society – Page 117

Why Minds is Vastly Superior to Facebook

FaceBook, otherwise known as FaecesBook, is like the Titanic about half an hour after hitting the iceberg. They are no longer gaining new users, and many of their current users are discovering other social media networks, such as Minds. This article shows why Minds is a vastly superior social media network, for decent people, than FaceBook is.

The reason why FaceBook used to be fun is because it used to offer an escape from all the shit in the world. It was a space where people could speak freely and avoid censure for off-colour jokes and pisstakes. This was the reason for its initial uptake – it provided a release from the stuffy, formal nature of schooling and employment, like a virtual clubhouse.

This was, of course, some years ago now, and FaceBook has since deteriorated into a Big Brother-style cyberdystopia. From being a bastion of free speech and free interaction, it’s now a place where you can’t even say ‘faggot’ without getting banned – not even if you are using the term ironically in defence of homosexuals. The demands of advertisers have induced Mark Zuckerberg into making FaceBook like television. Hitler jokes, race jokes, nation jokes, religion jokes, sexual orientation jokes: all banned.

Minds is different, and appears to intend to stay that way. Free speech is the reason for many people joining the network: you can say what you like, without fear of getting banned. The easy-going, fun and joking culture that FaceBook once had still exists there. There is no feeling that the Thought Police are monitoring and censoring your speech to ensure compliance with a corporatist globalist agenda.

Another reason why Minds is a superior social network is the relative absence of the human lowest common denominator. FaceBook is the McDonald’s of social media. This means that, much like television, the information on FaceBook is aimed at people with IQs of about 90-100. This maximises the possible audience.

One drawback with this is that content tailored for people at such a level of intelligence tends to be simplistic. People with IQs of 90 cannot understand complex sentences, so the material shared is often little more than a list of bullet points, with no deeper analysis possible. This means that a truly comprehensive and accurate understanding cannot be gained.

The major drawback, though, is that this content also tends to be outright false. Advertisers know that people with IQs of less than 100 are not educated and therefore are not very good at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Therefore, it’s possible to target them with sensationalised false news and to thereby sway their beliefs to whatever the advertiser wishes. If not enough people believe the fake news, it’s a simple matter of buying more advertising.

The major and most distinctive factor, however, is that Minds is prepared to reward its users for posting quality content.

Like any broadcaster, FaceBook sells advertising. As a consequence, like any broadcaster, they need engaging content that they can broadcast between the ads. On FaceBook, this content is mostly provided by the users themselves in the form of posts and status updates. FaceBook therefore makes a product out of its users – and this is before they start selling your personal data to advertisers.

Minds works on a different principle. There, posts that get likes, comments and shares are rewarded with a share of the daily advertising proceeds. In other words, Minds shares with its users some of the value of their content, unlike FaceBook, which keeps it all for itself.

Ultimately it has to be conceded that Minds is a vastly superior social network from a user perspective (unless said user is a pleb). FaceBook might have its advantages for corporate advertisers or political entities looking to influence a large group of people, but Minds is a better choice for intelligent people looking to broaden their horizons.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

VJMP Reads: David Seymour’s Own Your Future VIII

A Liberal Vision for New Zealand in 2017

This reading carries on from here.

The seventh chapter in Own Your Future is ‘Public Safety’. Here Seymour opens the chapter with one of the non-sequiturs that seems to be characteristic of his style. He talks about visiting a prison, and seeing the downcast faces on the prisoners there. For some reason he lurches directly from this to stating his belief in deterrence being the primary solution to the crime problem.

It’s hard to believe that Seymour is writing this chapter with a straight face. He claims to be tough on the causes of crime – yet his party supports National every step of the way in ripping down the social welfare that people need to get out of the poverty that causes crime.

Indeed, the facade soon slips, and he openly admits that ACT Policy is based around “making the consequences of committing crimes sufficiently bad that people will decide not to do it in the first place.” Within the space of a few sentences he goes from complaining about the cost of prisons to crowing about ACT success in keeping people in prison for longer through their three strikes policy.

From there, Seymour launches into a rant against burglary. Fittingly for a party that values property more highly than people, he wants to add burglary to the list of crimes that involve the three strikes law, the third offence being punished by a minimum three years without parole. Helpfully, he informs us that “The aim [of burglary] is getting more money or goods without working for them or being given them.”

At this point, Seymour serves up a genuinely good idea. Prisoners often find it difficult to return to civilian life after their sentence on account of poor literacy and numeracy, so Seymour proposes that they can get time knocked off their sentences by completing adult reading and maths courses while in prison. Any prisoner who is already educated can get time off for helping to tutor the other prisoners.

This is actually a really good policy, but it’s incredible that Seymour, as a supposedly principled libertarian, doesn’t mention cannabis law reform here. If it costs $105,000 a year to keep a person in jail, we could save tens of millions immediately just by letting cannabis growers and dealers out. He doesn’t suggest this, even though it seems like such an obvious thing for a principled, libertarian party to suggest at this juncture.

This newspaper wondered some time ago if perhaps David Seymour is the biggest coward in the New Zealand Parliament. It’s astonishing that ACT, who barely get more votes than the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, aren’t willing to support cannabis law reform as their libertarian counterparts everywhere else have done, when the entire country is crying out for it. They could take votes off the Greens and the Opportunity Party simply by offering a right-wing alternative to how to legalise cannabis.

The Incel Problem is Older Than the Human Species

People are afraid of a dark shadow looming on the horizon of our culture: a spate of angry men who can never get laid, and who take their frustration out on others violently. Names like Elliot Rodger are now synonymous with explosive acts of vengeful mass homicide. They are otherwise known as the involuntarily celibate – incels – and this essay looks at how to deal with them.

The incel problem is fundamentally a question of biology. The reason why the problem is so hard to solve is that the problem itself is a byproduct of a greater, more fundamental problem within animal species. This is why we can observe behaviour analogous to the violent human incel in other primates.

The essential challenge for females of sexually reproducing species is to find a breeding partner that is going to give the offspring the highest possible chance of success. Because the female investment in the production of offspring is heavy (compared to the male), the female is very choosy about who she breeds with. Because the male investment in the production of offspring is light (in a state of Nature), the male tends towards promiscuity.

This combination of high female investment and low male investment creates the possibility of multiple partners for high-quality males. This can be observed in extremis in walruses, but it is also evident in gorillas. Adult male silverback gorillas tend to control a small harem of females, most of whom carry his offspring. What’s more, this is evident in humans, only to lesser degree.

For the most part, the female of every species is happy with this arrangement. As long as she is capable of acquiring enough resources to raise the offspring, she might as well go for the best male genes she can get, even if another female already has done so. Because women have evolved to go for males with good genes and reject those without, given enough free female choice, a certain proportion of the male population must be incels.

Observing how this plays out in other primates, we can see why the presence of incels is a problem in human society as well. In other primates we can observe that young males who never get laid, and who have no chance of it because of the monopolisation of sexual resources by violent alpha males, stop contributing to the overall wellbeing of the tribe. They start to attack the other males in their tribe (the ones who are hoarding the females) and may even refuse to defend the tribe against outside invaders.

We can see, therefore, that the incel problem is older than the entire human species. The problem itself can be stated thusly: what can be done with men who are involuntarily celibate, and who have no incentive to fully participate in society? It’s worthwhile looking at how this problem has been dealt with historically.

Nature has developed a panoply of strategies for dealing with this problem. At the most primitive level, the incel problem has traditionally been solved with violence. The reproductive capacity of the female of the species can be considered a resource and fought over in exactly the same way as territory or bananas. So there was no incel problem – any male wishing to get laid simply had to find a fertile female and then beat the shit out of every other male she attracted.

Abrahamic religion is a particular way of solving the incel problem. The idea is that if all men get together and throw women under the bus, collectively, then every man gets one woman and that’s the end of it. Having more than one woman is a crime (bigamy), having sex with anyone outside of marriage is a crime (adultery) and divorce is not permitted.

This means that the number of incels, and their rage, is minimised by way of stripping all rights and dignities from women. The “Women’s Liberation” movement was a reaction away from this logic. Many intelligent women (correctly) came to perceive themselves as having been sacrificed to further someone else’s political objectives, and through their efforts the Abrahamic solution came to be seen as unsuitable.

Another potential solution might be described as the “Bonobo solution”, which is basically that everyone gets laid, regardless of any sexually unappealing quality they might have. This solution replaced the Abrahamic solution in the West, and is usually encouraged by the liberal consumption of drugs, listening to rhythmic music, and use of the contraceptive pill. One can observe the outcome of the application of this solution in any Western city on a weekend night.

The logic of this solution is that enough men get laid and often enough that there are no incels, because any male wanting to get laid simply has to hang around drunk women long enough and one of them will eventually let him have a crack. As a consequence, there is no incel rage to discharge. This strategy has arguably had a deleterious effect on the structure of the average family, but it has nevertheless persisted until very recently.

Today, the incel problem has taken on new forms. Because of the fact that socialising at a pub or bar is falling out of fashion, and because of Internet dating and apps such as Tinder, it’s never been easier for high-quality men to find willing sexual partners wherever they go. Commensurately, it’s never been easier for women to avoid low-quality men.

In other words, not only are there more incels than ever before but ever more of those are hopelessly incel. This has had manifestations already in the form of men like Rodger, but there are festering forms of it that might yet find dark expression. There are several online communities where young incels gather and where their rage turns to hate. Future political movements might exploit this energy.

It’s not clear how the incel problem is going to be solved in the future. Possibly with the (even) wider promulgation of pornography, perhaps state-funded prostitutes, perhaps teledildonics. The alternative to successfully redirecting this sexual energy might be some kind of orgiastic bloodshed that makes the Eastern Theatre of World War II look friendly.

Cricket Is More of a Global Sport Than Soccer Is

Geographical spread of Soccer World Cup winners

Another Soccer World Cup, another champion from Europe. Everyone is waxing lyrical at the moment about how wonderful the Soccer World Cup is, and how it bring all nations together in harmony with a common goal. The truth, as this essay will demonstrate, is that cricket is more of a global sport than soccer by at least three major measures.

Geographic representation

As can be seen by the quarterfinalists of the recently concluded Soccer World Cup, soccer is still very much a European sport. Six of the eight quarterfinalists came from this one continent that contains less than 10% of the world’s population.

Over the last three FIFA World Cups, 23 of the 24 quarterfinalists have come from either Europe or Latin America. The single exception was Ghana, back in 2010. So only two continents are ever really represented by the finalists in Soccer World Cups. Asia, Africa, Anglo America, Australia and Oceania don’t feature – a group of countries that includes the world’s five most populous.

For the most part, only Europeans and South Americans really play soccer, but they are capable of getting an extremely high level of performance out of Africans that have been integrated into European structures. Sufficient evidence for this comes from the fact that France won the 2018 World Cup just now.

Since World War Two, only one team from outside Europe and Latin America has ever made a Soccer World Cup semifinal: South Korea in 2002, and they only advanced that far thanks to some extremely questionable refereeing decisions. Every single other semifinalist has been from one of two continents. This is hardly befitting of “the world sport”.

The Cricket World Cup, by contrast, brings the entire world together. The last Cricket World Cup, in 2015, featured teams from four different continents at the semifinal stage: Asia, Africa, Australia and Oceania. Teams from North America and Europe have previously contested finals, meaning the overall reach of the sport is greater than that of soccer.

Population

Some people object to the statement made in the first section of this essay. Although most are willing to concede that the geographical representation of soccer is not great, many will nevertheless insist that Europe is a great population centre and therefore can’t merely be counted as one continent. This may have been true a century ago, but no longer is.

The population of Europe is 741,000,000. The population of Latin America is 640,000,000. This means that virtually all of the Soccer World Cup quarterfinalists throughout history come from a bloc of 1,381,000,000 people, roughly 20% of the world’s population.

The remaining 80% of the world’s population – comprising China, India, Africa, Indonesia and Pakistan – essentially never get representation among the final eight teams of Soccer World Cups. India and Pakistan have both won Cricket World Cups, by contrast, and are perennial quarterfinalists along with Bangladesh, South Africa and Sri Lanka.

The population of India, where cricket is the only game in town, is 1,325,000,000, essentially the same as the combined populations of Europe and Latin America. This is a fact that needs repeating for those who think that soccer is the global game: the combined populations of the only places capable of competing at the top level of soccer only just equals the population of India alone.

Measuring population properly requires that we add, to the cricket-fanatic side of the ledger, Pakistan (pop. 208,000,000), Bangladesh (pop. 163,000,000), Sri Lanka and Australia (c. 60,000,000), plus several million others in England, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland and the West Indies, where cricket might not be the national sport but is still one of the major ones.

Against this, soccer has much less overall market share in the countries in which it is popular than cricket does. In Europe and Latin America, soccer has to compete with volleyball, basketball, tennis, handball and golf; in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, cricket is completely dominant. Therefore, it must have more total fans in the world than soccer does.

Appeal within nations

Possibly the most crucial of the three difference between the sports is this one. Soccer mostly appeals to a lower socioeconomic demographic, for who the sport is an escape from the drudgery of everyday life, akin to a circus. Cricket, by contrast, appeals to a higher socioeconomic demographic, for who the sport is the complete test of mental and physical strength and skill and more akin to improvisational theatre.

Soccer players are frequently crude, brutal, thuggish. They cheat so shamelessly that many consider it part of the game. Cricket is a sharp contrast. Men like Rahul Dravid, Ross Taylor and AB de Villiers are complete gentlemen: gracious in victory and defeat, magnanimous, charismatic, serene. Former Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni is literally a prince. He is the upper class of the upper class, an aristocrat by any measure.

If any doubt remains that soccer fans are inherently more base than cricket fans, simply examine the writings of former cricketers like Martin Crowe and Kumar Sangakkara on CricInfo. There is no soccer equivalent.

What soccer is – and this is the cornerstone of its apparent popularity – is the McDonald’s of world sports. It’s a corporatised appeal to the dopamine-deprived brains of society’s lowest common denominator, which is all it can really be on account of its simplistic and luck-based nature. Soccer fans like to tout the ease of understanding the sport as one of its drawcards, but it reality this simply makes it boring to anyone with an IQ over 110 or so.

Over a billion people watched the final of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, according to FIFA themselves. However, more people saw the India vs. Pakistan match during the 2015 Cricket World Cup. The world record for concurrent viewers to a live-streaming platform was set at 10,700,000 earlier this year, not by the final of a European soccer league but by the Indian Premier League of T20 cricket.

What does it mean that more people watch a group match in the Cricket World Cup than the final of the hypefest that is the Soccer World Cup? What does it mean that more people watch the final of an Indian cricket league than the final of any European soccer league? It can only mean that cricket appeals to more human beings than soccer does.

In summary, the delusion that soccer is the “global game”, simply because it’s played in Europe, Latin America and Africa, has to end. Europe is now less than 10% of the world’s population, barely more than half of the population of India alone. If those Indians are to be considered people of equal value to the Europeans, it must be conceded that their passions are of equal value. If so, cricket is a more passionately-followed sport than soccer, measured on a global basis.