you're completely wrong, (intelligent) Americans are completely aware of the concept and more-or-less think in those terms regularly.
You won't find the term in speeches but that's because in America speeches are essentially slop. Or at least, they are basically not written as a dialogue with well-informed/intelligent people.
I've been overweight in my life and I hate it. You know how I lost weight and kept if off? I ate healthier, I walk a lot (to the grocery store, for example). US grocery stores have all the same healthy foods as every other country. You can eat healthy at restaurants too, if you must.
It's just people don't. There's nothing inehrently bad about food in the US. We at eat too much and don't exericse (walk). Now, if you'll look at all the other countries joining us in this because it isn't a US thing anymore.
You've added all these extra explanations (corn syrup, antibiotics, growth hormones) but it really isn't that complicated. BTW, I'm sure if you ate konbini foods every day in Japan and didn't exercise enough you'd get fat, too. There's nothing different about that food than a lot of junk/fast food in the US, it's just the Japanese seem to walk a lot more and I don't know how many people only eat out of 7/11.
> There's nothing inehrently bad about food in the US
Except that sugar (or more often, corn syrup) is added to everything.
Just as a small example: most regular people don't have the time to bake their own bread or make their own spaghetti sauce from scratch, so they get both from the store. However, in the US, unlike most European countries (and probably the rest of the world), both have tons of added sugar and/or corn syrup. This is true for most foods in the US, and while it's certainly possible to eat healthy, it's a lot harder to do so here.
> and don't exericse (walk)
A big part of this, too, is that not only are most areas in the US not designed to be walking-accessible, but I daresay most are designed to be openly hostile to pedestrians. Added bonus: in the case where you do happen to live in a walking-friendly area, you still can't send your kids out to walk around, lest you invite visits from CPS.
That isn't to say people in the US can't be doing more than they are to get healthy, but arguing it's no more difficult to stay in shape in the US versus other parts of the world is at best self-delusion.
I appreciate that there is a significant chunk of people that are like this, but I think if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out. What was happening (are you referencing 2024?) in 2024 and today was a government saying the economy was fine when it is not. When that happens, people are going to pick the person that isn't in power, who says they are going to fix it, even if they aren't. "It's the economy stupid". People care about their own well-being above pretty much everything else most of the time.
I don't think putting this on racism or anything else (though it is a smaller factor) helps, it's just rhetoric. 40% of the people in the US aren't dedicateed racists, they are, however, in working groups that the government has ignored for decades.
> if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
> The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government
helping them out.
40% is ....not a majority
the current POTUS has a 37% approval rating and this is considered to be historically low, due to wars, corruption, etc.
but even with all of that corruption and failure, 37% of surveyed adults, *still approve*. This includes his frequent, deeply racist tirades on Twitter. They approve!
But it's not even approaching 40%, nor did I tie the two together. If you think the 33% of people who voted from Trump did it because they are racist you are wrong. Some did, a lot that wasn't their primary concern. It's viewing pepole wrong to think that.
Yes, I've talked to Trump voters and I know people who aren't especially strong Trump supporters that voted for him because the economy was shit. Their reasoning wasn't racism. There is a huge chunk where that is their reasoning, sure.
Once again, if you think it's 40% of 33%, you're wrong. Not everybody who voted for Trump is a racist, it's just not how people work.
Voters don't pay attention to or they justify their votes. That doesn't mean they are inherently racist, it means they don't care enough about politics or they care about other issues to the point where they either aren't aware of it or they excuse it away. People pay attention to or remember a lot less about politics than that blog posts suggests.
The majority of people are seeing a variety of headlines from news sources they may not trust (for good reason and bad) and remember a few events over the year, some have such a strong attachment to party that that's the defining thing above all that they're voting for. They're being propagandized and lied to as part of a political campiagn. That they are making the I'd argue wrong choice does not mean they are racist or even intend to be. That racism isn't the defining thing for the majority of them.
It goes back to the original claim, I still think it's obvious that most people aren't voting for a guy because racism. That's inverting how people operate, which is seeing their own needs as the center of the world. If you're unemployed and hurting for money and you are racist, what is your primary motivation for voting? It's probably to get you a job because that's the fastest path to improving your life. But that's presupposing a lot of people are racist, and living around Trump voters, or knowing Trump voters that are minorities, something else is happening other than racism.
I don't think individuals care more about other people than they do themselves. Some people are that spiteful but the majority of people are not because they cannot afford to be.
I don't mean to over argue this but I think it's important that we understand people as they understand themselves.
Well - the fact that they don't pay attention (or lack critical thinking skills and a baseline reasonable education) is a large part of the problem.
But - with a person like POTUS - and those he surrounds himself with, they will throw every possible promise to get the votes - but, each of those issues are only part of their overall agenda and platform. When they got called-out on controversial issues, they outright lied about knowing about things like "Project 2025" during the last election cycle.
Choosing to live in ignorance - or abstaining from voting is accepting that agenda and platform, regardless.
Yes, but I'd argue those people are victims as much as anybody else. To truly be ignorant is to not know, and if you are in a situation where you've never been trained to need to know or you simply don't know there's another world out there, that's not a choice, that's a situation you've been placed in.
You have to win these people to fix the system. Casting them as hateful rubes only voting because they are racist is wrong, not on a moral level but on an intellectual one. We've got large chunks of of the country that haven't been effectively educated for decades, no wonder they are ignorant.
For the record, I choose not to vote not because I accept Trump's racism but I think a valid way of signaling you are not happy with either party (but especially Trumpsim) is to not engage in the system. If the system isn't offering better it isn't the people at fault, it is the system. Non-votes are as valid as any other. If I vote for a process that I believe is fraudulent, that politician will see that as an indicator they have some kind of mandate (see Bush in 2004). I'm not giving it to them, it's the job of either party to be better not to just not be worse.
The Dems must be better and the biggest part of that to me is to engage and understand working class people and not do what they did in 2024 and say everything is fine because it wasn't and it certainly isn't today (and that's Trump's fault). I was never especially leftist but as I've grown older I think the economy is the biggst driver of artificial divides. When people hurt, they look for others to blame. If both parties (or either) were genuinely focused on helping the poor to get a foot up, a lot of this discourse wouldn't be happening. I hate Trumpism but I don't think the corporatism that has captured the Democratic party is much better.
It's really a problem of the system, being forced into an artificial duopoly. If you want to lose me further by saying I'm choosing that platform by not voting, then you're just further disengaging people and I argue you're choosing not to understand my posittion. You need the "racists" and the non-voters to win.
> 40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
Do we truly believe that's 40% of people in the US? 33% of US voters even voted for him, so you're saying it's pretty much all of them and another 7%. I just don't see it, it's rhetoric and it's not helpful because if your goal is to win over the people that need to be won over, you can't call them racists when they really aren't.
It's a misshaped worldview formed in bubbles. People don't work that way because you're literally assuming that their hate for somebody else overrides their own well-being. Their actions might end up with that result, but I've interacted with enough people from all over the spectrum to know that imagining that many people have that much hate is just wrong. People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
If people had jobs, a lot of of this division would disappear but the govt for years has treated low income workers as people that don't matter and can just be displaced without any answers. It's whey the Democratic party which was traditionally the working class party has struggled against Trumpism, because he pretends to care.
(back from my two hour Hacker News ban - "make sure all the tempban knobs are turned to the max for that zzzeek guy"
look this is the thing with racism - racism to the degree "races" are fit (randomly, or forcibly) into different ethnic / cultural / etc categories (e.g. "in-groups" and "out groups") is largely, due to the in-group/out-group differential, a natural tendency in humans that has to be actively worked against (hence the term "anti-racism"). Nobody who has grown up in modern society with extreme separation of "races" / cultures into disparate groups can really say "oh I'm not a racist" amongst people who study this at an anthropoligical, sociological, or evolutionary level, biases towards those in societally placed in "out groups" have to be critically challenged on a regular basis.
This is why it's not enough to be some MAGA who says, "oh Im not a racist! i just agree with trump's policy", they of course have no idea how their words and actions are linked to racism because they've never looked at it (and by my experience with Trump voters, they angrily, adamantly refuse to even look at contrarian evidence to their belief systems if you try to show them, much less have the critical thinking skills to actually understand them). They are marinating in distrust and contempt of "the other" (if you know me in RL I'll introduce you to people who wont listen to a single fact you give them if it was not on FOX news).
> People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
they care about their in-group. Countries like those in Scandanavia have developed very deep social welfare systems largely because of their history (now being challenged by immigration) of being culturally homogeneous meant that everyone trusted each other implicitly and had no issue with their government dollars being used to help their neighbors [1] (this is a really interesting article btw). A diverse society has a steeper hill to climb in establishing social trust between different cultural / ethnic groups.
A president could literally shout Korean slurs all day long (I'm Korean) and get a Nazi symbol tattooed on his forehead, and if he continued to do a good job of policymaking I would approve in that poll, though hate the guy. This is what you are not understanding about Trump voters. We really don't care if Trump is racist at all. But that's not because we are racist ourselves. That's just not relevant to the political platform. If he starts passing racist policies, that's bad, but otherwise we don't give a shit.
Leftists, on the other hand, are very highly concerned with the moral purity of their candidates, even above their political efficacy. I don't understand it myself.
> Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth, the rumbustious defense secretary who has made it his mission to remake a military ethos he denounced as “woke”, has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given.
> About 60% have been Black or female, an approach seemingly driven by the administration’s proclaimed onslaught against “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hires”.
so..it's not "racist" when it's "oh all those Black men and women are obviously DEI hires", is that the logic?
60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below. 50% of people are female, and more than 10% in the USA are black. A random selection of citizens would likely turn up as 60%+ black or female.
I'm not saying this firing wasn't statistically suspect, since I don't know the demographics of that cohort, but I'm guessing based on this misleading phrasing and the lack of information about the cohort that it wasn't.
this is upper military leadership. Black individuals account for 6.5%-9% of general officers/admirals, senior female leaders (colonels, generals, and admirals) represent less than 5% of all senior military leadership.
> 60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below.
doing the math this means a Black or female senior military leader has 8.5-11 times higher chance of being fired by Pete Hegseth compared to a white male counterpart
That seems bad! But at the end of the day it is not bad enough to warrant voting for the other side's policies. I choose conservative policy with some likely *ist firings thrown in over the alternative, for now. Fwiw I voted Obama; the Democrats can win me back, they just haven't.
I think we're gonna see some def Democratic gains because the economy is shit and that's how voting always happens.
The only argument I was making is it's no where near 40% of people that are voting for somebody cause they're racist. If you believe that then you're not going to see the world accurately. It's not how people work.
But it goes back to my main point, Dem gains won't be what they should be because politics are a very vague and murky thing and people make all kinds of justifications for why they vote for their person. See the stat where most people rate Congress poorly but their Congressperson highly. It's not racism, it's that politics are inherently pretty stupid.
It doesn't take responsibility. The defining theme seems to be their political views. She says the reason she was uninvited from a talk is not at all the given reason (political) that the reason she directly links to is. She's either dishonest or just unaware. The fact that she posted this here and won't respond to anything tells me she knows that it is indeed her past and political views that are harming her reputation but she either won't reject them or cannot because she holds them.
She's asking for money to fly private and live in a nice neighborhood in one of the more expensive places in the world. She has a massive ego, saying that donating to her does more for open source than anything else. She cites issue after issue she's had with people including governments saying she hasn't paid taxes. Sometimes when nobody likes you it is because something you are doing, and this post doesn't do any soul-searching. None of this registers to you?
I almost don't want to post this because I've posted twice here and I don't wan to come off as a Justine-hater, but I truly don't get how you don't read this in th epost.
The fundamental tension here is between pre-Christian and post-Christian worldview. Are you allowed to be great, or do you have to apologize for your greatness? Justine refuses to apologize, which is the cardinal sin. And yet she does not fully own it, but leans into the oppression thing. Hence, the post lands with neither side.
What about the part of the world that's A-Christian? Why is the only choice pre or post? And why is Christianity the only religion that gets to claim pride being bad? Lots of cultures oppose bragging. Also why is there no spectrum in your postulation? There's no "being great but not bragging about it or being incredibly egotistical."
Yarvin believes in a world where the upper class (monarchy) runs everything. It's a pretty controversial take to support them from somebody who themselves has faced discrimination. I think Justine might be out of touch with people who aren't well off.
She seems to do some trolling (but it isn't obvious because she won't address) it where she even made statements which seemed like they were in support of slavery back in 2012. She's brilliant but controversial and I'm sure being trans doesn't help with people rejecting her for no reason either.
> Yarvin believes in a world where the upper class ... runs everything.
Plenty of people believe that, if perhaps only in a descriptive sense. Given the constraints of human social organization, it's just very difficult to not have a world where some kind of restricted social elite (that people may of course rotate in and out of, allowing for some kind of social mobility) is running things. Especially if we're even less comfortable with the main realistic alternative to social hierarchy, namely open markets.
Even self-proclaimed anarchists have long acknowledged that 'the tyranny of structurelessness' is a thing: trying to remove structure just makes it less readable and overt; it doesn't make it go away.
> Even self-proclaimed anarchists have long acknowledged that 'the tyranny of structurelessness' is a thing
structure and hierarchy are two very different things. you can have elected leaders who manage the day to day problems and a popular vote on all the important issues. of course its hard to implement in practice but it is possible. the reasons our society is elitist are economic inequality and different social connections but they only have real power when the people cant decide directly. if there was a federal ballot prop system america would look very different
A federal ballot prop system would be completely unworkable, which is why it was not made part of the Constitution. It would just increase opaque agenda-setting power compared to the present system, and the overall outcome would be even worse.
Upper class carries a heavy implication of nepotism with minimal social class mobility.
This is quite distinct from, say, a government of elected policy debaters submitting bills to a body of elected law passers that are part of a silo separate from the the silo's of military, civil enforcement, policy enactment (merit based civil service), etc.
The later is a hierarchy but not a class based one (assuming sufficient widespread education and social support).
Some of the reactions to this are slightly unfair because it looks like Justine (who I'm not familiar with) supported Moldbug in 2014. It was only in around 2020 when Yarvin sold out, did a 180 in his views, and became a Trumpist; in the early 2010s, he would write long posts about how populism inevitably leads to fascism, any entity who wants power cannot ever be trusted with it, etc. His political views back then were far weirder than what people probably think - e.g. he thought a dictator needs to be simultaneously secure and yet overseen by a board of directors with power to replace the dictator, using some galaxy-brained setup I don't really understand.
Hence, recommending Curtis Yarvin in 2014 is rather eyebrow-raising but a very different thing from recommending him now.
It’s hardly a 180 to go from supporting a dictator in general to picking one in particular. Yarvin is the kind of reactionary who appealed to to the kind of person who intellectualized themselves out of understanding what reactionary politics leads to. When it led to that it was easier to say that Yarvin sold out and changed rather than reckon with the fact that no course change happened.
> Some of the reactions to this are slightly unfair because ... in 2014. It was only in around 2020...
I think you're wrong about Yarvin changing, but let's say you're right for a moment. Do you know what's easy to do between then and now? Say, "That was an error. I regret it." Do you know what hasn't been done between then and now? Yeah.
I feel like it is a very great privilege to be able to post this to Hacker News, soliciting donations. I was out of work for the longest time (thankfully, I finally found some). I too have disadvantages, I have a few mental disorders which make living not the easiest and the world is not made for people who are different in any way. I've contributed to HN in the past, have plenty of stuff on Github but I do not have the access to be able to ask people to pay my way. I realize that my output is a fraction of Justine's but there are very few people who can post a blog post soliciting donations on the top of such a major site. It just feels very, very personal, and it is.
I realize that it takes great courage to do what Justine does, the world is not fair to trans people or many other groups. I want her to be safe and happy. I have however, observed Justine make some pretty careless remarks about homeless people or you can Google her views on slavery or various political individuals and they're not great. They are views that hurt people. I've noticed in past threads these are brought up but she does not address them, which strikes me as lacking the courage that she usually has.
Justine, can you clarify some of the views you've had over the years so that people who donate to you feel like they are not supporting somebody who might not hold the same views for other groups of people that are in danger?
> I've noticed in past threads these are brought up but she does not address them, which strikes me as lacking the courage that she usually has.
The reason is a massive ego problem they refuse to address. Reading this difficult to follow rant also reveals they no clue what it means to be humble.
I don't think people have to be humble if they are proud of what they have produced and get recognition to validate them. I am much more concerned by her holding views that are in favor of hurting others.
I feel like it is a very great privilege to be able to post this to Hacker News, soliciting donations.
Just curious -- are you implying that this is exempted from the rules because the poster is famous? I'm not familiar with any HN rule that forbids "soliciting donations", but also it's been a minute since I looked them up.
As a culture, HN strongly dislikes people who post their own stuff outside of ShowHN. Justine herself acknowledges in the post that she is able get away with things on the site that the majority are not allowed.
There is absolutely some form of creation there. The most basic models now are just prompts but somebody has to prompt them, there is a human being there prompting the song and then deciding to share it (a form of curation).
I'd imagine these will get more and more granular to where you're not just prompting but you are gradually building up songs and at that point I'd be surprised if people were still making this argument.
These things don't exist without human interventio.n
Some form of creation, maybe. In the same sense that choosing what restaurant to go to and what to order is an act of creation. Going ahead and declaring yourself the chef is, however, ridiculous.
to where you're not just prompting but you are gradually building up songs
There's indeed a huge difference between asking the AI to just generate something with a short and generic prompt, and directing it far more specifically. To use the dragon tattoo analogy, it's the difference between asking for "a dragon tattoo" and precisely specifying exactly what type of dragon, what pose, colours, any other adornments, etc.
That's a very gatekeepy standard for something which has for all of history been a subjective thing. What I think will fall by the wayside are dogmatic takes like these.
If I gen up then curate a bunch of tracks into a concept album, why is that not art?
The US could have pretty easily annexed Cuba in 1902 or held onto the Philippines.