Damn, that was a compelling read. When I clicked on the link and saw it was from 1941, I felt a grim resolve to read it in full, because when people post decades old pieces on fascism, it always hits hard (like that Sartre bit about antisemitism that gets shared quite often).

Reading through this piece was a curious feeling, because I was wondering which of the people at this party I might be. Certainly not Mr A, because I am descended from no-one great. I certainly didn’t go to the same school as any Mr A, so I’m also not Mr B. With a certain sense of dread, I considered that maybe I’m Mr C, given that I also started out very poor and worked my way up to where I am (I’m the first in my family to go to university, for example). I concluded that whereas Mr C’s battle against class has left him cold and hard, I have found myself becoming warmer as the years go on.

I was thinking like this throughout most of the piece, perversely waiting for someone I will never meet to tell me whether or not I’m the kind of person who becomes a Nazi. In the end, none of the archetypes described seem to fit me. It turns out that although fascism today functions remarkably similarly to how it did then, the world itself is different enough that the archetypes today don’t map onto the past.

I know I’m just a random person on the internet, but I’m super proud of you for this. Like, making that decision and turning a serendipitous situation into an active choice takes a strong sense of will. Congrats

I have a couple of friends who smoke and I really enjoy heading outside with them when they go out to smoke. I especially enjoy it when it’s very cold out, because nothing makes me appreciate the cosy warmth of my home more than a brief spell of bracing cold.

Shame about the passive smoking though

The British didn’t create the caste system from scratch, but they had a huge role in shaping what became the modern caste system. I’m sleepy, so I’m going to quote direct from this BBC article (though it’s a good amount article, if you have the time. It does a good job for a summary, imo)

“[Britain’s reshaping of Indian society] was done initially in the early 19th Century by elevating selected and convenient Brahman-Sanskrit texts like the Manusmriti to canonical status”

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" [The caste] categories were institutionalised in the mid to late 19th Century through the census. These were acts of convenience and simplification."

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“The colonisers established the acceptable list of indigenous religions in India - Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism - and their boundaries and laws through “reading” what they claimed were India’s definitive texts.”

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“There is little doubt that the religion categories in India could have been defined very differently by reinterpreting those same or other texts.”

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“In fact, it is doubtful that caste had much significance or virulence in society before the British made it India’s defining social feature.”

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"The colonisers invented or constructed Indian social identities using categories of convenience during a period that covered roughly the 19th Century.

“This was done to serve the British Indian government’s own interests - primarily to create a single society with a common law that could be easily governed.”

“A very large, complex and regionally diverse system of faiths and social identities was simplified to a degree that probably has no parallel in world history, entirely new categories and hierarchies were created, incompatible or mismatched parts were stuffed together, new boundaries were created, and flexible boundaries hardened.”

“The resulting categorical system became rigid during the next century and quarter, as the made-up categories came to be associated with real rights. Religion-based electorates in British India and caste-based reservations in independent India made amorphous categories concrete. There came to be real and material consequences of belonging to one category (like Jain or Scheduled Caste) instead of another.”

Apologies for just quoting at length at you. I fear that presenting info this way will give the sense that I am lecturing you, but that is not my intention; a large part of why I share this info is because I learned of this relatively recently and I was astounded by how significant Britain’s role was.

Subvert expectations by being normal. It’s diabolical.

I always hope that Ubisoft loses.

This comment is for Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who was abducted by the Chinese government after he was selected as the 11th Panchen Lama. The Panchen Lama is the 2nd most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama.

He was 6 years old when he was taken. He and his family have not been seen for 29 years. I think about him often.

It’s an ironic tragedy that the average LWer claims to value critical thought far more than most people do, and this causes them to do themselves a disservice by sheltering in an echo chamber. Thinking of themselves as both smart and special helps them to make sense of the world and their relative powerlessness as an individual (“no, it’s the children who are wrong” meme.jpeg). Their bloviating is how they main the illusion.

I feel comfortable speculating because in another world, I’d be one of them. I was a smart kid, and building my entire identity around that meant I grew into a cripplingly insecure adult. When I wrote, I would meander and over-hedge my position because I didn’t feel confident in what I had to say; Post-graduate study was especially hard for me because it required finding what I had to say on a matter and backing myself on it. I’m still prone to waffling, but I’m working on it.

The LW excerpts that are critiqued in the OP are so sad to me because I can feel the potential of some interesting ideas beneath all the unnecessary technobabble. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see that potential, because dressing up crude ideas for a performance isn’t conducive to the kinds of discussions that help ideas grow.

Oh, nice! I stumbled across this essay ages ago and misplaced it due to forgetting to bookmark it. Thanks for bringing it back to my attention.

It is quite a beautiful thing to see Scott Alexander’s beige technobabble eviscerated by such vibrant and incisive prose.

They do seem to worship Bayes

Edit: I want to qualify that I’m a big fan of Bayes Theorem — in my field, there’s some awesome stuff being done with Bayesian models that would be impossible to do with frequentist statistics. Any scorn in my comment is directed at the religious fervour that LW directs at Bayesian statistics, not at the stats themselves.

I say this to emphasise that LWers aren’t cringe for being super enthusiastic about maths. It’s the everything else that makes them cringe

I am reminded of this excellent essay that I saved a while back: "“your brain does not process information and it is not a computer”

I think the quirky foreignness of British phrases and cultural motifs is a big part of why shows like Dr Who are so popular in the States.

I always find the “rational self-interest” folks funny, because they always seem to imagine people’s inner nature to be anti-social and ruthless. Over the last few years, I have been working on being kinder, and I am the primary beneficiary of that work. Trying my best to not be an asshole is me at my most rationally self-interested.

Yeah! Contrarians unite!

If ever you feel like you’re making slow progress, perhaps it will be a small comfort that I, a random internet person, am impressed by how pretty your factory is. My factories feel distinctly Spartan compared to what other people make — clean, and functional, but not very stylish

Thanks for that link, I have sent it to a friend who I know will love it.

Gosh, you must have been startled by that. Tempered glass terrifies me because it feels like it has demons inside (that’s why it explodes so violently when the seal is breached)

I feel quite anxious trying to make sense of geopolitical events like this, especially given I’m ashamed of how little thought I gave to Palestine before Israel escalated from apartheid to all-out genocide; as you say, this is a ridiculously complex situation, and the snippets we get on the news are ridiculously oversimplified at best, and egregiously biased at worst.

Syria seems like a far away, foreign land where conflict is the inevitable norm. But it feels like that’s something that I’m meant to think, because it’s politically useful for people like me to think that way. Unfortunately, simply knowing that you’re subject to propaganda is far easier than actually gaining a more full and nuanced understanding of a conflict.

Oh I struggled most of all on the sand twins. I’m mildly claustrophobic and those caves freaked me out (especially as I tend to think poorly under pressure, so running out of time made me panic and get lost more).

I think it’s good to check. I’ve experienced similar things with words like “dude”. It’s safest when speaking to friends, I’ve found. Like, I game with a group of friends who are almost entirely trans/nb, and none are men, yet sometimes we will jokingly refer to the group as “lads” or similar. In the context of me saying it, it isn’t offensive to them, because they know that I respect their gender and identity, so it’s clear that it’s ironic and joking.

With strangers, some extra caution is warranted. For example, I am autistic and often make autism related jokes at autistic friends, in a way that could be offensive if I was saying it to a stranger. To give a specific example, if a friend said they wouldn’t be around later because they were going out with friends, I replied “don’t lie — you don’t have any friends, you autistic weirdo”. In context, this was very funny because both of us are autistic so the fact that I was saying it to my friend negates the insult because we both clearly have at least one friend (another layer of funny is that my friend’s friends were also very neurodivergent, so another disproving of the “autistics don’t have friends” insult). Without this irony, that comment would seem cruel and mean-spirited.

The problem is that you can’t necessarily assume good intentions from strangers, especially on the internet. I have been insulted in the way I jokingly insulted my friends, and it hurts (and I think sometimes jokes with friends can feel like healing from the hurt of genuine insults and slurs). It’s hard to laugh at a joke when you’re not sure whether it’s a joke or not.

In the context of dude, I think that’s a good example of why hard and fast rules don’t work. I’m a cis woman and generally I’m fine with being called dude (and also tend to use it in a gender neutral way (with the understanding that some people won’t receive it in a gender neutral way, even if I intend it that way. In practice, that I know some friends who prefer not to be called dude, and I try to be mindful of assumptions when talking to strangers)).

Sometimes though, I do feel irked to be called dude — often it’s in an online discussion where it seems like the person I’m speaking to is assuming that I am a man (because thinking of men as default is a pervasive thing that even I find myself doing.) Often assumptions like that aren’t personal, but especially as a woman in science, I often feel weary of the frequent implications that I am a guest in male spaces. “Weary” is the key word here — sometimes if I feel irked, it isn’t so much about that individual conversation, but more a case of the background miasma of unpleasant people in my life causing me to become hyper vigilant.

This is a long way of saying that whilst it’s good to be mindful of using memey phrases (especially amongst strangers), you should try not to take things too much to heart if you are chewed out by someone; sometimes the level of ire that someone expresses is disproportionate to your error because their annoyance may relate to how many people have made that error towards them, rather than the number of times that you have made that mistake. Online conversations unfortunately make it too easy to assume poor faith of people, and that can lead to a very hostile tone to things. Having a lot of shit to deal with isn’t an excuse for being unkind, but it can be an explanation. That in mind, it’s useful to check about what’s okay to say, but realise that there’s no straightforward set of rules. What’s okay for one person might cause someone to blow up the next. Or it might vary day by day. This is frustrating to deal with if you’re just wanting to avoid pissing people off, but I find it easier to understand if I think about how little context I have of the person who is yelling at me. Their life circumstances may cause them to be overly guarded, and that’s not your fault, but you can help to shift the balance by showing compassion and acknowledging that there’s a human on the other side of the screen, and apologising and moving on (which may or may not mean changing your behaviour in future).

This got overly long, my apologies. For the record though, I don’t think it’s a dumb question you asked. It’s a kind one. Figuring out how to coexist in a messy online world is hard, but being considerate of other people’s needs is a good start.