good/Evil, Light/Dark, Male/Female.
With that cultural background (plus the gentle suggestions of the CCP overlords), I wonder if Chinese society is at all protected.
This is kind of the tl;dr 30-second elevator version of it.
Hegel's Dialectic is at its simplest the belief in a positive idea (the thesis), a competing negative or contradictory idea (the antithesis), and the end result, a new concept that nullifies and replaces both the thesis and antithesis, the synthesis.
Social Marxists, cultural anthropologists, and other leftist thinkers have loved to rely on the Hegelian dialectic to attack Western thought for many years. Edward Said (a literature professor) wrote the famous book "Orientalism" that basically says everything that Westerners believe about the Middle East is pure fantasy, wish fulfillment, the Other; that which the West is not. The West is civilized, therefore the East is savage. Western women are chaste and virtuous, therefore Eastern women are sultry whores (harem fantasy). Western men are honorable, Eastern men are untrustworthy, etc. Said, incidentally, just built his book on the prior work of everyone's famous pedophile, Foucault.
Ok, getting to the point.
Today, why do leftists of all stripes love drag queen toddler time? Why do they love kids burlesque shows? To reference a post from today, why do leftists NPCs love cities and hate suburbs.
Thesis. Antithesis.
The left today is defined entirely by what the right is NOT. To be more accurate, the left today defines itself in opposition to their perverse imaginary view of what the right is.
The left believes the right is Christian, therefore the left exults in atheism, satanism, Islam, etc--anything that is NOT Christian.
The left believes the right is ignorant rural and suburban dwellers, therefore the left is modern and urban--anything that is NOT rural.
The left believes that the right requires strict gender roles and rules, therefore the left wants to tear down the very concept of gender.
The left believes that the right wants to kill all gay people, therefore the left wants to groom more children to be gay.
Edit to add: The left believes the right is irredeemably racist and white, therefore the left exults and honors anyone non-white over anyone white.
Edit to add: The left believes the right is male-dominated and patriarchal, therefore the left attacks anything masculine and praises the feminine.
Some of these points are a bit (but only a bit) exaggerated, but the point is that the modern left is an entirely intellectually bankrupt movement. It is a negative. It can only define itself as the opposite of the right.
Anyone have the latest version?
I'm not looking to start a conversation about the motivations, advantages, dangers, science, politics, etc. I'm just curious. For those willing to respond:
- Have you been vaxed?
- If yes, when did you get vaxed?
- If yes, which?
- Have you received, or will you receive a booster?
Positively dull around here...
In the mid-2000s I worked for a few years at a large 3-letter government agency. Large as in 40,000+ employees.
They were going through a time of transition. Lots of old guard, boomer types were retiring, and huge numbers of new Millennials coming on board. This agency spent a lot of time studying the workplace, interviewing employees, etc., to try to create effective management practices. The report was huge and long (and classified), but I've never forgotten some of the takeaways.
One of the main takeaways is that Millennials have short attention spans. They want to be doing a lot of different tasks, and they feel they are most effective when they are multitasking--meetings, email, working on their primary project, keeping up with team leader on IM, researching, etc. They want to do it all, every day. The study found that, objectively, the work product coming out of those who THOUGHT they were the best multitaskers was the worst quality. That is, those people who thought they were doing a great job because they also seemed busy, were really doing a shit job.
Anyway, the most interesting thing to me had to do with a large study of managers. This agency, as with just about every other agency and business, was in the midst of a big push to train and hire more female managers. I doubt anything changed after this study, but the results of an agency-wide survey were pretty shocking.
Men didn't really care if their boss was a man or a woman.
Women, by a large percentage (something like 70-30), preferred having a male boss. There were many reasons given, but the most common was a variation of "My boss is a bitch to me and nice to my coworkers." Women managers reported that they struggled with either being the "mom" boss or the "bitch" boss, with nothing else possible. Employee conflicts that got escalated up to HR or management were most common between female bosses and female employees.
For what it's worth, I had a female boss, and she was one of the best bosses I ever had. She was also very much the "mom" style of boss.
This was the first time I heard of the "Queen Bee syndrome," and while I'm not sure it has it entirely right, I think there's something to it.
I just wasted 20 mintues of my fucking live going down the Twitter rabbit hole reading about this Jennifer Scheurle / Noni Ochs whatever rabbit hole. I think Jennifer is a loathsome person, but I still have no idea of what she's actually accused of doing. All of the accusations are vague milquetoast bullcrap.
"grooming" "lovebombing" "tried to isolate me from my friends" "I think she was jealous" "She claimed she wanted to lift up other women, but really she was happy with their success as long as they climb above her." "She played the victim and appealed to some of my friends, damaging those relationships with lies." "Significantly impacted my mental health"
So what the fuck did she actually do?
Multiple other women (most with pronouns, fat advocacy statements, disability statements, mental health statements, and statements of bisexuality) have entered the conversation on twitter with similar shot complaints.
One who comes up a bunch (twitter nobody, fat advocate and disabled):
"I worked my ass off WHILE PREGNANT and got put on BED REST because she was ABUSIVE and this lady didn’t even PAY ME but sure, I SCAMMED YOU. @jeanleggett you are a coward"
"I’ve worked in tech and games for 7 years, every single one of my bosses was abusive, controlling, manipulative. @jeanleggett was worse - she pretended to be different, that she understood. Just a different manipulation tactic. She used me until I literally almost died from it."
It's a damn shame that "toxic masculinity" has entered culture the way it has, because you want to see toxicity, BEHOLD TOXIC FEMININITY.
This came to mind reading the thread about Chris Avellone's metoo response.
His accuser: https://miro.medium.com/max/1310/1*FFIXCEmICYAr1-XjH5GlLw.png
8 years ago, she superficially seems fairly normal, kind of cute. Today her twitter has BLM fists, WEARAMASK, pronouns in bio, danger hair, anti-fascist, anti-racist, resists, yadda yadda. You name it, she's got it. Her profile pic is deliberately a picture that makes her look like rabidly angry harridan. (She's also protected her tweets as of today.)
We all know the SJW movement is female driven. I think even SJWs admit that.
What happened to this girl in the last 8 years? Has she realized that society sucks? That her own life sucks? Her obsession with cons, consumerism, and then social justice has left her feeling empty?
Isn't that basically the MGTOW/Incel position? Society and my life sucks, and I'm checking out.
So... are SJWs basically the equivalent of MGTOW and Incels? Are SJWs the female expression of "my life sucks and society sucks and I don't know what to do about it."?
I guess the difference would be that many parts of MGTOW are ostensibly about internal self-improvement, while SJWs' focus is entirely external -- "improving" society.
Side note: "Femcel" is an impossible thing. For any female who wants to get some, there is a male thirsty enough to do it
My hometown is as deep blue as it comes and masking is still the norm. Most stores still require it and you STILL see people in cars alone, walking down the street, even jogging(!) wearing masks. I never wore masks outside and regularly got dirty looks from maskers while hiking or walking down the street.
I'm on vacation now to a red area and it's such a relief to be gone from that. I didn't even realize how oppressive the constant masking is. I took my kid to a playground yesterday that must have had 50-60 people (kids and adults) and not a single mask in sight. My kid was nervous at first (he's had to mask at school for 8 hours a day), and now he can't shut up about how great it is not to wear masks.
It's wonderful.