Oceans Yet to Burn

Apparently Nick Fuentes started saying this and a bunch of people have allegedly been harassing people by saying it.

It then became a huge thing on left wing social media.

This made for an interesting divide. I saw a traditional media outlet that's usually fairly neutral credulously report that there was a huge uptick in 'online sexism' based on some NGO bulletin about this very phrase.

Because I have an account on Twitter/X, I had already heard that what actually happened was that Nick Fuentes, the racist Internet meme character, got up to some bullshit again, and probably half or more of the mentions are criticizing it.

Apparently, he also pepper sprayed an old woman that decided to go to his apartment to argue with him (which was a dumb idea on both their accounts).

Part of what was going on I think is that Nick Fuentes was doxxed, so everybody was Discoursing about it, and then there was some other groyperish rando who harassed someone with that phrase and apparently also got doxxed.

Huh. There's a selection pressure.

The kind of person who would think to go to Fuentes's house in order to lecture him in person, rather than quote-tweet dunk, is also the kind of person that would be unaware of other, more sophisticated right-wingers.

Apparently Nick Fuentes started saying this and a bunch of people have allegedly been harassing people by saying it.

It then became a huge thing on left wing social media.

This made for an interesting divide. I saw a traditional media outlet that's usually fairly neutral credulously report that there was a huge uptick in 'online sexism' based on some NGO bulletin about this very phrase.

Because I have an account on Twitter/X, I had already heard that what actually happened was that Nick Fuentes, the racist Internet meme character, got up to some bullshit again, and probably half or more of the mentions are criticizing it.

Apparently, he also pepper sprayed an old woman that decided to go to his apartment to argue with him (which was a dumb idea on both their accounts).

I'm gonna be honest. I would simply not bet against Elon Musk. It's fine not to like him! He can be unlikable. But I don't think there's an interpretation of base reality that's like.

'Elon Musk is bad at getting things done, accomplishing his goals, etc. The guy's a loser.'

It makes you look really stupid when you say things like this. On account of how obviously wrong you are.

Reminds me of:

They say that Elon Musk is around Trump constantly now. I think he's going to be disappointed. Although I think Trump aiming his vibe at a lower IQ and less educated band than Barack Obama did is deliberate, I think Trump's convention speech revealed that he's not a transcendent ideological innovator.

But the "finding" tweet... yeah.

Democrats need to be shaken out of this culture that is simultaneously hubristic and so hostile to agency that it cannot even conceive it.

I think this type of guy thinks "smart" is "socially smart, approved by ny tribe," as in, "what kind of idiot would do something that gets social disapproval from the tribe?" rather than "ability to rapidly process information" or "high transforming power."

I mean, I do not actually like JD Vance and he will use his smarts in ways that I wish people would not be using their smarts.

And of the 5 people involved in the Presidential race in 2024, he's visibly and obviously the smartest one up there from the second he opens his mouth right? And if you don't give him credit for that (and the very real limits of that as well), um.

At the end of the day, I think that in practical terms, "lol Elon Musk is an idiot that's totally incompetent" guys need to be treated as low individual agency.

You don't win them over by appealing to their individual sense of reason, except as a strategy to build internal tension within them to try to push them to undergo development and reach a new level of understanding.

You influence them by converting upstream institutions.

This is one of those those things that explains how historical atrocities happened. There is a huge layer of this kind of guy in society, and the friction that should prevent such things does not exist inside their cohort, but at its boundaries.

Highly socially determining opinions is a very cheap strategy that works great except when it doesn't!

would be much less worried about a trump/generic republican ticket but i honestly think vance is columbian smallpox bad news. bad in a way americans don't understand and have no antibodies to

You think that the country can't handle an enthusiastic Catholic convert?

the catholicism is downstream of the class habitus

I was typing up a longer explanation for @misledmagiard @torschlusspanikattack and @007-nightfire-yakuza-agent but...

Basically, I think that Vrisker may be worried that Vance thinks he's playing a map painting game and is going to Yale Flatten the country into something that looks more South Korean.

I was once in what another Tumblr user called "galaxy brain metacognitive coordination" with Democrats, in that I could coordinate with them based on shared models and information without speaking.

That stopped around 2014.

As of 2024, I can now sense or feel "metacognitive coordination" with Vance on two points - that we need to have a country in order to have functional institutions, and that it is vital not to crash the national (or global) industrial production system.

Vance is smarter than most politicians, though as you can see there's something a bit stiff and awkward about him. The problem is that because he's so smart, I can't get a proper read on him.

I legitimately don't know what he believes or what his goals are beyond those two points.

I think in Vrisker's point of view, online Trump enthusiasts are so happy that they finally convinced a Yale guy that we should have a country instead of either bombing Middle Eastern countries into democracy, or trying to turn the whole world into one big economic zone, that they're not considering he might attempt something as flattening as one of those two other things.

We don't even know exactly what that flattening would be, yet.

As Vrisker has noted, the Catholicism is an alternative to Nick Land, so it's (fortunately) probably not a blind worship of technological capital.

Some of the things he says sound a bit nihilistic, and I'm worried he may have been a bit damaged both by observing the SJ wave and trying to bend himself to fit all the MAGA rhetoric. It might be better if I were somehow about to talk to him one-on-one so that I could assure him that it's OK to use normal moral language again, and tell him he doesn't have to try to fit everything into the national security frame. There aren't that many people that can even summarize the issue in a legible way.

something i've noticed in both DC and online is a weird subterranean current of respect for antonio salazar. and it is both true and plausible to overindex on that catholic regimes came out of the 20th century without highly publicized atrocities such as those of the communists, the fascists, and the liberals

Another thing I'd like to put forward, based on Vance's rhetoric...

The strain of nihilism that sometimes comes forward in his statements weakly suggests that he may be stuck in David Chapman's "Stage 4.5," the gulf between formal and post-formal moral reasoning.

(The line about his bones being buried in the same mountains as the bones of his ancestors suggests this. People search for meaning by getting involved with something that will outlast them. Nations last longer than individuals, so it's tempting for people to invest in them as an immortality project.)

I'm gonna be honest. I would simply not bet against Elon Musk. It's fine not to like him! He can be unlikable. But I don't think there's an interpretation of base reality that's like.

'Elon Musk is bad at getting things done, accomplishing his goals, etc. The guy's a loser.'

It makes you look really stupid when you say things like this. On account of how obviously wrong you are.

Reminds me of:

They say that Elon Musk is around Trump constantly now. I think he's going to be disappointed. Although I think Trump aiming his vibe at a lower IQ and less educated band than Barack Obama did is deliberate, I think Trump's convention speech revealed that he's not a transcendent ideological innovator.

But the "finding" tweet... yeah.

Democrats need to be shaken out of this culture that is simultaneously hubristic and so hostile to agency that it cannot even conceive it.

I think this type of guy thinks "smart" is "socially smart, approved by my tribe," as in, "what kind of idiot would do something that gets social disapproval from the tribe?" rather than "ability to rapidly process information" or "high transforming power."

silly mystic fluff but maybe worth considering, if not more than jokes about ancient frog deities, that one literally valid interpretation of the sentence "destroy DEI and end woke" is "kill god and sleep forever"

Oh, you noticed.

Yes, I'm not sure if they named it that way deliberately or not, but it's inauspicious.

For this reason I don't use this terminology and instead talk about more specific problems.

"paying close attention to politics" means not paying attention to politics at all, because the presidency as an office contains traits that do not interact with "politics" in any sense ezra klein would mean.

the president is someone who every american is presumed to have heard of, and most americans know this. as a result, the president is uniquely positioned to shape the national culture, the fully general overworld, in a way that no celebrity can. if you're on tumblr you're 90th percentile uninterested in authority, so you probably don't understand the importance of this

(and are probably disaffected and socially unattached as a result, unless you've been able to find an obscure and selective subcultural niche to burrow into and hide. maybe you have unusual tastes; maybe you just have an unusual facility with information, which allows you to refine your sense of taste more than most)

and you know what a percentile is, which makes you even less likely to understand its importance. most people are not literate, do not participate in the public square, they eat what's put in front of them, what's big-budget enough to be marketed with an expectation of industrial profit, and that's it besides maybe, maybe, church. you are a medieval scribe, you are a monk, you are in mindset if not in lineage someone who would've been literate when most people aren't.

you are, factually, as a member of a community centered around the recreational production and consumption of words, literate in ways most people are not, today, in 2024. you'd be surprised how many salarymen paid six figures a year struggle to write a grammatical paragraph.

one of the problems that your class has in american politics is its inability to present things in simple, static terms suitable for distribution at scale. like, is it LGBT? LGBTQ? LGBTQIA? what's the proper form of the alphabet? what do these things mean? why are they even things? these are all easy questions to be unconcerned with if you live in a city and read books for fun, but the people outside the monastery literally believe you're changing things on purpose to fuck with them. what's the order expressible in no more than a minute that you want the avatar of cultural power, the one dunbar slot allocated to society itself, to drill into the heads of people who do not keep up with things and can't comfortably read?

This is an interesting analysis. I've seen some faint flickers of it elsewhere, but I don't think this view, "You are the monks; the rest of society is doing something more like returning to an oral tradition," has quite broken through into the political consciousness yet.

I would like to add something on to this.

My intuitive assessment is that there are only about 50,000 people (between 30,000 and 125,000), engaged in serious political discourse on the anglophone Internet.

I think there are more readers, more people who post short and casually, and more people involved in the politics fandom, but in terms of regular, long-form discourse of 250-500 words or more, the rate of discovery of new cliques or groups is simply too low.

Note that when I say, "serious political discourse," I mean consciously and independently considered. This is about process more than result. (Other people may weigh the differing factors, but they don't necessarily post about it.)

would be much less worried about a trump/generic republican ticket but i honestly think vance is columbian smallpox bad news. bad in a way americans don't understand and have no antibodies to

You think that the country can't handle an enthusiastic Catholic convert?

the catholicism is downstream of the class habitus

I was typing up a longer explanation for @misledmagiard @torschlusspanikattack and @007-nightfire-yakuza-agent but...

Basically, I think that Vrisker may be worried that Vance thinks he's playing a map painting game and is going to Yale Flatten the country into something that looks more South Korean.

I was once in what another Tumblr user called "galaxy brain metacognitive coordination" with Democrats, in that I could coordinate with them based on shared models and information without speaking.

That stopped around 2014.

As of 2024, I can now sense or feel "metacognitive coordination" with Vance on two points - that we need to have a country in order to have functional institutions, and that it is vital not to crash the national (or global) industrial production system.

Vance is smarter than most politicians, though as you can see there's something a bit stiff and awkward about him. The problem is that because he's so smart, I can't get a proper read on him.

I legitimately don't know what he believes or what his goals are beyond those two points.

I think in Vrisker's point of view, online Trump enthusiasts are so happy that they finally convinced a Yale guy that we should have a country instead of either bombing Middle Eastern countries into democracy, or trying to turn the whole world into one big economic zone, that they're not considering he might attempt something as flattening as one of those two other things.

We don't even know exactly what that flattening would be, yet.

As Vrisker has noted, the Catholicism is an alternative to Nick Land, so it's (fortunately) probably not a blind worship of technological capital.

Some of the things he says sound a bit nihilistic, and I'm worried he may have been a bit damaged both by observing the SJ wave and trying to bend himself to fit all the MAGA rhetoric. It might be better if I were somehow about to talk to him one-on-one so that I could assure him that it's OK to use normal moral language again, and tell him he doesn't have to try to fit everything into the national security frame. There aren't that many people that can even summarize the issue in a legible way.

things we need to address:

Sigh.

The idea that you could lose something by trying to exercise more control over it may seem counter-intuitive, but it's the kind of thinking documented in the Dao Dejing, which was written over 2,000 years ago in ancient China.

You must learn to think at a higher level of abstraction, and consider second and third order effects.

America will soon have its 250th birthday party, which will be headed by the famous celebrity Donald Trump. America is the greatest force for liberalism that the world has ever known, and possibly will ever know. Under Democrats as they are now, it would be a national day of penance, of apology for the existence of the country. Under Donald Trump it will be a great celebration, and one of optimism, to the point that (at this rate) it might be capped off by a replay of America's signature achievement - the Moon landing.

What would Democrats have had to change to be the party that could lovingly celebrate America's 250th birthday with a tremendous smile, a party that could acknowledge both the benefits and the contradictions of America and act as a proper steward for the country's people and its mission?

Forget doomer essays ("here's this terrible problem that threatens to swallow us all"), now my kick is post-doomer essays (the same thing, except written decades ago and the doom just came true and now we all have to live with it). I've already mentioned Bowling Alone and Achieving Our Country, now I'm reading David Foster Wallace's essay on television and irony, and that's definitely a key entry in the post-doomer canon as well. It's brilliant, as you'd expect, in its analysis of how irony and cynicism not only anesthetize us, but do so in a way that makes the prospect of rebellion against their grip almost laughable, but even DFW could not foresee that television would be eclipsed by a technology exponentially more powerful at making detached irony the default affect of all human communication, with all the consequences that entails.

Couple of notes for readers.

1 - I won't get into it in too much detail, but radiating contempt is sort of the default culture war signal. It shows that someone is on, and loyal to, Team A, and that they consider themselves superior to Team B. It's much more efficient at this than making detailed arguments for Team A (which could have been made out of sincere desire to seek truth and thus don't signal loyalty as strongly), and it's much easier and therefore can be done by much less intelligent and informed people.

2 - I don't generally recommend the use of provocation as a discursive tactic in most contexts. It can make people feel like they're up against a wall, and reduce their willingness to consider alternative ideas. One of the main reasons aggressive social justice uses provocation, intentionally or not, is to reduce the dimensionality of opponents' responses (by making them panic, or making them angry) and thereby limit their maneuverability. In this context, it's a method for polarization.

However, there is a valid use for provocation.

One of the reasons that the default culture war behavior is contemptuous detached irony is that it doesn't actually specify a positive position - it only specifies a negation of a different position. A positive position has trade-offs. A negation is the set "every other position," so the trade-offs are not well-defined.

However, in the face of detached irony, provocation can act as a discourse grenade to flush the guy out from behind the cover of contemptuous detached irony and get him to give you his real opinion. One you have his real opinion, you can have an actual discussion on the relative merits of different approaches. Once this discussion has started, there's generally no more need for provocation unless the guy starts putting up a contempt wall again.

I've practiced this somewhat on Twitter - busting through the contempt wall, letting all of the stupid insults slide off and ignoring them, and dragging some guy into an actual discussion.

It's difficult to assess how well it works, as people generally don't change their opinions instantly unless they're quite undecided, but before they change their opinion, they have to think first.

That's still a numbers game, of course.

Incredibly eye-rolling discourse right now around Dems "not having a media ecosystem to compete with the right", put the cope bong down for a second y'all. You have *the actual media*, the New York Times is the biggest newspaper on the planet. You think there aren't left youtubers? They are so common they have their own stupid group nickname! Dems have podcasts in spades.

People who aren't Democrats won't *listen* to those podcasts because they disagree with their ideas. And the median voter doesn't listen to any political content at all, and just doesn't like you because of a bunch of reasons related to your actual stances and the things that happened under your president. There is no out from that.

Left youtubers and NY times columnists fuckin hate the democratic party for opposite reasons. Fox news & friends circulates right-wing talking points and ideas that circulate widely, they generate vibes that are picked up by Joe Rogan. Bad take man

This posits the idea that people who read the NYTimes, here its critique of the Democratic Party *from the left* or whatever, like that, and they therefore vote for *Trump*. That person doesn't exist! They are fake, they are not a problem, they all voted for Harris. Joe Rogan does not need the NYT's to invent his "vibes" and also this isnt actionable - you can't get smarter people en mass to listen to lockstep propaganda, they will turn it off and listen to media that isn't that. And you can't like censor far left media outlets to prevent them from being nutpicked.

The point is that there is an endless quantity of pro-Dem media out there, making more does nothing. People just dont like what they are selling this year.

NYtimes is not critizing the democrats "from the left", they're all "why don't they listen to centrist Legitimate Concerns?" Rogan does pick up Fox news & newsmax talking points through his guests. While maybe you can't get smart people to repeat your idiotic propaganda, you can get people like Elon Musk to do it

The NYT's absolutely does both of these things, and neither shifts people at margins that matter. And who wasn't repeating Dem's "dumb talking points" supporting Harris? She had Taylor Swift endorsing her! Beyonce at events! Every pundit, podcasts about movies, youtube channels about history, the works. Outside of some idea of "making sure no media criticizes dems ever" - an impossible dream that Republicans also do not have - I don't see what the change is people are debating on this one. They really just want people to like the Dems more and think the media exogenously shifting to be more positive would deliver that. It won't and it won't.

The NYtimes circulates every piece with "have the dems gone too far?" no I'm sorry they do not do those things. Having a inchaote mass of celebrities and influencers issue endorsements is also not what is needed, having no outside criticism is not what they need, you need a fucking messaging apparatus that repeats messages, clarifies where you actually stand and doesn't always feel like it's apologizing.

What message?

I'm trying to figure out what it is you're doing here. Earlier, when you grouped domain expertise (the thing in itself) in with credentials (which are just a measure of that thing) and dumped whatever you thought might be damaging on the other side of the grouping you created, it was pretty clear - your political allies have significant control over the credentialing apparatus, while Elon Musk, your political enemy, gets his perceived legitimacy from the stunning real world success of his rocket company.

You deliberately chose to avoid the correct criticism, that expertise in rocket company development doesn't necessarily translate into expertise in other domains, such as government.

At least one media outlet asked Kamala Harris to her face what she would do differently from Joe Biden, and she apparently didn't have an answer.

You have to know that a stronger messaging apparatus is not a substitute for not having a message, so what's your angle?