FiniteField (u/FiniteField)

FiniteField commented on Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech news.fsu.edu/news/educati... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

kelnos · 4 months ago

Not in that sense; high quality in the sense that there are a lot of actual, real people posting there, and those people tend to come from a pretty diverse set of backgrounds.

FiniteField · 4 months ago

Perhaps on the smaller subreddits, but have a look at /r/all on any given day and it's obvious that real people, and diverse backgrounds, it is not. Every single subreddit that goes above a certain activity threshold collapses into the exact same state of astroturfed, mass-produced political slop targeted towards low IQ people.

FiniteField commented on UK's Ancient Tree Inventory ati.woodlandtrust.org.uk/... · Posted by u/thinkingemote

donkeybeer · 7 months ago

Brits aren't a different species

FiniteField · 7 months ago

Why does the technicality that red and grey squirrels are different species hold any weight to you? The effect is still the same: They are two discernibly different populations, of which one is on the decline in its native land alongside the increase of another. As humans, we are orders of magnitude more sensitive to population differences amongst humans than amongst squirrels. Squirrel populations do not have associated music, dress, religion, traditions, and so on. So the question remains: Why does the decline of a discernable population of squirrels carry immense sentimental weight to many people, but not the decline of an ethnic group? Especially when most people would give a very different answer if that ethnic group were, for example, Native American or Palestinian? The only answer to me is that people feel that they aren't allowed to hold these sentimental thoughts, and work to block them from their own mind.

FiniteField commented on UK's Ancient Tree Inventory ati.woodlandtrust.org.uk/... · Posted by u/thinkingemote

pxeger1 · 7 months ago

I agree it is happening and is and will be interesting to study, but I don’t think there is any reason other than racism to be outraged by it.

FiniteField · 7 months ago

I don't mean to say this as a challenge to what you said, but as a genuine question: Do you hold any value in the continued existence of the red squirrel in Great Britain? Would you see its extinction as any kind of loss? I know many people that are hugely invested in securing the red squirrel, but would never be seen dead expressing any kind of hesitancy towards the idea of their own ethnic group disappearing. I've always found it a little odd, given that squirrels don't have culture, traditions, or a written history attached, and it's purely aesthetic.

FiniteField commented on UK's Ancient Tree Inventory ati.woodlandtrust.org.uk/... · Posted by u/thinkingemote

DonaldFisk · 7 months ago

> In the last recorded statistics, the White British population in Britain had been reduced to 54% by births

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_British , "In the 2021 Census, the White British group numbered 44,355,044 or 74.4% of the population of England and Wales." In Scotland the percentage is 87.1%.

You might be referring to the percentage of recent births to non White British parents, which is a different thing. (And, if someone's parents are, say, Polish, but they're born in the UK, surely that makes them White British.)

> It's a staggering, utterly unprecedented rate of demographic change that historians will look back on with the same or greater significance as the Anglo-Saxon or Norman invasions.

Well, we mostly speak English with a lot of vocabulary from Norman French, rather than Welsh or a close relative of it as we would have done had those invasions never happened. And I don't see that changing as a result of recent immigration.

FiniteField · 7 months ago

Demographics by births are much more meaningful than the total population because it's only births (and more immigration of course) that informs all future generations. Even if all immigration was halted today, the Britain of the future will be ~50% native (not taking into account the statistically lower native birth rates).

>if someone's parents are, say, Polish, but they're born in the UK, surely that makes them White British

Not exactly. "White British" as a compound noun means "ethnically British", not "white AND a British citizen".

>Well, we mostly speak English with a lot of vocabulary from Norman French, rather than Welsh or a close relative of it as we would have done had those invasions never happened. And I don't see that changing as a result of recent immigration.

Large areas of England do not speak English as their first language, and there are rapidly evolving youth dialects with strong black and other minority ethnic influences. As a reminder, the mutation of Old English due to Norman French influences took centuries. It's not at all out of the question that even the current already-done migration may cause the largest transformation of the language since the Normans.

FiniteField commented on UK's Ancient Tree Inventory ati.woodlandtrust.org.uk/... · Posted by u/thinkingemote

trextrex · 7 months ago

Which are the indigenous ethnic groups experiencing dissolution?

FiniteField · 7 months ago

White British is an ethnic umbrella recognised by the British government. In the last recorded statistics, the White British population in Britain had been reduced to 54% by births, and dropping significantly each year. A generation ago Britain was 90-95% White British. It's a staggering, utterly unprecedented rate of demographic change that historians will look back on with the same or greater significance as the Anglo-Saxon or Norman invasions.

FiniteField commented on Buffett to step down following six-decade run atop Berkshire bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

kinnth · 8 months ago

Buffet reminded me a lot of Angela Merkel.

They stood clearly and simply for good moral judgment, fair systems and looked at the bigger picture to carry most people forward. They also based all their decision in facts, truth and science. They learn't their trades (economics & politics) over time and weren't afraid to adapt as times changed.

Their slow and steady presence did more for equality and fairness than many others. We will need to find these values again after the current times have played out.

FiniteField · 8 months ago

"The current times" are a direct result of decisions like that of Merkel to throw open the borders of Germany to a million unchecked foreign men. If there's one reason that the AfD is the largest party in Germany today, it's because of that decision Merkel made a whole decade ago. How was that "based in facts, truth and science", or "slow and steady"?

FiniteField commented on 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak knowyourmeme.com/memes/ev... · Posted by u/LookAtThatBacon

api · 8 months ago

I've heard multiple times about a bit of lore that holds that 4chan once tried to brigade Stormfront, causing Stormfront to brigade back, and that was how the cross pollination occurred and started turning 4chan fascist.

No idea if this is true but it sounds plausible.

FiniteField · 8 months ago

I think the much more likely explanation is that 4chan always existed as a genuine counterculture (which was particularly true in the age prior to the late 2010s, when the internet was like a completely different world to real life), and reflected the rejection and inversion of certain societal mores. The rise of a far right current in 4chan exactly mirrored the kind of progressive fundamentalism that emerged in the dominant culture from around 2013. The outer zeitgeist started to abandon a 30-50-year term of post-racial thought, and immutable characteristics like race and gender started to become meaningful as tangible social capital in a kind of "official" way, as ideas like the progressive stack filtered from online circles and Occupy Wall St, through academia, into the halls of power and governments. The emerging racial consciousness of places like 4chan were a direct (and predictable) reaction to that.

The reason that places like 4chan became a far-right haven and other areas of the internet didn't has nothing to do with whether people tried to raid Stormfront in the 2000s, but is purely a matter of the firm-handedness (or lack thereof) of their respective moderation. Prior to the 2010s, many less-moderated areas of the internet had a variety of political persuasions, but from 2015 to the present day, there is a very strong correlation between the prevailing political leaning of a space and that space's ideological moderation strength.

FiniteField commented on 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak knowyourmeme.com/memes/ev... · Posted by u/LookAtThatBacon

tokai · 8 months ago

Should be noted that they have a history of trying to co-opt neutral terms and symbols. Like the frog and the ok gesture.

FiniteField · 8 months ago

Pepe the frog became associated with the online far right because it was a commonly used memetic avatar in general 4chan culture, and became intertwined with the space's shift to the political right in a fairly organic way. The association was boosted by (IIRC) the 2016 Clinton campaign's assertion that it was a far-right symbol, which was obviously embraced by those people as a sort of irreverent statement. Likewise, there may have been some very thin, actually existing connection between the far right and the "ok" gesture, but it really came about as an association that was imposed by the media and subsequently embraced by that community. To say these terms were "co-opted" isn't really correct.

I think there's actually a better case to be made that the pipeline of "co-option" (if you want to call it that) is stronger in the reverse direction. I posted a sister comment to yours about that.

FiniteField commented on 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak knowyourmeme.com/memes/ev... · Posted by u/LookAtThatBacon

thih9 · 8 months ago

Note, some of these are associated with the far right.

> fren later came to prominence on sites such as 4chan and the subreddit /r/frenworld as a dog whistle used by far-right white nationalists and fascists to refer to each other

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fren

FiniteField · 8 months ago

>Note, some of these are associated with the far right.

I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg:

- based

- goyslop -> slop

- normalfag -> normie