Amoeba_Girl

oh my god

how do you even define "raw, intellectual horsepower" and how does it differ from knowing how to formulate questions mother fucker

Also in the comments to the followup you've got people debating whether believing that there are genetic differences between races constitutes scientific racism.

Steve Sailer doesn't think so. To which Philip replies

The point isn’t that what you’re saying isn’t true, that point is that for most people who have heard of Steve Sailer, Steve Sailer is the textbook example of a scientific racist. So I think we have a good working definition of scientific racism, which is just, whatever Steve Sailer says. I say this unironically with no disrespect; I also consider myself a scientific racist.

TGGP asks

Who doesn't think there are genetic differences between the races?

gottem

In the followup

One possible answer is that the causal pathway is high GDP → lots of education → lots of practice with abstract reasoning → high abstract/symbolic IQ. I don’t think this can be the whole story, because some countries that “cheated” to get high GDP (eg oil sheikhdoms) can’t translate it into IQ points at the same rate as everyone else. I’m stuck with the boring basic explanation that maybe you need to do a lot of abstract reasoning tasks to get high GDP.

You can't possibly be this dumb. Tfw you're so blinded by racism you transfer yourself to the platonic realm where numbers are things in themselves.

yoooooooooooooo

oh my god i didn't catch that this was astro slate star and thought i was reading some overtly racist piece of shit instead of a covert racist piece of shit. i haven't kept up with him lately but this this seems very fucked up even by scott's standards.

It's not so much the composition bit as all the extraneous stuff like multitracking a thousand pristine sounding takes and mixing and mastering it all to fuck because it will sound "professional" and fit with all the professional sounding songs on the streaming platforms. It's boring and annoying and it's what beginner bedroom musicians think they have to do these days and I hate it.

The real solution of course is to go fuck that noise and record your songs in one take with your laptop microphone as god intended.

My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the only viewpoint you get is that of a middle class bureaucrat. It's the assumed audience, and it's where Orwell would place himself as well. The narrative loses a lot of impact if you align yourself with the proles. Winston could live a real life if he really wanted to. I don't think this point is intended by the novel.

Isn’t Julia a member of some sort of anti-sex league, meaning there’s a lot of bad faith involved in their relationship from the get go?

That's a problem in itself, don't you think? It's all very "Feminists hate sex and they want to erase the differences between the genders". Julia gets a taste of freedom and her right place in the world by putting on makeup and girly clothes and having a lot of sex.

Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skillfully done, but Winston’s standards in such matters were not high. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of color in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above, all, far more feminine.

Also she's a flighty moron.

I think the premise of total control through language is in itself silly, though that can be excused by the book being satire. But Orwell, for good or ill, was undeniably a linguistic purist, as one can gather from a close reading of "Politics and the English Language".

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable.

Fair, though in Orwell's case the misogyny is not accidental either, but an essential aspect of the mostly conservative ideology he adopted for 1984 (contempt for the working class, linguistic purism, just really being a little too enamoured with his perfect crystal of unending oppression etc).