Very well written both in prose and tone. I'm glad she decided to tell this story. If the author isn't a professional writer I think she could be.
This is a great "behind the scenes" style look at the actual people behind a viral clip. Luckily they have an extremely strong relationship to help soften the blows here, I'm not sure an average (not even bad!) relationship could come out of something like this unscathed.
There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time, especially online from the safety of our screens. I found the announcers within the range of good fun but when it gets to people reaching out to break up their marriage or telling him to kill himself it becomes really sobering.
I think this is part of what people are calling the lonlieness epidemic - despite thousands of screaming voices the whole thing makes me feel hollow and hopeless.
„There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time“? You write this, as if this is just human and inevitable. But in my experience it’s a matter of character. People can train their body and they can work on self control. I really wish more people would try to become a better person.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. There are some very AI-style sentences in this article. GPTZero says "We are highly confident this text was human written and polished with AI"
I think we've entered the "people claiming other things is AI is getting old" phase of the forum.
Personally I don't care if it's AI generated or AI assisted. I didn't get any obvious AI tells, and arguing over whether or not it's AI generated doesn't seem to be relevant to the actual topic - strangers telling a man to kill himself based on a contextless TikTok video is not ok.
Plenty of people who use AI to write get paid to write. The bar isn't "used AI" vs "not used AI," it's "does the author make the point succinctly in a way that is entertaining" which, IME, is not something that AI can one-shot. The fact that so many people found her writing entertaining and meaningful means that she either prompted the LLM well enough to elicit those emotions, or she wrote them herself. Regardless, she succeeded in her goal.
> what are the chances someone randomly is a great writer
a lot better than folks who love pointing out "AIisms" and Pangram scores would have you believe. for starters just being a wife of nine years and a mother suggests at least a few decades of experience using language - that's already enough to be a better "writer" than a lot of people trying harder without the experience.
Get used to it. I don't think we're far from every bit of prose online, being at least edited, if not authored, by AI.
If people don't want to read AI, then they won't be reading anything but literary classics.
I'm not saying I find the prospect thrilling; just that it's inevitable.
As for the topic, projecting values, and life stories onto people from single data points, is a favorite sport of just about anyone. We often see people on this very forum, praising or attacking others as a person, and assigning motives; based on only a single comment. One habit that I've developed, is if someone posts something either in support or in opposition to one of my posts, I look them up, and try to find out as much as possible about them, before responding. It often fails, because people don't want others to know about them, but I suspect that it succeeds, a lot more than people might think.
> I don't think we're far from every bit of prose online, being at least edited, if not authored, by AI.
Zero chance of that happening anytime soon. I'm sure a lot of people have adopted it, and more will follow, but there are still plenty of us who enjoy writing and have no desire to let AI tools take that away from us.
> I'm not saying I find the prospect thrilling; just that it's inevitable.
I see no reason why this should be the case. All you have to do is keep writing and it's suddenly not inevitable.
Ironic, enjoying writing yet not catching that "every bit" does not literally mean every bit but an overwhelming majority instead. That some people like writing does not negate their comment.
I have found that in most cases you can simply ask people about their motives. Most often than not those motives and intentions are very different from your prior.
It’s not easy but developing a habit of "blank slating" is quite useful for inner peace.
you are not the minority, yours is the prevailing attitude on HN (and also the policy - AI-assisted writing is not welcome here) calling out AI isms and smells while ignoring the substance has become sport and an ugly look (IMO) especially with Pangram and sites like (https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector) automatically scanning everything that hits the frontpage (using the older/buggier version of Pangram no less)
Editing is critical. All professional writers get edited, and the quality of the editor can make all the difference. No writer likes being edited, but the editing can be the difference between success or failure.
I don't think that literary editors are doing a particularly good job, these days. That may be because they've all been fired.
LLMs can do a decent job of editing, but it imparts a "sameness" to the writing.
> It's like learning to play an instrument, and then using AI to make you sound better. Why bother to learn at all then??
I mean having a producer cut multiple takes or remove errors is not exactly new. And I think it exactly proves why people use AI. They could have spent a lot more time getting a piece to where they want it (and they often know where they want it) but why not get there faster. Intelligence and speed are related.
I’d go as far to say that no good writer uses AI for editing. It’s a tool for people that don’t know how to write, don’t know what good looks like, and are not confident enough to choose raw over soulless.
I had my first kid a couple years ago and found myself spending a ton of time holding my kid while he slept, since it's the only way he'd reliably sleep. I spent a good amount of that time browsing various parenting and new baby subreddits.
One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
I feel for moms, who in addition to giving birth and having their lives upended to raise a baby, are now told that not only are most men garbage, but their man is garbage too. I feel for the dads, who even if they work hard are told how useless they are, and have to combat a stream of negativity fed to their spouse. It's a divisive wedge thrown into a new family, one that social media algorithms are only happy to encourage for engagement.
When I see instances like the one in this topic, I can see how the default narrative has been applied here. The radio announcers surely aren't aware of the storm they're creating, but it suddenly thrusts two average people into the social media spotlight, where people are happy to assume any missing details to fit their narrative. Everyone is going to apply the default story without taking any time to consider the possibility of other context.
EDIT TO ADD: I know there are manosphere spaces that are toxic too. As a man I've had no problem avoiding them, so this is one of my first extended exposures to this type of content, which is why it stuck with me. Probably also because I felt personally unwelcome as a dad.
I'm imagining someone who actually did have a deadbeat father growing up then seeing messaging on social media about deadbeat men. Probably their social media feeds create a vicious cycle that only solidifies their distrust of men. It is just showing them things that they saw to be true since they were young children.
> One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
You can find quite a lot of data showing that the burden of managing domestic matters falls primarily on women. I would recommend people check out the book Fair Play which examines the problem and puts forward a system where people are assigned various personal tasks that need to be done (there are 100 in total, not all of which may apply to your life/household):
> The result is Fair Play: a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With four easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a figurative card game you play with your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore from laundry to homework to dinner.
I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship. We immediately made some small but lasting pivots that removed unneeded friction and now have new-found respect for each others daily "grind".
I've recommended it to a few friends and they have had similar stories. Nothing life changing, but some small, nice changes to the dynamic and how they think about it.
> I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship.
This is probably the best (and maybe the only) way that this is a good game. As soon as it turns into score keeping, the relationship will almost certainly go sideways.
Maybe some relationships should go sideways, but that can be addressed in a different way.
> As soon as it turns into score keeping, the relationship will almost certainly go sideways.
The system / cards is not about keeping score: each card is a task, and whomever holds the card is responsible for it from start to finish. E.g., three of the cards are "Meals (Weekday Breakfast)", "Meals (Kids; School Lunch)", and "Meals (Weekday Dinner)"; this may fall to one person, but there is also the "Groceries" card:
> Your family needs to eat. Can we all agree on that? Good. So how do the pantry and refrigerator get stocked on an ongoing basis? With CPE. This includes noticing what’s about to be used up or expire, keeping a running grocery list, and getting to the market . . . ideally before you realize there’s not a drop of milk in the fridge. Even if your family orders groceries online and your go-to dinner is frozen pizza, this card requires CPE nearly 365 days a year. Consult the various “Meals” cardholders regularly so you can be sure you have taco shells in the cupboard for taco night.
So the Meals person(s) have to plan the meal(s), and make an ingredient list for those specifically, and add to to a grocery list, but grocery buyer needs to take stock of what is already present in the fridge/freezer/pantry and buy anything missing generally, and specifically for the meals planned.
Eh, my marriage fell into this but it was because my ex refused to get a job, didn't think men were equally capable of parenting, and frankly invented a lot of work. It doesn't help that doctors, teachers, nurses, other parents, schools, and so talked to her by default. To be a truly equal parent or a primary parent as a father is swimming against the current.
> Eh, my marriage fell into this but it was because my ex refused to get a job, didn't think men were equally capable of parenting, and frankly invented a lot of work.
The book discusses expectations and 'standards of performance' and what is reasonable.
People are animals and animals can be trained. Dogs can be trained, elephants can be trained, tigers can be trained. This fact is hated, but has been known for thousands of years.
Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.
You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.
It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.
If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.
Owning the social networks doesn't mean you control all the information inherently, because it can easily get out of control. It wasn't that long ago that hundreds of thousands of bots had to be removed after running rampant for a long time which were manipulating trends that cause peaks on journalist's social media dashboards that influences what stories they cover.
Yes, social media bots impacting statistical trend services which some news organizations use to decide what stories to cover.
Communists caused World War 2 and yet love to play the victim. Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist" and most people don't even know what that really means.
We're not attacking Europe, we're making Europe stronger so it can stand more independently so it doesn't require as much US intervention in the case World War 3 does start and a new front opens there beyond Ukraine. That way the US can invest more of its resources in the pacific. NATO understands this.
The reason we had to do it rudely, is because we've been trying to get Europe to do this for decades nicely and that hasn't work. So you get the rude approach.
> Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist"
The man that bought one of the most important social networks and has substantially changed its algorithm is nearly openly a nazi. It's not just the sieg hail the day of the presidential swear-in, it's everything he does to the world and the USA. And so do all the others.
> So you get the rude approach.
You're digging your own grave. Your president is handing over your empire piecewise to your adversaries for a fistful of gold. You must understand this: the only thing worse than communism, is fascism, because it's just corruption as a form of government.
german here. just adding some soup to the meal, not offending.
for the definition what a nazi is, the movie "american history x" - that imo shows exactly what a nazi is: the main character is not german and not even in germany, but shows the nazi-mindset exactly! He glorifies hitler's thinking about others, fighting for the wrong idealogy for "own" country. ... Thats making a nazi. Neglection/sympathy for holocaust, supremacy thinking, .., too.
As I was told, the word nazi was invented by U.S. for the hitler and his followers so its a short word for national socialists (the party, its memembers and sympathisants) the US was fighting ("name your enemy"). Your question is about/implies nazi as "an individual person with a special characteristic", which makes that someone a nazi.
Its a "nation first + everything for the nation" thinking. For me a nazi is someone who glorifies the nazi time, saying it was all well done then, wanting those times back - like some elderly tend to say "earlier, everything was better". They dream of powerfull country with a straight people-body. Nazi think in races. And always say others are guilty for one's own failure, argument with "they" and "us" when they talk about own country/others.
So basically, patriotism, skinheads and far right are subsets of "nazi", but not full nazi :)
And may be, if one wants to be a REAL full nazi, its a must to shave the head and to have some on topic tattoos with being caucassian at the same time. This is how we differentiate them in germany - you see: "we" and "them". But i'm not nazi :)
funny, in US there was a nazi gang a few years ago, with the group's "leader" having the room full of nazi-stuff, flags and propaganda - as it came out later, he was jewish by himself and did not tell ..
Frank Meeik, Daniel Burros, but the one i mean was just like a joke of a nazi. But still dangerous thinking.
Exactly, which is what makes the Nazi/fascist/autarkist/autocratic position even more absurd. As we're seeing play out in the US, calls to "put the country first" are rooted in hate for the country that actually exists, and end up being quite destructive to the country's actual interests!
There would seem to be a common pattern whereby preaching of values tends to fill in for actually living out those values (eg religion, performative virtue signalling, so-called "rightist" libertarians), and the whole "put our country first!" or "make our country great again!" seem to be strong examples of this.
> Its a "nation first + everything for the nation" thinking.
If you think this means "our nation over other nations" then you misunderstood. It means "nation above all", e.g. "everything for the government, above citizens". That is, forget the individual, there is a greater good for which we must endure some hardship, trust me.
FYI, the promised land never materialized, historically.
> If you think this means "our nation over other nations" then you misunderstood. It means "nation above all".
A distinction without a difference, the second automatically leads to the first, no exceptions.
> "everything for the government, above citizens". That is, forget the individual, there is a greater good for which we must endure some hardship, trust me.
Right, in addition to being a code for "we over the others", "nation above all" also provides the excuse for the social mobilization necessary for wars. Nationalism is a tool of war, it may start in some covert form but the end result is the same.
Fair enough--so then, which successful nation has existed that prioritizes the individual over the nation's laws in any capacity?
Which successful nation has eschewed the idea of the greater good?
(And to your point--this absolutely has been perverted in various cases to justify atrocious behavior! It is necessary but not sufficient in order to govern well and righteously and be a successful country.)
It's not necessarily a binary choice, is it? There's a spectrum between true democracy that isn't simply "rule of majority", and authoritarianism.
There is a weakness in democracies too, that if they are too tolerant and allow too much freedom, this can paradoxically undermine democracy itself and lead to a collapse.
So in general, western democracies tend to respect human rights, sacrificing the greater good, because this in itself is considered a greater good.
Originally we had The League of Nations. The idea was a sort of collective defense. Europe failed. They did not come to each other's aid.
After WW2, that was the second time the US had to come stop the wars. We weren't simply going to join a defense pact if Europe couldn't demonstrate that its own collective defense had teeth. So the establishment of the Western Union was an attempt to demonstrate to the US that Europe was finally ready. Then NATO was formed.
Now, Europe has been underfunding its defense for decades and not meeting their NATO commitments, so that original question was back on the table. Can Europe even defend itself? Is it overly reliant on the US?
So, no. We will not apologize for being tough with you, because the world is changing and you no longer have the option to just stagnate. We're not losing any allies, that's just rhetoric and propaganda. You're not a serious person if you think that somehow western countries aren't going to help each other.
Making you stronger means you can help yourself or even help us later. Fundamentally, if our allies are stronger it also changes the Chinese calculus on how much of a threat from Europe they have to factor in before possibly starting World War 3.
The bottom line is, get off your asses and light a fire under your government to invest in defense spending, or be a small part of the cause of future millions of deaths, because your feelings were hurt.
If you don't even have enough compassion for fellow humans to want to stop World War 3, then you have no moral ground to stand on.
Your underpinnings for your arguments are the classic infant/adult fallacy where the people you're not sympathetic to are adults with incredible agency and power, and the people you have sympathy for are helpless children with no choices.
Putin wasn't forced to invade Ukraine. What was he even putatively trying to avoid? NATO's not belligerent (you can't simultaneously argue that Europe's military is pathetically weak, but also that it was so muscular and menacing that Putin had to respond proactively).
Hitler chose to start WW2. He wasn't forced to invade France to stop communism. He wasn't forced to attempt over and over to invade Great Britain to stop communism.
China, Russia, etc aren't looking for openings to start WW3. It would be devastating to them--just the war with Ukraine has had generational consequences for Russia. They also aren't innocent nations who, after intolerable saber rattling by the West, will have no choice but to start WW3. It's further not the case that the only deterrent to these innocent nations regrettably starting an insane conflict is a heavily armed Europe. The US is pretty heavily armed! France and GB are nuclear powers!
The way I see it, World War 2 was kind of a perfect intersection of the great depression creating a perfect opening for communist revolution as countries had seen during and after World War I and the protectionist contraction of trade during that time made matters worse. So you get countries that are simultaneously starving economically while risking being eaten alive by communism.
What we see today is different. Russia and China are projecting a shift to their hemisphere in terms of world influence. The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.
The CCP was directly established by Comintern, and even though the current thinking is that global communist expansion was abandoned, the way Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela have been behaving make communist or "post-communist" states a resurgent threat.
War would be devastating, but the idea is that if it was a World War, then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China. This is part of why we have supported Ukraine, but not overinvested. It's part of why we captured Maduro, who was threatening to invade his neighbor. It's also part of why we're sorting out Iran, because we need to take that trigger button out of China's toolchest. Imagine it going off while we're busy with China.
With the state of the world now, if China invaded Taiwan and tripped the Japanese tripwire, we would largely be free to focus on China. That is I think what Chinese analysts see now.
> The way I see it, World War 2 was kind of a perfect intersection of the great depression creating a perfect opening for communist revolution as countries had seen during and after World War I and the protectionist contraction of trade during that time made matters worse.
I think when economies falter governments falter, and their philosophies are discredited. So it makes sense that governments were on thin ice in the wake of WW1 and the Great Depression, and that more radical parties from the left and the right were ascendant. I think something similar is happening now, if of lower magnitude. But, no way was this a door only communists walked through, anarchists, fascists, etc were all in the mix.
> The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.
China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).
Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.
> then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China
You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.
Finally, I don't exactly know what you mean by "focus on China." The West's relationship with China is complex, a lot of people are focused on it. The likelihood of direct confrontation with them is quite low, as it'd be disastrous for both sides.
> But, no way was this a door only communists walked through, anarchists, fascists, etc were all in the mix.
Communism was an absolute existential, civilizational and culture destroying threat. That is how it was seen back then in Europe. Without that threat, fascism would not have risen. Communism wasn't a scapegoat for a totally separate fascist ideology, fascism was a direct counter to the threat of communism. People who argue that anti-communism was simply used as a political tool to gain power have a very large hill to climb to justify their argument. So you can't separate them the way you do here.
> China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).
They are Marxist-Leninist to the extent that it is baked into their constitution and "corruption" often means you are not upholding Marxist principles or carrying forward the revolution. So, reformers, democracy advocates, not using your money to benefit the state and so on. From a post market reforms perspective, they are more like a neo-mercantilist command economy, but make no mistake that the Marxist philosophy is alive and acted on in China. They were being lax before Xi Jinping. Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.
> Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.
China does not need a giant navy with all these bombers, jets, carriers and destroyers, building out all these fake islands across the region and demanding that no regional countries allow foreign countries to help them with military fortification. They don't need all of that in order to take Taiwan. China lacks critical resources that would prevent it from being reliant on external trade, the same way Japan did. The difference is, Japan was afraid of communism and China wants to prevent the communist party from falling the way the Soviet Union did.
Taking back Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet is about finishing the communist revolution which in China was less about class warfare and more about anti-colonialism. It's even baked into their constitution for this reason. What they will do with their power once they have it, is unknown. What they already do with the power they have is very concerning and not promoting peace in the world. This does not suggest great peaceful eventual motivations in their region if that's what they support.
> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin.
Stop thinking about Trump admin this, Trump admin that. It's the US. It's a very common mistake for people to see some presidential candidate and think that's everything they are and when they become president then that's what the US is. Universally, the US has its own aims and the presidency tends to align with those aims in one way or another regardless who becomes president. Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb? That's basically what you're describing. We've got thinktanks on top of thinktanks on top of thinktanks and objectively some very smart people in the admin whether you like their politics or rhetorical strategy or not. Like, measurably. So, no. Your not understanding of strategy is not proof of lack of strategy.
> They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.
This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries. They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc). Communists just love controlling the resources. Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.
So, yeah we wrecked them and with good reason. The US treated them fairly in the 1950s, gave them a standard international oil deal like most countries have, built hospitals, schools etc but then the communists tricked the population into thinking we were stealing their oil, then they nationalized it and after that no oil companies wanted to invest there. So their oil infrastructure fell apart and in the 1990s/2000s Venezuela tried to reverse course on their communist resource manifesto and give oil companies the same standard OPEC style deal they had in the 1950s before the nationalization, but no companies wanted to invest again. Same problem happens in Cuba, because Cuba keeps inviting companies to invest and then they steal the company's assets and nationalize it or otherwise.
So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.
> People who argue that anti-communism was simply used as a political tool to gain power have a very large hill to climb to justify their argument.
Again, Hitler didn't blitzkrieg GB because communism.
> Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.
No, it's Han Superiority. That's why they haven't expanded south: they don't care about non-Chinese. Marxism is fundamentally a workers movement. The CCP is a lot of things, but a workers movement isn't one of them.
> China does not... need all of that in order to take Taiwan.
The Taiwan Strait is notoriously treacherous. Taiwan has few beachheads, tons of tall mountains, dense urban environments, and flat, open farm land. It would be a nightmare of casualties and would destroy Taiwan's economy for at least a generation. China doesn't want to suffer any of that.
> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. ... Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb?
Obama spent years getting the JCPOA. Trump tore it up, spent billions of dollars, caused a worldwide energy crisis, and Iran's ascendant. Some presidents have better foreign policy than others.
> This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries.
Other countries had sanctioned Maduro and members of his regime, but only the Trump admin charged him with crimes.
> They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc).
The Biden admin didn't think this was credible.
> Communists just love controlling the resources.
Here's a quote from Trump:
“Now I love Venezuela. You know, I love it. We’re doing great in Venezuela. We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
Is Trump a communist or do more than just communists like to control the resources?
> Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.
This is pure conspiracy theory. Whatever algorithm you're in has broken your brain.
> So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.
Mostly agree, but this was uniquely Trump and wildly unlawful. You can't just invade other countries and abduct their leaders. You also can't just blow up random noncombatants in the ocean.
The Soviets gave the Germans a free hand to begin the war by splitting Poland via the Molotov pact. Without that agreement, and without the preceding years of Soviet resource shipments and technical exchanges, it is unclear if the European war would have happened.
This is about as far as I could guess as well. Unfortunately by this logic you could just as easily implicate France and the UK for the Munich agreement, as well as the failure to excercise their defense pact with Poland. So essentially every party with exception of Germany and the United States is at fault for WW2. This also leaves the Pacific theatre unaccounted for as you implied. So I'm very curious what the original commenter intends.
It doesn't merit more response, you can just look at the reality of actual fascist states. Economic stagnation, the most extreme corruption and incompetence, and cruelty beyond imagination. True masterminds.
The rationale is that Communist International (Comintern) based in Russia at the time was openly aiming for total global communist revolution. These weren't simply activists (though there was that too), but actual armed militant Marxist groups. They were in China, Japan, Spain, Germany, France, Britain, the US you name it. It was a pervasive problem in the early 1900s.
The US and Germany were both helping fight back against the communists in China and Spain. Everyone was basically on board with being against the communists, they just weren't on board with the extremes to which Japan and Germany were going. Japan was passing laws to suppress Marxist revolution in their country in the 1920s and Germany went to many extremes, routing out communists anywhere.
In Germany you even saw education being changed to fortify new students as anti-communist, because preventing communist revolution from taking over Germany was existential for them. The teachers knew what they were teaching, but they were afraid enough of communism that it seemed a reasonable defensive mechanism. There had already been examples of communist revolution upending countries, so it wasn't as if it was a fake threat or concern.
It was very real, and people who dismiss the pacts signed between Japan, Germany and Italy to cautify the fact that they explicitly saw communism as a threat, do so in ignorance. It's often argued that it was some kind of fake political front to justify their actions, but on close inspection that seems to absolutely not be the case. These people legitimately believed communism was an existential threat.
This is further evidenced in the years after WW2, where there were many more communist conflicts in other countries. Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, etc. If you put yourself in their shoes, simply imagining being any of these countries, would it be unreasonable to feel an existential threat? No. Just, flat out, logically, no.
So why did they end up invading all these other countries? What was that all about?
The communists love to control the resources and in terms of a total global communist revolution, you've heard things like domino theory and you could understand it in numerous ways. One is that, if you expand to control a tipping point of resources, then you can leverage those resources to dominate the rest of the world and enforce your revolution.
Japan and Germany wanted to route out communism in other countries, but they also wanted to leverage the resources. Germany working with Russia to take Poland was largely strategic, not a sign of actual good faith towards Russia. Both Japan and Germany explicitly intended as their end goal, to conquer Russia and destroy Comintern.
This is part of why Stalin dismantled the Comintern, to deflate Japanese and Germany aims while simultaneously fostering military support from the allies.
Another critical point to support my argument, is that even if you don't think communism was the primary issue, why the heck would Japan and Germany join forces, causing it to become a World War? You could certainly argue that it doesn't become a World War until that happens. After all, people often make the mistake of saying the war didn't even start until something random in Europe happened and they can never ever convincingly explain how that caused the war to spin out of control. It makes no sense, because it is BS.
The war was already raging in the Pacific long before anything began in Europe. So why were the things in the Pacific happening? The thing that unifies both of these conflicts is communism.
People often deflect and just say oh Hitler was a racist and it was just this and that. They never answer the question: so what about Japan?
If they were fascist, what is a fascist? Many things, but most fundamentally they are a reaction to the communist threat. Communism is underpinned by a philosophy that all action is social action, so every person must be an activist. This puts society out of order rapidly, because anyone not involved gets overrun if it gains traction.
So fascists develop psychological counter-strategies to communism. That's why the Nazi flag was red. That's why they emphasize race instead of class, to unify people rather than divide them. That's why they uplift beautiful art and collected precious artifacts that communists hate and try to destroy. Everything was an intentional counter-strategy to communist revolution. It's easy to look back on it and say it looks insane, because it is and it is patterned as the inverse of communist revolution which is also itself insane. They wanted to immunize their country as a cultural powerhouse to fend off communism for all time.
And if the revolution was going to take over sufficient resources to steamroll other countries, then Japan and Germany were reasoning that they would need to expand to counter it.
Comintern wanting total global communism was logically inept and wrong for them to do. Germany and Japan going nuts and killing a ton of people was wrong for them to do.
It wouldn't have happened if the communists had not created a global existential threat. Remember too, this is before the internet, before pervasive communications and such. People still largely got their news from word of mouth, newspapers and radio so I'm sure there was plenty of miscalculation to go around, but the slow verifiable things were undeniable and that's what they were reacting to.
The communists have been threatening to start World War 3 and that is also what the Trump administration is reacting to today. Between Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, both Russia and China have lost essential partners in rapid succession. We've been helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure which has dual purpose, since it both weakens Russia and also demonstrates to China that not only is their Venezuelan and Iranian oil not secure, but not even the oil they get from Russia is reliable. China built the largest strategic oil reserve in the world which is something like double the rest of the entire world combined and they were going to use it to sanction proof themselves in the case of engaging with Taiwan. Now they are drawing it down, which reduces the chance of WW3.
There is whole genre of authors (Ernst Nolte, Viktor Suvorov, David Irving) who argue WW2 was all preemptive strike, that middle classes felt under threat and that soviets were preparing wide actions to take over europe.
It's revisionist history. Constructed arguments that quickly fall apart - like Yes Hitler was afraid of Bolsheviks but that doesn't explain why he invaded all the other countries France, Poland, Denmark, Norway... many more.
The repeat of the same trick on current events with Iran/Venezuela/Cuba is very telling. I doubt anybody believes that US attacks Iran because of communism. But yes all the US conflicts are because of communism.
More likely explanation is that big business backs fascism to crush social causes. Fascism exists to save capitalism from the people.
No, this is nonsense. I don't think that Russia was suddenly aiming to take over Europe in some big blitz attack. That is ignorant of what the fear of communism was based in. It was spreading just fine without any military invasion, though it was essentially supported by the communists in Russia and this was transparent to everyone, a mystery to none.
These countries had real world evidence of it happening and back then times were hard. You had starvation, unemployment, mistreatment and really societies were still trying to find the balance in an industrializing age. This was ripe territory for the spread of Marxism and it was adapted differently to a country depending on what the main complaints were.
Simply look at the spread of communism to other countries even after World War 2. You need to pay close attention to that, because it's the same fear other countries had before WW2. This was a very real issue and simply falling back on some propagandistic argument that the role of communism was overblown because of X, Y and Z, ignores all the reasons the communist threat wasn't overblown.
I think people forget that back then, death was normal and constant. People were dying all the time from all manner of both horrific and normal things. Most countries wanted to achieve some kind of stability and countries invading other countries was much more common in the recent history to them in a way that threatened them or in other words was normalized.
If the US had relative stability, England had relative stability and Russia had relative stability, countries like Japan and Germany did not. The great depression and communism both combined with the trade protectionism to create an internal existential threat. Suddenly you had mass hunger and unemployment. Yes they wanted to expand, yes they wanted more room for their people, but a strong factor that drove it to be existential was communism. Several of these other countries had already appeased communism, like France.
Germany and the US had already been fighting against communism in Spain and China, so this was going on long before the European side of the war started and it was a demonstrated actual acted on concern with evidenced history. If communism was going to expand, then if Japan and Germany wanted to survive communism or generally an expanded Russia. Like, think back then. You had Britain which had its empire. Now imagine a Russia that had an expansive communist empire.
Germany and Japan both had a rough history with Russia trying to take their territory. If they were going to be able to survive in an environment with an expanded Russia with vast communist acquired resources in an industrializing world, they would have to expand and establish control of resources of their own.
I'm not saying that it was right or good or that Japan and Germany don't take any blame and they were simply defending themselves, because that's not the case. Everybody made mistakes, but back then miscalculations were common and life was harsh. We take the comfy relatively peaceful life today for granted, but life was an everyday natural disaster back then by comparison to today. If you look at how Japan and Germany both prioritized their threats, communism was at the very top. It was real, they acted on it and as humans they acted in ways that demonstrate it was their highest priority.
Many European countries had official communist political parties and in the stable countries they didn't have much sway, but in other countries suffering from economic ruin from every direction, communist parties were gaining a lot of traction. The timing for why Hitler was appointed was explicitly because the communist party was gaining too much influence and reached the point of being an existential threat.
Make sure that you know one specific thing. Communism was basically known for dissolving countries from the inside, destroying their culture, their history and their identity. This is why it's more than simply worker activism, it's an existential threat to your civilizational existence. Japan and Germany both had strong cultures with a lot to lose.
There is no version of history where the communists are innocent, kind and good and there is no version of history where Japan and Germany are innocent, kind and good. That said, communism was actual evil even if on its surface it aimed to help workers. They legitimized and normalized horrific murder and assassination in all kinds of countries.
Part of the economic disaster that hit Japan and Germany was because of trade protectionism that went to extremes, because countries were protecting their local trade out of fear of communist revolution and they relied more on external trade for their needs. Without vast natural resources to leverage they couldn't sufficiently provide for their people without open trade which was closing down.
I've been doing my own research and taking notes for maybe 15 years. I'm not sure there's any author that thinks the way I do about it.
If I was to point at the absolute fundamentals, I'd say the open trade in the 1800s that caused many countries to rely on external supply chains leading to mass urbanization and hollowing out their agriculture created countries that were far less self sufficient.
With millions migrating away from the farms and working the land, moving to the cities, many countries were less self sufficient and it created an extreme imbalance and vulnerabilities. World War I might not have happened without that.
The economic issues combined with World War I was ripe ground for social movements which in the past were not always existential. When Russia was taken over by communists, they began to weaponize communism around the world. Any country that was undergoing hardship was a prime target.
Japan and Germany both suffered greatly from the 1800s mass urbanization with a weakened agricultural sector and when trade began to shut down in the 1930s to protect local economies out of fear not doing so would create an opportunity for the communists, this crushed Japan and Germany.
It would be fair to say then that there was some wisdom to globalism, but there was also some ignorance and it was not well managed. Yet, had communism not been the threat it was, global trade may not have receded as aggressively as it did.
So Russian weaponized communism, in full understanding of what communism actually is and how it operates in brutal destructive ways to destroy a society, combined with international imbalances caused by poorly managed trade in a rapidly industrializing world is a pretty good summary of what I see as the real causes of World War 2.
I'm not accurate about everything and I've made mistakes even in this thread which I didn't notice until after the edit option was gone, but I do make an effort to identify mistakes when I find an inaccuracy. Broadly, I think all the critical things I've said here will hold up as I haven't found convincing counter-arguments. If high quality counter-arguments are presented, I'm not closed minded and will consider them.
Regardless of the truth of the times, if you ever write a book with this view and cite your research where possible I suspect many of us would read it. The concept is fascinating.
I can't find any author with such a sweeping and elegant theory. But if you do have any sources of inspiration, reading material, or recommended authors at hand, I'd be happy to take a look.
A family is a autonomous unit, in theory capable of survival without society for a while. For those who marry the state to receive alimony from the taxpayer this independent union is a blatant declaration of war.
Giants fan here. Watched the game. Even when it was happening and before knowing any of this, I could tell that Kruk and Kuip were going too far. It was starting to get super uncomfortable.
For those who aren't Giants/baseball fans, Mike Krukow (the Giants' color commentator) is retiring at the end of this season. He and Duane Kuiper have been the Giants' primary TV broadcast team for something like 37 years and have been best friends since they were teammates in the early '80s.
Krukow's mind is still sharp, but he has inclusion body myositis, and it's becoming unsafe for him to be anywhere other than at home.
It's just an emotional situation all around. They both thought that they would probably continue broadcasting together for at least a few more years, and now they're not.
So they're pulling out all of their usual schticks -- including poking fun at the fans -- and taking them really, really far because they know it's the last time.
I'm sure they would agree they went a little too far with that one.
A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.
Telling women they're being abused even when the woman herself disagrees is a very ironic pattern I see often. Somehow it's seen as anti-sexist and yet it puts the onus on the woman to justify herself like the case here where she wrote an entire article. What happened to letting women make their own choices? I'm sure some of them are legitimately concerned, but I think a lot of people just want to spread their preferred narratives about the world.
As a black man, I can't help but think of the whole Chris Brown thing here. Yes, I personally found what he did disgusting, and if everyone else obviously felt that way, I would keep that up.
But no -- I know too many Black women who have -- I suppose -- chosen forgiveness. Too many intelligent humans that I know or know of, are good with this for me to say "No, ladies, you are wrong."
That is a problem I've had with the whole "listen to women" thing. That became a popular phrase and I said okay that's reasonable I'll do so. Over time though I'll see women on both sides of just about every issue. Even women having the right to vote you'll somehow find women who disagree(probably for political reasons).
My only conclusion is the whole idea of "listen to women" is itself simplistic as it assumes women all think the same. Certainly I still listen to women, but im not willing to assume they all feel a certain way just because a few people insist they do. Otherwise Im just ignoring the women with the minority view
I don't know the particular "listen to women" trend you're referring to there but, as you say, there is no doubt that women hold diverse and independent views like men do.
So no statement by some or other advocate can legitimately claim to be the viewpoint of all women. Myself, I also wouldn't want that to be a bar that must be cleared to get onto the platform and take the mic.
We can listen even as women debate their own varied viewpoints with other women. And women themselves must call out and challenge the misrepresentations made in their name, it's a responsibility that comes with the mic.
> C. T. Studd, (1860-1931) the famed English missionary who served God in China, India, and Africa, once remarked: "Remember the miller's donkey. The miller, son and donkey went to the market. The miller rode the donkey all the way and people exclaimed, 'Cruel man, riding himself and making his son walk.' So he got down and his son rode; then people slanged, 'What a lazy son for riding while poor old father walks.' Then both father and son rode, and people then said, 'Cruelty to animals, poor donkey.' So they got down and carried the donkey on a pole, but folks said, 'Here are two asses carrying another ass.' Then all three walked and people said, 'What fools to have a donkey and not ride it.' So let's go ahead with our work for God and not care what folks say."
Secular wisdom for the ages! 150 years ago we would have been taking a donkey to market wrong. Now with the advent of YouTube and Reddit and Twitter we've charted vast new swaths of incorrect behavior that we can leverage to make ourselves feel superior to others.
It’s not only online. Just last weekend, someone heckled me at Costco because my wife was pushing a heavy ass cart while I was walking freely next to her. She chose to do it, I offered to take it and she refused. But somehow a random stranger had something to say about it.
Online behavior is unfortunately a slightly worse mirror of real life. If you want to experience people outside of your bubble, just go to any public hearings or meetings and you’ll find that a lot of people are quite out there.
I admired a man tending to his partner at a restaurant, and my then-girlfriend told me that she could tell from observing them that he was controlling, and his deference was purely performative.
Because "of similar situations she'd seen".
She had magically deep telepathic abilities, it seems.
Ok, but like were you offended, I feel like it's mostly a harmless slightly funny observation. I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it? I live in the south and there's a pretty much constant running stream of public commentary on any and everything going on and 99.9% of it is friendly intentioned even if on the surface it's deriding. So really the idea of thinking someone is making a meaningful judgement is strange. And of course, even if they really were, why care?
> I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it?
Flip genders and most likely people say things like this. Somehow men are just expected to deal with this but if it’s directed at a woman it’s all bad.
I’ll jump in- why care? Because it sucks to have people taking pot shots at you. If it is just one, then sure, that isn’t so bad, but when you have a group doing it, it can become existential. You may not have seen this type of violence before but it is unsettling. A group of people can do low effort violence that feels fun and harmless to them (each taking a lazy swing at someone), but the cumulative effect can be beating up or killing someone. Getting yelled at, or having someone write threatening things to you, is not as bad as being punched or having a stone thrown, but it is still damaging to humans.
Eh, when I was a kid violence was physical by definition. That distinction seems to be getting lost such that the phrase "physical violence" is no longer redundant. But the new usage is figurative.
Nowadays there's the risk that someone will record you, put it on social media, it'll go big, and suddenly you have a large amount of people weighing in on your personal life without having any context. If that happens, it's likely to trickle back to you directly from other people seeing it or whatever.
The answer to this is to simply not pay attention to social media. There could be a mob on Twitter/X right now flaming me, and I wouldn't know about it or care, because I simply don't go there.
But members of your social circle (family members, friends, coworkers/bosses etc.) do pay attention, and when they do, they can make it your problem. You can ignore an Internet mob, but you can't ignore getting fired by your employer because they want to preserve optics.
I don't know--I think these stories of real-world consequences stemming from online rage are few and far between. It happens but it's rare. IMO the Online World is kind of not-real, and it's really hard to get so much visibility there to actually affect the real world.
covid made the wearing of masks publicly acceptable. in western culture it used to be unwelcome. like if you hide your face you must be a criminal. in austria has a contoversial law that made masking your face in public generally illegal.
A place for those who would be marginalised by their own community, gay, religious apostates etc etc.
Communicating with relatives on the other side of the world.
Maintaining old friendships that would have died due to distance.
Somewhere to find like minded people.
Somewhere like hacker news (I count it as social media top) where I discovered great books, expanded my horizons and learnt that there were other ways at looking at the world.
There are social sharing functions and then there are algorithmic feedback loops that induce doomscrolling. Pretty sure it’s technically feasible to have one without the other.
The question to me is, with enough content and a powerful enough recommendation algorithm trained with enough eyeballs can short form videos be considered addictive in a clinical sense? If so what are the deleterious effects of the addiction? Should it be regulated?
I’m all for freedom, but we regulate drugs because we deem them bad for society.
You are describing old-school social-network designs that began to be marginalized already before Covid, not modern social media. The latter would prefer that you not forge or maintain authentic connections with other human beings, but rather doomscroll through endless-scroll content.
Keeping in touch with relatives or friends in much of the world has long since moved to chat apps like WhatsApp instead of an open social network.
I think it's not even that there's a benefit to it, it's that a lot of traditional communities that had their own forums are now exclusively on Facebook groups. I'm in several groups for mountain biking, for cars, for 3D printing, and those communities just don't exist anywhere else online other than small pockets with very little activity. Discord is the other one that has captured a bunch, but it's mostly centered around gaming, memes and tech.
You should probably say "freedom of speech" so this makes sense anywhere except USA.
But more importantly I call bullshit. If something, anything, is proven to be extremely deleterious to peoples health and also to the democratic process then you absolutely can write laws banning it specifically. Eg. you cant build your own nukes or biological weapons at home. That's how laws and constitutions work.. they are developed over time as things come up.
Thank god the founders thought of people like you when they made abundantly and unambiguously clear “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”
Without that you do not live in a democracy, only an authoritarian state where the ruling class permits you to discuss their conduct only as they see fit and out of the goodness of their hearts, and permits you to vote only for candidates holding positions they pre-approve.
I noticed how easy it is to frame something online when you’re viewing it out of context. I’ve seen myself getting it wrong from time to time, because a title was misleading, and I don’t know why after 30 years of internet I’m not way more skeptical.
"A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them."
While also erasing everything that is real about that person's life, too.
I cringe whenever I hear someone angrily yell something like "You don't/can't know how I feel!", because unless the person making the accusation knows the accused very, very well, they could well be really stepping it. Nobody makes it through this life unscathed. Everybody loses people they love. Everybody gets kicked in the gut multiple times in life. Yes, everyone's personal life story, if you get specific enough, isn't exactly like someone else's. I won't claim to know exactly what it's like to be sexually abused, for instance. Wouldn't dream of it. Very serious issue. But I've had kicks to the gut that the one screaming that they may not have an exact analog for either.
I may not know how your exact gut punch feels. Maybe you've had noticeably more gut punches than I have. But everybody has had some sort of experience with them.
If one day a genie's magic spell made you see text pop ups above everyone's head with their traumas and abuses in life, and the emotional and physical burdens they're carrying today, you'd probably have a very hard time walking down the street.
Similarly, I really have a distaste for any variation of the "everyone's sheep" meme, especially when it's because they're not being active in some particular political way that the person flinging the meme around thinks they should be. If you could see those popups, maybe you'd understand why not everyone has a bunch of spare time to do whatever it is you think they should do to not be "sheep". Looking out on to a crowd of people and presuming they are "sheeple" reveals a lack of imagination and sympathy with people rather that the possession of a wise eye and strong understanding of the world.
There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left. Most of the learning feedback to that -- pointing out to people when they might be missing something or acting unfairly -- is ignored, except to attack those who point it out.
AFAICT, for various reasons, they're proud of being warriors for their beliefs, and anyone who sounds like they're saying anything differently is the enemy, and the only thing you do with an enemy is score points against them or hurt them, while trying not to concede anything that the enemy would claim as points or hurt you. It's a toxic recipe for society.
Coincidentally, recently I've decided even Fedi isn't safe from that (it's just different and fewer people doing ideological bully thinking), and have resigned myself that issues of substance can't be discussed there either. Maybe the only safe thing to post is cat pictures.
I think it's much less a problem with HN. Of course, over time you realize certain positions get downvotes that aren't flattering to the people doing it, and some annoying commenting behaviors, and not always all the integrity we'd like to see, which are relatively mild by social media standards. However, I'm also seeing occasional random individual actor extreme toxicity problems with HN. And I'm anticipating some related but different kind of problems from how AI-powered tools will be easily used with the corpus/firehose to play toxic games.
If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.
Kinda off topic, but as a single Father I cant help but notice how much less of a support system Fathers get. When shit hits the fan its always people assuming the worst. A Fathers major support system is their Wives and Family. Good for him for having such a great Woman by his side... Im not complaining, just an observation
Yeah, it is complicated because we do live in a very misogynistic civilization with patriarchal privileges. It’s just often difficult not to overcompensate to counterbalance and resist these circumstances. Treat people as individuals instead of the archetypes.
As author wrote: we need to practice the benefit of the doubt. Or I like the “trust but verify” pattern
I'd argue making women do more labor by forcing them to write articles justifying their marriage is misogynistic as well. Its just in that case people see it as acceptable because they think it's fighting the patriarchy. But really the patriarchy is not disappearing because of this comments, it's just insulting a random woman based on nothing of substance. If someone tells a women to wear more clothing to protect herself from abuse that's considered sexist, I don't see how this is different. Everyone thinks it's for the best
I'd also argue that misogyny had mutated into this implicit assumption where every woman is silently oppressed by the men in their lives. I find it ironically misogynistic that a woman is assumed to have no agency in their life and we have to police the men instead.
Indeed. On further reflection, it may say something that she was compelled to write such a piece defending her husband instead of telling others to mind their own damn business
We consider it 'misogynistic' because women have more difficulty engaging in certain pursuits (career and enterprise) while more easy engaging in others (child-rearing, family life). It's because of our own bias that career and enterprise is worth more than family life that we say the world as a whole is 'misogynistic' instead of the truth, which is that some areas of life, it's easier to be a woman and in others a man.
I started to notice a bit over a decade ago (about the same time as Cersei's walk of shame on GoT) that millennials as a generation were piling into naming and shaming people publicly as blindly appropriate punishment, without any consideration of what could go wrong and considering it their right and entitlement to do that. Any time a public figure gets into any kind of trouble, people demand to know all the details so they can satisfy their need to express outrage. It really is not healthy. Even if another person who was harmed comes out to express that they are satisfied with the outcome and the process that was followed, the crowd still wants to know all the details so they can feel angry.
I'm not sure this is unique to that generation. Tabloids have always been like that. It's just been "democratized" so anyone can start it.
Also I note that a lot of "legacy" pretexts for shaming are off the table. It's not done to shame people simply for being gay; that's now acceptable even in Conservative circles. So perhaps the total shame has just been redistributed, somewhat arbitrarily.
(And another thing: this has evolved shame resistant politicians just like antibiotic overuse evolved MRSA)
This has also resulted in "punishing" people for having the "wrong ideas" by publicly shaming them with partial truths just because they disagree.
It sometimes feels like everyone around is secretly working on behalf of the thought police and we're being coerced into believing one specific narrative.
I think it's their frustration of other things they can't control - climate change, K-shaped economy, PFAS in everything, no healthcare, 7% and rising mortgages for $1.5 million 1000 sq ft built in 1965 shitboxes, corruption by politicians, suppressed elections, pedophile rings operating carte blanche while law enforcement casts a blind eye, presidential pardons for sale to the rich, clawbacks of longstanding LGBTQ and women's rights... culture wars against trans people to distract from class inequality.... and on and on.
Well, I can't make much progress on or change those things so let me distract myself checking out this shitbird who won't help his wife or hold the baby while she gets some nachos. I can be outraged at him because it's small and tangible compared to being outraged at structural inequality of our current economic reality or the looming climate crisis.
And the mean house sale price was under $96k (which is still under $250k, adjusted for inflation).
From roughly 1953 to 2000, the inflation-adjusted cost of the mean house was around $200k-$250k in today's dollars. Now it has nearly doubled, and mortgage rates are on the rise and headed back towards 10%.
The interesting way is the way the pinned post primes people to attack without it being obvious. Basically, they use assumptive language - "is this just how it's always been. Modern marriage or traditional marriage?" assumes that this two minute clip shows this couple's entire relationship.
And that kind of language to "get discussion going" is well know to those aiming for views.
I'm Danish, but how is this terrible? I should show these people a video of my twins sleeping in a snow covered trolley outside the bar I was having a beer and a board game by the window at.
Danes being willing to leave their kids unattended outside, as good as it may be in practice, is a horrifying idea to people in the US at least, and is liable to get Child Protection Services called on you. Different culture.
In the US, CPS will go after you, even if you're just doing what's normal in our culture, as long as one single person doesn't like it.
Someone in my area was in her apartment doing dishes while her kid was playing in the playground in the apartment complex's common area in front of the unit. (https://fox40.com/news/local-news/sacramento-mother-faces-ch...) Someone called CPS and complained that she was inside, while her kid was outside. Even though most anyone would agree it was a nuisance call, they still charged her and opened a case, telling her that if her child is ever out of her direct sight, she'll be violation of the rule they just made up.
Nothing stops CPS from making up their own rules. There's even an effort to specify in each states' laws that parents letting children roam free isn't legally endangerment, but despite having such language in their laws, a mom was recently prosecuted in Virginia, for similarly letting her child roam within a gated common area. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/virginia-mom-child-abuse-convic...)
Agreed. I grew up living for the weekends. I’d wake up, crush some cereal while watching cartoons, and then I’d run out the door to find my friends. I’d usually be home by dark. Or I’d call and tell my mom I was sleeping over at a friend’s house and I’d be back in the morning. She might literally not see me for 30+ hours even when I was in elementary school.
We’d spend our time playing spies and hiding in the bushes watching neighbors do whatever, or looking for crawfish in the creek, or just breaking sticks on trees in the woods lol.
Living in Copenhagen, I do not recognize that. I live in a city apartment on Vesterbro. We have maybe a hundred bikes parked in the backyard, nobody I know brings his bike home for the night, unless it is a really fancy racing bike. But yes, I do lock my bike when ever I really away from it.
Those comments are pure vitriol juice, my god, and they just keep coming from all angles as to why that dude is an absolutely piece of shit on very little data. Incredible stuff, and a good lesson right there.
I had a co-worker who's dad is paraplegic, and they had a family van with hand controls, so that his dad could drive it. His dad was a big guy and his mom was tiny, but she could load and unload the wheelchair without a problem. My co-worker said that sometimes people would stare when his mom was pumping gas, while his dad sat in the drivers seat doing nothing. He said they had a bit of a routine where his mom would start washing the windows and his dad would point out spots she missed.
They totally did it to entertain themselves, but I'm sure it got a few people riled up thinking that the dad was a jerk.
Almost anyone can be seen as a hero or a zero if the right 15 second clip is captured. We love it when our best moments hit social media, but everyone also piles on when we are caught at our worst (or what appears to be bad, even if it not).
It is amazing how many haters emerge like in this case, when there is so much more to the story.
I was thinking of this recently. I "dogsit" for many families and had one recently that wasn't great on leash. She would do this thing where she would lay down and try to eat something off the ground (sticks, garbage, animal/dog poop, dead mice, dead birds... whatever she could find). Much of it would likely make her sick and therefore I would have to quickly pull on the leash to prevent her from eating some random thing she found. Being an 80lbs dog, I had to tug quite hard to quickly get her away from whatever she had found. If someone saw me in that moment, they'd probably think I was a terrible dog owner. Without the context that I was actually trying to prevent harm, someone could take a video, post online with the caption "Identify this dog abuser!" and ruin my reputation.
> When I’ve cried reading the comments and the social media “explanations” of our marriage. The man people have been attacking was the one who consoled me. While strangers described how little he must care about me, he was helping me through the hurt their words have caused.
Everyone loves to hate right away when they see something like this. It's a good practice to try to make up a story that gives an alternate, less vilifying explanation to what you're seeing. This is a great response from Erika. Thanks for sharing.
There are times when I read something I don’t have to refer dictionary or concepts and the flow of words makes you move even though you have no idea what this was about. Great writing and write more. My favorite lines
>> The benefit of the doubt is more than an expression. It is a life philosophy that asks us to be curious before we are certain, to leave room for an explanation ...
>>Thank you for dubbing me “mom of the year.” Please believe me when I tell you I can only be so with the dad sitting next to me.
You never know what others are going through, or what is happening in a relationship between two people, even when you think you’re close to them. So the online masses making these judgements based on a short clip is kinda insane although it doesn’t surprise me.
Wow, Reddit is horrible. Atrocious behavior. Leave your brains in the anteroom!
> Whoever sees this and it reminds them of their current relationship, DUMP HIM
> you can tell by the body language, lack of initiative, and lack of joy and welcome-ness for his woman and baby to be back, everything you need to know.
> There is a VERY good chance that when he realizes he went viral for being the *Poster Manchild* of taking your spouse for granted, of choosing to act like a parasitic blob
Modern Reddit provides a simulacrum of commentary. There are posts and people discusing these posts, but nobody understands or wants to know anything about the underlying topic. The lack of comprehension is crucial to the community.
Its unfortunate because it's not only one of the things that makes social media toxic, but it also makes it less and less like reality. Which in turn pushes away people who have more "normal" views, thereby making the community even more extreme over time. Ask a random person in the street and they might say they think he should help her, but they wouldn't come up with these detailed narratives about abuse and manipulation. That kind of reaction is characteristic of social media and the more I see it the less I want to spend time online with those kinds of people
The other end feeds into itself too. Someone who posts something like that also is over-exposed to content enforcing that narrative. When you see your 50th video of the day of (e.g.) a man behaving in a way you don't like, you eventually conclude that men are all bad, and your reactions begin to become more and more pronounced. You're not reacting to that man, you're reacting to every man!
I think it's also important to remember that these people are karma farming. When you can get 5k points for "man bad", who wouldn't?
Doubly reminded of that as I'm watching a DEFCON talk where he cites fake Internet points as a driving motivator. Which is my feeling too but yeah idk the whole thing is missing that "we're real people" thing.
I gave up even touching that site many years ago. Any anonymous forum will turn to crap with enough people, and they have a voting system encouraging bad behavior on top of that, and loser admins, and probably bots voting too. There's no point.
In a way, this comment precisely demonstrates the kind of vitriol responses that the article talks about -- witch hunt without evidence, going with the trend, herd mentality.
Really? A comment in another thread says Pangram says it's 100% AI. I just checked with the free plan, and it told me 29% AI. What I'm learning here is that Pangram may not be a reliable checker.
Thing is, I also twigged it as heavily LLM written when I read it, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I checked again with a longer sample—the first eight paragraphs—and, this time, Pangram said 61% human. Hmm. I think your twigging may be more accurate.
Even if so, this would seem to be a positive use of LLMs. Something traumatic happened, and she wants to put her perspective into the public dialog rather than continuing to be a passive subject of the social media industry's two minute hate. I know in such a position I myself would be at a loss for words, with the perfect being the enemy of the good enough.
Algorithmic social media amplifies and promotes our basest, vilest impulses. Crowds were always worse than people, but now these "technologies" put that into turbo-overdrive, 5 billion people at a time, pushed and prodded by the engagement-maxxing machine. I don't see a bright future if we don't get a hand on this, and I don't see us getting a hand on this.
And yet, tons of comments on Threads from women saying she's been gaslit or even that the husband must have threatened her with violence and forced her to write this.
normal people -- employed, in a relationship, with chores and hobbies to occupy their free time -- simply do not participate in the gender war on the Internet. most are blissfully unaware that it's even happening. the womanosphere is a mirror image of its critically panned counterpart -- a refuge for the unhappy and/or mentally ill, an obnoxiously loud minority.
And every man as well (all the usual stereotypes, slurs, expectations non-stop), but men don’t complain, shrug, and carry on with our duties and hope she doesn’t get board and take half or more.
The conclusion was made from a 30s clip, and no amount of evidence can overturn that. New theories will be created to support the original conclusion to avoid any amount of critical self-reflection.
> Six weeks before my daughter was born, my employer of 13 years laid off my entire division. Ramses had just put up the down payment on a bigger home for our growing family. My unemployment meant he was facing the mortgage payments and managing a remodel on his own, while we prepared to welcome another child.
i thought that too, but that's not really a story, that's just normal for the US. in europe (most of the EU i am sure) and china and probably elsewhere it's illegal to lay someone off while they are pregnant. (exceptions exist, and if they apply insurance works also for the unemployed)
Part of being grounded and self aware is realizing you are not your thoughts and not everything you believe is true.
The brain does what it does in an attempt to help you, but not often it hits the mark, sometimes it takes a bit of a reminder to pause and unpack things more carefully.
Unfortunately for Ramses and Erika the description tapped into something deeper, a symbol that is all too actually present in our society of the infantile male whose every whim is taken care of.
I myself confused the person for the symbol and owe him an apology. But also eff all the child men walking around always taking and never giving. Be more like Ramses.
> My employer provided medical coverage would lapse before my daughter’s birth. I was at risk of not have medical insurance for the birth of our daughter
Wow. That brought tears to my eyes. What a wonderful and upstanding woman. So many people — both men and women — would jump at the opportunity to play the victim card and amplify their private resentments against their spouse to glorify themselves when they got the spotlight like that. Instead she displayed immense character and honor in defending her husband. All of us should take a lesson from her example.
There will always be idiots who see a 10 second video of someone and think that it gives them enough info to fully understand the subjects' values and motivations but I think most people understand that a meme is not reality.
It's like how some people can come across as very 'nice' and helpful superficially but really it's all virtue signalling and they're actually serial backstabbers; awful, unreliable, untrustworthy people. I met many people like this so I know not to judge a book by its cover.
Another reason social media is a social illness. They never should have been turned into entertainment for strangers (nor sent vile hateful messages). They were just a family at a ball game.
What I notice quite often is a sort of "LLM derangement syndrome" where people start flagging the most innocuous figures of speech and speech pattern as "clearly LLM".
Quite ironic when we are talking about an article which argues for extending the benefit of the doubt.
These patterns aren't somehow alien to human speech. It's the quantity. In ChatGPT (and I think it must be ChatGPT specifically) the default writing voice tries for dramatic and profound by dramatically overusing these figures of speech, chaining them together one after another. But they're things most writers use occasionally, one paragraph in ten or twenty. If you're giving a TED Talk or some other elaborate, melodramatic persuasive public speaking role, you might use them one paragraph in four. ChatGPT uses them every other paragraph at least, sometimes multiple times in the same paragraph, so something like a negation comparator or a triplet is present in sentence after fatiguing sentence.
It's trained on the speech of online commenters like us; That's where it's getting these. I'm not gonna change just because Timmy the Zoomer has been with his LLM girlfriend for the past three years and occasionally I remind him of her. I'm not going to deliberately code switch into somebody who doesn't open a new tab to Google things as he talks about them. And you can take my bullet point lists from my cold, dead hands.
I mean I think were agreeing, in a body of text this size I'd expect to see the dramatic short sentences and standalone dramatic sentence maybe one or twice. This article they are constant. They're great devices were used appropriately, but when the whole body of text reads like it it's awful.
Not asking anyone to stop using those writing devices, just begging for any work to not be exclusively dramatic devices. And when you read a piece of work like that its generally a child or AI lol.
I thought the piece sounded like AI as well, so I ran it through Pangram, which reports it as 100% AI. Considering Pangram's extremely low false positive rate, I'm inclined to believe this was AI written.
Didn't have the same feel about the piece. But based on the parent comment, decided to also test it, using Pangram free "credits". For me it reported that only sections of it (30%) have been "touched" by an LLM. There is 60% of human written text.
Pangram does not report this as 100% LLM generated. Why do I use the word "touched" - because there are some specific details that must have come from some existing text and are not elsewhere.
How did I do the check? Please do check my results! I copied just the authored prose from the page, carefully removing any comments and site text that got mixed in. I did not have it analyze the "URL".
In looking at the details, a large part of the story is flagged as all human generated.
I've personally used LLMs when I've been very upset. I used it to rewrite / edit my rant into something with a more balanced tone. The modified text got what I wanted, my original rant would almost certainly not have.
So I do think this was a thought out piece that was largely written by a human who used an LLM as an "editor" to polish the writing. Someone took time to think about this and write it.
Thing is, it might be or it might not be. At some point you have to realize that some people need wheelchairs to move, some people need glasses to see, and some people need LLMs to write.
IMHO It's when you see someone who is paid to write/think using LLMs that you might make a value judgement.
I once knew a girl who wore prescription-free glasses b/c it made her feel smarter so she'd study longer. Not kidding. I made a value judgement about that. But she got the studying done. There's been other more prevalent cases of that on socials.
It might be worth letting some people write in any way they can.
I think we are approaching the point where collaboration with ai is going to be so ubiquitous that it becomes an unreasonable thing to criticize on its face.
Even before reading, I would assume a non-professional writer would lean on ai to try to figure out what points she wanted to hit and how to phrase things. The cost right now for that is the writing can be somewhat bland, but sometimes that isn't a big problem. Haven't we all seen enough incoherent ai slop to understand the value of editorial oversight by now?
I am working on a libretto in my free time, a hobby I've had for 15 years. Lyrics that would previously take me a week often take an evening. Nearly every suggested stanza and bar is rewritten by me still, but these models can be very helpful in explore the structure of beats to hit, imagery that may or may not land, rhyme and phonetic space etc. Maybe it's ai psychosis or cope but I think my current project is a leap beyond my last two plays. Isn't that what matters for creative expression at the end of the day?
Plaease don't spoil threads with comments like this. The writing doesn't come up as LLM-authored according to the tools we use (polished, perhaps, but not generated).
Who cares? She isn't a public figure, and she never asked to be. She has some thoughts she wants to put out there after going viral due to nothing she did.
Very well written both in prose and tone. I'm glad she decided to tell this story. If the author isn't a professional writer I think she could be.
This is a great "behind the scenes" style look at the actual people behind a viral clip. Luckily they have an extremely strong relationship to help soften the blows here, I'm not sure an average (not even bad!) relationship could come out of something like this unscathed.
There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time, especially online from the safety of our screens. I found the announcers within the range of good fun but when it gets to people reaching out to break up their marriage or telling him to kill himself it becomes really sobering.
I think this is part of what people are calling the lonlieness epidemic - despite thousands of screaming voices the whole thing makes me feel hollow and hopeless.
„There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time“? You write this, as if this is just human and inevitable. But in my experience it’s a matter of character. People can train their body and they can work on self control. I really wish more people would try to become a better person.
Many instincts require self control to override, and character is your ability to to so.
Snap judgements are human and inevitable, but acting on them isn't.
I'm agreeing with you!
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I don't know why you're getting downvoted. There are some very AI-style sentences in this article. GPTZero says "We are highly confident this text was human written and polished with AI"
We've entered the "AI is good and inevitable and only pretentious people would write their own words" phase of the forum.
I think we've entered the "people claiming other things is AI is getting old" phase of the forum.
Personally I don't care if it's AI generated or AI assisted. I didn't get any obvious AI tells, and arguing over whether or not it's AI generated doesn't seem to be relevant to the actual topic - strangers telling a man to kill himself based on a contextless TikTok video is not ok.
The topic is "the author could be a professional writer." I'm not allowed to say no, she couldn't? I wouldn't have mentioned AI if not for that.
Plenty of people who use AI to write get paid to write. The bar isn't "used AI" vs "not used AI," it's "does the author make the point succinctly in a way that is entertaining" which, IME, is not something that AI can one-shot. The fact that so many people found her writing entertaining and meaningful means that she either prompted the LLM well enough to elicit those emotions, or she wrote them herself. Regardless, she succeeded in her goal.
Oof maybe I'm losing my ai-dar. This didn't rub me the wrong way on phrasing.
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> what are the chances someone randomly is a great writer
a lot better than folks who love pointing out "AIisms" and Pangram scores would have you believe. for starters just being a wife of nine years and a mother suggests at least a few decades of experience using language - that's already enough to be a better "writer" than a lot of people trying harder without the experience.
> pretty clearly spruced up with AI
Get used to it. I don't think we're far from every bit of prose online, being at least edited, if not authored, by AI.
If people don't want to read AI, then they won't be reading anything but literary classics.
I'm not saying I find the prospect thrilling; just that it's inevitable.
As for the topic, projecting values, and life stories onto people from single data points, is a favorite sport of just about anyone. We often see people on this very forum, praising or attacking others as a person, and assigning motives; based on only a single comment. One habit that I've developed, is if someone posts something either in support or in opposition to one of my posts, I look them up, and try to find out as much as possible about them, before responding. It often fails, because people don't want others to know about them, but I suspect that it succeeds, a lot more than people might think.
> I don't think we're far from every bit of prose online, being at least edited, if not authored, by AI.
Zero chance of that happening anytime soon. I'm sure a lot of people have adopted it, and more will follow, but there are still plenty of us who enjoy writing and have no desire to let AI tools take that away from us.
> I'm not saying I find the prospect thrilling; just that it's inevitable.
I see no reason why this should be the case. All you have to do is keep writing and it's suddenly not inevitable.
Ironic, enjoying writing yet not catching that "every bit" does not literally mean every bit but an overwhelming majority instead. That some people like writing does not negate their comment.
Re topic:
I have found that in most cases you can simply ask people about their motives. Most often than not those motives and intentions are very different from your prior.
It’s not easy but developing a habit of "blank slating" is quite useful for inner peace.
I honestly do not understand this at all. I never use AI to edit my writing, nor do I want to. To me that defeats the entire fucking point of writing.
It's like learning to play an instrument, and then using AI to make you sound better. Why bother to learn at all then??
I get I may be very much in the minority here, but I still hate it.
> I may be very much in the minority here
you are not the minority, yours is the prevailing attitude on HN (and also the policy - AI-assisted writing is not welcome here) calling out AI isms and smells while ignoring the substance has become sport and an ugly look (IMO) especially with Pangram and sites like (https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector) automatically scanning everything that hits the frontpage (using the older/buggier version of Pangram no less)
Perhaps because her goal wasn't to become a better writer, but because she wanted to get her view out there?
Editing is critical. All professional writers get edited, and the quality of the editor can make all the difference. No writer likes being edited, but the editing can be the difference between success or failure.
I don't think that literary editors are doing a particularly good job, these days. That may be because they've all been fired.
LLMs can do a decent job of editing, but it imparts a "sameness" to the writing.
> It's like learning to play an instrument, and then using AI to make you sound better. Why bother to learn at all then??
I mean having a producer cut multiple takes or remove errors is not exactly new. And I think it exactly proves why people use AI. They could have spent a lot more time getting a piece to where they want it (and they often know where they want it) but why not get there faster. Intelligence and speed are related.
I’d go as far to say that no good writer uses AI for editing. It’s a tool for people that don’t know how to write, don’t know what good looks like, and are not confident enough to choose raw over soulless.
I had my first kid a couple years ago and found myself spending a ton of time holding my kid while he slept, since it's the only way he'd reliably sleep. I spent a good amount of that time browsing various parenting and new baby subreddits.
One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
I feel for moms, who in addition to giving birth and having their lives upended to raise a baby, are now told that not only are most men garbage, but their man is garbage too. I feel for the dads, who even if they work hard are told how useless they are, and have to combat a stream of negativity fed to their spouse. It's a divisive wedge thrown into a new family, one that social media algorithms are only happy to encourage for engagement.
When I see instances like the one in this topic, I can see how the default narrative has been applied here. The radio announcers surely aren't aware of the storm they're creating, but it suddenly thrusts two average people into the social media spotlight, where people are happy to assume any missing details to fit their narrative. Everyone is going to apply the default story without taking any time to consider the possibility of other context.
EDIT TO ADD: I know there are manosphere spaces that are toxic too. As a man I've had no problem avoiding them, so this is one of my first extended exposures to this type of content, which is why it stuck with me. Probably also because I felt personally unwelcome as a dad.
I'm imagining someone who actually did have a deadbeat father growing up then seeing messaging on social media about deadbeat men. Probably their social media feeds create a vicious cycle that only solidifies their distrust of men. It is just showing them things that they saw to be true since they were young children.
> One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.
You can find quite a lot of data showing that the burden of managing domestic matters falls primarily on women. I would recommend people check out the book Fair Play which examines the problem and puts forward a system where people are assigned various personal tasks that need to be done (there are 100 in total, not all of which may apply to your life/household):
> The result is Fair Play: a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With four easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a figurative card game you play with your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore from laundry to homework to dinner.
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44071899-fair-play
* Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6FfxfRMQkw
I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship. We immediately made some small but lasting pivots that removed unneeded friction and now have new-found respect for each others daily "grind".
I've recommended it to a few friends and they have had similar stories. Nothing life changing, but some small, nice changes to the dynamic and how they think about it.
> I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship.
This is probably the best (and maybe the only) way that this is a good game. As soon as it turns into score keeping, the relationship will almost certainly go sideways.
Maybe some relationships should go sideways, but that can be addressed in a different way.
> As soon as it turns into score keeping, the relationship will almost certainly go sideways.
The system / cards is not about keeping score: each card is a task, and whomever holds the card is responsible for it from start to finish. E.g., three of the cards are "Meals (Weekday Breakfast)", "Meals (Kids; School Lunch)", and "Meals (Weekday Dinner)"; this may fall to one person, but there is also the "Groceries" card:
> Your family needs to eat. Can we all agree on that? Good. So how do the pantry and refrigerator get stocked on an ongoing basis? With CPE. This includes noticing what’s about to be used up or expire, keeping a running grocery list, and getting to the market . . . ideally before you realize there’s not a drop of milk in the fridge. Even if your family orders groceries online and your go-to dinner is frozen pizza, this card requires CPE nearly 365 days a year. Consult the various “Meals” cardholders regularly so you can be sure you have taco shells in the cupboard for taco night.
* https://fairplaypolicy.org/the-cards
So the Meals person(s) have to plan the meal(s), and make an ingredient list for those specifically, and add to to a grocery list, but grocery buyer needs to take stock of what is already present in the fridge/freezer/pantry and buy anything missing generally, and specifically for the meals planned.
Eh, my marriage fell into this but it was because my ex refused to get a job, didn't think men were equally capable of parenting, and frankly invented a lot of work. It doesn't help that doctors, teachers, nurses, other parents, schools, and so talked to her by default. To be a truly equal parent or a primary parent as a father is swimming against the current.
> Eh, my marriage fell into this but it was because my ex refused to get a job, didn't think men were equally capable of parenting, and frankly invented a lot of work.
The book discusses expectations and 'standards of performance' and what is reasonable.
People are animals and animals can be trained. Dogs can be trained, elephants can be trained, tigers can be trained. This fact is hated, but has been known for thousands of years.
Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.
You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.
It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.
If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.
> It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US
It's the USA eating itself and trying to attack Europe, if anything. It's American fascist billionaires who own, buy, and steer these social networks.
This type of content is mostly on reddit, which leans heavily leftist. They censor right-wing views aggressively.
Owning the social networks doesn't mean you control all the information inherently, because it can easily get out of control. It wasn't that long ago that hundreds of thousands of bots had to be removed after running rampant for a long time which were manipulating trends that cause peaks on journalist's social media dashboards that influences what stories they cover.
Yes, social media bots impacting statistical trend services which some news organizations use to decide what stories to cover.
Communists caused World War 2 and yet love to play the victim. Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist" and most people don't even know what that really means.
We're not attacking Europe, we're making Europe stronger so it can stand more independently so it doesn't require as much US intervention in the case World War 3 does start and a new front opens there beyond Ukraine. That way the US can invest more of its resources in the pacific. NATO understands this.
The reason we had to do it rudely, is because we've been trying to get Europe to do this for decades nicely and that hasn't work. So you get the rude approach.
> Not everybody who is against communism is a "fascist"
The man that bought one of the most important social networks and has substantially changed its algorithm is nearly openly a nazi. It's not just the sieg hail the day of the presidential swear-in, it's everything he does to the world and the USA. And so do all the others.
> So you get the rude approach.
You're digging your own grave. Your president is handing over your empire piecewise to your adversaries for a fistful of gold. You must understand this: the only thing worse than communism, is fascism, because it's just corruption as a form of government.
What makes someone a nazi? What specific worldviews? Holocaust sympathy? Aryan supremacy?
german here. just adding some soup to the meal, not offending.
for the definition what a nazi is, the movie "american history x" - that imo shows exactly what a nazi is: the main character is not german and not even in germany, but shows the nazi-mindset exactly! He glorifies hitler's thinking about others, fighting for the wrong idealogy for "own" country. ... Thats making a nazi. Neglection/sympathy for holocaust, supremacy thinking, .., too.
As I was told, the word nazi was invented by U.S. for the hitler and his followers so its a short word for national socialists (the party, its memembers and sympathisants) the US was fighting ("name your enemy"). Your question is about/implies nazi as "an individual person with a special characteristic", which makes that someone a nazi.
Its a "nation first + everything for the nation" thinking. For me a nazi is someone who glorifies the nazi time, saying it was all well done then, wanting those times back - like some elderly tend to say "earlier, everything was better". They dream of powerfull country with a straight people-body. Nazi think in races. And always say others are guilty for one's own failure, argument with "they" and "us" when they talk about own country/others.
So basically, patriotism, skinheads and far right are subsets of "nazi", but not full nazi :)
And may be, if one wants to be a REAL full nazi, its a must to shave the head and to have some on topic tattoos with being caucassian at the same time. This is how we differentiate them in germany - you see: "we" and "them". But i'm not nazi :)
funny, in US there was a nazi gang a few years ago, with the group's "leader" having the room full of nazi-stuff, flags and propaganda - as it came out later, he was jewish by himself and did not tell ..
Frank Meeik, Daniel Burros, but the one i mean was just like a joke of a nazi. But still dangerous thinking.
Has there ever been a prosperous and successful country that has not put its own nation first?
Exactly, which is what makes the Nazi/fascist/autarkist/autocratic position even more absurd. As we're seeing play out in the US, calls to "put the country first" are rooted in hate for the country that actually exists, and end up being quite destructive to the country's actual interests!
There would seem to be a common pattern whereby preaching of values tends to fill in for actually living out those values (eg religion, performative virtue signalling, so-called "rightist" libertarians), and the whole "put our country first!" or "make our country great again!" seem to be strong examples of this.
Has there ever been a prosperous and successful fascist country?
No, they stagnate economically in corruption.
No, no, answer the question posed--which country has prospered by putting other countries first?
> Its a "nation first + everything for the nation" thinking.
If you think this means "our nation over other nations" then you misunderstood. It means "nation above all", e.g. "everything for the government, above citizens". That is, forget the individual, there is a greater good for which we must endure some hardship, trust me.
FYI, the promised land never materialized, historically.
> If you think this means "our nation over other nations" then you misunderstood. It means "nation above all".
A distinction without a difference, the second automatically leads to the first, no exceptions.
> "everything for the government, above citizens". That is, forget the individual, there is a greater good for which we must endure some hardship, trust me.
Right, in addition to being a code for "we over the others", "nation above all" also provides the excuse for the social mobilization necessary for wars. Nationalism is a tool of war, it may start in some covert form but the end result is the same.
Fair enough--so then, which successful nation has existed that prioritizes the individual over the nation's laws in any capacity?
Which successful nation has eschewed the idea of the greater good?
(And to your point--this absolutely has been perverted in various cases to justify atrocious behavior! It is necessary but not sufficient in order to govern well and righteously and be a successful country.)
It's not necessarily a binary choice, is it? There's a spectrum between true democracy that isn't simply "rule of majority", and authoritarianism.
There is a weakness in democracies too, that if they are too tolerant and allow too much freedom, this can paradoxically undermine democracy itself and lead to a collapse.
So in general, western democracies tend to respect human rights, sacrificing the greater good, because this in itself is considered a greater good.
No, _you_ must understand this.
Originally we had The League of Nations. The idea was a sort of collective defense. Europe failed. They did not come to each other's aid.
After WW2, that was the second time the US had to come stop the wars. We weren't simply going to join a defense pact if Europe couldn't demonstrate that its own collective defense had teeth. So the establishment of the Western Union was an attempt to demonstrate to the US that Europe was finally ready. Then NATO was formed.
Now, Europe has been underfunding its defense for decades and not meeting their NATO commitments, so that original question was back on the table. Can Europe even defend itself? Is it overly reliant on the US?
So, no. We will not apologize for being tough with you, because the world is changing and you no longer have the option to just stagnate. We're not losing any allies, that's just rhetoric and propaganda. You're not a serious person if you think that somehow western countries aren't going to help each other.
Making you stronger means you can help yourself or even help us later. Fundamentally, if our allies are stronger it also changes the Chinese calculus on how much of a threat from Europe they have to factor in before possibly starting World War 3.
The bottom line is, get off your asses and light a fire under your government to invest in defense spending, or be a small part of the cause of future millions of deaths, because your feelings were hurt.
If you don't even have enough compassion for fellow humans to want to stop World War 3, then you have no moral ground to stand on.
Your underpinnings for your arguments are the classic infant/adult fallacy where the people you're not sympathetic to are adults with incredible agency and power, and the people you have sympathy for are helpless children with no choices.
Putin wasn't forced to invade Ukraine. What was he even putatively trying to avoid? NATO's not belligerent (you can't simultaneously argue that Europe's military is pathetically weak, but also that it was so muscular and menacing that Putin had to respond proactively).
Hitler chose to start WW2. He wasn't forced to invade France to stop communism. He wasn't forced to attempt over and over to invade Great Britain to stop communism.
China, Russia, etc aren't looking for openings to start WW3. It would be devastating to them--just the war with Ukraine has had generational consequences for Russia. They also aren't innocent nations who, after intolerable saber rattling by the West, will have no choice but to start WW3. It's further not the case that the only deterrent to these innocent nations regrettably starting an insane conflict is a heavily armed Europe. The US is pretty heavily armed! France and GB are nuclear powers!
The way I see it, World War 2 was kind of a perfect intersection of the great depression creating a perfect opening for communist revolution as countries had seen during and after World War I and the protectionist contraction of trade during that time made matters worse. So you get countries that are simultaneously starving economically while risking being eaten alive by communism.
What we see today is different. Russia and China are projecting a shift to their hemisphere in terms of world influence. The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.
The CCP was directly established by Comintern, and even though the current thinking is that global communist expansion was abandoned, the way Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela have been behaving make communist or "post-communist" states a resurgent threat.
War would be devastating, but the idea is that if it was a World War, then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China. This is part of why we have supported Ukraine, but not overinvested. It's part of why we captured Maduro, who was threatening to invade his neighbor. It's also part of why we're sorting out Iran, because we need to take that trigger button out of China's toolchest. Imagine it going off while we're busy with China.
With the state of the world now, if China invaded Taiwan and tripped the Japanese tripwire, we would largely be free to focus on China. That is I think what Chinese analysts see now.
> The way I see it, World War 2 was kind of a perfect intersection of the great depression creating a perfect opening for communist revolution as countries had seen during and after World War I and the protectionist contraction of trade during that time made matters worse.
I think when economies falter governments falter, and their philosophies are discredited. So it makes sense that governments were on thin ice in the wake of WW1 and the Great Depression, and that more radical parties from the left and the right were ascendant. I think something similar is happening now, if of lower magnitude. But, no way was this a door only communists walked through, anarchists, fascists, etc were all in the mix.
> The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.
China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).
Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.
> then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China
You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.
Finally, I don't exactly know what you mean by "focus on China." The West's relationship with China is complex, a lot of people are focused on it. The likelihood of direct confrontation with them is quite low, as it'd be disastrous for both sides.
> But, no way was this a door only communists walked through, anarchists, fascists, etc were all in the mix.
Communism was an absolute existential, civilizational and culture destroying threat. That is how it was seen back then in Europe. Without that threat, fascism would not have risen. Communism wasn't a scapegoat for a totally separate fascist ideology, fascism was a direct counter to the threat of communism. People who argue that anti-communism was simply used as a political tool to gain power have a very large hill to climb to justify their argument. So you can't separate them the way you do here.
> China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).
They are Marxist-Leninist to the extent that it is baked into their constitution and "corruption" often means you are not upholding Marxist principles or carrying forward the revolution. So, reformers, democracy advocates, not using your money to benefit the state and so on. From a post market reforms perspective, they are more like a neo-mercantilist command economy, but make no mistake that the Marxist philosophy is alive and acted on in China. They were being lax before Xi Jinping. Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.
> Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.
China does not need a giant navy with all these bombers, jets, carriers and destroyers, building out all these fake islands across the region and demanding that no regional countries allow foreign countries to help them with military fortification. They don't need all of that in order to take Taiwan. China lacks critical resources that would prevent it from being reliant on external trade, the same way Japan did. The difference is, Japan was afraid of communism and China wants to prevent the communist party from falling the way the Soviet Union did.
Taking back Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet is about finishing the communist revolution which in China was less about class warfare and more about anti-colonialism. It's even baked into their constitution for this reason. What they will do with their power once they have it, is unknown. What they already do with the power they have is very concerning and not promoting peace in the world. This does not suggest great peaceful eventual motivations in their region if that's what they support.
> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin.
Stop thinking about Trump admin this, Trump admin that. It's the US. It's a very common mistake for people to see some presidential candidate and think that's everything they are and when they become president then that's what the US is. Universally, the US has its own aims and the presidency tends to align with those aims in one way or another regardless who becomes president. Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb? That's basically what you're describing. We've got thinktanks on top of thinktanks on top of thinktanks and objectively some very smart people in the admin whether you like their politics or rhetorical strategy or not. Like, measurably. So, no. Your not understanding of strategy is not proof of lack of strategy.
> They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.
This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries. They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc). Communists just love controlling the resources. Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.
So, yeah we wrecked them and with good reason. The US treated them fairly in the 1950s, gave them a standard international oil deal like most countries have, built hospitals, schools etc but then the communists tricked the population into thinking we were stealing their oil, then they nationalized it and after that no oil companies wanted to invest there. So their oil infrastructure fell apart and in the 1990s/2000s Venezuela tried to reverse course on their communist resource manifesto and give oil companies the same standard OPEC style deal they had in the 1950s before the nationalization, but no companies wanted to invest again. Same problem happens in Cuba, because Cuba keeps inviting companies to invest and then they steal the company's assets and nationalize it or otherwise.
So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.
This is what many Venezuelans think about it and this is just one person, but many could echo this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cylfhA8pNgY
> People who argue that anti-communism was simply used as a political tool to gain power have a very large hill to climb to justify their argument.
Again, Hitler didn't blitzkrieg GB because communism.
> Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.
No, it's Han Superiority. That's why they haven't expanded south: they don't care about non-Chinese. Marxism is fundamentally a workers movement. The CCP is a lot of things, but a workers movement isn't one of them.
> China does not... need all of that in order to take Taiwan.
The Taiwan Strait is notoriously treacherous. Taiwan has few beachheads, tons of tall mountains, dense urban environments, and flat, open farm land. It would be a nightmare of casualties and would destroy Taiwan's economy for at least a generation. China doesn't want to suffer any of that.
> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. ... Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb?
Obama spent years getting the JCPOA. Trump tore it up, spent billions of dollars, caused a worldwide energy crisis, and Iran's ascendant. Some presidents have better foreign policy than others.
> This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries.
Other countries had sanctioned Maduro and members of his regime, but only the Trump admin charged him with crimes.
> They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc).
The Biden admin didn't think this was credible.
> Communists just love controlling the resources.
Here's a quote from Trump: “Now I love Venezuela. You know, I love it. We’re doing great in Venezuela. We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
Is Trump a communist or do more than just communists like to control the resources?
> Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.
This is pure conspiracy theory. Whatever algorithm you're in has broken your brain.
> So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.
Mostly agree, but this was uniquely Trump and wildly unlawful. You can't just invade other countries and abduct their leaders. You also can't just blow up random noncombatants in the ocean.
> Communists caused World War 2 and yet love to play the victim.
This is an unconventional position. What's your rationale?
My best guess is something like this:
The Soviets gave the Germans a free hand to begin the war by splitting Poland via the Molotov pact. Without that agreement, and without the preceding years of Soviet resource shipments and technical exchanges, it is unclear if the European war would have happened.
This is about as far as I could guess as well. Unfortunately by this logic you could just as easily implicate France and the UK for the Munich agreement, as well as the failure to excercise their defense pact with Poland. So essentially every party with exception of Germany and the United States is at fault for WW2. This also leaves the Pacific theatre unaccounted for as you implied. So I'm very curious what the original commenter intends.
"ackchually, facism good" is what he intends.
It doesn't merit more response, you can just look at the reality of actual fascist states. Economic stagnation, the most extreme corruption and incompetence, and cruelty beyond imagination. True masterminds.
The rationale is that Communist International (Comintern) based in Russia at the time was openly aiming for total global communist revolution. These weren't simply activists (though there was that too), but actual armed militant Marxist groups. They were in China, Japan, Spain, Germany, France, Britain, the US you name it. It was a pervasive problem in the early 1900s.
The US and Germany were both helping fight back against the communists in China and Spain. Everyone was basically on board with being against the communists, they just weren't on board with the extremes to which Japan and Germany were going. Japan was passing laws to suppress Marxist revolution in their country in the 1920s and Germany went to many extremes, routing out communists anywhere.
In Germany you even saw education being changed to fortify new students as anti-communist, because preventing communist revolution from taking over Germany was existential for them. The teachers knew what they were teaching, but they were afraid enough of communism that it seemed a reasonable defensive mechanism. There had already been examples of communist revolution upending countries, so it wasn't as if it was a fake threat or concern.
It was very real, and people who dismiss the pacts signed between Japan, Germany and Italy to cautify the fact that they explicitly saw communism as a threat, do so in ignorance. It's often argued that it was some kind of fake political front to justify their actions, but on close inspection that seems to absolutely not be the case. These people legitimately believed communism was an existential threat.
This is further evidenced in the years after WW2, where there were many more communist conflicts in other countries. Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, etc. If you put yourself in their shoes, simply imagining being any of these countries, would it be unreasonable to feel an existential threat? No. Just, flat out, logically, no.
So why did they end up invading all these other countries? What was that all about?
The communists love to control the resources and in terms of a total global communist revolution, you've heard things like domino theory and you could understand it in numerous ways. One is that, if you expand to control a tipping point of resources, then you can leverage those resources to dominate the rest of the world and enforce your revolution.
Japan and Germany wanted to route out communism in other countries, but they also wanted to leverage the resources. Germany working with Russia to take Poland was largely strategic, not a sign of actual good faith towards Russia. Both Japan and Germany explicitly intended as their end goal, to conquer Russia and destroy Comintern.
This is part of why Stalin dismantled the Comintern, to deflate Japanese and Germany aims while simultaneously fostering military support from the allies.
Another critical point to support my argument, is that even if you don't think communism was the primary issue, why the heck would Japan and Germany join forces, causing it to become a World War? You could certainly argue that it doesn't become a World War until that happens. After all, people often make the mistake of saying the war didn't even start until something random in Europe happened and they can never ever convincingly explain how that caused the war to spin out of control. It makes no sense, because it is BS.
The war was already raging in the Pacific long before anything began in Europe. So why were the things in the Pacific happening? The thing that unifies both of these conflicts is communism.
People often deflect and just say oh Hitler was a racist and it was just this and that. They never answer the question: so what about Japan?
If they were fascist, what is a fascist? Many things, but most fundamentally they are a reaction to the communist threat. Communism is underpinned by a philosophy that all action is social action, so every person must be an activist. This puts society out of order rapidly, because anyone not involved gets overrun if it gains traction.
So fascists develop psychological counter-strategies to communism. That's why the Nazi flag was red. That's why they emphasize race instead of class, to unify people rather than divide them. That's why they uplift beautiful art and collected precious artifacts that communists hate and try to destroy. Everything was an intentional counter-strategy to communist revolution. It's easy to look back on it and say it looks insane, because it is and it is patterned as the inverse of communist revolution which is also itself insane. They wanted to immunize their country as a cultural powerhouse to fend off communism for all time.
And if the revolution was going to take over sufficient resources to steamroll other countries, then Japan and Germany were reasoning that they would need to expand to counter it.
Comintern wanting total global communism was logically inept and wrong for them to do. Germany and Japan going nuts and killing a ton of people was wrong for them to do.
It wouldn't have happened if the communists had not created a global existential threat. Remember too, this is before the internet, before pervasive communications and such. People still largely got their news from word of mouth, newspapers and radio so I'm sure there was plenty of miscalculation to go around, but the slow verifiable things were undeniable and that's what they were reacting to.
The communists have been threatening to start World War 3 and that is also what the Trump administration is reacting to today. Between Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, both Russia and China have lost essential partners in rapid succession. We've been helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure which has dual purpose, since it both weakens Russia and also demonstrates to China that not only is their Venezuelan and Iranian oil not secure, but not even the oil they get from Russia is reliable. China built the largest strategic oil reserve in the world which is something like double the rest of the entire world combined and they were going to use it to sanction proof themselves in the case of engaging with Taiwan. Now they are drawing it down, which reduces the chance of WW3.
What reading materials/authors do you recommend? The history here and in many of your comments is orthogonal to my mainstream understanding.
There is whole genre of authors (Ernst Nolte, Viktor Suvorov, David Irving) who argue WW2 was all preemptive strike, that middle classes felt under threat and that soviets were preparing wide actions to take over europe.
It's revisionist history. Constructed arguments that quickly fall apart - like Yes Hitler was afraid of Bolsheviks but that doesn't explain why he invaded all the other countries France, Poland, Denmark, Norway... many more.
The repeat of the same trick on current events with Iran/Venezuela/Cuba is very telling. I doubt anybody believes that US attacks Iran because of communism. But yes all the US conflicts are because of communism.
More likely explanation is that big business backs fascism to crush social causes. Fascism exists to save capitalism from the people.
No, this is nonsense. I don't think that Russia was suddenly aiming to take over Europe in some big blitz attack. That is ignorant of what the fear of communism was based in. It was spreading just fine without any military invasion, though it was essentially supported by the communists in Russia and this was transparent to everyone, a mystery to none.
These countries had real world evidence of it happening and back then times were hard. You had starvation, unemployment, mistreatment and really societies were still trying to find the balance in an industrializing age. This was ripe territory for the spread of Marxism and it was adapted differently to a country depending on what the main complaints were.
Simply look at the spread of communism to other countries even after World War 2. You need to pay close attention to that, because it's the same fear other countries had before WW2. This was a very real issue and simply falling back on some propagandistic argument that the role of communism was overblown because of X, Y and Z, ignores all the reasons the communist threat wasn't overblown.
I think people forget that back then, death was normal and constant. People were dying all the time from all manner of both horrific and normal things. Most countries wanted to achieve some kind of stability and countries invading other countries was much more common in the recent history to them in a way that threatened them or in other words was normalized.
If the US had relative stability, England had relative stability and Russia had relative stability, countries like Japan and Germany did not. The great depression and communism both combined with the trade protectionism to create an internal existential threat. Suddenly you had mass hunger and unemployment. Yes they wanted to expand, yes they wanted more room for their people, but a strong factor that drove it to be existential was communism. Several of these other countries had already appeased communism, like France.
Germany and the US had already been fighting against communism in Spain and China, so this was going on long before the European side of the war started and it was a demonstrated actual acted on concern with evidenced history. If communism was going to expand, then if Japan and Germany wanted to survive communism or generally an expanded Russia. Like, think back then. You had Britain which had its empire. Now imagine a Russia that had an expansive communist empire.
Germany and Japan both had a rough history with Russia trying to take their territory. If they were going to be able to survive in an environment with an expanded Russia with vast communist acquired resources in an industrializing world, they would have to expand and establish control of resources of their own.
I'm not saying that it was right or good or that Japan and Germany don't take any blame and they were simply defending themselves, because that's not the case. Everybody made mistakes, but back then miscalculations were common and life was harsh. We take the comfy relatively peaceful life today for granted, but life was an everyday natural disaster back then by comparison to today. If you look at how Japan and Germany both prioritized their threats, communism was at the very top. It was real, they acted on it and as humans they acted in ways that demonstrate it was their highest priority.
Many European countries had official communist political parties and in the stable countries they didn't have much sway, but in other countries suffering from economic ruin from every direction, communist parties were gaining a lot of traction. The timing for why Hitler was appointed was explicitly because the communist party was gaining too much influence and reached the point of being an existential threat.
Make sure that you know one specific thing. Communism was basically known for dissolving countries from the inside, destroying their culture, their history and their identity. This is why it's more than simply worker activism, it's an existential threat to your civilizational existence. Japan and Germany both had strong cultures with a lot to lose.
There is no version of history where the communists are innocent, kind and good and there is no version of history where Japan and Germany are innocent, kind and good. That said, communism was actual evil even if on its surface it aimed to help workers. They legitimized and normalized horrific murder and assassination in all kinds of countries.
Part of the economic disaster that hit Japan and Germany was because of trade protectionism that went to extremes, because countries were protecting their local trade out of fear of communist revolution and they relied more on external trade for their needs. Without vast natural resources to leverage they couldn't sufficiently provide for their people without open trade which was closing down.
If not those authors, which ones? Or is this your own theory?
I've been doing my own research and taking notes for maybe 15 years. I'm not sure there's any author that thinks the way I do about it.
If I was to point at the absolute fundamentals, I'd say the open trade in the 1800s that caused many countries to rely on external supply chains leading to mass urbanization and hollowing out their agriculture created countries that were far less self sufficient.
With millions migrating away from the farms and working the land, moving to the cities, many countries were less self sufficient and it created an extreme imbalance and vulnerabilities. World War I might not have happened without that.
The economic issues combined with World War I was ripe ground for social movements which in the past were not always existential. When Russia was taken over by communists, they began to weaponize communism around the world. Any country that was undergoing hardship was a prime target.
Japan and Germany both suffered greatly from the 1800s mass urbanization with a weakened agricultural sector and when trade began to shut down in the 1930s to protect local economies out of fear not doing so would create an opportunity for the communists, this crushed Japan and Germany.
It would be fair to say then that there was some wisdom to globalism, but there was also some ignorance and it was not well managed. Yet, had communism not been the threat it was, global trade may not have receded as aggressively as it did.
So Russian weaponized communism, in full understanding of what communism actually is and how it operates in brutal destructive ways to destroy a society, combined with international imbalances caused by poorly managed trade in a rapidly industrializing world is a pretty good summary of what I see as the real causes of World War 2.
I'm not accurate about everything and I've made mistakes even in this thread which I didn't notice until after the edit option was gone, but I do make an effort to identify mistakes when I find an inaccuracy. Broadly, I think all the critical things I've said here will hold up as I haven't found convincing counter-arguments. If high quality counter-arguments are presented, I'm not closed minded and will consider them.
Regardless of the truth of the times, if you ever write a book with this view and cite your research where possible I suspect many of us would read it. The concept is fascinating.
I can't find any author with such a sweeping and elegant theory. But if you do have any sources of inspiration, reading material, or recommended authors at hand, I'd be happy to take a look.
> One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless.
This is a sitcom trope no? I wonder if that's why that assumption is made.
A family is a autonomous unit, in theory capable of survival without society for a while. For those who marry the state to receive alimony from the taxpayer this independent union is a blatant declaration of war.
Giants fan here. Watched the game. Even when it was happening and before knowing any of this, I could tell that Kruk and Kuip were going too far. It was starting to get super uncomfortable.
For those who aren't Giants/baseball fans, Mike Krukow (the Giants' color commentator) is retiring at the end of this season. He and Duane Kuiper have been the Giants' primary TV broadcast team for something like 37 years and have been best friends since they were teammates in the early '80s.
Krukow's mind is still sharp, but he has inclusion body myositis, and it's becoming unsafe for him to be anywhere other than at home.
It's just an emotional situation all around. They both thought that they would probably continue broadcasting together for at least a few more years, and now they're not.
So they're pulling out all of their usual schticks -- including poking fun at the fans -- and taking them really, really far because they know it's the last time.
I'm sure they would agree they went a little too far with that one.
A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.
Telling women they're being abused even when the woman herself disagrees is a very ironic pattern I see often. Somehow it's seen as anti-sexist and yet it puts the onus on the woman to justify herself like the case here where she wrote an entire article. What happened to letting women make their own choices? I'm sure some of them are legitimately concerned, but I think a lot of people just want to spread their preferred narratives about the world.
As a black man, I can't help but think of the whole Chris Brown thing here. Yes, I personally found what he did disgusting, and if everyone else obviously felt that way, I would keep that up.
But no -- I know too many Black women who have -- I suppose -- chosen forgiveness. Too many intelligent humans that I know or know of, are good with this for me to say "No, ladies, you are wrong."
That is a problem I've had with the whole "listen to women" thing. That became a popular phrase and I said okay that's reasonable I'll do so. Over time though I'll see women on both sides of just about every issue. Even women having the right to vote you'll somehow find women who disagree(probably for political reasons).
My only conclusion is the whole idea of "listen to women" is itself simplistic as it assumes women all think the same. Certainly I still listen to women, but im not willing to assume they all feel a certain way just because a few people insist they do. Otherwise Im just ignoring the women with the minority view
I don't know the particular "listen to women" trend you're referring to there but, as you say, there is no doubt that women hold diverse and independent views like men do.
So no statement by some or other advocate can legitimately claim to be the viewpoint of all women. Myself, I also wouldn't want that to be a bar that must be cleared to get onto the platform and take the mic.
We can listen even as women debate their own varied viewpoints with other women. And women themselves must call out and challenge the misrepresentations made in their name, it's a responsibility that comes with the mic.
What you said more or less, plus my 2c.
Those who tell you to "listen to women" usually also tell you which women you should listen to.
The father-mother-child-donkey conundrum. Its only solution is: to hell with anyone's thoughts, we'll act as we prefer.
I had to look this up [1]:
> C. T. Studd, (1860-1931) the famed English missionary who served God in China, India, and Africa, once remarked: "Remember the miller's donkey. The miller, son and donkey went to the market. The miller rode the donkey all the way and people exclaimed, 'Cruel man, riding himself and making his son walk.' So he got down and his son rode; then people slanged, 'What a lazy son for riding while poor old father walks.' Then both father and son rode, and people then said, 'Cruelty to animals, poor donkey.' So they got down and carried the donkey on a pole, but folks said, 'Here are two asses carrying another ass.' Then all three walked and people said, 'What fools to have a donkey and not ride it.' So let's go ahead with our work for God and not care what folks say."
Secular wisdom for the ages! 150 years ago we would have been taking a donkey to market wrong. Now with the advent of YouTube and Reddit and Twitter we've charted vast new swaths of incorrect behavior that we can leverage to make ourselves feel superior to others.
[1] https://www.actsweb.org/articles/article.php?i=295&d=2&c=6
The tale seems to pre-date that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_miller,_his_son_and_the_do...
Studd's conundrum.
It’s not only online. Just last weekend, someone heckled me at Costco because my wife was pushing a heavy ass cart while I was walking freely next to her. She chose to do it, I offered to take it and she refused. But somehow a random stranger had something to say about it.
Online behavior is unfortunately a slightly worse mirror of real life. If you want to experience people outside of your bubble, just go to any public hearings or meetings and you’ll find that a lot of people are quite out there.
I admired a man tending to his partner at a restaurant, and my then-girlfriend told me that she could tell from observing them that he was controlling, and his deference was purely performative.
Because "of similar situations she'd seen".
She had magically deep telepathic abilities, it seems.
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Ok, but like were you offended, I feel like it's mostly a harmless slightly funny observation. I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it? I live in the south and there's a pretty much constant running stream of public commentary on any and everything going on and 99.9% of it is friendly intentioned even if on the surface it's deriding. So really the idea of thinking someone is making a meaningful judgement is strange. And of course, even if they really were, why care?
> I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it?
Flip genders and most likely people say things like this. Somehow men are just expected to deal with this but if it’s directed at a woman it’s all bad.
I’ll jump in- why care? Because it sucks to have people taking pot shots at you. If it is just one, then sure, that isn’t so bad, but when you have a group doing it, it can become existential. You may not have seen this type of violence before but it is unsettling. A group of people can do low effort violence that feels fun and harmless to them (each taking a lazy swing at someone), but the cumulative effect can be beating up or killing someone. Getting yelled at, or having someone write threatening things to you, is not as bad as being punched or having a stone thrown, but it is still damaging to humans.
Not all hurtful and harmful behavior is violence and we need to maintain the distinction.
Don’t want to be the semantics guy but hurtful and harmful behaviour is by definition violence.
Evidently, you are in fact not "the semantics guy".
Eh, when I was a kid violence was physical by definition. That distinction seems to be getting lost such that the phrase "physical violence" is no longer redundant. But the new usage is figurative.
By whose definition?
The World Health Organization includes not just actual but also threatened physical force or power that results in injury, death or psychological harm
Something that causes harm is harmful; something that causes hurt is hurtful. So something that is harmful or hurtful is violence?
Or what am I missing?
Nowadays there's the risk that someone will record you, put it on social media, it'll go big, and suddenly you have a large amount of people weighing in on your personal life without having any context. If that happens, it's likely to trickle back to you directly from other people seeing it or whatever.
The answer to this is to simply not pay attention to social media. There could be a mob on Twitter/X right now flaming me, and I wouldn't know about it or care, because I simply don't go there.
But members of your social circle (family members, friends, coworkers/bosses etc.) do pay attention, and when they do, they can make it your problem. You can ignore an Internet mob, but you can't ignore getting fired by your employer because they want to preserve optics.
I don't know--I think these stories of real-world consequences stemming from online rage are few and far between. It happens but it's rare. IMO the Online World is kind of not-real, and it's really hard to get so much visibility there to actually affect the real world.
This is one reason I've heard why some people still mask. It's mainly to have some privacy.
covid made the wearing of masks publicly acceptable. in western culture it used to be unwelcome. like if you hide your face you must be a criminal. in austria has a contoversial law that made masking your face in public generally illegal.
This right here is why good leadership is fading. Who would want to be in the limelight?
Or speculation grows and a few hours later it's suddenly historical fact, like a modern version of telephone... just with a more harmful outcome.
Is there any benefit to social media? Just seems like a new form of cancer we have to deal with now along with everything else.
A place for those who would be marginalised by their own community, gay, religious apostates etc etc.
Communicating with relatives on the other side of the world.
Maintaining old friendships that would have died due to distance.
Somewhere to find like minded people.
Somewhere like hacker news (I count it as social media top) where I discovered great books, expanded my horizons and learnt that there were other ways at looking at the world.
Anyway, it's not all bad :)
There are social sharing functions and then there are algorithmic feedback loops that induce doomscrolling. Pretty sure it’s technically feasible to have one without the other.
The question to me is, with enough content and a powerful enough recommendation algorithm trained with enough eyeballs can short form videos be considered addictive in a clinical sense? If so what are the deleterious effects of the addiction? Should it be regulated?
I’m all for freedom, but we regulate drugs because we deem them bad for society.
You are describing old-school social-network designs that began to be marginalized already before Covid, not modern social media. The latter would prefer that you not forge or maintain authentic connections with other human beings, but rather doomscroll through endless-scroll content.
Keeping in touch with relatives or friends in much of the world has long since moved to chat apps like WhatsApp instead of an open social network.
You can do most of that with IRC. There's a distinction imo between static webpages / IRC / forums, and modern "social media".
I don't use social media much myself, but I feel that this is going in the direction of that infamous dropbox comment.
I think it's not even that there's a benefit to it, it's that a lot of traditional communities that had their own forums are now exclusively on Facebook groups. I'm in several groups for mountain biking, for cars, for 3D printing, and those communities just don't exist anywhere else online other than small pockets with very little activity. Discord is the other one that has captured a bunch, but it's mostly centered around gaming, memes and tech.
Homemade Dog videos. Not sure of anything else
I live alone, and have friends throughout the US.
Social media kept me from attempting suicide during COVID. It helps me feel loved and connected.
Yeah, there are faults, but condemning it wholeheartedly is like suggesting we should abolish ICE cars immediately.
And suggesting we abandon it as a comment on a social media platform is ironically self-unaware.
I always try to be specific and condemn addiction engineering.
Social media before algorithmic attention hacking wasn’t nearly as bad, might have been a net good.
The first thing the algorithm destroyed was the “social” part of social media. Then it set about destroying society and kids attention spans.
> And suggesting we abandon it as a comment on a social media platform is ironically self-unaware.
Gotta reach people where they are.
You can’t have the internet and the first amendment and not have social media, and I’d suggest both of the above are beneficial.
You should probably say "freedom of speech" so this makes sense anywhere except USA.
But more importantly I call bullshit. If something, anything, is proven to be extremely deleterious to peoples health and also to the democratic process then you absolutely can write laws banning it specifically. Eg. you cant build your own nukes or biological weapons at home. That's how laws and constitutions work.. they are developed over time as things come up.
Thank god the founders thought of people like you when they made abundantly and unambiguously clear “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”
Without that you do not live in a democracy, only an authoritarian state where the ruling class permits you to discuss their conduct only as they see fit and out of the goodness of their hearts, and permits you to vote only for candidates holding positions they pre-approve.
Story also mentions SF Giants sports commentators making jokes about this
I noticed how easy it is to frame something online when you’re viewing it out of context. I’ve seen myself getting it wrong from time to time, because a title was misleading, and I don’t know why after 30 years of internet I’m not way more skeptical.
Also known as "Mind your own damn business" (to those karens who judge assuming they know better than the people in the situation themselves)
"A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them."
While also erasing everything that is real about that person's life, too.
I cringe whenever I hear someone angrily yell something like "You don't/can't know how I feel!", because unless the person making the accusation knows the accused very, very well, they could well be really stepping it. Nobody makes it through this life unscathed. Everybody loses people they love. Everybody gets kicked in the gut multiple times in life. Yes, everyone's personal life story, if you get specific enough, isn't exactly like someone else's. I won't claim to know exactly what it's like to be sexually abused, for instance. Wouldn't dream of it. Very serious issue. But I've had kicks to the gut that the one screaming that they may not have an exact analog for either.
I may not know how your exact gut punch feels. Maybe you've had noticeably more gut punches than I have. But everybody has had some sort of experience with them.
If one day a genie's magic spell made you see text pop ups above everyone's head with their traumas and abuses in life, and the emotional and physical burdens they're carrying today, you'd probably have a very hard time walking down the street.
Similarly, I really have a distaste for any variation of the "everyone's sheep" meme, especially when it's because they're not being active in some particular political way that the person flinging the meme around thinks they should be. If you could see those popups, maybe you'd understand why not everyone has a bunch of spare time to do whatever it is you think they should do to not be "sheep". Looking out on to a crowd of people and presuming they are "sheeple" reveals a lack of imagination and sympathy with people rather that the possession of a wise eye and strong understanding of the world.
That seems to be a big part of it.
There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left. Most of the learning feedback to that -- pointing out to people when they might be missing something or acting unfairly -- is ignored, except to attack those who point it out.
AFAICT, for various reasons, they're proud of being warriors for their beliefs, and anyone who sounds like they're saying anything differently is the enemy, and the only thing you do with an enemy is score points against them or hurt them, while trying not to concede anything that the enemy would claim as points or hurt you. It's a toxic recipe for society.
Coincidentally, recently I've decided even Fedi isn't safe from that (it's just different and fewer people doing ideological bully thinking), and have resigned myself that issues of substance can't be discussed there either. Maybe the only safe thing to post is cat pictures.
I think it's much less a problem with HN. Of course, over time you realize certain positions get downvotes that aren't flattering to the people doing it, and some annoying commenting behaviors, and not always all the integrity we'd like to see, which are relatively mild by social media standards. However, I'm also seeing occasional random individual actor extreme toxicity problems with HN. And I'm anticipating some related but different kind of problems from how AI-powered tools will be easily used with the corpus/firehose to play toxic games.
> There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left.
As of 2026, it's disingenuous to both sides this issue, at least in the US
This is really toxic offline, too.
If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.
Kinda off topic, but as a single Father I cant help but notice how much less of a support system Fathers get. When shit hits the fan its always people assuming the worst. A Fathers major support system is their Wives and Family. Good for him for having such a great Woman by his side... Im not complaining, just an observation
> If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.
I’m not so sure, I’m convinced people would not bat an eye. Or at least I don’t expect any positive compliments, only neutral or negative.
That actually sounds more like it. It probably would have went unnoticed.
Yeah, it is complicated because we do live in a very misogynistic civilization with patriarchal privileges. It’s just often difficult not to overcompensate to counterbalance and resist these circumstances. Treat people as individuals instead of the archetypes.
As author wrote: we need to practice the benefit of the doubt. Or I like the “trust but verify” pattern
I'd argue making women do more labor by forcing them to write articles justifying their marriage is misogynistic as well. Its just in that case people see it as acceptable because they think it's fighting the patriarchy. But really the patriarchy is not disappearing because of this comments, it's just insulting a random woman based on nothing of substance. If someone tells a women to wear more clothing to protect herself from abuse that's considered sexist, I don't see how this is different. Everyone thinks it's for the best
I'd also argue that misogyny had mutated into this implicit assumption where every woman is silently oppressed by the men in their lives. I find it ironically misogynistic that a woman is assumed to have no agency in their life and we have to police the men instead.
Indeed. On further reflection, it may say something that she was compelled to write such a piece defending her husband instead of telling others to mind their own damn business
We consider it 'misogynistic' because women have more difficulty engaging in certain pursuits (career and enterprise) while more easy engaging in others (child-rearing, family life). It's because of our own bias that career and enterprise is worth more than family life that we say the world as a whole is 'misogynistic' instead of the truth, which is that some areas of life, it's easier to be a woman and in others a man.
Viral clip in question: https://www.tiktok.com/@espnatbat/video/7688719334973230366
Article is about the impact of social media pile-ons (and has been getting praise within tech) so it is within scope for HN.
I started to notice a bit over a decade ago (about the same time as Cersei's walk of shame on GoT) that millennials as a generation were piling into naming and shaming people publicly as blindly appropriate punishment, without any consideration of what could go wrong and considering it their right and entitlement to do that. Any time a public figure gets into any kind of trouble, people demand to know all the details so they can satisfy their need to express outrage. It really is not healthy. Even if another person who was harmed comes out to express that they are satisfied with the outcome and the process that was followed, the crowd still wants to know all the details so they can feel angry.
I'm not sure this is unique to that generation. Tabloids have always been like that. It's just been "democratized" so anyone can start it.
Also I note that a lot of "legacy" pretexts for shaming are off the table. It's not done to shame people simply for being gay; that's now acceptable even in Conservative circles. So perhaps the total shame has just been redistributed, somewhat arbitrarily.
(And another thing: this has evolved shame resistant politicians just like antibiotic overuse evolved MRSA)
Yeah, the same happened on Facebook, long before smartphones were normal for everyone.
This has also resulted in "punishing" people for having the "wrong ideas" by publicly shaming them with partial truths just because they disagree.
It sometimes feels like everyone around is secretly working on behalf of the thought police and we're being coerced into believing one specific narrative.
I think it's their frustration of other things they can't control - climate change, K-shaped economy, PFAS in everything, no healthcare, 7% and rising mortgages for $1.5 million 1000 sq ft built in 1965 shitboxes, corruption by politicians, suppressed elections, pedophile rings operating carte blanche while law enforcement casts a blind eye, presidential pardons for sale to the rich, clawbacks of longstanding LGBTQ and women's rights... culture wars against trans people to distract from class inequality.... and on and on.
Well, I can't make much progress on or change those things so let me distract myself checking out this shitbird who won't help his wife or hold the baby while she gets some nachos. I can be outraged at him because it's small and tangible compared to being outraged at structural inequality of our current economic reality or the looming climate crisis.
I can see where it comes from, but it is still highly dysfunctional, and a lot of millennials will use those arguments to defend that behavior.
I think it needs to be called out as being bad, and deconstructed properly, and that outrage needs to get redirected back onto the structural issues.
Which is another argument--that when people behave badly because of structural issues, that isn't an excuse.
I agree. If you feel previous social systems of justice and fairness have eroded, the only outlet that seems reasonable is "democratic" mob action.
for our parents generation, mortgage rates were 10%+
And the mean house sale price was under $96k (which is still under $250k, adjusted for inflation).
From roughly 1953 to 2000, the inflation-adjusted cost of the mean house was around $200k-$250k in today's dollars. Now it has nearly doubled, and mortgage rates are on the rise and headed back towards 10%.
TikTok threw up a big "login" popup that I couldn't skip, so here is a youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUwQmrEFf7E
Normally the comments on that video are something I could laugh along with, but reading them after the article is... sobering.
The interesting way is the way the pinned post primes people to attack without it being obvious. Basically, they use assumptive language - "is this just how it's always been. Modern marriage or traditional marriage?" assumes that this two minute clip shows this couple's entire relationship.
And that kind of language to "get discussion going" is well know to those aiming for views.
I'm Danish, but how is this terrible? I should show these people a video of my twins sleeping in a snow covered trolley outside the bar I was having a beer and a board game by the window at.
Danes being willing to leave their kids unattended outside, as good as it may be in practice, is a horrifying idea to people in the US at least, and is liable to get Child Protection Services called on you. Different culture.
In the US, CPS will go after you, even if you're just doing what's normal in our culture, as long as one single person doesn't like it.
Someone in my area was in her apartment doing dishes while her kid was playing in the playground in the apartment complex's common area in front of the unit. (https://fox40.com/news/local-news/sacramento-mother-faces-ch...) Someone called CPS and complained that she was inside, while her kid was outside. Even though most anyone would agree it was a nuisance call, they still charged her and opened a case, telling her that if her child is ever out of her direct sight, she'll be violation of the rule they just made up.
Nothing stops CPS from making up their own rules. There's even an effort to specify in each states' laws that parents letting children roam free isn't legally endangerment, but despite having such language in their laws, a mom was recently prosecuted in Virginia, for similarly letting her child roam within a gated common area. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/virginia-mom-child-abuse-convic...)
virginia mom is discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550174
Sad world to live in
Agreed. I grew up living for the weekends. I’d wake up, crush some cereal while watching cartoons, and then I’d run out the door to find my friends. I’d usually be home by dark. Or I’d call and tell my mom I was sleeping over at a friend’s house and I’d be back in the morning. She might literally not see me for 30+ hours even when I was in elementary school.
We’d spend our time playing spies and hiding in the bushes watching neighbors do whatever, or looking for crawfish in the creek, or just breaking sticks on trees in the woods lol.
When I first moved to Denmark, I marveled at the babies in unattended carriages parked outside the grocery stores.
You totally should do that, as long as you can't be doxxed. I would love to see the reactions from self-righteous Americans.
The only terrible thing is the food they're having.
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Living in Copenhagen, I do not recognize that. I live in a city apartment on Vesterbro. We have maybe a hundred bikes parked in the backyard, nobody I know brings his bike home for the night, unless it is a really fancy racing bike. But yes, I do lock my bike when ever I really away from it.
Those comments are pure vitriol juice, my god, and they just keep coming from all angles as to why that dude is an absolutely piece of shit on very little data. Incredible stuff, and a good lesson right there.
Probably from unmarried people anyway
I had a co-worker who's dad is paraplegic, and they had a family van with hand controls, so that his dad could drive it. His dad was a big guy and his mom was tiny, but she could load and unload the wheelchair without a problem. My co-worker said that sometimes people would stare when his mom was pumping gas, while his dad sat in the drivers seat doing nothing. He said they had a bit of a routine where his mom would start washing the windows and his dad would point out spots she missed.
They totally did it to entertain themselves, but I'm sure it got a few people riled up thinking that the dad was a jerk.
That this is something that has to be told to adults is the saddest part of humanity. No one has grown up.
> That this is something that has to be told to adults is the saddest part of humanity. No one has grown up.
It's worse, grown ass adults who taught me that this kind of reaction is wrong growing up are the same ones I see behaving this way now.
And she spells it out really well. But yeah.
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People are imperfect.
I'm not sure that we can brush away toxic behavior of people and social media as a simple "imperfection".
These can cause serious damage to the lives of ordinary people.
Oh, I agree, but the GP overstated it, I think. It's hardly "the saddest part of humanity, nor would I agree that "No one has grown up."
We SHOULD be less eager to jump to strong judgments.
We ARE still going to make this mistake. Even some of the best of us, sometimes.
Almost anyone can be seen as a hero or a zero if the right 15 second clip is captured. We love it when our best moments hit social media, but everyone also piles on when we are caught at our worst (or what appears to be bad, even if it not).
It is amazing how many haters emerge like in this case, when there is so much more to the story.
I was thinking of this recently. I "dogsit" for many families and had one recently that wasn't great on leash. She would do this thing where she would lay down and try to eat something off the ground (sticks, garbage, animal/dog poop, dead mice, dead birds... whatever she could find). Much of it would likely make her sick and therefore I would have to quickly pull on the leash to prevent her from eating some random thing she found. Being an 80lbs dog, I had to tug quite hard to quickly get her away from whatever she had found. If someone saw me in that moment, they'd probably think I was a terrible dog owner. Without the context that I was actually trying to prevent harm, someone could take a video, post online with the caption "Identify this dog abuser!" and ruin my reputation.
Remember these types of videos happened every day and they would even show up on the news. People would lose their jobs over baseless videos.
I really hoped all that stopped and the fun has worn off.
The incredible thing is the husband came in for bashing not plausibly based on his actions in the video but based on mutating narrative.
Go from "X great, Y OK" to "X great, Y terrible".
This got me:
> When I’ve cried reading the comments and the social media “explanations” of our marriage. The man people have been attacking was the one who consoled me. While strangers described how little he must care about me, he was helping me through the hurt their words have caused.
Everyone loves to hate right away when they see something like this. It's a good practice to try to make up a story that gives an alternate, less vilifying explanation to what you're seeing. This is a great response from Erika. Thanks for sharing.
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Quite a common thing to see online where strangers judge relationships off some small slice. You see it on reddit and relationship subs all the time.
The internet feels like one those shitty religious villages were everyone is gossiping.
That's just humans; now there's a lot more of us and we have advanced gossip technology.
Reddit is kind of a cult. "Ditch your loved ones so you can spend more time on reddit telling people to ditch their loved ones."
It’s making me sad that this article needed to exist in the first place. Just leave people alone.
That man has found a treasure of a woman!
This is the main takeaway from all this.
This should be required reading before you get your internet drivers license.
There are times when I read something I don’t have to refer dictionary or concepts and the flow of words makes you move even though you have no idea what this was about. Great writing and write more. My favorite lines
>> The benefit of the doubt is more than an expression. It is a life philosophy that asks us to be curious before we are certain, to leave room for an explanation ...
>>Thank you for dubbing me “mom of the year.” Please believe me when I tell you I can only be so with the dad sitting next to me.
Note: I am 99% sure this is not LLM written :)
David Foster Wallace's This is Water speech more relevant than ever.
Link to transcript and audio of the This Is Water commencement speech:
https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
You never know what others are going through, or what is happening in a relationship between two people, even when you think you’re close to them. So the online masses making these judgements based on a short clip is kinda insane although it doesn’t surprise me.
I can confirm the ergobaby is great.
Though the memory of owning one and knowing about different brands of baby carriers feels like it belongs to another lifetime now.
Universal context - or uni-context is an idea that could use some more attention.
The idea is universally we can all relate to the negative, but the good is rarely universal, but often local.
This is what drives social media or media in general to tend negative.
https://matthewevanseducation.substack.com/p/why-context-mat...
She’s a great writer.
A lot of people owe this family an apology. Here’s a sampling of some of the vile comments left on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1wpll52/clip_of_a_...
Some of them would read this and still complain. There's no use in trying to please some very unhappy and likely single people online.
They did read this and still complained, as you predicted
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1wqhd02/im_the_mom...
If you sort by 'controversial', it only shows the sane replies.
I think the votes on that site are 90% bots, but it'd be believable that they're all real people too. It's just not a good place.
I think some of them caught wind of their shit-posting and started deleting their comments. Hopefully they learn something.
https://archive.is/MlgWh
Wow, Reddit is horrible. Atrocious behavior. Leave your brains in the anteroom!
> Whoever sees this and it reminds them of their current relationship, DUMP HIM
> you can tell by the body language, lack of initiative, and lack of joy and welcome-ness for his woman and baby to be back, everything you need to know.
> There is a VERY good chance that when he realizes he went viral for being the *Poster Manchild* of taking your spouse for granted, of choosing to act like a parasitic blob
Modern Reddit provides a simulacrum of commentary. There are posts and people discusing these posts, but nobody understands or wants to know anything about the underlying topic. The lack of comprehension is crucial to the community.
Its unfortunate because it's not only one of the things that makes social media toxic, but it also makes it less and less like reality. Which in turn pushes away people who have more "normal" views, thereby making the community even more extreme over time. Ask a random person in the street and they might say they think he should help her, but they wouldn't come up with these detailed narratives about abuse and manipulation. That kind of reaction is characteristic of social media and the more I see it the less I want to spend time online with those kinds of people
The other end feeds into itself too. Someone who posts something like that also is over-exposed to content enforcing that narrative. When you see your 50th video of the day of (e.g.) a man behaving in a way you don't like, you eventually conclude that men are all bad, and your reactions begin to become more and more pronounced. You're not reacting to that man, you're reacting to every man!
> and lack of joy and welcome-ness for his woman and baby to be back
Damn, do these people really jump out of joy whenever their SO, parent, child, friend, or whoever comes back after a 10' chore?
Life is not a movie, “coming back” is a dozen-times-of-day occurrence, no one will cheer you back from the toilets.
I think it's also important to remember that these people are karma farming. When you can get 5k points for "man bad", who wouldn't?
Doubly reminded of that as I'm watching a DEFCON talk where he cites fake Internet points as a driving motivator. Which is my feeling too but yeah idk the whole thing is missing that "we're real people" thing.
I gave up even touching that site many years ago. Any anonymous forum will turn to crap with enough people, and they have a voting system encouraging bad behavior on top of that, and loser admins, and probably bots voting too. There's no point.
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In a way, this comment precisely demonstrates the kind of vitriol responses that the article talks about -- witch hunt without evidence, going with the trend, herd mentality.
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Isn't this story pretty much all about jumping to conclusions and pissing on people who you don't know?
I read it and didn’t get that impression.
Perhaps you could endow your claim with some evidence.
Amused by a claim about writing composition that uses “clearly mostly” back to back.
This is just the obviously sort of thing you gotta do to make sure your writing isn't mistaken for ai these days.
A gem of a point. Thank you.
That's a legitimate usage of both words.
there are higher levels of writing than "grammatically correct"...
we don't dismiss claims of poorly written code with "but it compiles!"
Indeed. You’re with me!
Hmm. Pangram AI detection says the piece is “100% human written.”
Really? A comment in another thread says Pangram says it's 100% AI. I just checked with the free plan, and it told me 29% AI. What I'm learning here is that Pangram may not be a reliable checker.
Thing is, I also twigged it as heavily LLM written when I read it, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I got the vibe that maybe an LLM was used for editing but the stench wasn't overwhelming.
I checked again with a longer sample—the first eight paragraphs—and, this time, Pangram said 61% human. Hmm. I think your twigging may be more accurate.
Based on what?
Even if so, this would seem to be a positive use of LLMs. Something traumatic happened, and she wants to put her perspective into the public dialog rather than continuing to be a passive subject of the social media industry's two minute hate. I know in such a position I myself would be at a loss for words, with the perfect being the enemy of the good enough.
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The real scandal is the prices on the menu she posted.
Algorithmic social media amplifies and promotes our basest, vilest impulses. Crowds were always worse than people, but now these "technologies" put that into turbo-overdrive, 5 billion people at a time, pushed and prodded by the engagement-maxxing machine. I don't see a bright future if we don't get a hand on this, and I don't see us getting a hand on this.
Hopefully AI slop kills it
And yet, tons of comments on Threads from women saying she's been gaslit or even that the husband must have threatened her with violence and forced her to write this.
You can't win with these people.
normal people -- employed, in a relationship, with chores and hobbies to occupy their free time -- simply do not participate in the gender war on the Internet. most are blissfully unaware that it's even happening. the womanosphere is a mirror image of its critically panned counterpart -- a refuge for the unhappy and/or mentally ill, an obnoxiously loud minority.
I guarantee you that every woman on Earth is aware of mistreatment due to her gender. Sexism is not a fantasy created online, as you assert.
And every man as well (all the usual stereotypes, slurs, expectations non-stop), but men don’t complain, shrug, and carry on with our duties and hope she doesn’t get board and take half or more.
you mean like having her family harassed by terminally online femcels over the deranged assumptions they'd made from a 10-second clip?
The conclusion was made from a 30s clip, and no amount of evidence can overturn that. New theories will be created to support the original conclusion to avoid any amount of critical self-reflection.
Another important story hiding in there:
> Six weeks before my daughter was born, my employer of 13 years laid off my entire division. Ramses had just put up the down payment on a bigger home for our growing family. My unemployment meant he was facing the mortgage payments and managing a remodel on his own, while we prepared to welcome another child.
i thought that too, but that's not really a story, that's just normal for the US. in europe (most of the EU i am sure) and china and probably elsewhere it's illegal to lay someone off while they are pregnant. (exceptions exist, and if they apply insurance works also for the unemployed)
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All other things aside, 20 dollars for a can of beer!?
If you have reasons to want to limit how much most people drink at your venue, this would be a good way to do it.
More like a captive audience of people who have self selected for having disposable income that they don't mind being parted from.
This exorbitant price is actually for your own good!
Why someone even should explain yourself in this situation? It shows that something is broken in the society.
Part of being grounded and self aware is realizing you are not your thoughts and not everything you believe is true.
The brain does what it does in an attempt to help you, but not often it hits the mark, sometimes it takes a bit of a reminder to pause and unpack things more carefully.
What fresh hell is this? What is wrong with us?
It’s great to see her setting a role model for others.
Unfortunately for Ramses and Erika the description tapped into something deeper, a symbol that is all too actually present in our society of the infantile male whose every whim is taken care of.
I myself confused the person for the symbol and owe him an apology. But also eff all the child men walking around always taking and never giving. Be more like Ramses.
> My employer provided medical coverage would lapse before my daughter’s birth. I was at risk of not have medical insurance for the birth of our daughter
...
Another side to the story is that I wonder how many of the reddit/tiktok posts pouring gasoline on the discourse were LLMs.
If only we truly knew how much divisive online content was generated from geopolitical adversaries…LLM or not.
Wow. That brought tears to my eyes. What a wonderful and upstanding woman. So many people — both men and women — would jump at the opportunity to play the victim card and amplify their private resentments against their spouse to glorify themselves when they got the spotlight like that. Instead she displayed immense character and honor in defending her husband. All of us should take a lesson from her example.
There will always be idiots who see a 10 second video of someone and think that it gives them enough info to fully understand the subjects' values and motivations but I think most people understand that a meme is not reality.
It's like how some people can come across as very 'nice' and helpful superficially but really it's all virtue signalling and they're actually serial backstabbers; awful, unreliable, untrustworthy people. I met many people like this so I know not to judge a book by its cover.
Another reason social media is a social illness. They never should have been turned into entertainment for strangers (nor sent vile hateful messages). They were just a family at a ball game.
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What I notice quite often is a sort of "LLM derangement syndrome" where people start flagging the most innocuous figures of speech and speech pattern as "clearly LLM".
Quite ironic when we are talking about an article which argues for extending the benefit of the doubt.
These patterns aren't somehow alien to human speech. It's the quantity. In ChatGPT (and I think it must be ChatGPT specifically) the default writing voice tries for dramatic and profound by dramatically overusing these figures of speech, chaining them together one after another. But they're things most writers use occasionally, one paragraph in ten or twenty. If you're giving a TED Talk or some other elaborate, melodramatic persuasive public speaking role, you might use them one paragraph in four. ChatGPT uses them every other paragraph at least, sometimes multiple times in the same paragraph, so something like a negation comparator or a triplet is present in sentence after fatiguing sentence.
It's trained on the speech of online commenters like us; That's where it's getting these. I'm not gonna change just because Timmy the Zoomer has been with his LLM girlfriend for the past three years and occasionally I remind him of her. I'm not going to deliberately code switch into somebody who doesn't open a new tab to Google things as he talks about them. And you can take my bullet point lists from my cold, dead hands.
I mean I think were agreeing, in a body of text this size I'd expect to see the dramatic short sentences and standalone dramatic sentence maybe one or twice. This article they are constant. They're great devices were used appropriately, but when the whole body of text reads like it it's awful.
Not asking anyone to stop using those writing devices, just begging for any work to not be exclusively dramatic devices. And when you read a piece of work like that its generally a child or AI lol.
I thought the piece sounded like AI as well, so I ran it through Pangram, which reports it as 100% AI. Considering Pangram's extremely low false positive rate, I'm inclined to believe this was AI written.
Didn't have the same feel about the piece. But based on the parent comment, decided to also test it, using Pangram free "credits". For me it reported that only sections of it (30%) have been "touched" by an LLM. There is 60% of human written text.
Pangram does not report this as 100% LLM generated. Why do I use the word "touched" - because there are some specific details that must have come from some existing text and are not elsewhere.
How did I do the check? Please do check my results! I copied just the authored prose from the page, carefully removing any comments and site text that got mixed in. I did not have it analyze the "URL".
In looking at the details, a large part of the story is flagged as all human generated.
I've personally used LLMs when I've been very upset. I used it to rewrite / edit my rant into something with a more balanced tone. The modified text got what I wanted, my original rant would almost certainly not have.
So I do think this was a thought out piece that was largely written by a human who used an LLM as an "editor" to polish the writing. Someone took time to think about this and write it.
And? That doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Some people say that AI is glorified spellchecker and then they complain when it’s used like a glorified spellchecker.
Thing is, it might be or it might not be. At some point you have to realize that some people need wheelchairs to move, some people need glasses to see, and some people need LLMs to write.
IMHO It's when you see someone who is paid to write/think using LLMs that you might make a value judgement.
I once knew a girl who wore prescription-free glasses b/c it made her feel smarter so she'd study longer. Not kidding. I made a value judgement about that. But she got the studying done. There's been other more prevalent cases of that on socials.
It might be worth letting some people write in any way they can.
I think we are approaching the point where collaboration with ai is going to be so ubiquitous that it becomes an unreasonable thing to criticize on its face.
Even before reading, I would assume a non-professional writer would lean on ai to try to figure out what points she wanted to hit and how to phrase things. The cost right now for that is the writing can be somewhat bland, but sometimes that isn't a big problem. Haven't we all seen enough incoherent ai slop to understand the value of editorial oversight by now?
I am working on a libretto in my free time, a hobby I've had for 15 years. Lyrics that would previously take me a week often take an evening. Nearly every suggested stanza and bar is rewritten by me still, but these models can be very helpful in explore the structure of beats to hit, imagery that may or may not land, rhyme and phonetic space etc. Maybe it's ai psychosis or cope but I think my current project is a leap beyond my last two plays. Isn't that what matters for creative expression at the end of the day?
Plaease don't spoil threads with comments like this. The writing doesn't come up as LLM-authored according to the tools we use (polished, perhaps, but not generated).
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858463 and marked it off topic.
Everything is LLM if you want it to be
Who cares? She isn't a public figure, and she never asked to be. She has some thoughts she wants to put out there after going viral due to nothing she did.
i suspect in some time people might begin to flag every bit of text they see online as "LLM sounding", even if it's very clearly not
Yup. The real risk with AI is not that something could be fake, rather that nothing can be trusted to be true