The Grey Tribe

a primitive culture of savage robots

[isaacsapphire]

I think you need to calm down a bit isaac, in regards to the heredity thing, but yes I understand what you mean in that there is a vague progressive consensus towards feeling uncomfortable to hostile around non-blank-slateism when it is brought up in relation to people and populations of people

and I'd really wonder what all the people who have parents they cut contact with would think about the very obvious hereditarian conclusion that they are more like their parents than pretty much anyone else

Though interestingly, epigenetics, to my limited knowledge, has demonstrated that there may be a kernel or more of truth to lamarck after all.

Sorry about the delay; I was writing a reply, fell asleep, and tumblr ate it.

I thought I was being calm. The fence around the law keeps getting more fences built around it in the last couple decades.

Epigenetics do provide a scientific explanation for why heredity is not necessary or sufficient to explain traits.

Two people can both be genetically inclined to a trait that certain forms of result in behaviors negative enough that many people would prefer to never speak again with a parent who expresses those behaviors. Eg the child of an alcoholic may themselves be genetically inclined to alcoholism, but also still not want to interact with their alcoholic parent ever again. This is not generally seen as a contradiction. “I will not repeat my parents’ mistakes” is a pretty common sentiment, and isn’t a contradiction. “I know that I am inclined toward a negative tendency because I saw my parents fall into it, so I will take steps to avoid that” is also fairly common.

[the-grey-tribe]

Epigenetics is a real thing, but it's usually deployed as a meaningless buzzword or just-so story. You can just add "because of epigenetics" to something, without thinking in terms of gene expression or genes to be expressed, and this lets you hand-wave a lot.

[mariacallous]

[the-grey-tribe]

Why would you make a separate dinner? Does he have dietary restrictions? Do you have dietary restrictions? Are you a really picky eater? Is he a really picky eater? Do you not believe in shared meals as an important thing in a family or a relationship? Is somebody on a diet? What the fuck is the story there?

I mean, I know I'm not normal. I don't know what is normal. I had an ex who bought a lot of shoes, and people told me it's normal, but she bought shoes to the point where she ran out of space. I had trouble communicating the difference between "women be shopping" and the pathological form. That ex was also a really bad cook.

I also had an ex who was a good cook, but a really picky eater, and she constantly insisted she wasn't a picky eater. She definitely was. She wouldn't eat stuff I cooked after asking me to cook it, because it had stuff it in she didn't like (THAT SHE KNEW ABOUT). Often she wouldn't eat food she ordered at a restaurant. Like, I don't know what is normal.

I had an ex who insisted on making salad dressing with more vinegar than oil, but that's just eccentric.

But honestly, this feels like a weird thing to complain about. You're cooking for two, and your fiance doesn't eat what you eat, and you don't eat what he eats. This is... fine? I guess you have to cook two different dishes. I can't even determine who is to blame here. I mean, it's implied that he is to blame, but like... there isn't enough information here.

As for folding laundry, this is such a weird one. Folding laundry isn't a chore, or even a task. "Folding laundry" is the simulacrum of a household chore that you get when you exclusively wear no-iron shirts or tumble-dry all your clothes. Folding laundry is hardly worth complaining about. It's like... I don't know, it's like you're trying to find a modern equivalent to "churning butter", so you complain about having to put the nitrogen capsules into the heavy cream, and then you suffer from some sort of nervous breakdown when you see whipped cream in a can in the supermarket.

I do my own laundry. I line-dry. I iron my trousers. I hand-wash the cashmere sweaters. I just don't get it.

[snovyda]

The Good Russian Is Not Coming To Save You

And when you tell them that, they will make you pay for it.

An extremely good and important article, please read and share.

"There is a machine in Western liberal culture, and it runs on one specific fuel: the Good Russian.

The Good Russian is not a person, exactly. He is a function. He is the individual Russian who opposes Putin — usually through artistic or journalistic or activist means, usually having suffered professionally or personally for it, usually now residing in comfortable exile in Prague or Berlin or London or Copenhagen — who the Western liberal establishment elevates as proof that Russia is not irredeemable. That Russia contains, within its vast and complicated body, the seeds of its own moral reconstruction. That if we are patient and generous and appreciative enough of the Good Russians among us, the arc of history will eventually bend.

The machine is always running. It has been running for decades. Before Talankin there was the Navalny documentary. Before that there were the dissident artists, the exiled journalists, the human rights lawyers who became household names in Western capitals while remaining strangers in their own country. The cast rotates. The function does not change.

Here is what the function is.

The Good Russian releases the West from a demand it cannot tolerate: the demand for a reckoning with Russian society, not just Russian leadership. Ukrainians have been saying for four years — for longer, since 2014, since before — that this is not just about Putin. That Putin is the expression of something, not the cause of it. That Russian imperial culture, Russian colonial consciousness, the Russian refusal to acknowledge Ukrainian identity as real and distinct and sovereign — these are not the invention of one man and they will not die with him. That the poll numbers showing majority Russian support for the war are not manufactured by the Kremlin but reflect something real and deep and socially embedded about how Russian society understands its relationship to the territories it considers its own."

[sixty-silver-wishes]

I love it when headlines get cut off

[jazzy-mint-219]

[the-grey-tribe]

Venti if true

[misanthropymademe]

aspiring Scientologist Obama: let me be Clear

[cromulentenough]

REVIEW: The Real North Korea, by Andrei Lankov

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia, Andrei Lankov (Oxford University Press, 2014).

In the 1980s, Japan experienced a crisis of disinformation. For years, there had been mysterious disappearances of Japanese people with no known history of mental illness, drug addiction, or gambling debts. All kinds of people — men and women, young and old, just suddenly vanishing without a trace. Many theories were put forward to explain the puzzle (for instance, some believed it was alien abductions), but the most widespread, pernicious, and dangerous view was that North Korea was responsible. There were people who claimed to have actually seen teams of North Korean commandos lurking on beaches, nabbing random passers-by, and bundling them into waiting submersibles just off the coast. This was obviously crazy. Products, no doubt, of atavistic xenophobia and reactionary sentiments. The Japanese media, government, and academic authorities put a lot of effort into refuting this dangerous disinformation throughout the 1980s and 1990s…which made them look real silly when in 2002 Kim Jong-Il issued a formal apology for the abductions and ordered the surviving captives returned to Japan.

[argumate]

gotta admit that is pretty funny

[fandom-man]

[enki2]

[wormcosmologies]

i just saw the phrase "unregistered molotov cocktails" in a news article and im really enjoying imagining this world where you have to register molotovs to the state

[balaclava-trismegistus]

That's literally how it works in the US if you don't want to catch a felony charge and a ten-year prison sentence for an NFA violation.

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

hill i will die on forever: the trolley problem is a good and interesting thought experiment with relevance to real life.

during covid, the J&J vaccine killed a very small number of people due to rare side effects. the decision was made to pull the J&J vaccine and stop distribution of it, despite the almost certainly larger number of people who would die of covid while waiting for another vaccine dose.

this is a real life trolley problem! we decided to let more people die of covid instead of killing a smaller number due to side effects. and there are considerations other than abstract moral philosophy at play - legal ramifications, questions about faith in drug companies and the medical system, etc etc. but to everyone who says "well obviously everyone would pull the lever", sometimes people en masse decide to let the trolley run over the bigger group!

[lumsel]

Fave video essayist appears to be playing female characters increasingly often in his B-Roll footage. Which could mean nothing.

[the-grey-tribe]

Maybe surprising if you watch the videos with the sound turned off and don't listen to the opinions, but hardly otherwise.

[prudencepaccard]

heard two jokes Q. Why has Norway started putting barcodes on their ships? A. So they can scan da Navy in. this one requires audience participation from someone: what's the difference between toilet paper and curtains?

[the-grey-tribe]

Fine. I'll bite. What is ligma?

[the-grey-tribe]

The Two Genders

Somebody here on tumblr has received two asks. They weren't by me, and they weren't anon. I don't think they would have been answered like that of they had been anon. Both had been asked by accounts with well-established blogs, with bios and identities and fandoms they post about.

The first anon ask got roughly this answer:

If it sucks, hit da bricks! Be demanding, know what you want, and if you don't get your needs met, leave without guilt or an explanation! You can just ghost people. You can break up in the middle of sexual intercourse. You can always quit! You can break up with anybody for any reason! I can't tell you whether to break up, but, y'know...

The second got roughly this answer

Well, in a relationship you have certain obligations. You shouldn't be focused on your own desires. You should ask the other party for a list of acts or positions they are comfortable with, and then you should stay strictly within the confines of that list, because that's how you get good at sex: By talking about what you're allowed to do, never being adventurous, and by strictly staying within the confines of an established routine. Bitches love sex that is routine and predictable.

These answers weren't written back-to-back, or even on the same day. They were written a couple of weeks apart, and they were re-blogged onto my dash a couple of hours apart by two different accounts I follow.

Now here's the punch line (I hear this phrase is an AI thing, but I need you to read this in the voice of Paul Harrell a second before he pulls the trigger and explodes a melon with a hollow-point)

Where was I? Yeah, here's the punch line: The first was a reply to an AFAB, the second was a reply to an AMAB. OP is non-binary, and both asks were written by people with their non-binary identities and at-birth genital configuration prominently featured in their tumblr bios.

You can deconstruct gender all you want, and you can (correctly!) point out when queer discourse reinvents the same gender roles that hack comedians have milked for jokes until there was no humour left before you and I were even born, but... when push comes to shove, your advice to "boys" is "nice guys finish last" and your advice to "girls" is "give little, give seldom, and above all, give grudgingly. Always let a guy know you are doing him a favour. And for god's sake, don't let him think you're enjoying yourself."

I am exaggerating here, partly to obscure who I am talking about, in case you follow them, but I think I am correct in my diagnosis. Even the people who balk at "theyfab" and people who recoil at attempts to tease apart whether they are "boy nonbinary" or "girl nonbinary" (so their interlocutor can run the appropriate social scripts) will absolutely treat boy nonbinary and girl nonbinary differently. The difference is normies make the difference explicit, and tumblr users just happen to think that all cats are girls and all dogs are boys, you know?

[the-grey-tribe]

As in: For every dog, they just *happen* to think he's a boy, and for every girl, they just happen to think she's a cat.

I actually met more people like this IRL than on Tumblr, but there are people out there who are pointedly, insistently, even militantly non-binary in their language, but completely trad in the way they treat normie men and women, and also completely aligned with trad social scripts on how they want to be treated. They just think that their unique non-binary gender includes "people hold open the door for me" and "men pay on dates" and all that, but not because of their sex/sex at birth, not because of any social scripts, but because their unique and individual gender they pick and choose includes "feminism is by, for, and about people like myself" and "if I hit a man he's not allowed to hit back" and "I'm allowed to be irrational and emotional and my relationship partner isn't permitted to be annoyed by this because this is just who I am and I need an unemotional rock as a partner" and "I can't do heavy lifting and even if it's not heavy I expect men around me to volunteer to help lift something".

But as soon as you say "ladies first" or if they think you are pointedly implying that you are holding open the door because that's the script for women, they give you something between dirty looks and a lecture.

You can tell me I am being needlessly mean to people who have very strong gender feels and who want nothing else from me than to use the correct pronouns, but I am making a structural point here. There is a large contingent of people who object to any phrasing like "women and femmes" or "for women, trans* and nonbinary people", but who fundamentally want to be part of some sort of women-and-nonbinary coalition, they just don't want you to call it that. Instead of "as a woman" and "as a mother", they say "as a feminist", but they mean the same thing.

I'm not saying these people are dishonest about their internal felt sense of gender. They are just inconsistent about the social context. It is what it is.

[geniusbee]

these are getting weird

[the-grey-tribe]

Obviously this kind of fishing for validation is distasteful, and you shouldn't engage with it, but you also shouldn't make these people grovel any more, or at all, really. Your response shouldn't be "You will never have my blessing for this", but "You do not need absolution or validation from me, and if I gave it for you, it would be superfluous and dishonest."

[unknought]

For me the biggest thing that makes the Fable shutdown a Leopards Eating People's Faces moment is not the fact that Anthropic asked for regulation and got regulated (although there is some of that) but that Anthropic has gone out of their way to make "AI safety" into a specifically nationalist issue, about ensuring US technological dominance. For example from a few days ago:

“These safeguards prevent foreign adversaries from using our most capable models in ways that pose severe safety risks. The US and its allies hold an edge in frontier chips and the highly optimized software that runs them at full potential,” the company said in a statement to WIRED. “These safeguards ensure Claude isn't used to erode that advantage—by optimizing chips developed by those adversaries, for example.”

and now Anthropic's noncitizen employees can't use Mythos! Which isn't to say that there is a direct causal link there or that Anthropic is responsible for the Trump administration's actions, but one might hope that it would make Anthropic warier of that kind of framing in the future.

...not that I'm holding my breath. I would have expected that getting penalized by the US government for refusing to enable autonomous killbots and domestic surveillance would have already tempered Dario Amodei's nationalism somewhat, but it doesn't really seem to have.

[bambamramfan]

don't tell people the technology you are working on may have dangerous downsides and needs to be handled cautiously, because then it's your fault when corrupt strongmen and petty egos take you down to put you in your place.

no, i must be exaggerating--

anyway, continue with the victim blaming for acting honestly instead of defensively

[cognitohazardous]

no one is stupid in quite the same way as a tumblr user