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Has Siskind been called out for talking a little too pointedly about crime rates in predominantly black neighbourhoods or something? (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way)
41

I don’t think we’ve reached 100% fixation on nobody-uses-Confederate-flags-innocently. A distant relative of mine who lives in the South and has no known political opinions still has a Confederate flag sticker in his room

“no known beliefs” is performing a lot of work by being able to read as a “blank slate,” rather than “I don’t know what his opinions are, but I do know they can’t be that bad!”

Apropos of nothing, can someone tell me what fallacy it is when someone has a phrase read two different ways? Is that bad? I need to learn how to thibk more rationally.

> In Canada, terms for Indians (the legal term) do this to an annoying degree. There is Indian, Native, Aboriginal, and Indigenous. In roughly that order. I know I sure believe this person who doesn't even know the term First Nations.
What's really performing a lot of work is saying "no known political opinions" and citing in the same breath the one big clue about what those political opinions might be. It's ridiculous.
The correlation between displaying a Confederate flag and their political opinions is literally what he's investigating. So using the Confederate flag as a data point for political opinions would be circular.
It is extremely disingenuous to pretend that you don't know the political opinions of someone who openly displays a political symbol. We're talking about a confederate flag here, not something innocuous that happens to be a part of "southern culture". It's also extremely stupid to say that someone has "no known political opinions". Unless the person in question has some kind of mental handicap (in which case I'd point the blame to other people around them). But apart from this case, on the one hand you can just ask people about their opinions (either directly or obliquely), or you can USE THE GIANT OBVIOUS CLUE AT YOUR DISPOSAL, and if they deny its political significance, you have no obligation to take their word for it.
Equivocating > verb > > gerund or present participle: equivocating > > use ambiguous language so as to conceal the truth or avoid committing oneself. > "“Not that we are aware of,” she equivocated"
For what an anecdotal data point is worth, I actually had to explain to my good ol' Oklahoma redneck boy father a few years back that the Confederate flag was not, in fact, a symbol of southern pride (never mind that Oklahoma wasn't actually part of the South...), and that having it hung up in his living room was a massive (literal) red flag that was not saying what he thought it was saying. He took it down, and was rather embarrassed about the whole thing.
As a non-American I'm well aware of plenty of people who have basically no idea that the confederate flag is a racist symbol. I'm pretty sure I was a teenager before I even realised it was something other than a logo for the Dukes of Hazzard TV show. Lots of people here think it just represents being a bootlegger or a "rebel" (as in someone who drives too quickly down country roads, screeching "yeee haw" and knocking down mailboxes while blasting AC/DC on tinny speakers. There's even a black man here who drives a small, bright orange motorbike and his helmet is done in Confederate flag livery on an orange background with the caption "General Lee" But I do NOT just give these people the benefit of the doubt when I encounter them in the wild and there's usually context clues as well To quote the ADL "care should be taken to evaluate the symbol in the context in which it appears."

This story shows

Such a classic Scooter transition. “I will now use this story I made up based on my beliefs as evidence for my beliefs.”

hyperstitions

“Now reader, let me reach for a confusing-sounding bit of jargon instead of a commonly-used phrase that you already know, like ‘self-fulfilling prophecy,’ so that I can educate you.”

In 2019, I wrote a post about respectability cascades

“Citing my previous bit of made-up jargon to assist the justification of this new jargon…”

“Black people commit more crime”

“And finally, let me arrive at my real, true, sincerely held belief: racism.”

You missed the part where he slithers around the 'black people commit more crime, ' in order to land squarely on the more rounded and even more reprehensible 'black people commit more crime, even when accounting for poverty'
Look, man, there's only so many hours in a day...
> let me reach for a confusing-sounding bit of jargon this was an ingroup signal. He is assuming his readers are hip to Nick Land too.
it works. seeing "hyperstitions" almost made me stop reading and close the tab
seeing "Astral Codex Ten" had much the same effect on me
Maybe if the NYT cancels him some more we could eventually get it to "LAN Codex Taters".
Excretal Sandbox
It's not necessarily a reactionary signal, unless Mark Fisher and Matt Colquhoun too are reactionary. It's a somewhat useful concept - but of course Scooter himself is signalling edgy NRx Land

I just want to bookend this whole screed with.

“… anyway, that’s why I’m banned from the sushi place around the corner.”

In fact I feel like quite a few of Siskind’s more snivelling pieces could be made much more transparent this way.

This one feels like a hastily written rebuttal.

I was wondering why Scooter has been getting less air time in the sub recently, but if this piece is indicative of his current standard I shall wonder no more.

It’s so lazy as to almost feel like punching down, though there are a few classic Siskindisms.

Bay area myopia? Check. Absolutely arbitrary assignment of figures to otherwise unquantifiable phenomena? That’s a big check. Lip service to Bayes? Check. Poorly reasoned, totally tone deaf and factually incorrect takes on race? Check!

Why does it feel like the whole essay was written simply to trot out the old ‘black crime rates are higher than white, even adjusting for poverty’ line?

> I was wondering why Scooter has been getting less air time in the sub recently, but if this piece is indicative of his current standard I shall wonder no more. Yeah, to put it in movie terms his earlier stuff is [Cyborg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dv3bpt8_s8) while this is [Birdemic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu0sy9OG4RU) - they're both *bad*, but the former at least is technically ccompetent enough that you can have fun laughing at it. The latter is just... dull and unpleasant. >there are a few classic Siskindisms The only one you missed is being ridiculously uncharitable to your polictical opponents, who couldn't possibly be acting out of sincere beliefs and are instead cartoon supervillains who just want to make the world worse for everyone.
>Yeah, to put it in movie terms his earlier stuff is Cyborg while this is Birdemic Now you're speaking my language.
I really "liked" Birdemic. Have to check out Cyborg, though
Have you ever heard of 'best of the worst'? on YouTube? If you like bad movies they're a must. They watch a selection of bad movies each episode and then rank them based on the most entertaining. Even if you don't appreciate their comedy stylings, which aren't for everyone, it's worth googling the list of winners, it's a fairly definitive list of the best bad movies.

One thing I will say for him, his new, lackadaisical style really makes those untruths jump right off the page.

God, what an atrocious comments section.

Who would have thought a main motivation for this community is wanting a space to comfortably type slurs.
Scott's paying customers. His comment section is the Culture Wars thread with required SSC civility words.
At least one of the comments, going off on how much they hate people using asterisks to censor slurs, had this gem in it: > I mean, this is so basic that it's a lesson that even the first Harry Potter book gets right

Scott is claiming that words become slurs due to annoying politically correct people going out of their ways to claim that they are slurs.

Apparently there are no people using the “common everyday word for a group of people” in such a derogatory and insulting manner that it becomes loaded with negative connotation ! No sirree

Nope, it’s just mean negative SJW people going out of their way to ban words for no particular reason.

I’m tempted to call Scott a cretin, a term that was at one time a medical diagnosis, but through some mysterious process that was in no way linked to any ableism whatsoever, is now an insult, for some weird reason.

This story shows that slurs are hyperstitions.A hyperstition is a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true.

Isn’t this true of all language? Words mean what they mean, and carry the connotations they do, because people believe they do.

I even agree that many words regarded as slurs maybe started out differently. I don’t even relate to people being offended by specific words much. But the fact is some words DO offend people, sometimes a great deal, and it isn’t really very hard to just not say them. It’s really one of the easiest ways to be respectful to others.

The thing is, he pretends that 'Japs' was originally simply the accepted short hand for 'Japanese', and that it has been perverted into a pejorative term from one that was perfectly acceptable, but accepted by who? Wouldn't that be important? The same way that knowing where other pejorative terms originated, and who accepted them, might be key to understanding why they are seen as unacceptable by those against whom they were used, in the modern day. He does nothing to support his statements here, he just chooses what, I can only assume, he saw as the least inflammatory racial pejorative he could find, presumably so he could type it without outing himself as someone who wants to reclaim racist terms, and hand waves some lazy excuse for why it isn't as bad as you think it is. I'm no philosopher of language by any means but the whole idea of 'hyperstition' seems tenuous to me, or at least so vague as to be meaningless. Any human idea could be described as such in that they might have real, tangible effects on the world if enough people believe them.
He could absolutely make this same argument with all kinds of words that have morphed in meaning over time. Yet the example chosen is an ethnic slur. HMM

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I’m actually surprised he’s capable of making an argument this weak and professing to believe it. The phrase “previously independent subregion” is doing the work of a thousand thesauri.
The phrase “previously independent subregion”, when applied to the American South, isn't even historically or legally applicable. Someone needs to tell Scott how that "Southern War of Independence" worked out there.
Audience response: [singing] Just how many southerners did you talk to Scott?
Maybe. The more time passes the more I suspect he is, intentionally or not, utilizing the same extremist strategy of the modern Republican party. If you constantly push the Overton window of your followers in one direction, they will feel like they're the same but to everybody else they seem more and more extreme. In this way, you isolate them and bulwark yourself against criticism in the same stroke.
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What, ally? He’s deriding the CPC here is he not?
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I think what the poster is saying is that Scott is using the CCP as the bad guys to make his disingenuous comparison, not allying with them, as you said above. They're not arguing that Scott's comparison isn't being made in bad faith.
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Virulent sinophobia is *also* an actual sentiment among far-right wingers like him, the american right more broadly, and (concerningly) centrists everywhere
lmao that comment is pretty insane
He's getting destroyed in that thread

https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/ArsonAtDennys/status/1362153191102677001

archive version https://archive.is/EP7PA

Ah good he’s going full Nick land too. What a world

Diet caffeine free Nick Land. “Respectability Cascades” will probably not have the same staying power as “hyperstition”, as far as neologisms/turns of phrase go. Hyperstition sounds downright snazzy.

hyperstition is from Land no?

hyperstition is from Land yes
Make up your minds, is it from Land No or Land Yes? I need to firm up my travel plans.
Where ever you go it will be, Land Ho!
rationalists quite frequently have a copy of Fanged Noumena that they pretend they've read (much as the rest of us, tbf)
For the record my fav is A Dirty Joke.

Nice window into the mind of how privileged white ppl view racism and slurs.

I’m a privileged white person, via wealth, income, and class and not just race, and I don’t view slurs this way. Conversely, plenty of people who are far less privileged than I, but still white, do view slurs largely in this way. Being aware of and recognizing my own privilege doesn’t suddenly mean I am not privileged.
it's cool that you have learned and grown, but the attitude in scotty's screed is perniciously common nonetheless

I had to stop reading at the mention of dogecoin.

“Dogecoin is a great short-term investment and you need to buy it right now!” is true if everyone believes it is true; lots of people will buy Dogecoin and it will go way up.

This is not what people believed! People who get sucked into that kind of thing who prop up the artificial market value of cryptocurrencies believe it is a great long-term investment as well, and that the value will keep going up indefinitely. And their beliefs didn’t change reality, because bubbles burst, Ponzi schemes collapse. This is not a good argument for him to bring up, so he had to misrepresent the beliefs involved.

Anyway, let’s all start believing “Siskind” is a slur.

Kind of what happened with Santorum.