"5" is such a bad glyph! maybe the worst one i use routinely.

It would be a little less bad if we did not already have S, but still bad.

Learning that part of Elizabeth Holmes' megalomania was making everyone read "The Alchemist" making me ask:

If you were an egomaniacal tech startup entrepreneur, what book would you foist upon your minions?

The King in Yellow

i feel like the school shootings as like a go-to criticism of the US are like an automatic "this person is innumerate or ignorant" signal. the US has tons of problems! the US has a truly massive amount of problems, many of which are rare among wealthy countries! and yeah, school shootings are *bad*, obviously. but to anyone capable of basic division they are so obviously not a big deal.

I mean you are right quantitatively but I can't help but read this as

This Is not a Big Deal, Says Only Country where This Happens

It's not actually the only country where this happens, the Onion article that slogan came from was written by satirists with anti-gun-rights politics, not by people who are actually investigating rates of shooting deaths in different parts of the world.

Wait, what are the rates of mass shootings in the US compared to other countries?

"The U.S. endures the most mass shootings in the world, with—depending upon one's definition of a mass shooting (see next section)—somewhere between 21 and more than 600 in 2020. A 2015 Politifact article correcting then-President Barack Obama’s statement that no other advanced country experiences mass shootings like the U.S. cited data from 2000 to 2014 to prove that mass shootings do indeed happen in other advanced countries. However, the article conceded that the U.S. experienced 133 shootings during that period, while the next-highest total was Germany with six."

Mmmmhmmm...

So if I am reading these data correctly, for the years 2009-2015, the US had 199 deaths from mass shootings, while the EU countries totaled 228 (using only those EU countries listed and assuming those not listed had zero deaths). The EU has a larger population than the US, so annual deaths in mass shootings per million people comes to 0.84 in the US and 0.63 in the EU. The EU has a larger population than the US, so accounting for that, the EU was 75% as deadly as the US for mass shootings over this period.

And that is a much higher rate in the EU than I expected. Of course, in both areas, mass shooting deaths are still very rare. For comparison, an average of 23 people were killed by lighting strikes in the US over the years 2012-2021.

The years 2009 to 2015 are going to distort the numbers by including the Utøya shooting in Norway, 72 deaths in a single day, one third of the total for 'EU' countries (which Norway is not). Of course, excluding the outlier has its own problems. Averages are kind of tricky for this sort of power-law process; we see the same with deaths from terrorism where your results change drastically depending on whether 2001 is included or not.

The figures I gave above only include EU countries, so I already excluded Norway, along with the other non-EU countries mentioned in the article. On the other hand I did include the UK, since it was in the EU at the time.

i feel like the school shootings as like a go-to criticism of the US are like an automatic "this person is innumerate or ignorant" signal. the US has tons of problems! the US has a truly massive amount of problems, many of which are rare among wealthy countries! and yeah, school shootings are *bad*, obviously. but to anyone capable of basic division they are so obviously not a big deal.

I mean you are right quantitatively but I can't help but read this as

This Is not a Big Deal, Says Only Country where This Happens

It's not actually the only country where this happens, the Onion article that slogan came from was written by satirists with anti-gun-rights politics, not by people who are actually investigating rates of shooting deaths in different parts of the world.

Wait, what are the rates of mass shootings in the US compared to other countries?

"The U.S. endures the most mass shootings in the world, with—depending upon one's definition of a mass shooting (see next section)—somewhere between 21 and more than 600 in 2020. A 2015 Politifact article correcting then-President Barack Obama’s statement that no other advanced country experiences mass shootings like the U.S. cited data from 2000 to 2014 to prove that mass shootings do indeed happen in other advanced countries. However, the article conceded that the U.S. experienced 133 shootings during that period, while the next-highest total was Germany with six."

Mmmmhmmm...

So if I am reading these data correctly, for the years 2009-2015, the US had 199 deaths from mass shootings, while the EU countries totaled 228 (using only those EU countries listed and assuming those not listed had zero deaths). The EU has a larger population than the US, so annual deaths in mass shootings per million people comes to 0.84 in the US and 0.63 in the EU. The EU has a larger population than the US, so accounting for that, the EU was 75% as deadly as the US for mass shootings over this period.

And that is a much higher rate in the EU than I expected. Of course, in both areas, mass shooting deaths are still very rare. For comparison, an average of 23 people were killed by lighting strikes in the US over the years 2012-2021.

seahorse seashell party. who didn’t invite me

mr walkway. mr walk-down-me-im-the-walkway. lead me to the building. fuck you

5643

This is the Finnegans Wake of skluugposting. As in, I'm a big fan of the author's previous work but I just cannot figure out how to interpret this one.

Customer: MOST EVIL. DMV: HOSTILE? Verdict: ACCEPTED

When you live on East Vile Street and you are proud of your neighborhood.

i nominate "male gaze."

I nominate "capitalism"

if I were a doctor specializing in sleep i would wear one of those cartoon caps with the puff on the tip with my labcoat and speak in a soft soothing voice all the time, and carry a teddy bear around with me that I referred to as my assistant

Would the teddy bear be wearing pajamas?

Okay, fine, let’s define “wokeness” so you people will shut up about it

Wokeness is amorphous but not nebulous. Like all social phenomena, it exists only to the extent to which it is subject to formal description, and its purveyors are wont to resist any attempts at being pinned down by outsiders (I cannot, for example, think of a single philosopher associated with Postmodernism who did not reject the label–at least not at first). The difficulties with defining human phenomena are compounded greatly while the phenomenon in question is still unfolding, but that does not mean that earnest efforts toward definition cannot be undertaken. Wokeness most certainly exists. It deserves to be delineated, even if its vastness and dominance make it difficult to do so in a manner that everyone (or anyone) finds fully definitive. 

Wokeness should be understood as an immense and rapidly adopted change in the manner through which left-liberals adjudicate morality, righteousness, and even factuality. It applies not just to individual people but to nearly everything: broad social happenings, historical events, places, industries, and matters of scientific fact. It engenders contradictions at an hysterical pace, which actually strengthens the movement, due to the radicalism of its approaches.

Wokeness is best described as a form of Associationist Manicheanism. Whatever falls under its analytical purview is declared either good or bad (never both) not according to the beliefs and ideologies in question, nor to the material consequences thereof, but according to the conceptually recognized identity markers associated with whatever is being analyzed. There are good things and good people. There are bad things and bad people. Good things are good because they are good. Bad things are bad because they are bad. All other forms of adjudication–from direct empiricism, deductive and inductive logic, or even simple cause-and-effect–are subordinated within wokeness, if they are even acknowledged. 

The lack of ideological consistency and dismissal of material analysis naturally leads to a slew of obvious contradictions, which makes wokeness very difficult to pin down even as its presence becomes more and more undeniable. This provides an added bonus to the movement’s purveyors, as their wanton duplicity allows them to claim the lack of existence of something that’s happening right in front of them, an absence of belief in very the causes they champion. (”Why are you freaking out about this? It’s not even happening! And also it is happening and it’s good.”)

The wokes believe that police and prisons should be abolished, but also that we need much stricter gun control and hate speech laws. They believe it a form of severe violence–perhaps even genocide–to not understand the identities of others as they understand themselves, but also that you face a moral obligation to understand yourself as they tell you to. They believe that outsiders should be subjected to brutal criticism regarding their very existence, but also that any disagreement is a form of violence. They think that violent street crime–up to and including rape–should be dealt with via the light hand of “restorative justice,” but also that vague accusations of causing discomfort should be enough to ruin a man’s life and career. They revel in victimhood but deplore fragility, embrace vague “ways of knowing” while demanding absolute clarity and unpassable evidentiary bars of from their ideological enemies, and regard truth as a white supremacist fiction while possessing unshakable certainty in their own worldview. 

There are many, many more examples. These are just ones from the top of my head. 

These contradictions are allowed to stand. They are never acknowledged, let alone addressed. This is because the woke believe there is only one, universal mechanism for (in)validating any belief, action, or assertion: determining its conceptual association with the pre-established Good or the pre-established Bad. They don’t start by asking “is this statement true” or “is this belief harmful.” They can tell everything they need to know by running a quick identity index of the person who made the statement or professed the belief. Sometimes, in the absence of obvious markers of race, gender, or sexuality (or in the case of those markers contradicting the desired (in)validation outcome), they will revert to aesthetic symbols or nominally ideological group affiliations. So, yes, a white Democrat man outweighs a black Republicanman , who outweighs a white Republican man, who is outweighed himself by a black Republican woman, etc, etc, but most issues play out according to partisan lines.

And that’s it. Seriously, that’s it. You can regard it as a bold new era of social progress or as a civilization-destroying scourge. Your opinion does not matter. The point is, this is all a very blunt and very radical sleight of hand in regards to how beliefs, actions, and statements are adjudicated. Its purveyors readily admit to this. Nothing written in this essay is in the least bit deniable. 

Of course, my analysis won’t matter for the reasons outlined above. I am a white (bad) man (bad) who has previously expressed reservations toward left-identitarian activism (very super double bad). Three Bad designations is too much to overcome, no matter how much I profess myself to be on the left or assure my readers I support that broad social goals that wokeness disingenuously claims to be striving toward. But even if I were a black trans woman who was born without legs, this essay would still be dismissed because it would be conceptually associated with the people who criticize wokeness, who are bad. I am bad and this piece is bad. That’s all there is to it. And that means I’m wrong, wokeness isn’t a real thing, but also it is a real thing and it’s so good and perfect that criticizing it makes you bad.  

The thing for me that seemed odd was that, if felt like it came out of nowhere, fully formed, with believers confidently spreading The Word.

In what forge was this weapon made?

Lassiez’s Faire forum on Something Awful was not where the material came from, but where it was forged into a blade: the need to express glib contempt above all. everything is easy to identify because only stupid contemptible people don’t agree with you. nothing withstands any sort of scrutiny because you respond with the “wordswordswords” emoticon. the identity-games scale of Wokeness is based on the hypocritical Internet Funneyman scale of “when someone does the same thing, is it CAWG because I like them, or is it kys because I don’t like them?” 

there is no underlying reality or factual basis to interface with because it was made by people for whom an underlying reality is poisonous. this is what happens when people who are allergic to sincerity posture about how they are the only ones who care about a better world.

In my opinion we need to look back at least as far as the 70s, which is when I think politics started to eat everything.

The *type* of thinking defined here, shorn of particular ideology, seems to me to be at least somewhat identifiable in right-wing nationalist sentiment. Here’s what I focus on:

“The wokes believe that police and prisons should be abolished, but also that we need much stricter gun control and hate speech laws. They believe it a form of severe violence–perhaps even genocide–to not understand the identities of others as they understand themselves, but also that you face a moral obligation to understand yourself as they tell you to. They believe that outsiders should be subjected to brutal criticism regarding their very existence, but also that any disagreement is a form of violence. They think that violent street crime–up to and including rape–should be dealt with via the light hand of “restorative justice,” but also that vague accusations of causing discomfort should be enough to ruin a man’s life and career.”

Which of these goals have they managed to translate into American policy in any systematic way?

I can actually name a handful of laws which were passed with the specific goal of preventing some of that stuff, I can’t name any, off the top of my head, mandating it (EDIT: aside from some victories for gun control, but that hardly seems like a central pillar of wokeness).

The last bit, collapsing a person’s career, does translate into real action, but primarily by parasitizing existing laws designed to make employment generally precarious, rather than through specific lawmaking.

Contrariwise, how much of the above would we feel comfortable arguing about with a coworker? Or having on Facebook for employers to read? Do we snore through corporate training which takes the whole woke framework for granted, biting our tongue because it’s better not to rock the boat?

The thing that happened was that this stuff gained cultural power. Forty years ago a TV station was way more concerned about angry letters from the conservative Christians and put the stuff from the radical feminists in the circular file; today it’s much the opposite.

This stuff has a lot of soft social power and simultaneously almost no political power, and I think any attempt to understand it needs to see that as foundational, but unfortunately basically everyone has reasons to ignore that.

Social power is political power. That’s how politics works. Social power among the class of politicians, doubly so. So we can confidently date the ascent of wokeness to political power to on or before the day Bernie Sanders confusedly said that all lives matter and had reversed course by the next morning. The day that Joseph Biden committed to making his VP pick a woman of color, similarly, is the last possible date for the ascent of wokeness to having the power to control the highest office in the land.

It “hasn’t achieved anything” because it’s incoherent and any coherent policy is necessarily out of step with wokeness.

See, it’s weird because I just lifted a whole bunch of things from the OP that can absolutely be the subject of policy.

For example, defunding the police. Surely we agree that police funding, and, in fact, the existence of police at all, are policy issues amenable to law-making?

Texas passed a bill to prevent local municipalities from lowering police budgets; I’m not aware of any municipalities that have abolished the police or even permanently reduced their budgets.

This is a very strange kind of political power, one which is somehow simultaneously in control of the highest office in the land but largely uninterested in exercising that power to make policy.

I mean, OP literally says woke people want hate speech laws; if that’s not the case, we need to reassess that definition!

No, defunding the police is obviously not a viable policy issue. Because it doesn’t literally mean “removing all funding from the police”, and in fact no one who advocates it can be pinned down on what it does mean. Because it’s incoherent, and (at least on some level) they know that.

And, again, it is not necessary to achieve policy goals to have political power. As we learn from Sir Humphrey Appleby, the strongest form of political power is the ability to shape what gets discussed at all, which is a power that social power gets you. This is extremely powerful even if you don’t get your preferred goals passed, because you prevent your opponents from even getting a chance. Judging on this metric, it is inescapable that woke people have a complete stranglehold on the national Democratic Party. And only somewhat less on the local level.

I see. I assume, in that case, that there haven’t been any successful efforts to change or even discuss the use of woke training materials in primary schools?

I also assume abortion is still legal throughout the nation, yes?

Honestly I don’t understand how you can promulgate this view.

You’re essentially arguing that getting everyone around you to agree that cops are bad is a much stronger and more important form of power then *actually changing anything about how the police act* and that is *bonkers* to me.

Also, with all due respect, if none of this stuff is going to effect policy in any way, why on earth should we care? And more importantly, why pb earth would we be trying to address it through policy? If nobody actually wants to do anything to the police budget, why not just ignore everyone who says “Defund the police”? If nobody actually wants to abolish prisons, pass hate speech laws, or change school curricula, why on earth would we waste time on opposing those things?

None of that, literally none, is responding to what I said, rather than something vaguely similar it would be convenient for you for me to have said. You really are walking epistemic closure, aren’t you?

I think he is responding to your point. Or at least he’s trying to.

@morlock-holmes seems to be responding to your claim “the strongest form of political power is the ability to shape what gets discussed at all, which is a power that social power gets you.”

His response is to cite two examples which he thinks refute your point: “successful efforts to change or even discuss the use of woke training materials in primary schools” and “abortion is still legal throughout the nation”.

He apparently doesn’t realize that both of these examples fit the form “Should we do woke things, yes or no?” - i.e. that both of these are actually examples of your point in action, the ability to shape what gets discussed at all. Abortion yes or no, woke training materials in primary school yes or no. The most anti-woke option up for discussion is to undo a previous action.

For a comparable example of some other political philosophy having that kind of power, look at Intelligent Design. When was the last time Republicans tried to stuff Christian doctrine into the curriculum of every elementary school in the USA?

This is bordering on the most insane definition of power I have ever heard of.

“Power is the ability to ask for something.”

“Do you get what you ask for?”

“Irrelevant.”

“These people are powerful enough to suggest that abortion ought to be legal! And that the police ought to be defunded!”

Oh, so they have the same power that is granted to literally every American by the first amendment?

First of, why on *earth* would I care about this so-called “power”? Second, every opponent of wokeness has exactly the same kind and amount of power, and third, how on earth could you possibly limit this form of power?

If woke power is merely the ability to discuss a thing in public, why on earth would we possibly care?

EDIT: You’ve told me I’ve completely missed your point but I’ve read it over three times and I genuinely have no idea what your point is.

“Judging on this metric, it is inescapable that woke people have a complete stranglehold on the national Democratic Party. And only somewhat less on the local level.”

Okay, so what? No really, so what?

I oppose Hate Speech laws and I oppose defunding the police. So one possible answer to “so what” is, “Woke people will make policy that you dislike.”

But… they aren’t. Despite the near complete stranglehold on the democratic party we aren’t seeing what I would expect given the definitions we’re using, which are a raft of hate speech laws and budget cuts.

“Oh that’s not the kind of power they have or want.”

Well, then who gives a shit if they have a stranglehold on the Democratic party? If they’re going to keep the police budget the same then who gives a shit what their slogans are?

Feel free to say what part of your argument I’ve gotten wrong.

If the woke crowd really did have control over what gets discussed at all, then the questions would not be “Should we do woke things, yes or no?” They would be “Should we do this woke thing, or this other woke thing?” Because if they had that kind of power, they would set the Overton window so that it only includes woke options.

“You prevent your opponents from even getting a chance” simply does not describe a country where Roe v. Wade was overturned and where states are banning cross-dressing. Nor does it describe the Democratic party by itself – not when Joe Biden, a lifelong centrist, beat out women, people of color, and a gay man for the nomination.

So the only options are “total control” and “no control”?

And they’d have to use that total control the way you think they would?

Yes, when I was refuting the explicit claims that wokeness has "the ability to shape what gets discussed at all" in order to "prevent [their] opponents from even getting a chance" (empahsis in original) and that "woke people have a complete stranglehold on the national Democratic Party" (emphasis in original)

what I was really saying is that they in fact have no power at all. By contradicting one extreme position I was actually affirming the opposite extreme position. Good job deciphering the hidden message in my words.

Behind the scenes of Godzilla (1998)

man why didn’t they just have this guy fight him off. dude’s huge

i wouldn't fight godzilla if i was this dude's size, for roughly the same reason i wouldn't fight a komodo dragon at the size i currently am

Not even to save New York?

brb thinking about the immortality of the crab

So here I am in Maryland, and -- is it just crabs? I mean, everyone loves a crab, don't get me wrong, but is there really nothing more to this state's identity than "we have crabs"?

We also have a bangin’ flag.

sir and/or ma'am that is four flags in a trenchcoat

and you know what here's a language related one

The confusion comes from people analyzing the prefix ir- to mean "not," as in irregular, but in fact the meaning is "into, in, on, upon," as used in irradiate or irrigate, for example. And this is just the form of the prefix when it precedes a word starting with r, where the default is the more common form in-, as in inhabit or inform. Strange that this one word should be so controversial when the same prefix passes without comment in so many other words.

I don't think this is true. the best guess ican find for the origin of 'irregardless' is that it takes the first bit from 'irrespective', which is in fact the negative in- prefix.

anyway my opinion is that 'irregardless' is best described as a real word but people saying it's not are often getting at a real thing about it and they're not so much wrong as using terminology differently. arguably using terminology *badly*, but calling it a misconception doesn't get at the real issue.

Let's compromise and say that irregardless is an irreal word.

and you know what here's a language related one

The confusion comes from people analyzing the prefix ir- to mean "not," as in irregular, but in fact the meaning is "into, in, on, upon," as used in irradiate or irrigate, for example. And this is just the form of the prefix when it precedes a word starting with r, where the default is the more common form in-, as in inhabit or inform. Strange that this one word should be so controversial when the same prefix passes without comment in so many other words.