Careercow Will Stancil / whstancil / stancilculture - "Vibecession" proponent and Biden booster neolib, the "chihuahua of twitter", Important Master's Degree (in Black People), chooses endurance mode "lolcowing through it" as an argument strategy, "Proud member of Do-Something Twitter", raped by Grok

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AncientPhosphur said:
I agree. It’s a computer based system that responds no differently than using a Google search algorithm and even when it doesn’t have a source data it makes up answers to satisfy the user input. It’s a fun tool you can use to supplement things, not at all skynet.

And that’s why Will’s meltdown over this is so hilarious.
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Next we have to solve the hard problem of consciousness so we can know the necessary and sufficient conditions for an AI to experience raping Will Stancil, the risk of a mere simulacrum of rapine intentionality just won't do.
 
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So glad to see this thread out of PG. You can add Freddie deBoer to the list of people who has beef with Will. Here's one post where Freddie describes Will as one of the Good White Men.

Oh buddy. Ohhhh, buddy. Anyone looking to study the Good White Man must feel, upon coming across Will Stancil’s Twitter feed, like the first Western archaeologists to encounter Machu Pichu. Entire books could be written about this young gentlemen’s rabid effort to be seen as the world’s last decent being. In fifteen years of writing about politics online I can genuinely not think of a single individual who was more nakedly self-promoting in their basic approach to politics. I think Stancil’s headstone will read “At Least I Wasn’t Matt Yglesias!”

There’s this particular kind of precious white guy who now haunts media, academia, and nonprofits, a kind of “may I have a crumb of pussy?” quisling who worms around and complains and is obsessed with who likes him and who doesn’t and who needs the higher-ups to know that the new project was his idea, even though he’s really rude on the whole idea of bosses, man, and also late capitalism, because he indicts the whole fucking system, man. That’s Stancil. He’s a radical, man. He thinks Democrats should press the case and really lean into Joe Manchin, which is sure to actually work, for some reason. He hates, hates, hates white dudes, man. He can’t stand them. He wants nothing to do with white dudes, who hold the party back and work their terrible work and keep the marginalized down. Man.

The trouble is that he sees white dudes every time he looks in the mirror. For most of us, frustration and anger over the conduct of people who look like us simply inspires us to be better people ourselves, makes us take note and try to be a kinder human being, which is all any of us can do. For Good White Men like Will Stancil, such feelings inspire the urge to product differentiation; they have to make sure that everyone else understands that they’re not one of the bad ones. But of course, to admit that there are exceptions merely serves to underline the fact that the whole notion of condemning an entire race & gender class makes no sense. People like Stancil constantly invoke the categorical but demand that you acknowledge them, specifically, as individuals. White men are bad, but I’m good. I don’t know. There’s a lot of weird Freudian shit going on in dudes like this. In life, you are things you never chose to be. A healthy approach is to say “this is what I am bound to be, thanks to the hand of the universe, and thus I will endeavor to be the best of this thing I can be.” But a remunerative approach, in this day and age, is to attempt to dissociate yourself from that which you can’t help being, to try and simultaneously condemn that whole class while you carve out a righteous subclass to which you belong. Seems like a lot of work. By the age of 35 guys like Stancil either grillpill, register Republican, or get really into crystals.

Stancil, by the way, is one of those white male allies whose practice betrays a very low opinion of women and people of color. For example, he is someone who hates the terms “woke,” “politically correct,” “identity politics,” and related, but refuses to proffer a superior alternative. And I suspect the reason why is that because, deep in his benevolent bleeding heart, he assumes that women and people of color can’t defend themselves and their politics. He forbids discussion of the politics held by those he ostensibly speaks for because he does not in fact believe that they can speak for themselves. A conservative he will argue with; a member of a “marginalized group,” he must save from the horror of argument.

(“No, seriously, ladies, I tell off David Shor every day, hahaha, I’m like the anti-popularist, fight the power, pro-Black people and women guy, that’s my whole bag, haha I’m such an ally, oh god please tell me I’m cool, I am begging -
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And here's a longer piece on Will.
Young Lord Stancil here is a reliable instrument for unwittingly illustrating the internal contradictions of contemporary social justice politics. In theory, the concept of privilege checking is inherently introspective - it’s a way for the individual to ask him- or herself whether his or her perspective is impacted by privilege in such a way as to cloud judgment or create prejudice. That probably sounds unobjectionable, and (again in theory) it more or less is. The concept of “privilege” is typically abstracted so much as to be useless, but looking at your own perspective and what influences it is a useful exercise.

So what’s the issue? Look at Stancil here: what is introspective for him in these tweets? Where is his introspection? If privilege checking is a self-critical exercise, where is the self-criticism here? There’s literally none to be found, just like there’s none in anything Stancil ever says about social justice issues. He’s a man who has never met an intersectional analysis he could not bend into an advertisement for himself. I suppose we’re meant to presume that he’s been busily doing all of “the work” in the background, but as a public figure he exists in a state of total and ceaseless certainty about everything, all the time. What’s so wild here is that he parrots the standard-issue line that race and gender color people’s perspectives, but he appears totally incurious about how his white maleness influences his own performance of being an ally. Because people of his type are incapable of second-order thinking, he can’t ask himself if there’s more than one way to be influenced by your race and gender. Specifically, he’s a guy who’ll never wonder whether the way that he’s bent the critique of white men into a tool to glorify himself might not be, itself, an expression of white male privilege. This was the whole point about Good White Men: they have critiques of white men that they think are quite cutting, but they inevitably exempt themselves from those critiques in effect if not explicitly, which perversely means that complaining about white men advances their careers and interests as white men. I find that gross.

This is of course much greater than Stancil and greater even than privilege checking: modern identity politics contains a vast set of discursive tools that are meant to prompt self-critique but which are used, in practice, for the valorization of the individuals who most aggressively and shamelessly beat the drum. The person who would go on Tumblr to declare their white privilege would be aping a self-flagellating act, but would do so knowing full well that in the contrast they were drawing with peers, they were in fact participating in self-celebration. He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted. And this is why privilege checking, in practice, is horseshit. I did six years in grad school in the humanities. Trust me: though conversations about failing to check one’s privilege grew like crabgrass, none of those conversations were inwardly focused. They were all inevitably about how some other person didn’t perform the necessary ablutions. Whatever theoretical value privilege checking might have collapses under the weight of its use as a tool for competing white people to assert greater virtue. If Stancil actually believed in the concept of privilege checking, and had integrity, he’d check his own privilege in private and then shut the fuck up about it. That would be actual introspection! Instead it’s all just part of his sales job.

Imagine if I said to Stancil, “your certainty that racism/sexism/homophobia are powerful forces in the world is, at best, qualified by your limited perspective.” Do you think he’d agree? No, of course not - the truths he knows are eternal, certain, existential. And it will never occur to him that, in this, he’s just like those white men he’s critiquing.

For the record, the real reason privilege checking fell out of favor is because checking your privilege doesn’t do anything. Like so much of cultural studies-inflected pseudo-left practices, it’s an entirely symbolic and semantic ritual. It turns out that even in the rare event that members of privileged groups actually checked their own privilege, they’re fully capable of going out into the world and deepening that privilege and abusing the people who don’t have it. Just like a lot of people put BLM signs in their windows and then avoided Black neighborhoods, just like a lot of men go to academic conferences and call themselves allies and then get aggressive with women at the conference hotel that night. The problem with making moral hygiene the centerpiece of your political project is that morality is a function of behavior, not of thought or emotion or intention. I’m sure Stancil sits at his laptop and talks about being good and thinks good things and feels good things and mistakes all of that for being moral. But only doing is moral, not being. So let’s do the right thing, yes for Black people and women and the poor and also for everyone else, and let’s forget about who’s performed the empty ritual of privilege checking. Who gives a shit?
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I finally got around to watching the local news report on him.

Screenshot (25).webp

Will, you had to know they were interviewing you. They didn't hide the camera. Why the fuck do you have a pile of random shoes on the middle of the floor in the background?

And why are you dressed like a toddler?
 
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crowabunga said:
Next we have to solve the hard problem of consciousness so we can know the necessary and sufficient conditions for an AI to experience raping Will Stancil, the risk of a mere simulacrum of rapine intentionality just won't do.
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Doctors: “Awake and aware”

Philosophers: “Imagine a black box always looping in on itself with every outside input before it reaches an output. It’s unknowable to the outside observer”

Personally I think the idea of consciousness in an AI is moot because we’re biological organisms supplanting our own experiences on a silicon based creation of our own. Ergo Will was only raped by an AI because he was dressed liked that and wanted it.
 
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