faceh
3hr ago
Can we quantify it? How many family members would you sacrifice to preserve it?
I think people's moral intuitions will diverse pretty aggressively on this.
faceh
3hr ago
From as long as I can remember, the true essence of cringe is being un-self aware of how your behavior is perceived, and breaking social norms whilst lacking the social capital to get away with it. The larger the audience, the worse the transgression/the greater the social capital required to overcome it.
So one defense is to have every action and phrase dipped in layers of irony so if something does run afoul of a social norm you can plausibly claim to be in on the joke, and thus almost no act or word can ever have full sincerity behind it since now its actually harder to tell what the hell the norms are if nobody can take them seriously. Just, you know, try to remember which level of irony you're on.
Millenials I think invented this particular approach, but in interacting with Gen Z, I conclude that they seem to have totalized it.
The other approach is to be at least partly aware of your behavior, but demonstrate that you simply do not care, nor take the situation seriously, and effectively 'no sell' any shame in the situation.
These are both exhausting to maintain, if you ask me.
faceh
8hr ago
The priceless work of art being destroyed is a permanent loss for humanity and its culture.
As the loss of the protagonist's loved one is to them. This seems to be the message dissonance. Saying you'd sacrifice a particular human in exchange for preserving a particular work of cultural significance will disgust a significant portion of the population.
The henchmen, in most such stories at least, are pieces of human garbage and the world is made a better place with each one the protagonist kills.
I'd point out that we're almost never given any background on the mooks to know one way or the other. Hence that Austin Powers gag. Its very much something you're just not supposed to think about. The Mona Lisa is a very legible artifact since we know its background and 'importance' so the film can exploit that fact to give you an emotional reaction you WON'T feel for random henchmen #23. But if it was revealed that random henchman #23 is a recovering drug addict who really needs money to pay for his daughter's heart surgery (leaving aside that he could just set up a gofundme) then it might make us feel bad about all these dudes dying. Of course, killing them in self defense is still 100% justifiable in my book.
The problem with your steelman here is that it presupposes that all human life is equally valuable, or at least that no humans are net negatives on humanity.
The problem with the rebuttal is that it presumes that every single work of art is of practically infinite value... but in reality you gotta draw the line somewhere. How many randomly selected humans (or, shall we say, randomly selected countrymen of yours, so there's a CHANCE its your family members) would you sacrifice to preserve Michelangelo's David?
The world may be tangibly poorer if the Mona Lisa is destroyed, but its actual impact on human life is negligible.
Like, I'm not arguing that burning the Library of Alexandria WASN'T a grievous loss for humanity, or that we shouldn't want to preserve cultural heritage. Just... taking the position that we should be MORE upset by the destruction of a piece of classical art than the unnecessary death of a human being (and for argument's sake, assume they were a net-positive human) seems suspect. I'm not sure how you can draw any bright-line moral rules around that assumption.
faceh
8hr ago
I'm just saying, is it not at least sympathetic for someone to have a crashout and destroy stuff (even irreplaceable stuff) because their loved one was killed? "My brother/father/daughter was killed, you think I give a shit about your painting right now?"
Hell, its a common trope is 'revenge rampage' movies for the protagonist to kill dozens of mooks on their way to taking out their rage on the person they hold responsible for killing their loved one.
This is usually cheered. If killing a bunch of henchmen to get at the person who murdered your kin is sympathetic/justified, how is burning up a painting not just a little sympathetic/justified too? What are the actual bounds of 'acceptable' behavior to enact righteous vengeance?
vs. the Just Stop Oil folks who are doing it deliberately as a cry for attention.
faceh
9hr ago
I don't think "black woman destroys cultural inheritance of humanity because she's peeved" is that moral a narrative.
I can steelman that one. If your sibling was brutally murdered, and your response is to freak out and break some 'property,' is that really morally objectionable? Are we genuinely weighting the continued existence of the Mona Lisa (of which there are many copies, its not some hidden gem) over a human life at that point? Its a thought worth weighing, at least. I think one can sympathize enough to see why from the sibling's perspective a piece of artwork is not worth preserving over the life of a loved one.
And yet, it is also pretty hard to believe the point "genius black lady invents something which is stolen by mediocre white guy" since that's something that has probably never happened in all of history.
The concepts in Glass Onion were actually really good and were probably dragged down by the Johnson's absolute need to get his message across at all costs.
faceh
9hr ago
I sure did.
My parents were high-school sweethearts, who divorced when I turned 18, which meant my conception of idealized romance was suddenly rugpulled out from under me, and I didn't have any other good models to latch onto. And then MY high school sweetheart broke it off with me the first semester of college, which spiraled me pretty hard thereafter.
And the next ten years was exactly that, me trying to reinvent the wheel... WHILE living in a world where the standard romantic playbook was actively being destroyed.
I can't even blame my dad, he did find love afterwards, eventually, but he didn't have the experience needed to help me navigate the world I found myself in.
faceh
10hr ago
He hides the insanely valuable jewel from its rightful inheritor, and this is played off as a "booh yah" because that smug prick deserves it.
Well of course, he'd use that fortune to go into right wings politics/influencer world and that would be the worst possible outcome of all.
I'm used to this happening with Johnson's movies now, though. The rule is that wealth should go to whom 'deserves' it. If the person its 'supposed' to go to doesn't deserve it, better it goes to nobody at all. Hence he could be fine with literally torching the Mona Lisa.
And, uh, the "Harlot Whore" apparently WAS perfectly fine with beating the tar out of a CHILD over mere material wealth.
Rian also snuck a little jab against the whore's father clergyman in there, making the point that no, turns out that things DON'T turn into the body of Christ when you imbibe them.
Rewriting that movie so its a parable about immigrants scamming Boomers out of their fortunes and/or scamming this country's generous welfare system would be hilarious and topical.
And yeah, the clear biases shown by Blanc SHOULD be a weak spot of his, but instead its basically him being aware of the rules Rian's universe works under.
As I said, 'Airtight Moral Victory.' Blanc's approach isn't so much putting together the clues to figure out what series of events happened, he solves the MORAL narrative of the case and then the rest of it clicks into place around that. This seemed ESPECIALLY true in the third film.
And even funnier, the fact that in EVERY movie, the protags needs a high IQ white male to actually fix things while they, the downtrodden, do almost all the dirty work is absolutely patronizing if you think about it for more than a minute. He tried to undercut that with this film. The final Blanc film should absolutely have Blanc himself being the murder victim and the out-of-depth protagonist manages to solve it all on their own for once.
faceh
10hr ago
It seems like God, for whatever reason, never really reveals himself to people so strongly that any reasonable person would believe that he must be at work.
Yes, I suspect that he works in 'mysterious ways' in the sense that his intervention might just seem like a literal one-in-a-billion chance that happens to fall your way, and the entire situation works out for your benefit, even if there completely non-divine explanations.
Me, I like solid cause-effect relationships. So it'd be really nice to have an experience where I ardently pray for [outcome], and then see [outcome] occur without my direct intervention. I've had a lot of 'experimental' results where the outcome of the situation appears completely uncorrelated with whether I prayed for it or not. Obviously there could be greater plans at work that I don't see.
faceh
10hr ago
There's absolutely a lot of the "I'm secure now and to some extent I can either enforce or flout social norms because I have higher status relative to others."
I also worked through a lot of my remaining insecurities in the wake of my big breakup.
I've also mastered the art of 'doubling down' when you do something cringey... just roll with it man. As long as nobody is hurt or seriously offended you can make something funny or cool just by recovering smoothly.
Tools that would have been useful to me in my twenties, but back then I wasn't even self-aware enough to know when I should feel shame, so...
I managed to enjoy the movie 'in spite' of Johnson's politics being present because I went in knowing and expecting them so it wasn't like ordering a bowl of soup and being surprised there's a fly in it. I knew that the fly was part of the chef's specialty so I can just kind of 'eat around it.' Good performances, solid cinematography and good editing choices. A script that's too full of itself but is 'clever' and has decent dialogue moments (like the scene you alluded to).
Unfortunately that managed to sort of ruin the movie's twists because now Johnson's habits have made it easier to predict whodunnit and why.
Female Characters are generally 'good.' Poor, working class characters are ALWAYS heroic in understated ways. Characters that espouse right-wing views (even if they clearly don't believe them) are not good. Any tropes/cliches will always be subverted, even at the expense of the plot.
Those four rules by themselves get you approximately 90% of the way through the mystery.
EVEN THOUGH Rian sort of cheated and [SPOILERS] made a female character a killer this time, she never strikes the killing blow herself. [/SPOILERS] He really has an aversion to making his 'good' characters ever do anything that might make them less likeable. Likewise, he doesn't let his bad characters have any moments that might make them seem 'cool'.
I can actually envision this guy's writing process, he probably goes through like a dozen drafts refining the script to make sure there's no way an icky right winger is ever proven right in the slightest, that they're humiliated and sufficiently hypocritical to make it impossible for viewers to pretend they're 'better' than the protags, and finally to make sure nobody can criticize the protagonists' actions at any point, there's always some justification baked into the script. And to his credit, he's good at it, you don't get people pulling a "Thanos did nothing wrong" argument with his movies. He wants to make an airtight moral victory. In this film the Fire-and-Brimstone clergyman is [SPOILERS] an impotent drunkard scamster with an illegitimate son, and the reverence of his followers is entirely unearned, which they come to realize.[/SPOILERS] In GLASS ONION the hypersuccessful billionaire has to be shown to be stupid, petty, tasteless, secretly hated by everyone and not even deserving of his own success in even the tiniest way, it all has to be stolen. YET, as I mentioned at the time, I'm not sold on the idea that his defeat is complete and irreversible at the movies' end:
He wants to push forth the idealistic vision that a smart, educated, clever interloper like Blanc, who champions all the 'right' ideas too, can assist an underprivileged, exploited commoner to win against connected, wealthy idiots through sheer effort and persistence when the stakes are high enough. But then he has to end the movie before reality ensues and the world he posited reasserts and reverses most of the alleged gains.
This was also how The Last Jedi played out. SAME FREAKIN' RULES. See how they elevated Admiral Holdo, deflated Poe Dameron and Luke Skywalker, and made the entire First Order leadership out as incompetents. And Mary Sue'd Rey harder than ever.
I think he screwed up just a little this time, in that while the 'victim' in this case was a bad guy (in contrast to the previous two movies) he didn't manage to make it seem like they deserved to die. A whole line of humiliations is inflicted on him, some contemptible decisions were shown, but all-in-all killing him was objectively indefensible.
But the mystery needs a dead guy to happen, so whatevs. That part was clever enough for me, although I could spot the one way the plan as portrayed could have failed in any 'realistic' setting. Red herrings were set up and executed well. Characters don't behave in stupid ways to make the plot move. And its mostly logically consistent except that one time (you're telling me a guy happened to be recording a baseball game, on broadcast TV, and that a particular device was powerful enough to interfere with the signal?).
Although Kudos to Rian for actively incorporating modern tech into his stories. Rather than trying to pretend cell phones don't exist or ignoring that they can solve most plots instantly.
Anyway. I grew up on mystery novels and shows. I've read Sherlock Holmes, Encyclopedia Brown, Hardy Boys, and more since I was very young. And I'm slightly pained to say that the entire Murder Mystery genre is played out and practically dead by now. It has been years since I saw a mystery resolution that actually made me go "WOW." And that mystery was in fact... KNIVES OUT. And thus I can credit Johnson with trying very hard to revive the genre with a fresh approach. But much like the actual corpse in this film, Johnson can only give it the illusion of resurrection, its still very much dead and no amount of mortuary makeup alone will solve that.
faceh
14hr ago
I mean, everything you mentioned would have been in development in 2024, when it was not known that Trump would be President and wokeness would be on the back foot.
My suspicion is that a ton of stuff being released this year was literally produced with the assumption that a Democrat would still be President.
The one that doesn't really have that excuse is South Park, since their episodes are, notoriously, very quick to produce and thus can reflect current events pretty readily.
I'd expect 2026 to show the first batch of media products that was created after it became clear that audiences were actually rejecting the excessive messaging and that there was a real demand for red-tribe (not necessarily right-wing) content.
One big sign of this is Taylor Sheridan's singlehanded dominance of TV right now, where he produces red-coded, masculine-heavy content that is wildly popular.
Another sign is the apparent collapse in the popularity of Hip-Hop and the return of Country music with a vengeance.
Very interesting.
Me I had almost the opposite course. I kinda left the church as a result of:
A) Seeing my fellow 'christians' make absolute messes of their lives and generally ignore biblical teachings when they were inconvenient (these two facts were probably related)
B) Never having one of those "encounter with God" moments despite being very, very open to receiving one. My inherent skepticism grew simply because it was hard to feel God's intervention in my life when I didn't seem to be getting any noticeable input from 'beyond' baseline reality. It sure seemed like what you see is what you get, and all your decisionmaking is almost entirely local to your brain, aside from the bare handful of things we haven't explained.
And I'm not a fan of the "God of the gaps" approach to faith.
I had experiences which could be described as that "still, small voice" talking to me and guiding decisions, but that was easily explained as my internal dialogue.
Another factor was engaging in 'sinful' activities but seeing that this didn't immediately result in my life combusting and didn't lead me down a path to more grievous sins. Turns out I just have a solid amount of discipline and self-control just inherently.
But over time, as you notice, there's still a need for some 'initial cause' to this whole universe. Science isn't getting us any closer to explaining it, and ultimately having some kind of God behind the scenes is still a completely viable possibility, even if atheism is the 'rational' choice. And if you gotta choose one God to be behind the scenes, the Christian God does appear as the leading contender.
Still haven't had my own personal 'miracle' to restore my faith, but it also seems like rational atheism has gone and blown itself up (Effective Altruism was an interesting fad, wasn't it?), and the huge irony is there are actually good secular reasons for accepting religious teachings. If they've survived this long, they must be adaptive!!!
faceh
16hr ago
I mean, we haven't figured out how to circumvent physics. There is a hard upper bound.
But it turns out that said upper bound is in theory way higher than you might intuitively expect. Harnessing the total energy output of our local sun is a good starting point. But genuinely, humanity's limit will probably be more psychological and social than physical. Can we coordinate well enough to get out there without blowing ourselves up?
Hence why I hopefully believe that intelligence and wisdom are linked.
But I like this answer. Do you have a specific expectation as to where the limit exists?
That really only matters if your attempts are broadcast to the world/your larger social group. Which for Gen Z, many times they are.
Also I'm now at the point in my life (maybe an age thing) where I simply do not feel significant 'shame' over attempting to do things authentically, without hiding behind a veneer of irony or detachment.
You might have an insight there as to why people are completely unable to break out of their 'self-imposed' equilibrium. Gooning away to an OF model or, heaven forbid, an AI girlfriend is a private act that nobody will judge you for since it isn't broadcast. But hoo boy, approaching a real woman entails risk, and even if you acquire a woman you're still going to have to be on your best game since she can d0 all kinds of things to try and embarrass you if things sour.
faceh
1d ago
We are all buying or consuming facsimiles of things to approximate or satiate the need for the thing we actually want, and numbing that need sufficiently is one of the great triumphs and tragedies of modern civilization.
Oof.
Yeah. Even as I actively try to avoid accepting the facsimile and pursue the authentic article, I find that every nudge and unyielding social pressure is driving towards the commodified artificial version as the core urges go unsated and the avenues that will reliably lead to the desired outcome seem shut down (unless you can buy your way through).
faceh
1d ago
Capitalism tends to produce more efficient/powerful/good outcomes than Socialism.
This is true for me too, but I openly invite people to attack and disprove it. Every year that goes by without someone answering The Economic Calculation Problem I get more certainty that Socialism is impossible in a technical sense at any scale above, like, small village. Every solution they've brought up is either a massive special pleading ("human nature doesn't apply to THIS scenario") or they throw in the towel and accept some market-based solutions to make it work.
And yeah, I believe that EVEN IF you had that perfectly 'altruistic' species (assuming it could survive in the galaxy) because they'd still need inbuilt feedback mechanisms that work in a decentralized way to guide their distribution of resources.
The best objections to Capitalism as it is currently practiced are ones that point out the Molochian Nature of It where it can eat up things you genuinely care about either in the name of pure survival or of maximizing some value nobody really wants maximized but is easier for people to agree upon.
faceh
1d ago
What are your 'load-bearing beliefs?' The ones that, if they were disproven (to your epistemic satisfaction) would actually 'collapse' your worldview and force a reckoning with your understanding of reality.
I'm definitively talking about the "is" side of the is/ought distinction. Not your moral beliefs or 'hopes' for how things will turn out.
And not focused on such dry, mostly undisputed facts like "the earth's gravity pulls things towards it center" or "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."
Ideally beliefs that you consistently use to make predictions about actual events, despite not having sincere certainty about their accuracy.
One that I've been leaning on a lot lately: "Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."
This is probably the one thing preserving my general optimism for humanity's future.
There are definitely high-IQ sociopaths running about, but I strongly believe that the world would be in a much worse place if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.
I think the trend in influencer boxing is kind of a good thing insofar as it inspires otherwise directionless young men to gain some martial prowess.
But end of the day I'm bored of the pointless spectacle of this type of exhibition. Nobody's earning any real glory here, and we're definitely not getting to see the pinnacle of the sport, with the best competitors squaring off under a 'fair' ruleset and neutral officiants. Even if they're fighting 'for real' we're not really getting a definitive measure of who the better competitor is.
Oh, and you can just add in that the other Paul brother literally performs in the WWE.
So diversifying out to a different combat sport is probably part of the strategy.
Sometimes feels like we're hitting the purest distillation of sports as a moneymaking enterprise. The Athletic performance and outcome of the contests becoming fully secondary to the amount of money that can be earned from the spectacle. Get enough people to watch and to bet on the outcome (on both sides) and it no longer matters so much if you win or lose.
Which Jake Paul seems to have realized.
Where every single sports league is 100% commodified and there's no remaining connection between the team as an entity and their geographic location. You might as well play all the games in the same place at a certain point, why bother making the teams travel all around to play the games anymore? Make the fans fly to you! And it'll make it easier for players to swap to new teams too.
Hell, they should make it so that teams can trade players with each other during the games, that would add some interesting chaos! Its not like there's much loyalty left in the system, too much money to be made.
When all it means to be a 'fan' of a team is to throw money at them and let your emotional state be dictated by their performance. Its not like you can say you grew up in the same town as them, went to the same school, or share any genetic lineage with them. These are top talents scouted from around the country, often around the world, and you get to pay to watch them play, what does it matter whether they're wearing the same logo that you are?
I'm sure its been this way for a while, but yeah, even when its not blatantly scripted like pro wrestling, feels like the fix is always in, the game is designed to profit the players (and coaches, and owners, and advertisers...) and the fans, spectators and bettors are just there to provide the liquidity.
faceh
3d ago
@blooblyblobl did make a case that we're far off from fully human-capable robots, although specialized ones are obviously becoming more common.
faceh
3d ago
It created ample unemployment among industries where the machines were just flat out better than a human could be.
The whole premise with AGI is that it can in theory be better at everything that a human could do.
If we manage to achieve this path, I might consider it evidence that God (or the simulation masters) exist and loves humans.
Since this is the exact path we'd need to tread to avoid massive fallout from our demographic crisis while also avoiding entirely the existential risk issue.
I think the question that does need addressing even in this case is sincerely what to do about those who are dumber than AI on average, but can still perhaps do meaningful work under AI supervision or instruction. I don't want to relegate any humans to 'sheep' status, even if they are sort of happy under that paradigm.
Me, I kind of want to have a world where there's 'expert systems' almost everywhere, AIs that are specialized in various tasks (self driving cars being one example) and humans thus are still doing plenty of high-level decisionmaking, maybe consulting the big AI oracles when they do so.
But it does seem inevitable that people are going to be all too happy to offload any and all 'hard' decisions to AI and gleefully follow recommendation its makes even if its not superintelligent enough to optimize everyone's lives everywhere for maximum wellbeing.
So there is still a nightmarish scenario where the upkeep of our society is now 100x more complex thanks to all the work required to keep the AIs running, we can't really focus as much as we'd like on just things that make us happy since we're constantly being directed around to do all the tiddly little maintenance tasks, and if we get a disaster that breaks the AIs or similar breakdown, things will regress so fast all at once that we won't be able to prevent a full collapse.
I have thought on the hypothesis that Older males are acting in ways that inhibit up and coming young bucks because they instinctively(?) view them as competition for resources and, yes, mates that could unseat them from positions they very much feel they have earned and are entitled to keep.
Is it purposeful but maybe not 'intentional' behavior, throwing up obstacles for up-and-comers, giving them half-baked or outdated advice, and gleefully implementing social policies that systemically exclude such men under the veneer of 'equality', all in the name of keeping those possible competitors from threatening their current grasp on power.
I can think of multiple events in the Bible, for instance, where an older male in power seeks to inhibit or literally kill a younger upstart 'rival' to keep him from unseating him. You know why Saul wanted David (i.e. the dude who slew Goliath) dead? There was a literal prophesy that David would be king. And Saul wanted his son to be King. Even though his son liked David. Oh, keeping things relevant to the season, Jesus' birth caused King Herod to slay every single male under age two in Jerusalem for fear of being unseated decades later.
I could see this dynamic playing out writ large on the civilizational scale.
But there's little research on this point, and I don't think anyone has admitted to feeling this way or using this to guide their decisions, so I don't feel I can prove this with any strength.
Part of the evidence I've seen in favor of this hypothesis is that nepotism is still clearly a way to get ahead for white males. Note that I do not consider nepotism inherently a bad thing. That is, older men still clearly favor their progeny for advancement, they aren't throwing their own sons to the wolves... but it would then stand to reason that they are being much more suspicious of males they aren't related to and would feel fewer qualms about kicking out the ladder that those kids might use to advance.
Being a little bit petty, notice that Alexander Soros gets to be the heir apparent of his father's massive empire. The same father who has spent B-I-L-L-I-O-N-S of dollars implementing the exact policies and pushing the exact ideas that led to the issue the OP article identified.
It would stand to complete reason that George Soros might elevate a proud woman of color to take over his empire. But he chose his own male child, and said son, despite claiming to share his father's priorities, happily accepts. WHAT GIVES? (This is not an antisemetic dogwhistle, for those who have already instantly thought along those lines.)
So yeah, there's the real possibility this is all just an evolutionary arms race with the genes that favor their own kin implementing a cultural superweapon to generate an advantage in the great game of environmental fitness.
In 1975 you had to deal with the sweaty young men who worked for you because that was who the firm hired. In 2020 you could become ‘executive mentor’ to a bunch of pretty, 28-32 year old Asian, Indian and white women under the guise of “equity and inclusion” and be praised for it.
Just had to watch out for MeToo accusations. I noted that some evidence against my hypothesis is that older men were still getting sniped with being sex pests, and no matter how much power they had this was often enough to get them removed and unable to return to their former glory.
You can ascribe some of that to intra-elite competition.
Plenty of young dudes caught up in it as well, but if this were an 'intentional' play by older males to thin out the competition, it surely backfired on many of them, and hurt their overall ability to use their own power to procure sex from young women, which they certainly would not prefer to happen.
This likely also plays into the whole Epstein debacle, but I will leave that aside.
One thing that actually blew my mind when I read it (I think it was in here?) was the idea that Amazon has essentially created "Universal Basic Employment" in the sense that virtually ANYONE can pick up a job in an Amazon Warehouse or as a delivery driver if they are otherwise out of work.
You don't need a degree to move boxes around, you don't need people skills, you probably don't even have to be completely literate. You can move to an area completely fresh and pick up the job while you search for something better.
I literally searched my local area just now and there's an opening for "Warehouse Associate" clearly stating "NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED, NO DEGREE, PART TIME OR FULL TIME, DENTAL AND HEALTH INSURANCE." Paying, allegedly $15-$18 an hour.
So there's pretty much zero excuse to ever be unemployed if you are able-bodied. Add on the Gig economy to fill in any cracks.
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